Ryan stretched. ‘That makes it sound like an exercise, sir. We’ll want a little more data on what they’re doing, though. Have you talked to Admiral Davenport?’
‘That’s the next step. Haven’t had time. I’ve only been in long enough to shave myself and turn the coffee on.’ Greer sat down and set his phone receiver in the desk speaker before punching in the numbers.
‘Vice Admiral Davenport.’ The voice was curt.
‘Morning, Charlie, James here. Did you get that NSA-976?’
‘Sure did, but that’s not what got me up. Our SOSUS net went berserk a few hours ago.’
‘Oh?’ Greer looked at the phone, then at Ryan.
‘Yeah, nearly every sub they have at sea just put the pedal to the metal, and all at about the same time.’
‘Doing what exactly, Charlie?’ Greer prompted.
‘We’re still figuring that out. It looks like a lot of boats are heading into the North Atlantic. Their units in the Norwegian Sea are racing southwest. Three from the western Med are heading that way, too, but we haven’t got a clear picture yet. We need a few more hours.’
‘What do they have operating off our coast, sir?’ Ryan asked.
‘They woke you up, Ryan? Good. Two old Novembers. One’s a raven conversion doing an ELINT job off the cape. The other one’s sitting off King’s Bay making a damned nuisance of itself.’
Ryan smiled to himself. An American or allied ship was a she; the Russians used the male pronoun for a ship; and the intelligence community usually referred to a Soviet ship as it.
There’s a Yankee boat,’ Davenport went on, ‘a thousand miles south of Iceland, and the initial report is that it’s heading north. Probably wrong. Reciprocal bearing, transcription error, something like that. We’re checking. Must be a goof, because it was heading south earlier.’
Ryan looked up. ‘What about their other missile boats?’
‘Their Deltas and Typhoons are in the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, as usual. No news on them. Oh, we have attack boats up there, of course, but Gallery doesn’t want them to break radio silence, and he’s right. So all we have at the moment is the report on the stray Yankee.’
‘What are we doing, Charlie?’ Greer asked.
‘Gallery has a general alert out to his boats. They’re standing by in case we need to redeploy. NORAD has gone to a slightly increased alert status, they tell me.’ Davenport referred to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. ‘CINCLANT and CINCPAC fleet staffs are up and running around in circles, like you’d expect. Some extra P-3s are working out of Iceland. Nothing much else at the moment. First we have to figure out what they’re up to.’
‘Okay, keep me posted.’
‘Roger, if we hear anything I’ll let you know, and I trust –’
‘We will.’ Greer killed the phone. He shook a finger at Ryan. ‘Don’t you go to sleep on me, Jack.’
‘On top of this stuff?’ Ryan waved his mug.
‘You’re not concerned, I see.’
‘Sir, there’s nothing to be concerned about yet. It’s what, one in the afternoon over there now? Probably some admiral, maybe old Sergey himself, decided to toss a drill at his boys. He wasn’t supposed to be all that pleased with how CRIMSON STORM worked out, and maybe he decided to rattle a few cages – ours included, of course. Hell, their army and air force aren’t involved, and it’s for damned sure that if they were planning anything nasty the other services would know about it. We’ll have to keep an eye on this, but so far I don’t see anything to –’ Ryan almost said lose sleep over ‘– sweat about.’
‘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 in 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 furious 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