Books: One of Their Subs Is Missing

Ronald Reagan, who rarely has time for fiction, has read it, pronounced it “the perfect yarn” and issued an invitation to the author to visit him at the White House this month. Other avid fans of the novel in the Administration include U.S. Information Agency Chief Charles Wick, outgoing White House / Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver and the brass at the Defense Department. The Soviet embassy in Washington has reportedly bought several copies, presumably for shipment to Moscow. The object of all this high-level interest is The Hunt for Red October, a sea thriller about spooks and submarines by Tom Clancy. Currently in its fourth printing, the book has been on the capital’s best-seller list for 15 weeks and is inching toward the charts in other major cities. Paperback rights have been sold for $49,500. Negotiations are under way for a movie.

Clancy’s book differs from the usual commercial publishing success in a number of ways. First, it was brought out not by Simon & Schuster or Random House but by the Naval Institute Press (N.I.P.) of Annapolis, an academic publisher specializing in works like The Mariner’s Pocket Companion and Dictionary of Naval Abbreviations. Second, the author is not an experienced novelist but a Maryland insurance broker who wrote his tale of high-tech undersea warfare without having served a single day in the Navy, much less aboard a submarine.

Clancy had gone directly to N.I.P. with the manuscript of The Hunt because his only previously published writing, a letter to the editor and a three-page article about MX missiles, had appeared in the press’s monthly magazine, Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. N.I.P. grabbed Clancy’s book; as it happened, the editors had just decided to publish original fiction, provided it was “wet”–about the Navy.

What rescued The Hunt from the publishing boneyard was Clancy’s gripping narrative. Navy buffs and thriller adepts have been mesmerized by the story of Soviet Submarine Captain Marko Ramius, who seeks to defect to the U.S., bringing a billion-dollar present with him. This is Red October, a ballistic- missile-armed submarine, or “boomer,” equipped with a new, silent propulsion system. In a message to his superior in Moscow, Ramius challenges the whole Soviet navy to catch him. He then takes off for Norfolk, together with a group of equally disaffected officers and an unsuspecting crew. Moscow dispatches 58 attack submarines to hunt and destroy the rogue boat before its secrets can fall into U.S. hands.

Exploits at sea are complemented by onshore skulduggery. A mole in the Kremlin tips off the CIA to Ramius’ intentions. The agency, the Navy and the White House then concoct a scheme to deceive the Kremlin into thinking that Red October has exploded in a nuclear accident when in fact the U.S. has blown up one of its own obsolete boomers. The denouement has Soviet and American nuclear subs playing a game of chicken that stops just short of unleashing World War III.

President Reagan was impressed by the technical information: the receptors on the sub’s hull that act like the sensory organs on a shark, the missile rooms that are dubbed Sherwood Forest because the green missile tubes resemble a stand of trees. Praising the author, the President is said to have wondered, “How in the world did he have all this knowledge?”

The answer is that Clancy, 37, studied the major unclassified books dealing with Soviet submarines, such as Combat Fleets of the World and Norman Polmar’s Guide to the Soviet Navy. Another important resource was the $9.95 war game Harpoon, devised as an instruction manual for Navy ROTC cadets, which comes with a 40-page rule book of strategy and tactics for Soviet-American naval engagements. The author also interviewed former submariners who are now operating the Baltimore Gas & Electric nuclear power plant near his home in Huntingtown, Md. “I didn’t get kissed by the muse,” he says. “It was hard work.”

It was also the fulfillment of an old dream. Clancy had longed to write a thriller ever since he majored in English at Loyola College in his native Baltimore. Severe myopia kept him from serving in the Viet Nam War, and the need to earn a living made him put his literary ambitions aside for the insurance business. The writing urge resurfaced in 1976 when Clancy read about a mutiny aboard the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy. The ship’s political officer and a group of enlisted men had attempted to defect to Sweden, and most of them had been killed. “That mutiny rattled around in my head for years,” Clancy recalls. Eventually the frigate was imagined as a submarine, and the novel began to take shape. He completed a first draft in six months. The finished manuscript was read by two submarine officers, who found only a few mistakes. For example, at one point Clancy had put valves on the bottom of ballast tanks instead of at the top.

In spite of the book’s popularity in the White House and the Pentagon, some expert readers have expressed reservations. Says one top-level Navy officer: “Though the descriptions of sea duty are fairly accurate, the plot line is ludicrous.”

Clancy may also be faulted for setting up a model of macho military behavior that includes potential disobedience of orders. In his zeal to defend the defecting Red October from an Alfa-class Soviet hunter, the commander of a U.S. attack sub considers torpedoing the Alfa on his own authority. Another American officer vows that if the Soviets fire at Red October, then he will destroy the hunter, “and rules of engagement be damned.”

In a blurb on the novel’s jacket, the former CIA chief, Admiral Stansfield Turner, is quoted as saying, “(Clancy) makes you appreciate that decisions naval commanders on both sides may have to make in peacetime could lead the United States and the Soviet Union into war.” Readers might well hope that the highly placed fans of The Hunt will keep the admiral’s thought in mind.