Jack Ryan 4 - The Hunt for Red October Read Online Free PDF Page B

year.”
    “Oh, I see. And you're afraid he doesn't come here?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “Why didn't you ask me before? Of course he comes here. Promise.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”
    “Okay.” She kissed her father and ran out of the room, back to watching cartoons on the telly, as they called it in
    
    
     England
    
    
    . Ryan was glad she had interrupted him. He didn't want to forget to pick up a few things when he flew over to
    
    
     Washington
    
    
    . Where was—oh, yeah. He pulled a disk from his desk drawer and inserted it in the spare disk drive. After clearing the screen, he scrolled up the Christmas list, things he still had to get. With a simple command a copy of the list was made on the adjacent printer. Ryan tore the page off and tucked it in his wallet. Work didn't appeal to him this Saturday morning. He decided to play with his kids. After all, he'd be stuck in
    
    
     Washington
    
    
     for much of the coming week.
     
     
    The
    
     V. K. Konovalov
     
    The Soviet submarine V. K. Konovalov crept above the hard sand bottom of the
    
     Barents Sea
    
     at three knots. She was at the southwest comer of grid square 54-90 and for the past ten hours had been drifting back and forth on a north-south line, waiting for the Red October to arrive for the beginning of Exercise O
    CTOBER
     F
    ROST
    . Captain Second Rank Viktor Alexievich Tupolev paced slowly around the periscope pedestal in the control room of his small, fast attack sub. He was waiting for his old mentor to show up, hoping to play a few tricks on him. He had served with the Schoolmaster for two years. They had been good years, and while he found his former commander to be something of a cynic, especially about the Party, he would unhesitatingly testify to Ramius' skill and craftiness.
    And his own. Tupolev, now in his third year of command, had been one of the Schoolmaster's star pupils. His current vessel was a brand-new Alfa, the fastest submarine ever made. A month earlier, while Ramius had been fitting out the Red October after her initial shakedown, Tupolev and three of his officers had flown down to see the model sub that had been the test-bed for the prototype drive system. Thirty-two meters long and diesel-electric powered, it was based in the
    
     Caspian Sea
    
    , far from the eyes of imperialist spies, and kept in a covered dock, hidden from their photographic satellites. Ramius had had a hand in the development of the caterpillar, and Tupolev recognized the mark of the master. It would be a bastard to detect. Not quite impossible, though. After a week of following the model around the north end of the
    
     Caspian Sea
    
     in an electrically powered launch, trailing the best passive sonar array his country had yet made, he thought he had found a flaw. Not a big one, just big enough to exploit.
    Of course there was no guarantee of success. He was not only in competition with a machine, but also with the captain commanding her. Tupolev knew this area intimately. The water was almost perfectly isothermal; there was no thermal layer for a submarine to hide under. They were far enough from the freshwater rivers on the north coast of
    
    
     Russia
    
    
     not to have to worry about pools and walls of variable salinity interfering with their sonar searches. The Konovalov had been built with the best sonar systems the
    
     Soviet Union
    
     had yet produced, copied closely from the French DUUV-23 and a bit improved, the factory technicians said.
    Tupolev planned to mimic the American tactic of drifting slowly, with just enough speed to maintain steerage, perfectly quiet and waiting for the Red October to cross his path. He would then trail his quarry closely and log each change in course and speed, so that when they compared logs in a few weeks the Schoolmaster would see that his erstwhile student had played his own winning game. It was about time someone did.
    “Anything new on sonar?” Tupolev was getting tense. Patience came hard to