Jack Ryan 4 - The Hunt for Red October (12 page)

“How old were you at
Pearl Harbor
?”

“My father was nineteen, sir. He didn't marry until after the war, and I wasn't the first little Ryan.” Jack smiled. Greer knew all this. “As I recall you weren't all that old yourself.”

“I was a seaman second on the old
Texas
.” Greer had never made it into that war. Soon after it started he'd been accepted by the
Naval
Academy
. By the time he had graduated from there and finished training at submarine school, the war was almost over. He reached the Japanese coast on his first cruise the day after the war ended. “But you know what I mean.”

“Indeed I do, sir, and that's why we have the CIA, DIA, NSA, and NRO, among others. If the Russkies can fool all of us, maybe we ought to read up on our Marx.”

“All those subs heading into the
Atlantic
. . . ”

“I feel better with word that the Yankee is heading north. They've had enough time to make that a hard piece of data.
Davenport
probably doesn't want to believe it without confirmation. If Ivan was looking to play hardball, that Yankee'd be heading south. The missiles on those old boats can't reach very far. Sooo—we stay up and watch. Fortunately, sir, you make a decent cup of coffee.”

“How does breakfast grab you?”

“Might as well. If we can finish up on the
Afghanistan
stuff, maybe I can fly back tomorr—tonight.”

“You still might. Maybe this way you'll learn to sleep on the plane.”

Breakfast was sent up twenty minutes later. Both men were accustomed to big ones, and the food was surprisingly good. Ordinarily CIA cafeteria food was government-undistinguished, and Ryan wondered if the night crew, with fewer people to serve, might take the time to do their job right. Or maybe they had sent out for it. The two men sat around until
Davenport
phoned at
quarter to seven
.

“It's definite. All the boomers are heading towards port. We have good tracks on two Yankees, three Deltas, and a Typhoon.
Memphis
reported when her Delta took off for home at twenty knots after being on station for five days, and then Gallery queried Queenfish. Same story—looks like they're all headed for the barn. Also we just got some photos from a Big Bird pass over the fjord—for once it wasn't covered with clouds—and we have a bunch of surface ships with bright infrared signatures, like they're getting steam up.”

“How about Red October?” Ryan asked.

“Nothing. Maybe our information was bad, and she didn't sail. Wouldn't be the first time.”

“You don't suppose they've lost her?” Ryan wondered aloud.

Davenport
had already thought of that. “That would explain the activity up north, but what about the Baltic and Med business?”

“Two years ago we had that scare with Tullibee,” Ryan pointed out. “And the CNO was so pissed he threw an all-hands rescue drill on both oceans.”

“Maybe,”
Davenport
conceded. The blood in
Norfolk
was supposed to have been ankle deep after that fiasco. The USS Tullibee, a small one-of-a-kind attack sub, had long carried a reputation for bad luck. In this case it had spilled over onto a lot of others.

“Anyway, it looks a whole lot less scary than it did two hours back. They wouldn't be recalling their boomers if they were planning anything against us, would they?” Ryan said.

“I see that Ryan still has your crystal ball, James.”

“That's what I pay him for, Charlie.”

“Still, it is odd,” Ryan commented. “Why recall all of the missile boats? Have they ever done this before? What about the ones in the Pacific?”

“Haven't heard about those yet,”
Davenport
replied. “I've asked CINCPAC for data, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. On the other question, no, they've never recalled all their boomers at once, but they do occasionally reshuffle all their positions at once. That's probably what this is. I said they're heading towards port, not into it. We won't know that for a couple of days.”

“What if they're afraid they've lost one?” Ryan ventured.

“No such luck,”
Davenport
scoffed. “They haven't lost a boomer since that Golf we lifted off
Hawaii
, back when you were in high school, Ryan. Ramius is too good a skipper to let that happen.”

So was Captain Smith of the Titanic, Ryan thought.

