Commander-In-Chief (14 page)

The men of The Campus nodded at this.

Gerry said, “We’re a small outfit. Losing one of our own hits us in the gut, that’s for sure.”

Mary Pat looked to Dom Caruso now. “The Campus has paid a terrible price in the past several years, and yet you all keep showing up in the most dangerous situations. This country can’t know what you are doing, but I know, and I want to convey my thanks.”

The men thanked her, then Chavez and Caruso each immediately began a well-practiced routine of prepping and packing to leave town.

A
deckhand hard at work clearing fishing nets of their mackerel just happened to look up and off the starboard bow of his fifty-foot trawler. It was sunrise, thirty-eight miles northwest of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, and there were no other fishing boats or cargo ships in sight. This meant this boat should have had the sea to itself, because no pleasure craft ever came up here, since there was not one thing pleasurable about bobbing and rolling and freezing to death on this stretch of the North Atlantic.

The deckhand glanced away from the bow and back down to his work, but then his head lifted back up quickly and his eyes focused on a point less than a mile distant. It took a second to pick out the anomaly in the waves that caught his attention, but once he found it again, he knew what it was. The fisherman was still a young man, and his eyesight was excellent. The low form was gray like the water around it, but a few shades darker, and its edges were unmistakable. Man-made. It was also massive, easily the length of a train car and three times the height.

He looked out across the water by himself for a moment, ignoring the fish falling out of the net and onto the deck behind him, but soon he grabbed the man next to him and pointed.

This deckhand was much older, his eyes weren’t so sharp, and he agreed only that he saw “something.”

The younger man said, “It’s a bleedin’ submarine.”

“You’re bleedin’ daft. That out there is not as big as a submarine. Haven’t you seen one?”

“It’s the . . . It’s that hat thing on the top of the cigar thing. I don’t fuckin’ know what they call them.”

The young fisherman waved his arms up toward the bridge of the trawler, where the captain sat on the other side of a pane of glass. When the captain noticed the movement, the deckhand pointed toward the squat form off the starboard bow.

Quickly the captain stopped the nets, grabbed his binoculars, and looked out into the early-morning waters.

But not for long. After just a few seconds he flipped a switch on the console in front of him and his voice came high and flat over the speaker over the deck. “It’s a fuckin’ sub, Danny. Big bloody deal. The Brits have submarines. Back to work!”

Danny dropped his shoulders, the excitement robbed from him, and he bent down to scoop up the mackerel flopping around on his deck, but the captain lifted his binoculars back to the big conning tower moving through the water off his bow, now just crossing over to the port side. The captain assumed the sub was British, but he saw no markings on the black form, so it was only a guess. It ran like a knife’s blade through the rough water on a southwesterly course, and he knew in minutes he’d lose sight of it.

As he told the young man below, military vessels here were normally nothing to get excited about, but a year earlier, a fishing boat off the Orkneys had reported a sighting of a periscope, and the
British Navy had reacted with alarm. They claimed to have no boats in the area and, even though an exhaustive search had turned up nothing, the final conclusion by the Royal Navy had been that it was a Russian submarine patrolling off the Scottish coast.

Of course, the captain of the mackerel boat could not imagine why a Russian submarine would sail with its conning tower proudly on display to a Scottish trawler if it wished to skulk around the United Kingdom, but, the captain thought, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to officials in the area, just to let them know he’d seen an unidentifiable sub.

Before he radioed in his sighting, however, the captain grabbed a point-and-shoot digital camera with an eight-power optical zoom. He stepped out of the bridge and into the cold, fought the roiling sea for balance, and took a few pictures with the camera zoomed in as tight as it would go.

After taking the snapshots he returned to his helm on the bridge and reached for the radio.

Within ninety minutes of the deckhand on the trawler seeing a queer sight off the starboard bow of his boat, Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, known more commonly in the area as Faslane, had the images of the sighting in its possession. And in less than another half-hour, the base went on full alert. Faslane was on the Scottish mainland in Argyll and Bute, a good 450 miles from the incident, but they notified their ships in the area, as well as those along the Atlantic coast, of the general heading of the sub sighting.

The HMS
Bangor
was a mine hunter, but it was closest, just west of the Orkney Islands and directly on the path of the conning tower. The
Bangor
headed northeast in search of the mysterious vessel.

The HMS
Astute
, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was just leaving Faslane on an eighty-day patrol mission of the North
Atlantic, so it was ordered to make best possible speed to a position ahead of the submarine.

It would take two and a half days for the
Astute
to arrive on station, so no one was optimistic about its chances.

