BEFORE RED OCTOBER

G.H. Spaulding

Somewhere south of Iceland — 4:17 a.m.

                        “Mark on top,” said Lieutenant Paul D’angelo from the left seat of the P-3C that circled busily at 12,000 feet over the frigid North Atlantic. Further aft, Lieutenant Rhonda “Little Mac” McIntyre, the crew’s tactical coordinator, pushed a button on her computer console to update the relative position of a sonobuoy bobbing on the surface of the frothy sea more than two miles below.
            The sonobuoy was a radio transmitter. For the next two hours, it would continue relaying acoustic data received by its underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, dangling hundreds of feet beneath it in the cold, ebony sea. Computers aboard the P-3 Orion would process the data and display it on screens for tactical crewmembers to decipher. There were at the moment nine sonobuoys in the water, each of them collecting and, via its own unique frequency, sending information for on-board processing. Their signals conveyed a variety of sounds—the hum of distant commercial shipping, the bellow of

HARPOON MISSILE LAUNCH

Scratch one surface target

            A P-3C Orion from Patrol Squadron 23 (VP-23) in Brunswick, Maine. Nicknamed the “Seahawks,” the squadron of 9 P-3s and 12 flight crews deployed to Iceland, Bermuda, the Azores and Sicily, from where they tracked Soviet ballistic missile and attack submarines.

            Submarines were tracked by means of sonobuoys, small radio transmitters dropped from the belly of the plane. Floating on the ocean’s surface, sonobuoys spooled out underwater microphones to depths of 1,000 feet and could detect submarines more than 50 miles away.

an occasional whale, the chattering of a swarm of snapping shrimp and the persistent pitch of a Soviet nuclear-powered Delta-class submarine.

            The Delta was on patrol, moving stealthily southward. Over 450 feet in length, it carried 16 SS-N-8 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each with a range of 4,200 miles and each outfitted with a cluster of nuclear warheads aimed independently at targets in the United States. More than 100 American targets now lay within the Delta’s striking range. Operating from Keflavik, Iceland, the P-3 had been tracking the Delta covertly for more than three hours. It would continue doing so for nearly three more before a relieving aircraft was scheduled to arrive from Kef.

            D’angelo, known affectionately as “Dangerous Dan” to the rest of his eleven-man, one-woman crew, guided the plane smoothly in the direction of the next buoy in the pattern. Blind to it in the darkness, he followed the point of a needle on his instrument panel that was slaved to the buoy’s radio frequency. “Mark on top,” he reported to “Little Mac” when the needle flipped over a moment later.

            Suddenly, the tranquility of the cockpit was broken by the nerve-jarring blare of a warning claxon. At the same time, a red light on the instrument panel above the gages for the number three engine illuminated, bathing the darkened flight station in a brilliant scarlet glow.

            Petty Officer First-Class Roger Kyle, the flight engineer occupying the middle seat, reacted first. His “Oh shit!” spoke for the two pilots who flanked him.