Understrike
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Author’s note
Copyright
Understrike
James Barrington
Prologue
Fifteen months ago
Znamenka 19, Moscow, Confederation of Independent States
‘The colonel will see you now, Professor Semenov. Please follow me.’
A bald-headed man who appeared to be in his late fifties stood up from the extraordinarily uncomfortable upright wooden chair he had been occupying for almost all of the previous hour and followed the smartly dressed young stárshiy leytenánt – senior lieutenant – along the wide echoing corridor on the first floor of the building. The Здание Минобороны России, the main building of the Russian Ministry of Defence at Frunzenskaya Embankment was a hulking structure, eight storeys high, the interior coldly opulent, the walls decorated with stones of contrasting colours, mainly marble, granite and serpentine, and other stones quarried from the Ural Mountains.
Semenov walked with a slight stoop, and as he approached the closed door at the end of the corridor he wondered, and not for the first time, if he was doing the right thing. Or if he was seeing something that wasn’t really there.
The stárshiy leytenánt – Semenov had not asked his name, and the junior officer had not volunteered it – paused outside the door for a couple of seconds to allow Semenov to reach his side. Then he knocked briskly on the door, twice, opened it when he heard the shouted command from inside the room, announced the name of the visitor, ushered the professor inside, then pulled the door closed behind him and walked away.
The office Semenov had just stepped into was dominated by a broad mahogany desk positioned in front of the window, which meant he had to squint against the bright afternoon sun in order to clearly see the figure sitting behind it. He immediately assumed that the positioning was deliberate, to provide the officer behind the desk with a small but significant psychological advantage over anyone he summoned to his presence.
‘Professor Semenov, thank you for contacting us,’ the officer said, standing up behind the desk and leaning forward over it to offer the academic his hand. ‘My name is Viktor Alexeev, Colonel Viktor Alexeev. Please sit down. Now, how may we help you?’
Semenov sat down in the chair the officer indicated, a brown leather armchair that was – thankfully – infinitely more comfortable than where he had been sitting before. But he still felt at a disadvantage, because now he was looking up towards the officer, the level of the armchair being significantly lower than the chair Alexeev was sitting in, again no doubt deliberate. Semenov was actually staring directly at a brass plaque, mounted on a wooden block at eye level on the desk, which bore the legend ‘Colonel – Polkóvnik – Viktor Mikhailovich Alexeev’, behind which the senior army officer regarded him with frank curiosity.
Without waiting for Semenov to reply, Alexeev continued: ‘You are an academic, and I am not betraying any secrets when I tell you that we see very few of those in this building. So I am intrigued as to the reason for your visit. Do you work here in Moscow?’
‘Yes, Colonel, I have an office in a building on Bol’shaya Gruzinskaya. Nothing as grand as this, obviously.’
‘Perhaps it’s full of computers or laboratory equipment, Professor? Something like that?’
Semenov shook his head.
‘In my particular field, we cannot do experiments in any kind of laboratory. Most of the equipment we use are sensitive measuring devices, nothing more exotic than that. But we do have a computer system, because my job involves running analyses using complex and specialized software.’
‘And what exactly is your field, Professor?’
Semenov told him, and the look of curiosity on the officer’s face became even more pronounced.
‘Then I really do not see why you are sitting in front of me,’ Alexeev said. ‘What has that, what has anything related to your profession, got to do with the military defence of Mother Russia? That, after all, is the primary purpose and tasking of every officer working in this building.’
‘I know,’ Semenov said, almost helplessly. ‘I simply didn’t know where else to go, or who else to talk to.’
He took a deep breath, then launched into the explanation he’d been mentally rehearsing all day.
‘Have you ever heard,’ he began, ‘of Kambalny? Or Shiveluch, or Karymsky? Or even KVERT?’
* * *
Just over 20 minutes later, Alexeev stood up again from his comfortable leather swivel chair, leaned across his desk and shook his visitor’s hand. The stárshiy leytenánt was waiting at the open door of the office to escort the visitor out of the building, non-military personnel not being permitted to wander the corridors alone.
As the door closed behind the two men, Alexeev leaned back in his seat and exhaled sharply, unaware that he had been holding his breath for a few moments. The theory – if that was not too grand a word for the story that the professor had told him – made absolutely no sense on at least two levels, as he had immediately realized when the man had begun his somewhat rambling explanation.