A more immediate chance for identifying the sub came from the Royal Air Force. RAF stations in the Scottish Highlands scrambled helicopters with antisubmarine capabilities, but it was known from the outset that the distances required would mean the helicopter missions would be less about search patrols and more about hoping for another sighting from a fishing trawler that could vector the helos in to exactly the right coordinates.

But one after another the helicopter missions returned to base without locating their quarry.

The British used to have the perfect tool for this job, but no longer. The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft had been recently retired from service, a victim of British defense budget cuts. This left few options for the British short of calling up the United States to ask for help.

So they did.

A pair of U.S. Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft were flown from their home station at RAF Mildenhall, up to RAF Lossiemouth in the Scottish Highlands, and from here they began launching on patrols. The Orion could fly racetrack patterns over the sea for many hours and use its high-tech cameras and sensors, built expressly for antisubmarine warfare.

While the Orions flew off the west coast of Scotland and the British naval vessels hunted from the surface, the British submarine
Astute
closed on its quarry.

By now it was certain the sub had gone deep, since the hunt itself turned up nothing, but the identity of the sub was determined thousands of miles away in an office just southeast of Washington,
D.C. The Office of Naval Intelligence Farragut Technical Analysis Center spent days with the photographs taken by the captain of the fishing trawler, looking over each pixel.

Finally, their analysts came to a consensus about just what it was they were looking at.

At the same time, the HMS
Astute
picked up faint acoustic readings of a large submarine passing to the northwest, but they were unable to catch up to it, and within moments of the dim signals, they lost it. The only thing they were able to determine with near certainty was that it was heading westerly, into the Atlantic Ocean.

From this, inferences could be drawn. The sub seen on the northern tip of Scotland was sailing, almost certainly, to America.

P
resident Jack Ryan sat on a sofa in the Oval Office, a stack of photos in his hands. He examined them carefully, took in every bit of the meager intelligence he could derive from them, then laid them down on the coffee table.

Admiral Roland Hazelton, the chief of naval operations, sat on the couch across from him, and next to him was SecDef Burgess. Scott Adler, Mary Pat Foley, and Jay Canfield also were present, as well as Arnie Van Damm, Ryan’s chief of staff.

The President looked up from the photos. “I used to know subs inside and out. I could still give you specs on Kilos and Ladas and Typhoons, or at least the specs that haven’t changed since I was in that world, but to tell you the truth, all I can see here is a distant conning tower on rough seas. It’s big, but not shockingly so. I’m guessing it’s one of the new Boreis or Severodvinsks, otherwise you two wouldn’t be sitting here looking at me like that.”

CNO Hazelton said, “It took us a couple of days to ID it, but the Office of Naval Intelligence is convinced it is the
Knyaz Oleg
. It’s a boomer, a brand-new Borei. It’s so new we had no idea it was
taking part in fleet ops. From the track of the sightings, it’s definitely heading out into the Atlantic. There’s not much for it to do there in the middle of the ocean, so it is a reasonable assumption that it’s making a crossing.”

Ryan flexed his jaw. “It’s coming here, then.”

With a nod Hazelton said, “
That’s
why SecDef and I are here looking at you like this.”

“What are we doing to find it?”

“The Atlantic Fleet is on notice. We are moving surface ships and subs out of Norfolk to augment what is already out on routine patrol. We have P-3s and P-8s either en route or prepping on both coasts, and ONI is working to plot possible courses.”

Ryan detected something in Hazelton’s voice. “But?”

“But the Borei will be difficult to detect. Damn near impossible. Frankly, all the advantages in this hunt are in favor of the
Knyaz Oleg
.”

“Why didn’t we pick it up sooner?”

“Olavsvern, Mr. President. When the Norwegians sold off their Arctic naval base, it hurt our efforts to find, fix, and track subs coming out of Kola Bay.”

Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “Kill me now. Just put me out of my misery.” After a moment he said, “How many Borei are in the Russian fleet?”

“We thought they had three operational Borei-class subs. Now it appears they have five. The two that were under trials are apparently further along than we thought.”

“Where are the five?”

“One in the Pacific Fleet, two in the Northern Fleet, one in the Black Sea near Sevastopol, and one, from what the intel tells us, is heading over here.”

“They can launch Bulavas, right?”

Hazelton nodded. “The Borei has the capability to carry Bulava missiles, yes.”

Ryan said, “Talk to me about the specs of the Bulava.”

Burgess took this one. “It’s a new and relatively unproven system, but our intelligence on it makes it look impressive. It’s hypersonic, faster than anything else out there; it has the ability to conduct evasive post-launch maneuvers and deploy decoys to shake off antimissile ordnance.”

