Omega Deep (Sam Reilly Book 12)

by Christopher Cartwright

  Cognizant of the abundant interest in their new technology by friendly and hostile nations, the decision was made early on to use this cryptography for communications regarding the Omega Cloak.

  Secret key cryptography employs a single key for both encryption and decryption. In this case, a message was sent by the Pentagon using the key to encrypt the plaintext and send the ciphertext to the receiver. The receiver applies the same key to decrypt the message and recover the plaintext.

  Because a single key is used for both functions, secret key cryptography is also called symmetric encryption. When using a cipher, the original information is known as plaintext and the encrypted form as ciphertext. The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message – yet isn’t in a format readable by human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it.

  Halifax patiently waited as Dwight began the complex process of decoding the message.

  From the navigation table, Bower removed the book – Tolstoy’s War and Peace. From his pocket, he withdrew the key to the code. Today was October 2 – thus he had to add the year, ignoring the first two digits, to the day’s date. So, 2 and 18 made 20. He then turned the book to page twenty. October was the 10th month, so every 10th letter on the page would be discounted.

  Using the key, he slowly continued this process, transcribing the letters on the pad Halifax had handed him until they became a recognizable series of words.

  When Bower was finished, the lines around his face deepened for a moment. Then, abruptly, his wrinkles seemed to disappear as his face broke out in a surprisingly boyish smile.

  “The team of dedicated and highly intelligent men and women behind the Omega project back stateside are happy with our preliminary notes, and confident in our success,” Dwight said. “We’ve been given formal approval for silent running by engaging the Omega Cloak. We have been authorized to then complete our primary mission.”

  “Very good, sir.” Halifax looked at him. “May I ask the mission destination?”

  “I’ll explain that after we’ve dived, once the Omega Cloak is protecting us from all listening devices. They’re all focused on us now.”

  The XO firmly set his jaw. “When do you want to sail?”

  “We’ll dive as soon as we have visual confirmation of the Omega Cloak.”

  *

  The bow of the Vostok sliced through the icy swell of the Norwegian Sea with ease.

  In the darkness, a large diesel powerplant hummed, as more than five miles of longline fishing hooks were slowly retracted onto their drums housed on the stern. It appeared to be a poor catch, with little visible in the line. This type of fishing was a lot like gambling. A large factory fishing trawler could spend a fortune hunting a particular school of fish in the remote regions of the Barents and Norwegian Sea into the Arctic Ocean and be rewarded with nothing. At the same time, one good catch could see them all rich.

  Svetlana Dyatlova examined her monitoring station with alacrity, keen not to miss any detail.

  Her face was a study of jarring contrast. She was attractive – stunning in fact, yet there was a cold, calculating, hardness in her gaze that gave people pause. Her lustrous dark hair was smartly tied back in a single plait. She had pale, smoky blue-gray eyes and a strong nose. Her jawline was prominent, with high cheek-bones, leading to a rosebud mouth and full lips, that appeared set just shy of a permanent scowl.

  Suddenly, her scowl broadened into a menacing grin as she acquired her target, revealing a set of small, even white teeth, like a Cheshire cat. Her sharp eyes were wide, and despite an outward display of cold, calculating, reservation, her countenance would have made any man stare. Svetlana’s heart was pounding in the back of her ears – because she had just made the best catch of her career.

  Despite their appearance, those longlines that trailed from the Vostok’s stern into the shale-like sea were never designed to catch fish. Instead, they were used for hunting submarines. Embedded into their nearly five miles of high tensile cables, was an advanced, long-range, all-weather, sonar system with both passive and active components, operating in the low-frequency band between 100–500 hertz and capable of perceiving the slightest of sounds from her quarry. And Svetlana’s line had just located the U.S. Navy’s latest experimental submarine.

  The Vostok was Russia’s most advanced spy ship.

  At a length of 354 feet, a beam of 56 feet, and a hull displacement of 5,763 tons, she was similar in size and capabilities to her sister ship, the Yantar, which, although widely acknowledged as a spy vessel, operated on the auspice of the Russian Navy’s Main Directorate of Underwater Research. While Yantar was launched in 2015 and openly applauded as one of the most capable instruments of espionage and counter-espionage, Vostok, started her life as a fishing trawler.

  Unlike her sister ship, which had been stalked by satellites, submarines, and high altitude unmanned surveillance drones since she was first launched, the Vostok had quietly launched a year later at Murmansk. Designed and built to enter the Barents Sea for prolonged fishing expeditions, they had no evidence the vessel’s cover had been breached.

  Good deception, any Russian operative well knew, took time to develop.

  As such, the Vostok spent the first two years fishing on the edges of the Arctic Circle away from the rest of the world, while all eyes on Earth tracked the Yantar as she performed low-level espionage and counter-espionage missions. At times, Yantar followed fictional submarine cables, and zigzagged for no reason other than to distract the world’s surveillance machines, while the Vostok prepared to perform the most clandestine and vital spy operations for the Russian Navy.