“Thanks for the info, Charlie.” Greer hung up. “Looks like you were right, Jack. Nothing to worry about yet. Let's get that data on
Afghanistan
in here—and just for the hell of it, we'll look at Charlie's pictures of their Northern Fleet when we're finished.”

Ten minutes later a messenger arrived with a cart from central files. Greer was the sort who liked to see the raw data himself. This suited Ryan. He'd known of a few analysts who had based their reports on selective data and been cut off at the knees for it by this man. The information on the cart was from a variety of sources, but to Ryan the most significant were tactical radio intercepts from listening posts on the Pakistani border, and, he gathered, from inside
Afghanistan
itself. The nature and tempo of Soviet operations did not indicate a backing off, as seemed to be suggested by a pair of recent articles in Red Star and some intelligence sources inside the
Soviet Union
. They spent three hours reviewing the data.

“I think Sir Basil is placing too much stock in political intelligence and too little in what our listening posts are getting in the field. It would not be unprecedented for the Soviets not to let their field commanders know what's going on in
Moscow
, of course, but on the whole I do not see a clear picture,” Ryan concluded.

The admiral looked at him. “I pay you for answers, Jack.”

“Sir, the truth is that
Moscow
moved in there by mistake. We know that from both military and political intelligence reports. The tenor of the data is pretty clear. From where I sit, I don't see that they know what they want to do. In a case like this the bureaucratic mind finds it most easy to do nothing. So, their field commanders are told to continue the mission, while the senior party bosses fumble around looking for a solution and covering their asses for getting into the mess in the first place.”

“Okay, so we know that we don't know.”

“Yes, sir. I don't like it either, but saying anything else would be a lie.”

The admiral snorted. There was a lot of that at
Langley
, intelligence types giving answers when they didn't even know the questions. Ryan was still new enough to the game that when he didn't know, he said so. Greer wondered if that would change in time. He hoped not.

After lunch a package arrived by messenger from the National Reconnaissance Office. It contained the photographs taken earlier in the day on two successive passes by a KH-11 satellite.

They'd be the last such photos for a while because of the restrictions imposed by orbital mechanics and the generally miserable weather on the
Kola Peninsula
. The first set of visible light shots taken an hour after the F
LASH
signal had gone out from
Moscow
showed the fleet at anchor or tied to the docks. On infrared a number of them were glowing brightly from internal heat, indicating that their boilers or gas-turbine engine plants were operating. The second set of photos had been taken on the next orbital pass at a very low angle.

Ryan scrutinized the blowups. “Wow! Kirov, Moskva, Kiev, three Karas, five Krestas, four Krivaks, eight Udaloys, and five Sovremennys.”

“Search and rescue exercise, eh?” Greet gave Ryan a hard look. “Look at the bottom here. Every fast oiler they have is following them out. That's most of the striking force of the Northern Fleet right there, and if they need oilers, they figure to be out for a while.”

“
Davenport
could have been more specific. But we still have their boomers heading back in. No amphibious ships in this photo, just combatants. Only the new ones, too, the ones with range and speed.”

“And the best weapons.”

“Yeah,” Ryan nodded. “And all scrambled in a few hours. Sir, if they had this planned in advance, we'd have known about it. This must have been laid on today. Interesting.”

“You've picked up the English habit of understatement, Jack.” Greer stood up to stretch. “I want you to stay over an extra day.”

“Okay, sir.” He looked at his watch. “Mind if I phone the wife? I don't want her to drive out to the airport for a plane I'm not on.”

“Sure, and after you've finished that, I want you to go down and see someone at DIA who used to work for me. See how much operational data they're getting on this sortie. If this is a drill, we'll know soon enough, and you can still take your Surfing Barbie home tomorrow.”

It was a Skiing Barbie, but Ryan didn't say so.

WEDNESDAY, 8 DECEMBER

CIA Headquarters

Ryan had been to the office of the director of central intelligence several times before to deliver briefings and occasional personal messages from Sir Basil Charleston to his highness, the DCI. It was larger than Greer's, with a better view of the
Potomac
Valley
, and appeared to have been decorated by a professional in a style compatible with the DCI's origins. Arthur Moore was a former judge of the Texas State Supreme Court, and the room reflected his southwestern heritage. He and Admiral Greer were sitting on a sofa near the picture window. Greer waved Ryan over and passed him a folder.

