Red Metal

by Mark Greaney

  There was no shudder, no whooshing sound, nothing really above the noises of the sea slipping by outside the ship to indicate that the Kazan had just fired the first naval salvo of the next war.

  In spite of the cold air in the boat, Etush noted the two helmsmen had broken out in a sweat. It’s all in the hands of a couple of twenty-year-old boys at this point, he thought, and he realized he’d be sweating, too, if he were in their shoes.

  But he was the captain, and a much greater responsibility befell him. Even a sign of perspiration or nervous mannerism would make some of his men doubt his conviction. From his twenty-three years at sea, he had learned at times like this to minimize his movements across the bridge and to focus on the minute principles of navigating and steering his boat.

  He stayed perfectly still, standing under one of the sub’s downdraft ventilation systems, which blew cold air through his graying brown hair.

  The sonar operator called out: “Bridge, sonar reports contact, bearing six-three degrees. Sir, it’s the Norwegian Ula. She is twelve nautical miles and closing, speed nineteen knots.”

  If Etush had not been under the ventilation system, he, too, would have burst out into a sweat. Still, it brought a prickle of fresh perspiration to the back of his neck. He was an experienced enough seaman to do the calculations in his head even before his navigator spelled out the equation. At bearing sixty-three degrees and the ship driving at three-quarters speed, the Russian and Norwegian vessels would converge in about six minutes. The Norwegians would have no idea what the Russian Yasenevo-class was up to, but they would certainly be able to detect them.

  Navigation soon completed the calculation the captain had done in his head in two seconds. “Captain, on this heading and speed, we will intercept the Ula in five minutes forty-nine seconds.”

  “Understood, Navigator. Sonar, confirm all data. Navigator, replot for full speed; veer angle on target as necessary. If we can’t lay a clean row, we can still bomb all our cables at an intersection. Prepare and lay a new course to run the next two targets. We have a mission that takes priority.”

  “Aye, calculating.”

  Captain Etush watched the clock in silence for a moment: sixteen minutes remained. Speeding up meant the weapons crew would have to reset the timers on the torpedoes. He knew he’d have to trust them to just figure it out, but he couldn’t resist the urge to state the obvious.

  “Weapons, reset all torpedoes to zero and stand by for new timing data.”

  “Understood, sir,” answered Dmitry. Deep down belowdecks, five sailors and one officer would be furiously scrambling to zero out the SMDM-2C tube-launched torpedo mine. The SMDM-2C series of sea mine was new, vastly improved over previous generations, but the modernized version still required the weapons officer to unscrew a plate on the cavity and reprogram the timing. With the Kazan’s first target properly laid, there remained two more, and the next target was only five minutes away.

  “Navigation, status?” he demanded, still trying not to step on his men but watching his navigation section as they furiously computed the data.

  “Captain, triple confirming now, sending initial data to torpedo room. We have the timing updates. One moment for final confirmation.” Dmitry looked back at one of his men, who gave a thumbs-up. In the same monotone, but with more edge of adrenaline kicking in, Dmitry turned back to his captain. “Sir, navigation update. Recommend speed to flank, thirty knots, course change to zero-three-zero degrees magnetic.”

  “Bridge, Helm, do it.”

  The new plot, course, and speed would have already been digitally transmitted to the helm. But Etush had been in the navy long enough to follow sea protocols even in his sleep.

  Three minutes to target, Etush noted. Thirteen minutes on the clock. Still a full ten minutes to the last target. Barely enough time to reload the second torpedo into its tube.

  “Sir, weapon reprogram successful,” said Dmitry.

  “Very well. Inform the bridge once launched.”

  “Aye, Captain. Launch in on target two, designated ‘cable AC-One,’ in twenty seconds.”

  Etush glanced at the helmsmen. The two bald-headed boys held their yokes in a death grip.

  The weapons officer chanted off the seconds until launch. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .”

  Etush looked at the panel showing the status of the second torpedo tube and saw that it still indicated red. It was not ready to launch.

  “. . . four . . . three . . .” The tube coded from red to green. “. . . two . . . one . . . Launch on target designated ‘AC-One.’”

  The reply came instantly, with a twinge of relief from the weapons officer. “Torpedo is away.”

  “Helm, recommend new heading, zero-one-eight degrees magnetic, thirty-three knots.”

  Damn! thought Etush. They were almost at maximum speed.

  “Do it.”

  “Sir, Sonar reporting. Target zero one, the Ula, now bearing three-two-two degrees from bow. She will slip behind us in two minutes at this rate. She has picked up an active ping and has us locked.”

  Etush kept his voice calm. “Inevitable. Keep the boat steady on final target. Work up a continuous solution.” There was a hesitation in the acknowledgment of the order. Etush read the pall of nervousness permeating the bridge and attempted to alleviate it. He said, “She has no cause to fire on us. Our mine torpedo has slipped silently to the bottom by now. Our Norwegian friends could not have detected the launch.”

  Sonar spoke hesitantly. “Sir . . . calculating her sonar radius, the Ula will be within range to detect the launch on the final target.”

  “Yes, likely, but I am banking on her not wanting to start hostilities unless provoked.”