  Svetlana Dyatlova’s career had just taken a giant leap.

  Three weeks ago, Svetlana had broken an encrypted transmission from what appeared to be a U.S. experimental nuclear submarine, named Omega Deep. The breakthrough meant they now knew the exact location of the next surfacing for its next set of communications. Despite being a fairly low-ranking recruit, she was flown to the high-tech spy vessel, Vostok.

  This was what Svetlana was born for.

  Everything in her life had been leading up to this single event.

  Her father had been a senior Russian Intelligence Officer back when it was still the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – AKA, KGB. After the dissolution of the USSR, the KGB was split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. He moved into Foreign Intelligence, and when he got too old for that, he moved into education at The Institute in Moscow until his retirement ten years ago. Svetlana, as a baby growing up in the Mikhail Gorbachev-era Soviet Union, had watched her country go through many changes.

  It was because of her father that she was drawn into the field of intelligence. For his part, her father never intended her to become a spy, but none the less that’s what happened. As she was growing up, Svetlana had watched with fascination, impressed by the respect her father commanded. The fact his deference was founded on fear didn’t bother her in the least.

  When she graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with an arts degree, majoring in cryptography and foreign affairs, it was only natural for her to follow her father’s footsteps into foreign intelligence. There she excelled in every aspect from code-breaking to foreign affairs, languages, through to covert operations, athleticism, and fieldwork.

  Her father had been somewhat of a legend around The Institute. One would have thought it might have changed the way her trainers treated her. As it was, it had – but not in the way she might have hoped. Instead, she had a target on her back as someone who didn’t belong, and could never measure up to her father’s ability.

  Her father would have been proud of her effort today – if he was still alive.

  Svetlana was positioned in the dark bowels of the hull where the cold fish storage would have been had the ship been a fishing trawler. Instead, it was the elite ship’s command center. Dozens of complex instruments covered the wall
s, an array of technology included long and short-range listening devices, radar, sonar, and satellite hacking equipment.

  Lost in thought, Svetlana remained quiet for awhile. Her eyes darted from monitor to monitor. Like a member of the audience at a magic show, she felt something was being mysteriously concealed from her. It was a simple ruse, nothing more. But until she spotted it, she might as well admit her opponent had won.

  And in this case, her opponent was the U.S. Navy.

  It was hard to believe she’d let that happen.

  The Vostok’s commander, Kirill, climbed down the steep set of stairs, moving fast, breathing hard. She knew exactly why he’d raced down to the command center. Svetlana looked up, careful not to react when she saw his face. It was not a brutal countenance, but when angry he could be frightening.

  Kirill was ill-equipped for and unused to failure. She had no intention of becoming his casualty in this battle, a punching bag for his fury.

  Her commander’s eyes were piercing, “Well, what have you found?”

  “Nothing, sir.” She turned her palms skyward. “I don’t have anything that can scientifically explain it.”

  He swallowed. “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing. It’s like the damned submarine just vanished.”

  “That’s impossible. At least we know it definitely didn’t disappear.” He closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. She could see his mind ticking over all the possibilities like a computer. His lips settled into a sly, somewhat cunning smile. “Are we certain it was there to begin with?”

  Her brows drew down. For an alarming moment, the possibility occurred to her that he was suggesting it was best to report that there was no sub. “You saw it as well as I did, sir.”

  “Yes. But now I’m trying to look at this from a different angle.”

  “A different angle, sir?”

  “If a magician wanted to use sleight of hand to remove a 7900-ton submarine, or in this case, make him think it was moved, wouldn’t he have more easily placed something else in front of us to begin with?”

  She cocked an incredulous eyebrow. “You think the submarine was a fake?”

  “Don’t you?” he countered.

  “Absolutely not,” she said emphatically but held her breath as she waited to see how her CO would take the news.

  “How certain are you that what just happened was real?”

  “I’d swear on my life that it wasn’t counterfeit.”

  “You saw it.” His eyes lit up suddenly, his imagination caught by fantasy instead of science. “The entire submarine disappeared!”

  “And yet it didn’t. I’ll show you.” She turned to a digital recording of the footage taken from the event, moved her mouse, clicked through each image, frame by frame. “Look at this, here’s the entire submarine in this frame, and now it just disappears. If it were a magic trick – even a very good one involving a holographic projection or a cardboard cutout of a submarine – it would be impossible to change it in a single frame.”

  Standing with deference, she studied her commander’s face. It was hard and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye. She was relieved that she saw no sign of rage.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “I believe you. If you can’t work out how they’ve done it, or what has even happened, then the most logical explanation is that they’ve developed a concealing technology we’re decades from reproducing.”

  She said, “I’m sorry, sir.”

  He stood up and shook his head. “Not your fault.”

  “Would you like to watch it again?” she asked.

  He nodded, without taking his eyes off the screen.

  She pressed play. Her lips curled into an incredulous grin.