The folder was made of red plastic and had a snap closure. Its edges were bordered with white tape and the cover had a simple white paper label bearing the legends EYES ONLY Δ and
W
ILLOW
. Neither notation was unusual. A computer in the basement of the
Langley
headquarters selected random names at the touch of a key; this prevented a foreign agent from inferring anything from the name of the operation. Ryan opened the folder and looked first at the index sheet. Evidently there were only three copies of the
W
ILLOW
document, each initialed by its owner. This one was initialed by the DCI himself. A CIA document with only three copies was unusual enough that Ryan, whose highest clearance was N
EBULA
, had never encountered one. From the grave looks of Moore and Greer, he guessed that these were two of the Δ-cleared officers; the other, he assumed, was the deputy director of operations (DDO), another Texan named Robert Ritter.

Ryan turned the index sheet. The report was a xeroxed copy of something that had been typed on a manual machine, and it had too many strikeovers to have been done by a real secretary. If Nancy Cummings and the other elite executive secretaries had not been allowed to see this  . . .  Ryan looked up.

“It's all right, Jack,” Greer said. “You've just been cleared for
W
ILLOW
.”

Ryan sat back, and despite his excitement began to read the document slowly and carefully.

The agent's code name was actually C
ARDINAL
. The highest ranking agent-in-place the CIA had ever had, he was the stuff that legends are made of. C
ARDINAL
had been recruited more than twenty years earlier by Oleg Penkovskiy. Another legend—a dead one—Penkovskiy had at the time been a colonel in the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, a larger and more active counterpart to America's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). His position had given him access to daily information on all facets of the Soviet military, from the Red Army's command structure to the operational status of intercontinental missiles. The information he smuggled out through his British contact, Greville Wynne, was supremely valuable, and Western countries had come to depend on it—too much. Penkovskiy was discovered during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. It was his data, ordered and delivered under great pressure and haste, that told President Kennedy that Soviet strategic systems were not ready for war. This information enabled the president to back Khrushchev into a corner from which there was no easy exit. The famous blink ascribed to Kennedy's steady nerves was, as in many such events throughout history, facilitated by his ability to see the other man's cards. This advantage was given him by a courageous agent whom he would never meet. Penkovskiy's response to the F
LASH
request from
Washington
was too rash. Already under suspicion, this finished him. He paid for his treason with his life. It was C
ARDINAL
who first learned that he was being watched more closely than was the norm for a society where everyone is watched. He warned Penkovskiy—too late. When it became clear that the colonel could not be extracted from the
Soviet Union
, he himself urged C
ARDINAL
to betray him. It was the final ironic joke of a brave man that his own death would advance the career of an agent whom he had recruited.

C
ARDINAL
's job was necessarily as secret as his name. A senior adviser and confidant of a Politburo member, C
ARDINAL
often acted as his representative within the Soviet military establishment. He thus had access to political and military intelligence of the highest order. This made his information extraordinarily valuable—and, paradoxically, highly suspect. Those few experienced CIA case officers who knew of him found it impossible to believe that he had not been “turned” somewhere along the line by one of the thousands of KGB counterintelligence officers whose sole duty it is to watch everyone and everything. For this reason C
ARDINAL
-coded material was generally cross-checked against the reports of other spies and sources. But he had outlived many small-fry agents.