Ryan said, “We have no idea if the
Knyaz
, or if any of them, for that matter, are actually carrying Bulava missiles, do we?”

“None whatsoever. My guess is some are, some aren’t.”

Ryan said, “Still, we operate under the assumption that the
Knyaz Oleg
has a full complement of nuclear weapons in its stores.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Assuming this submarine does park along our coastline, what are the chances our antiballistic missiles can defeat a Bulava launch?”

Hazelton shook his head gravely as he spoke. “Next to none. It’s too close, it’s too fast, and it’s too smart. We can put several Aegis platforms near D.C. Destroyers with missile defense, but they’ve never successfully brought down anything with a Bulava’s capabilities. Frankly, Mr. President, our only real hope is launch failure.”

Ryan had heard this before, but he wanted to be certain.

“What else do you suggest we do?”

“Sir,” Burgess said gravely, “I would never tell my President what he has to do . . . but you asked me directly.”

“I did.”

“You have to make sure that sub doesn’t launch. I’m sure that’s easier said than done, but I can assure you that once those missiles fly . . . we aren’t stopping
any
of them. As a military man, it might
seem strange to say it, but our best defense is diplomacy on this one. A world where Valeri Volodin doesn’t order that sub commander to fire is the world we need at the moment.”

Scott Adler said, “Mr. President, if we’ve indeed identified this as a Russian nuclear ballistic missile sub, and if we are confident it is heading across the Atlantic, I suggest we go public with it. It might embarrass the Russians on the world stage enough for them to recall it.”

Burgess said, “I agree we go public. Don’t know if they’ll be embarrassed, but this is a case where I think revealing our capabilities at detection will be good for our national defense. Make the Russkies aware that we’re tracking closely. They won’t know that we’ve lost them, only that, at one point, we had them fixed.”

Ryan nodded. “We let Russia know that we know, although it doesn’t look like they were going to great lengths to hide the fact. I wonder if that was their point from the outset. Create a panic.”

Burgess said, “It’s possible. The Borei is a terror weapon, just like its predecessor, the Typhoon.” He shrugged. “At least until we got our hands on
Red October
and unlocked its secrets.”

Jack Ryan gazed out the window for a moment, through glass thick enough to stop a sniper’s bullet. He thought about his own short stint as an impromptu crew member on a Russian SSBN. “For a long time we had an incredible advantage on Russia in the antisubmarine-warfare realm. We essentially deconstructed the Typhoon we captured, and learned a lot in the process.

“But the Borei is using all new technology. It’s a game changer. The advantages go with the subs, not with the ships hunting the subs.” He sighed. In an annoyed tone he said, “Olavsvern. At the NATO summit, can we add a line to my speech politely requesting that no more strategic NATO bases be given to the Russians?”

Eyes turned to Adler, who said, “Diplomatically speaking, that will come off as an insult to Norway.”

Ryan said, “Well, they have it coming. I’m not going to this summit to ruffle feathers, but the fact I have to go hat in hand to make my case to increase the readiness state means our NATO partners”—he held a finger up to correct himself—“
some
of our NATO partners, are shockingly out of touch.”

Burgess said, “Remember, Mr. President. This isn’t the first time Russia has sent a ballistic missile sub across the Atlantic. They sent a Typhoon over two years ago, took a few pictures off North Carolina, and went home. We only found out about it after the fact when Russia reported it as a major success.”

Ryan said, “At the time it looked like they did it for the prestige, their way of saying the Russian Navy was coming back strong. Looking at that now, I wonder if it wasn’t some sort of proof of concept.”

He then asked, “Will the
Knyaz Oleg
go back to North Carolina?”

Hazelton shook his head. “Doubtful. They figure we’ll look there, and there is a lot of coastline to choose from instead.”

Adler said, “What I don’t get is why. Why is Volodin doing this, and why now?”

Ryan said, “My guess is that Volodin ordered this sub to come over here because he wants to remind the U.S. we have our own problems close to home so that we’re not too focused on events in Europe. He wants to threaten us directly, to use his submarine as a terror weapon, so we won’t be emboldened in advance of the summit.”

Adler said, “Mr. President, your performance in Europe next week is becoming more important by the day. You have to convince twenty-seven nations, in the face of all the increasing danger
coming out of Russia, to do something that many will call provocative. They will say you are poking at a wasps’ nest with a sharp stick.”

Ryan said, “Well, then, I’ll have to convince them that I just want to position a few cans of bug spray around the yard in case the wasps begin to swarm.”