  “Sir, the Ula is directly abeam of us bearing two-six-three degrees, four nautical miles.”

  “Very well.” Etush looked at the torpedo panel. Of the ten torpedo tubes, tubes one and two showed yellow for “launched and in recovery” mode, and number seven was in green, or “launch” status. Only tube three showed “red,” or “unable to launch.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re on it. Message from the torpedo room . . . The third torpedo-mine panel will not open. They report the screws are stripped.”

  “Then they have six minutes to figure it out.” Etush said it calmly, although his insides were screaming.

  CHAPTER 25

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  25 DECEMBER

  0025

  In the Bear’s Den, the men of APT28 all kept their eyes on the clock above the big screen on the front wall. They were seconds away from the first cyberattack of Operacyia Krasnyi Metal, and the criticality of perfect timing had been pounded into their psyches for months.

  Colonel Glowski knew they were ready, because most of the work had already been done. They’d spent the past two months feverishly perpetrating cookie theft attacks, turning on the Trojan horse packets already embedded in their NATO hosts, opening latent back doors, dry hacking, and launching watering hole attacks.

  Now it was time to exploit all of their attack paradigms at once.

  Glowski looked at the digital clock, his heart racing like a submarine commander’s while cruising just over the Atlantic seabed or a highly decorated combat pilot’s while streaking through the sky in a fifth-generation fighter.

  Thinking of himself now, his responsibility in this operation, caused him to harken back to a time just ten weeks earlier when a pair of VIPs entered the Bear’s Den. He’d been informed that the two generals in charge of ground operations in Red Metal would be visiting, and he and his team prepared the space accordingly. Cleaning up, donning ties, forcing chronically slumped shoulders back just as the door opened.

  His men were truly intimidated by the arrival of the two visitors, even the young guys who didn’t recognize them.

 
; But Glowski recognized them, and he knew he was in the presence of giants. Sabaneyev, who appeared markedly young to be a colonel general, looked and spoke like a national television newsreader.

  And Lazar . . . the Boris Petrovich Lazar. The Lion of Dagestan. Burly, weathered, and round-faced, but also the most storied general in the Russian military in a generation.

  True field commanders, Colonel Glowski had thought at the time.

  And intimidating as fuck.

  The generals surveyed Glowski and his men as they performed one of the important preparatory attacks on a Polish air defense radar chain. They watched in silence, mostly, but they asked two of his lead hackers some questions.

  What a day that was, Glowski thought now.

  Papabear pushed the commanders out of his mind and redirected his thoughts to his own battlefield. What a day this will be.

  Looking up at the Pageantry, he saw a green light blinking at the top of each of the ten “Christmas trees,” meaning they had pinged previously discovered back channels, and they were open. This left enemy networks exposed; the only thing left to do for APT28 was to flip some switches to fire the activation codes into them. This would be done manually, because it was more covert than placing initiation times on the intrusive codes already embedded in the system. Glowski had deemed that too dangerous.

  So the codes were left waiting for their triggers.

  Other of the “Christmas tree” hierarchies required his men to actively hack the network and then inject a code. Of course the twenty-four cyberespionage specialists here in the Bear’s Den had seeded hundreds of other government, industry, and military targets with ruse codes for months to prevent these ten hierarchies from being noted as unique.

  It was all part of the cyber game.

  Team Black Bear was the group of hackers responsible for Germany. As the timer over the Pageantry clicked off to the exact second of their attack, each man began tapping his keys.

  The rest of the room remained silent, all staring at their monitors. Black Bear’s work began to show up on the 162-centimeter screen, the German hierarchies filling from bottom to top.

  The top changed from green to red as the Russian computer code just shut all German NATO terminals down.

  * * *

  • • •

  BELARUS

  25 DECEMBER

  0028

  As Colonel Ivan Zolotov flew west over Belarus, he looked down to his A. Lange & Söhne wristwatch. A much-loved heirloom that had belonged to his great-uncle, a tough old bastard who eventually died from cirrhosis, but not before giving young Ivan the wristwatch and the story of how he acquired it.

  Leningrad, Zhukov’s 3rd Shock Army. October of 1943. Colonel Z’s great-uncle had described in detail the look on the German officer’s face as he hacked the man’s forearm off using his bayonet while two of his privates held him down.

  The watch and the great-uncle had both survived the brutal war, and Colonel Z thought of it as his good-luck charm.

  For the next hour, every altitude adjustment, every kilometer he and his wingman traversed, was completely scripted. He would check the timing against the timepiece on his wrist, and his great-uncle’s watch would see battle again.

  Looking at it, he saw they were exactly two minutes from crossing into Poland.

  The Red Talon fighters had taken off in pairs from six Russian and Belarusian air bases. Each pair would fly dangerously close to each other along preplanned courses, making broad, sweeping turns at predetermined locations. Their flight profiles—for this stage of their mission, anyway—were designed to appear to NATO air defense technicians like those of Russian tankers or routine passenger jets.

  Colonel Z checked the A. Lange & Söhne once more, then glanced at the cockpit’s chronometer.

  One minute to go.