The name C
ARDINAL
was known in
Washington
only to the top three CIA executives. On the first day of each month a new code name was chosen for his data, a name made known only to the highest echelon of CIA officers and analysts. This month it was
W
ILLOW
. Before being passed on, grudgingly, to outsiders, C
ARDINAL
data was laundered as carefully as Mafia income to disguise its source. There were also a number of security measures that protected the agent and were unique to him. For fear of cryptographic exposure of his identity, C
ARDINAL
material was hand delivered, never transmitted by radio or landline. C
ARDINAL
himself was a very careful man—Penkovskiy's fate had taught him that. His information was conveyed through a series of intermediaries to the chief of the CIA's
Moscow
station. He had outlived twelve station chiefs; one of these, a retired field officer, had a brother who was a Jesuit. Every morning the priest, an instructor in philosophy and theology at
Fordham
University
in
New York
, said mass for the safety and the soul of a man whose name he would never know. It was as good an explanation as any for C
ARDINAL
's continued survival.

Four separate times he had been offered extraction from the
Soviet Union
. Each time he had refused. To some this was proof that he'd been turned, but to others it was proof that like most successful agents C
ARDINAL
was a man driven by something he alone knew—and therefore, like most successful agents, he was probably a little crazy.

The document Ryan was reading had been in transit for twenty hours. It had taken five for the film to reach the American embassy in
Moscow
, where it was delivered at once to the station chief. An experienced field officer and former reporter for the New York Times, he worked under the cover of press attach‚. He developed the film himself in his private darkroom. Thirty minutes after its arrival, he inspected the five exposed frames through a magnifying glass and sent a F
LASH
-priority dispatch to
Washington
saying that a C
ARDINAL
signal was en route. Next he transcribed the message from the film to flash paper on his own portable typewriter, translating from the Russian as he went. This security measure erased both the agent's handwriting and, by the paraphrasing automatic to translation, any personal peculiarities of his language. The film was then burned to ashes, the report folded into a metal container much like a cigarette case. This held a small pyrotechnic charge that would go off if the case were improperly opened or suddenly shaken; two C
ARDINAL
signals had been lost when their cases were accidentally dropped. Next the station chief took the case to the embassy's courier-in-residence, who had already been booked on a three-hour Aeroflot flight to
London
. At
Heathrow
Airport
the courier sprinted to make connections with a Pan Am 747 to
New York
's Kennedy International, where he connected with the Eastern shuttle to
Washington
's
National
Airport
. By eight that morning the diplomatic bag was in the State Department. There a CIA officer removed the case, drove it immediately to
Langley
, and handed it to the DCI. It was opened by an instructor from the CIA's technical services branch. The DCI made three copies on his personal Xerox machine and burned the flash paper in his ashtray. These security measures had struck a few of the men who had succeeded to the office of the DCI as laughable. The laughs had never outlasted the first C
ARDINAL
report.

When Ryan finished the report he referred back to the second page and read it through again, shaking his head slowly. The
W
ILLOW
document was the strongest reinforcement yet of his desire not to know how intelligence information reached him. He closed the folder and handed it back to Admiral Greer.

“Christ, sir.”

“Jack, I know I don't have to say this—but what you have just read, nobody, not the president, not Sir Basil, not God if He asks, nobody learns of it without the authorization of the director. Is that understood?” Greer had not lost his command voice.

“Yes, sir.” Ryan bobbed his head like a schoolboy.

Judge Moore pulled a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it, looking past the flame into Ryan's eyes. The judge, everyone said, had been a hell of a field officer in his day. He'd worked with Hans Tofte during the Korean War and had been instrumental in bringing off one of the CIA's legendary missions, the disappearance of a Norwegian ship that had been carrying a cargo of medical personnel and supplies for the Chinese. The loss had delayed a Chinese offensive for several months, saving thousands of American and allied lives. But it had been a bloody operation. All of the Chinese personnel and all of the Norwegian crewmen had vanished. It was a bargain in the simple mathematics of war, but the morality of the mission was another matter. For this reason, or perhaps another, Moore had soon thereafter left government service to become a trial lawyer in his native
Texas
. His career had been spectacularly successful, and he'd advanced from wealthy courtroom lawyer to distinguished appellate judge. He had been recalled to the CIA three years earlier because of his unique combination of absolute personal integrity and experience in black operations. Judge Moore hid a Harvard law degree and a highly ordered mind behind the facade of a
West Texas
cowboy, something he had never been but simulated with ease.

