The Hunt for Red October - Tom Clancy [100]
Bait 1, he saw, was proceeding, unmindful of what had happened to her trailing sister.
The E. S. Politovskiy
It took nine minutes for the Politovskiy to fall the two thousand feet to the ocean floor. She impacted savagely on the hard sand bottom at the edge of the continental shelf. It was a tribute to her builders that her interior bulkheads held. All the compartments from the reactor room aft were flooded and half the crew killed in them, but the forward compartments were dry. Even this was more curse than blessing. With the aft air storage banks unusable and only emergency battery power to run the complex environmental control systems, the forty men had only a limited supply of air. They were spared a rapid death from the crushing North Atlantic only to face a slower one from asphyxiation.
THE NINTH DAY
SATURDAY 11, DECEMBER
The Pentagon
A female yeoman first class held the door open for Tyler. He walked in to find General Harris standing alone over the large chart table pondering the placement of tiny ship models.
"You must be Skip Tyler." Harris looked up.
"Yes, sir." Tyler was standing as rigidly at attention as his prosthetic leg allowed. Harris came over quickly to shake hands.
"Greer says you used to play ball."
"Yes, General, I played right tackle at Annapolis. Those were good years." Tyler smiled, flexing his fingers. Harris looked like an iron-pumper.
"Okay, if you used to play ball, you can call me Ed." Harris poked him in the chest. "Your number was seventy-eight, and you made All American, right?"
"Second string, sir. Nice to know somebody remembers."
"I was on temporary duty at the Academy for a few months back then, and I caught a couple games. I never forget a good offensive lineman. I made All Conference at Montana—long time ago. What happened to the leg?"
"Drunk driver clipped me. I was the lucky one. The drunk didn't make it."
"Serves the bastard right."
Tyler nodded agreement, but remembered that the drunken shipfitter had had his own wife and family, according to the police. "Where is everybody?"
"The chiefs are at their normal—well, normal for a weekday, not a Saturday—intelligence briefing. They ought to be down in a few minutes. So, you're teaching engineering at Annapolis now, eh?"
"Yes, sir. I got a doctorate in that along the way."
"Name's Ed, Skip. And this morning you're going to tell us how we can hold onto that maverick Russian sub?"
"Yes, sir—Ed."
"Tell me about it, but let's get some coffee first." The two men went to a table in the corner with coffee and donuts. Harris listened to the younger man for five minutes, sipping his coffee and devouring a couple of jelly donuts. It took a lot of food to support his frame.
"Son of a gun," the J-3 observed when Tyler finished. He walked over to the chart. "That's interesting. Your idea depends a lot on sleight of hand. We'd have to keep them away from where we're pulling this off. About here, you say?" He tapped the chart.
"Yes, General. The thing is, the way they seem to be operating we can do this to seaward of them—"
"And do a double shuffle. I like it. Yeah, I like it, but Dan Foster won't like losing one of our own boats."
"I'd say it's worth the trade."
"So would I," Harris agreed. "But they're not my boats. After we do this, where do we hide her—if we get her?"
"General, there are some nice places right here on the Chesapeake Bay. There's a deep spot on the York River and another on the Patuxent, both owned by the navy, both marked Keep Out on the charts. Nice thing about subs, they're supposed to be invisible. You just find a deep enough spot and flood your tanks. That's temporary, of course. For a more permanent spot, maybe Truk or Kwajalein in the Pacific. Nice and far from any place."
"And the Soviets would never notice