With that sort of reshuffling at the top and this sudden access to new and fantastic information . . . What does it mean for me? Ryan asked himself.  They couldn't want him to be the next DDI.  He knew he didn't have anything like the experience required for that job—though maybe in another five or six years . . .

Reykjanes Ridge

Ramius inspected his status board.  The Red October was heading southwest on track eight, the westernmost surveyed route on what Northern Fleet submariners called Gorshkov's Railroad.  His speed was thirteen knots.  It never occurred to him that this was an unlucky number, an Anglo-Saxon superstition.  They would hold this course and speed for another twenty hours.  Immediately behind him, Kamarov was seated at the submarine's gravitometer board, a large rolled chart behind him.  The young lieutenant was chain-smoking, and looked tense as he ticked off their position on the chart.  Ramius did not disturb him.  Kamarov knew this job, and Borodin would relieve him in another two hours.

Installed in the Red October's keel was a highly sensitive device called a gradiometer, essentially two large lead weights separated by a space of one hundred yards.  A laser-computer system measured the space between the weights down to a fraction of an angstrom.  Distortions of that distance or lateral movement of the weights indicated variations in the local gravitational field.  The navigator compared these highly precise local values to the values on his chart.  With careful use of gravitometers in the ship's inertial navigation system, he could plot the vessel's location to within a hundred meters, half the length of the ship.

The mass-sensing system was being added to all the submarines that could accommodate it.  Younger attack boat commanders, Ramius knew, had used it to run the Railroad at high speed.  Good for the commander's ego, Ramius judged, but a little hard on the navigator.  He felt no need for recklessness.  Perhaps the letter had been a mistake . . . No, it prevented second thoughts.  And the sensor suites on attack submarines simply were not good enough to detect the Red October so long as he maintained his silent routine.  Ramius was certain of this; he had used them all.  He would get where he wanted to go, do what he wanted to do, and nobody, not his own countrymen, not even the Americans, would be able to do a thing about it.  That's why earlier he had listened to the passage of an Alfa thirty miles to his east and smiled.

The White House