Alexeev was a career military officer, dedicated to the defence of Russia, her interests and her areas of influence, and he had been trained to assess any potential threat to the country on a number of levels. Two of those, obviously, were strategic – how dangerous would a particular attack be to the security of the homeland if it were mounted – and practical – from a technical point of view, how easily could such an attack be carried out?
The professor’s concern had been for what he saw as a potential but general threat to Kamchatka, virtually the most easterly point of Russia and over 4,000 miles from Moscow. To put that into perspective, the centre of the Kamchatka Peninsula was closer to the American state of Wyoming than it was to Moscow, which alone made the professor’s fears untenable, particularly because the potential aggressor – if there was one – clearly had to be the United States, and if the kind of attack Semenov feared was to be mounted, the American mainland would be as vulnerable as Russia herself, possibly even more vulnerable. So that made no sense.
The only real strategic concern Alexeev had as a result of the professor’s visit was the fact that the Kamchatka Peninsula was home to one of Russia’s nuclear submarine bases, whic
h perhaps made an attack by the West on that region more likely.
But even that potential risk could be largely dismissed because of sheer practicality. When Semenov had been explaining what he believed he had detected, Alexeev had questioned him closely, and had started by asking the professor one very simple question: how? And that had been when the man’s story started to fall apart, because although he had come up with a couple of theoretical mechanisms that could explain his idea, they made little practical sense. And, even in an area as sparsely populated as Kamchatka, there was simply no way that the kind of actions he was suggesting could have been taken without detection, either by the residents of the peninsula or through the unblinking eyes of one of the multitude of Russian surveillance satellites that scanned the landmasses of the world, including that of Russia herself, on a regular basis.
Alexeev had pointed out these fairly obvious counter-arguments, which had seemed to quell the professor’s fears, and the academic had left Alexeev’s office in a far more positive frame of mind than when he’d arrived.
After he’d gone, Alexeev had ordered tea and then sat in thought for some time, because although he was quite certain that the ‘attack’ Semenov believed he had detected was nothing more than a product of the man’s over-active imagination, a couple of remarks he’d made had stuck in the colonel’s mind. And his thoughts had then turned not to defence, but to attack, and that had started his ruminations running along an entirely different path.
Because although Kamchatka was not an obvious major strategic target – apart from the nuclear submarine base – there were a couple of much more likely places where what the professor had described could work, and probably work very well.
He suddenly remembered an article he’d read in one of the various trade papers that crossed his desk on a daily basis. VPK News, if his memory served him correctly. He recalled very clearly what the writer of the piece, Konstantin Sivkov, the head of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems in Moscow, had boldly claimed.
He had suggested a way of permanently eliminating the United States as a world power, and after talking with Professor Semenov, Alexeev had little doubt that what Sivkov had proposed was feasible. But what his interesting scheme failed to take into account was that if Russia acted upon it, America would immediately be aware of the identity of the perpetrator nation and would without any doubt respond with immediate and overwhelming force, launching its entire nuclear arsenal, because they would quite literally have nothing left to lose. And that, he knew just as well as anyone else in the Russian military, would turn his entire country into a desolate and smoking radioactive wasteland, uninhabitable for centuries to come. The name Chernobyl was deeply ingrained in every Russian’s memory.
Both superpowers would be destroyed at a stroke, because neither would be able to survive. It was the clearest possible example of the old concept of MAD – mutual assured destruction – but unlike a conventional nuclear war, if such a word could ever be applied to an exchange of thermonuclear weapons, with the option Sivkov proposed there could be no gradual escalation. As the United States would start to reel from the catastrophic events unfolding within its borders, at almost the same moment the first of a swarm of thousands of individually targeted and MIRVed warheads, released from the nose cones of American silo, bomber and submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles would begin detonating in or over Moscow and every other population centre and military base within the entire Russian landmass. No one but a suicidal idiot would even contemplate triggering such an apocalyptic event, because both sides would certainly and permanently lose.
But one thing Professor Semenov had said, almost as an aside, had stuck in Alexeev’s mind, because if one particular event could take place, although it wouldn’t destroy America completely as a world power, it would certainly cause catastrophic and widespread destruction in one part of the mainland. And the transcendental beauty of his idea was that Russia could not and would not be implicated in what happened, which meant that the American retaliatory strike would never take place. The idea he had come up with was almost childishly simple, but the big problem, Alexeev knew, would be the actual mechanics of the scheme.