“So, Dr. Ryan, what do you think of this?”
Moore
said as the deputy director of operations came in. “Hi, Bob, come on over here. We just showed Ryan here the
W
ILLOW
file.”

“Oh?” Ritter slid a chair over, neatly trapping Ryan in the corner. “And what does the admiral's fair-haired boy think of that?”

“Gentlemen, I assume that you all regard this information as genuine,” Ryan said cautiously, getting nods. “Sir, if this information was hand delivered by the Archangel Michael, I'd have trouble believing it—but since you gentlemen say it's reliable . . . ” They wanted his opinion. The problem was, his conclusion was too incredible. Well, he decided, I've gotten this far by giving my honest opinions . . .

Ryan took a deep breath and gave them his evaluation.

“Very well, Dr. Ryan,” Judge Moore nodded sagaciously. “First I want to hear what else it might be, then I want you to defend your analysis.”

“Sir, the most obvious alternative doesn't bear much thinking about. Besides, they've been able to do it since Friday and they haven't done it,” Ryan said, keeping his voice low and reasonable. Ryan had trained himself to be objective. He ran through the four alternatives he had considered, careful to examine each in detail. This was no time to allow personal views to intrude on his thinking. He spoke for ten minutes.

“I suppose there's one more possibility, Judge,” he concluded. “This could be disinformation aimed at blowing this source. I cannot evaluate that possibility.”

“The thought has occurred to us. All right, now that you've gone this far, you might as well give your operational recommendation.”

“Sir, the admiral can tell you what the navy'll say.”

“I sorta figured that one out, boy,”
Moore
laughed. “What do you think?”

“Judge, setting up the decision tree on this will not be easy—there are too many variables, too many possible contingencies. But I'd say yes. If it's possible, if we can work out the details, we ought to try. The biggest question is the availability of our own assets. Do we have the pieces in place?”

Greer answered. “Our assets are slim. One carrier, Kennedy. I checked.
Saratoga
's in
Norfolk
with an engineering casualty. On the other hand, HMS Invincible was just over here for the NATO exercise, sailed from
Norfolk
Monday night. Admiral White, I believe, commanding a small battle group.”

“Lord White, sir?” Ryan asked. “The earl of Weston?”

“You know him?”
Moore
asked.

“Yes, sir. Our wives are friendly. I hunted with him last September, a grouse shoot in
Scotland
. He makes noises like a good operator, and I hear he has a good reputation.”

“You're thinking we might want to borrow their ships, James?”
Moore
asked. “If so, we'll have to tell them about this. But we have to tell our side first. There's a meeting of the National Security Council at one this afternoon. Ryan, you will prepare the briefing papers and deliver the briefing yourself.”

Ryan blinked. “That's not much time, sir.”

“James here says you work well under pressure. Prove it.” He looked at Greer. “Get a copy of his briefing papers and be ready to fly to
London
. That's the president's decision. If we want their boats, we'll have to tell them why. That means briefing the prime minister, and that's your job. Bob, I want you to confirm this report. Do what you have to do, but do not get
W
ILLOW
involved.”

“Right,” Ritter replied.

Moore
looked at his watch. “We'll meet back here at
3:30
, depending on how the meeting goes. Ryan, you have ninety minutes. Get cracking.”

What am I being measured for? Ryan wondered. There was talk in the CIA that Judge Moore would be leaving soon for a comfortable ambassadorship, perhaps to the Court of St. James's, a fitting reward for a man who had worked long and hard to reestablish a close relationship with the British. If the judge left, Admiral Greer would probably move into his office. He had the virtues of age—he wouldn't be around that long—and of friends on Capitol Hill. Ritter had neither. He had complained too long and too openly about congressmen who leaked information on his operations and his field agents, getting men killed in the process of demonstrating their importance on the local cocktail circuit. He also had an ongoing feud with the chairman of the Select Intelligence Committee.