The president arrived a minute later.  Everyone in the room stood as he walked to his chair, on Ryan's right.  He said a few quick things to Dr. Pelt, then looked pointedly at the DCI.

"Gentlemen, if we can bring this meeting to order, I think Judge Moore has some news for us."

"Thank you, Mr. President.  Gentlemen, we've had an interesting development today with respect to the Soviet naval operation that started yesterday.  I have asked Dr. Ryan here to deliver the briefing."

The president turned to Ryan.  The younger man could feel himself being appraised.  "You may proceed."

Ryan took a sip of ice water from a glass hidden in the lectern.  He had a wireless control for the slide projector and a choice of pointers.  A separate high-intensity light illuminated his notes.  The pages were full of errors and scribbled corrections.  There had not been time to edit the copy.

"Thank you, Mr. President.  Gentlemen, my name is Jack Ryan, and the subject of this briefing is recent Soviet naval activity in the North Atlantic.  Before I get to that it will be necessary for me to lay a little groundwork.  I trust you will bear with me for a few minutes, and please feel free to interrupt with questions at any time."  Ryan clicked on the slide projector.  The overhead lights near the screen dimmed automatically.

"These photographs come to us courtesy of the British," Ryan said.  He now had everyone's attention.  "The ship you see here is the Soviet fleet ballistic missile submarine Red October, photographed by a British agent in her dock at their submarine base at Polyarnyy, near Murmansk in northern Russia.  As you can see, she is a very large vessel, about 650 feet long, a beam of roughly 85 feet, and an estimated submerged displacement of 32,000 tons.  These figures are roughly comparable to those of a World War I battleship."

Ryan lifted a pointer.  "In addition to being considerably larger than our own Ohio-class Trident submarines, Red October has a number of technical differences.  She carries twenty-six missiles instead of our twenty-four.  The earlier Typhoon-class vessels, from which she was developed, only have twenty.  October carries the new SS-N-20 sea-launched ballistic missile, the Seahawk.  It's a solid-fuel missile with a range of about six thousand nautical miles, and it carries eight multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, MIRVs, each with an estimated yield of five hundred kilotons.  It's the same RV carried by their SS-18s, but there are less of them per launcher.

"As you can see, the missile tubes are located forward of the sail instead of aft, as in our subs.  The forward diving planes fold into slots in the hull here; ours go on the sail.  She has twin screws; ours have one propeller.  And finally, her hull is oblate.  Instead of being cylindrical like ours, it is flattened out markedly top and bottom."