He spent a few more minutes deep in thought, jotting down notes on a pad in front of him with a pencil, then looked again at the notes he had made on the same pad while Professor Semenov had been talking. He had underlined one word that the professor had used – he thought it was spelled freetichsky – and before he did anything else he accessed the Internet to look for a definition. That took longer than he expected, because his guess at the spelling of the word had been less than accurate, but eventually he did find what he was looking for. He read a couple of definitions of it very carefully indeed, jotting down notes as he did so.
When he’d done that, he leaned back again in his chair, considering his next move. He would, he decided, write up the notes of the meeting and then think about it for a few days. He was a career officer, and what he definitely didn’t want to do was to approach his superior with a suggestion that the man would actually laugh at. That would do his long-term promotion prospects no good at all. He’d give it a week, look at the idea from all angles, and then make his decision.
* * *
It actually took him rather less time than that. Four working days later, he read through the notes he had made during his seemingly unproductive interview with the scientist Semenov again. Then he nodded to himself, walked over to the door to make sure no one was in the corridor outside, and locked it. He returned to his desk, sat down, looked up a number in the internal directory, and dialled it.
He held a short conversation with the much more senior officer he had called, then picked up the notes he had made, left his office and took the lift up to the eighth floor, where he had a rather longer conversation with the same man, this time face-to-face.
Half an hour later, Alexeev walked back into his own office, switched on the shredder and fed the pages of notes through it, together with the three blank pages from the top of the pad, just in case any of them retained indentations from the words he had written on the sheets above.
He had set the ball rolling, and the matter was now out of his hands. An entirely different department of the Russian military machine would now become involved, as long as the inevitable feasibility studies suggested that Alexeev’s plan had enough merit to make it worth proceeding.
Both he and the senior officer he had consulted had no doubts that it would succeed, as long as the technical difficulties could be overcome and the reports by the geologists confirmed what both men hoped and suspected to be the case. With that potential hurdle eliminated, the project would require engaging the services of a number of experts in several different scientific disciplines.
The real beauty of the scheme was that at least in the early stages almost none of the participants would have any idea what they were involved in, and by the time they did find out it would be too late for them to do anything about it. This would be an entirely covert strike against America, involving perhaps 50 people in Moscow to provide complete deniability for the leadership, and it would use the forces of nature as its principal weapon. More importantly, it would be a strike that could be neither countered nor defended against.
If it all worked as Alexeev hoped and believed it could, within about a year, maybe two at the most, America would be emasculated, and the balance of world power would shift irrevocably and permanently in Russia’s favour.
Chapter 1
Four weeks ago
Stratford, east London
There are some people who are effectively invisible. People whose physical presence is obvious to anyone who cares to look, but who are simply ignored and disregarded by almost everybody who sees them. People like barmen or waiters, who are just there to provide a service, or the beggars and the dossers on the streets, who people register as vague shapes before averting their eyes and hurrying onwards on important business of their own.
The probability is that anybody later asking about the appearance of one of these vagrants would have trouble remembering what the person looked like in anything but the broadest terms – they might perhaps give an estimate of age and sex, but little more. They were the non-people, the huddled shapes lying on beds of cardboard and newspapers, their unwashed and malnourished bodies clad in multiple layers of clothing against the cold of the nights. They were the welfare society’s most visible disgrace, the derelicts that people stepped around and did their very best to ignore.
But there were some people who didn’t ignore the dossers, who saw them instead as a kind of sick opportunity: a defenceless target, usually old and weak, that would provide a bunch of mindless yobs with the kind of ‘entertainment’ that they craved. Somebody who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fight back and who could be kicked or punched or clubbed or even knifed, and then left unconscious or bleeding or both in some gutter where they would either die or eventually recover sufficiently to crawl to a place of safety. Or at least to what they hoped would be a safer place.
Three weeks earlier, the death toll so far that year from these random attacks had escalated into double figures. The police, as usual, did nothing, citing the usual manpower shortages and commitments elsewhere, but the reality was that prosecuting motorists for speeding or charging homeowners with assault if they had the temerity to fight back when a gang of burglars broke into their home were far easier options. And, of course, there was all the paperwork they had to complete.
But a handful of people had decided that enough was enough, which was why another sad specimen of failed humanity was lying propped in a doorway in a back street in the East End of London, his body odour discernible from several feet away, his face black with dirt and stubble, covered in a torn and tattered blanket that might at one time have been cream in colour. He had made his way there slowly a little after six that evening, just as he had done for the previous eight nights, and had settled down to try to get what rest he could in the space that he had claimed as his own.
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