  There it was. The stars and stripes of the American flag. Nothing tremendously spectacular about such a thing proudly displayed off the sail tower of an enemy submarine. Only, in this case, it wasn’t attached to anything at all. Its edges luffed in the passive wind, just shy of twelve feet above the water, as though it was being mysteriously pulled by some invisible force at six knots.

  But no submarine was visible.

  If this was where the video ended, she might have assumed that the entire thing was nothing more than a clever ruse or a magic trick done by strings – albeit a very good one.

  She clicked pause.

  Commander Kirill stared at the image. “How are they doing it?”

  She cocked a well-trimmed eyebrow. “You know how they’re doing it.”

  “Yes, but we were told the technology was decades away.”

  She clicked play.

  A submarine’s hatch, roughly ten feet above the sea, appeared to materialize out of thin air. A sailor climbed through, and then another – apparently standing on nothing at all. They moved along above the water – before going through the careful process of lowering and then folding the flag away, as though being suspended in space concerned them not at all. With the flag creased into a triangle, the sailors glanced at the calm seawater below their feet.

  Svetlana’s eyes widened as one of the men’s legs and torso disappeared, frame by frame, as he descended into oblivion. The process was repeated for the other sailor, and at the very end, he took one last look around, and closed the hatch, leaving nothing but air and seawater in his place.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

  Kirill said, “I think we should have let them have space and concentrate on this technical knowledge instead.”

  She agreed with him.

  Invisibility was the Holy Grail of the military industry, for both its defensive and offensive advantages. But like the grail of the crusades, it seemed far out of reach to mere mortals. Cloaking technology itself was nothing new. It had been around for years. Basically, you take an image with a series of digital cameras on one side of whatever it is you want to hide and display it on the opposite side. Even their own engineers had developed such techniques within the Ministry of Defense. In terms of camouflage, the process was pretty good, but no one had been able to achieve anything like the perfect level of invisibility she’d just witnessed.

  The red satellite phone started to ring.

  The commander swallowed hard, picked up the phone and answered the call.

  Without preamble, he said, “You have my attention.”

  He listened for a few minutes and then whistled.

  “No,” the commander said. “The price is fine. Russia will pay. Just deliver us that submarine.”

  *

  Presidential Emergency Operations Center – White House, Washington, D.C.

  The PEOC was a blast-resistant bunker, situated deep beneath the East Wing of the White House. During emergency operations, it could be utilized by the president as an operations center capable of withstanding a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. In peacetime, the room was often utilized for training or in this case, its secure video-conferencing capabilities.

  Despite being in the middle of one of the most prolonged periods of relative peace throughout the world, the occupants of the PEOC were hard at work, and a tangible tension permeated the room.

  The secretary of defense set her jaw firm and breathed deeply. It was a practiced state of serenity, without which, she probably would have resigned her position years ago.

  The overhead LED lights had been dimmed, and the video feed transferred to one of the PEOC’s six large video monitors which continuously displayed an image of the Norwegian Sea. The water was dark and glossy in the minimal light, like shards of obsidian, as the crest of each wave gently collapsed, leaving the small ripples of whitewater in its wake.

  The president stood up from across the table and looked straight at her. “What just happened to our video feed?”

  “Nothing, Mr. President,” she replied. “It’s still in working order.”

  “Then can you please tell me why in God’s name my submarine just disappeared?”

 
She swallowed, hard. “It looks like they’ve activated the Omega Cloak, sir.”

  The president smacked the table with the latest situation report. “I know what it looks like. I thought I made myself quite clear after the British Dreamlifter went down. Surely, it was a dangerous time to test the device? The Omega Deep needed to utilize its array of high tech and expensive scouting equipment to locate the plane wreckage, not to continue testing.”

  “Your directive was clear, Mr. President,” she confirmed.

  The president’s eyes shifted toward Painter, his chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. “And?”

  Painter spoke in a confident, measured rate, without hesitation. “We relayed information to Commander Dwight Bower, Mr. President. The mission was to be canceled and the submarine to join the search for the missing 747 Dreamlifter.”

  The president’s eyes narrowed, darting between the secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, before finally setting angrily on her. “Are you suggesting he misunderstood my order?”

  A flash of alarm lit the secretary’s intelligent, emerald eyes. “No. I’m afraid we’re worried he might have intentionally disobeyed it, sir.”

  *

  Two Weeks Later

  The Omega Deep moved slowly through the submerged chasm, like an ancient predator.

  Commander Bower examined the bathymetric charts of the seafloor. The Omega Deep was currently tracking along a south to southwesterly direction through remnants of an ancient submerged valley. The basin was most likely the remnants of the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea which saw the supercontinent separated and fragmented into multiple continents more than 248 million years ago and the Permian mass extinction, which killed approximately 96 percent of all species on Earth.

  The low area of land between higher cliffs was three miles wide and nearly half a mile deep. Omega Deep was currently at a depth of 300 feet, leaving a cool 500 feet below her keel. Coming off the main valley was a series of smaller vales, the remnants of tributaries that once flowed into the ancient river system.