  He pushed the throttle forward a touch and noted that Commander Tatiyev responded, syncing his own speed almost instantly. He flicked a switch and opened a view below the left wing on his HUD camera. Shatskyi National Park passed ten kilometers to the south. He was certain Ukrainian antiair gunners would be monitoring him now, but that was fine, because in less than one minute the Poles to the West would not be. Or at least their daisy chain of radar would not be. He was confident that their computer systems would turn off right on schedule . . . seconds before he crossed into their territory.

  The independent AA stations were another story, but speed and altitude would prevent any danger from the ground; of this he was also confident.

  Pora! Time! He said it to himself, looking once more at the time as he pulled a hard right bank.

  He saw the lights of the Polish city of Włodawa racing below.

  He was over the border.

  With the easy but hostile act of crossing into Polish airspace, his airframe and that of the rest of Red Talon Squadron had just opened air hostilities with the West.

  * * *

  • • •

  KAZAN

  NORTH ATLANTIC

  25 DECEMBER

  0031

  On board the Kazan, Captain Etush and his crew had less than three minutes to fire their third and final torpedo mine.

  But the mine wasn’t cooperating.

  The whole mission in jeopardy over a few shit machine screws, Etush thought. Tough to fault the torpedo’s designers. The SMDM-2C panels were not meant to be hurriedly removed and replaced as the torpedo crew had just done. Program them once, then fire them—that was the manufacturer’s intended design. Not take apart, reprogram, then take apart again.

  But things always went wrong in combat.

  Etush turned to his veteran weapons officer. “Dmitry?”

  “Sir, we will launch on target cable TAT-15 on time.”

  Etush looked at his old comrade. The man seemed cool right now. Etush had to admire Dmitry’s confidence in his weapons, though he himself was worried.

  “Bridge, Ula-class contact is now five nautical miles bearing one-nine-seven degrees. She’s outside torpedo range, Captain.”

  Etush grunted in acknowledgment. Well, that was one thing off his mind, although he recognized that if they were unable to connect their last torpedo mine, he’d have a lot more to worry about than the little Norwegian submarine.

  “Thirty seconds to target,” said the helm. Etush looked at the weapons console and saw tube three was still glowing red.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  Etush fixed his stare on Dmitry, although the man had his back turned . . . one hand with the weapons phone to his ear, the other hand steadying himself as he looked at the panel.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Etush looked beyond him at the panel, and torpedo tube three remained red.

  “Sir . . . five seconds to target,” and then: “Captain, we are on target now.”

  Dmitry lowered the phone from his ear and turned to Etush. “Sir, weapons reports launch, on time, on target. Third fish is in the water.” A slight smile drew across his face. The third tube showed red still, although the number seven tube showed it had just launched and was now indicating “yellow,” recovery mode.

  “Dmitry . . . ,” said Captain Etush. “How the hell did—”

  “Sir, the men left the damaged torpedo in tube three and reprogrammed the device loaded in tube seven instead. Faster this way.”

  Etush couldn’t help but repress a smile, and the bridge released a collective sigh.

  “Sir, Sonar. Ula will pass near the target during detonation. She will likely catch some of the blast.”

  The entire bridge looked up at the ship’s clock. The chronometer still ticked, but now, instead of counting down, it was counting up. It showed one minute till detonation.

  “Bad luck for her,” said Etush.

  More than a minute later an undersea explosion could be heard through the hull of the Kazan
, and a wave shuddered the boat. It was soon followed by two softer thumping sounds.

  Seconds passed before sonar reported, “Sir, Ula’s been hit: she was caught up near the mine. She has launched. Three torpedoes in the water. Sir, we are being fired upon. They must have assumed we attacked her. They are well outside of range, though. Those fish will drop off well before reaching us.”

  “Okay . . . He must’ve gotten a good blast, a crippled boat, and he’s mad.” Etush smiled.

  The sonarman spoke again. “He’s turning to starboard, sir. Hull popping sounds. He’s surfacing! He’s out of the fight!”

  Etush nodded. “He’s had enough of us, but be ready for other threats.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The captain turned to Dmitry. “Weapons, I presume you have some more tricks up your skirt?”

  “Aye, Captain, five other tricks are loaded and will be ready with Nav’s latest solutions.”

  “Very well. Gentlemen, the first salvos of war have begun. And may God have mercy upon the men of the sea for what’s about to come.”

  * * *

  • • •

  APT28 CONTROL ROOM

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  25 DECEMBER

  0032

  Colonel Glowski continued pacing the floor of the Bear’s Den, keeping an eye behind all his teams of cyberespionage specialists.

  “Sir?” one of his analysts from Team Grizzly Bear, the U.S. hacking team, called out. “Confirmation on all channels; all U.S. and NATO transatlantic fiber-optic cables just went off-line. Our mimicry systems are established and already taking and faking NATO classified Internet traffic. Transfer mainframes systems are broadcasting and pinging returns. Poisoned watering holes continue to distribute Trojan horses downstream. All systems are up and running in Europe and America.”

  “Good work, team,” said Glowski. He looked around and was met with smiles and grins. He couldn’t help grinning a bit himself, but soon his smile disappeared. “Let’s not get cocky—the next ten minutes are vital. Back to work.”