The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy

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he had a gut suspicion that cancer was contagious.

      ‘Damned if they ain’t pretty busy up there. I read of a pair of Alfas, a Charlie, a Tango, and a few surface ships. What gives, sir?’

      ‘There’s a Delta there, too, but she just surfaced and killed her engines.’

      ‘Surfaced, Skipper?’

      ‘Yep. They were lashing her pretty hard with active sonar, then a ’can queried her on a gertrude.’

      ‘Uh-huh. Acquisition game, and the sub lost.’

      ‘Maybe.’ Quentin rubbed his eyes. The man looked tired. He was pushing himself too hard, and his stamina wasn’t half what it should have been. ‘But the Alfas are still pinging, and now they’re headed west, as you heard.’

      ‘Oh.’ Franklin pondered that for a moment. ‘They’re looking for another boat, then. The Typhoon that was supposed to have sailed the other day, maybe?’

      ‘That’s what I thought – except she headed west, and the exercise area is northeast of the fjord. We lost her the other day on SOSUS. Bremerton’s up sniffing around for her now.’

      ‘Cagey skipper,’ Franklin decided. ‘Cut his plant all the way back and just drifting.’

      ‘Yeah,’ Quentin agreed. ‘I want you to move down to the North Cape barrier supervisory board and see if you can find her, Chief. She’ll still have her reactor working, and she’ll be making some noise. The operators we have on that sector are a little young. I’ll take one and switch him to your board for a while.’

      ‘Right, Skipper.’ Franklin nodded. That part of the team was still green, used to working on ships. SOSUS required more finesse. Quentin didn’t have to say that he expected Franklin to check in on the whole North Cape team’s boards and maybe drop a few small lessons as he listened in on their channels.

      ‘Did you pick up on Dallas?’

      ‘Yes, sir. Real faint, but I think I got her crossing my sector, headed northwest for Toll Booth. If we get an Orion down there, we might just get her locked in. Can we rattle their cage a little?’

      Quentin chuckled. He didn’t much care for submariners either. ‘No, NIFTY DOLPHIN is over, Chief. We’ll just log it and let the skipper know when he comes back home. Nice work, though. You know her reputation. We’re not supposed to hear her at all.’

      ‘That’ll be the day!’ Franklin snorted.

      ‘Let me know what you find, Deke.’

      ‘Aye aye, Skipper. You take care of yourself, hear?’

       Tuesday, 7 December

      MOSCOW

      It was not the grandest office in the Kremlin, but it suited his needs. Admiral Yuri Ilych Padorin showed up for work at his customary seven o’clock after the drive from his six-room apartment in the Kutuzovskiy Prospekt. The large office windows overlooked the Kremlin walls; except for those he would have had a view of the Moscow River, now frozen solid. Padorin did not miss the view, though he had won his spurs commanding river gunboats forty years before, running supplies across the Volga into Stalingrad. Padorin was now the chief political officer of the Soviet Navy. His job was men, not ships.

      On the way in he nodded curtly to his secretary, a man of forty. The yeoman leaped to his feet and followed his admiral into the inner office to help him off with his greatcoat. Padorin’s navy-blue jacket was ablaze with ribbons and the gold star medal of the most coveted award in the Soviet military, Hero of the Soviet Union. He had won that in combat as a freckled boy of twenty, shuttling back and forth on the Volga. Those were good days, he told himself, dodging bombs from the German Stukas and the more random artillery fire with which the Fascists had tried to interdict his squadron … Like most men he was unable to remember the stark terror of combat.

      It was a Tuesday morning, and Padorin had a pile of mail waiting on his desk. His yeoman got him a pot of tea and a cup – the usual Russian glass cup set in a metal holder, sterling silver in this case. Padorin had worked long and hard for the perks that came with this office. He settled in his chair and read first through the intelligence dispatches, information copies of data sent each morning and evening to the operational commands of the Soviet Navy. A political officer had to keep current, to know what the imperialists were up to so that he could brief his men on the threat.

      Next came the official mail from within the People’s Commissariat of the Navy and the Ministry of Defence. He had access to all of the correspondence from the former, while that from the latter had been carefully vetted since the Soviet armed services share as little information as possible. There wasn’t too much mail from either place today. The usual Monday afternoon meeting had covered most of what had to be done that week, and nearly everything Padorin was concerned with was now in the hands of his staff for disposition. He poured a second cup of tea and opened a new pack of unfiltered cigarettes, a habit he’d been unable to break despite a mild heart attack three years earlier. He checked his desk calendar – good, no appointments until ten.

      Near the bottom of the pile was an official-looking envelope from the Northern Fleet. The code number at the upper left corner showed that it came from the Red October. Hadn’t he just read something about that?

      Padorin rechecked his ops dispatches. So, Ramius hadn’t turned up in his exercise area? He shrugged. Missile submarines were supposed to be elusive, and it would not have surprised the old admiral at all if Ramius were twisting a few tails. The son of Aleksandr Ramius was a prima donna who had the troubling habit of seeming to build his own personality cult: he kept some of the men he trained and discarded others. Padorin reflected that those rejected for line service had made excellent zampoliti, and appeared to have more line knowledge than was the norm. Even so, Ramius was a captain who needed watching. Sometimes Padorin suspected that he was too much a sailor and not enough a Communist. On the other hand, his father had been a model Party member and a hero of the Great Patriotic War. Certainly he had been well thought of, Lithuanian or not. And the son? Years of letter-perfect performance, as many years of stalwart Party membership. He was known for his spirited participation at meetings and occasionally brilliant essays. The people in the naval branch of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, reported that the imperialists regarded him as a dangerous and skilled enemy. Good, Padorin thought, the bastards ought to fear our men. He turned his attention back to the envelope.

      Red October, now there was a fitting name for a Soviet warship! Named not only for the revolution that had forever changed the history of the world but also for the Red October Tractor Plant. Many was the dawn when Padorin had looked west to Stalingrad to see if the factory still stood, a symbol to the Soviet fighting men struggling against the Hitlerite bandits. The envelope was marked Confidential, and his yeoman had not opened it as he had the other routine mail. The admiral took his letter opener from the desk drawer. It was a sentimental object, having been his service knife years before. When his first gunboat had been sunk under him, one hot August night in 1942, he had swum to shore and been pounced on by a German infantryman who hadn’t expected resistance from a half-drowned sailor. Padorin had surprised him, sinking the knife in his chest and breaking off half the blade as he stole his enemy’s life. Later a machinist had trimmed the blade down. It was no longer a proper knife, but Padorin wasn’t about to throw this sort of souvenir away.

      ‘Comrade Admiral,’ the letter began – but the type had been scratched out and replaced with a hand-written ‘Uncle Yuri.’ Ramius had jokingly called him that years back when Padorin was chief political officer of the Northern Fleet. ‘Thank you for your confidence, and for the opportunity you have given me with command of this magnificent ship!’ Ramius ought to be grateful, Padorin thought. Performance or not, you don’t give this sort of command to –

      What?

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