Understrike

by James Barrington

  He read through the background notes compiled by the officer Semenov had spoken to: all meetings at every ministry in Russia are either minuted by a secretary who attends them or are summarized after the event from the tape recording that is made of the meeting or interview. Most of the information contained within the notes was very obviously unclassified and not even particularly interesting.

  They began with a general discussion about Kamchatka. There are roughly 160 volcanoes on the peninsula, running in two ranges that flank the Kamchatka River, and about 30 of them are constantly active. The cause of the eruptions, the notes continued, was the Kuril – or more properly the Kuril-Kamchatka – Trench, an oceanic trench running parallel to the south-eastern coast of the peninsula and that had been formed in the late Cretaceous period by tectonic activity, specifically by the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the Okhotsk Plate, activity that was continuing today. The eruptions didn’t attract much in the way of international interest, or even national interest, come to that, simply because the Kamchatka Peninsula was largely uninhabited.

  Volcanologists and other scientists around the world were aware of the ongoing eruptions, as an organization known as KVERT, the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team, had been set up to monitor the activity and to issue colour-coded warnings to the aviation industry, because the biggest threat posed by these volcanoes was the explosion of ash that could reach heights of almost 50,000 feet, well above the cruising altitude of commercial airliners. KVERT monitored the situation and issued four aviation colour codes for the individual Kamchatka volcanoes when required. These were Green (non-eruptive state); Yellow (signs of volcanic activity); Orange (increased risk of eruption) and Red (eruption is imminent). Several of the Kamchatka volcanoes had been assigned an almost permanent Orange code.

  The background notes also summarized the events in Iceland in 2010, when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – the largely unpronounceable Icelandic name being conveniently replaced in the popular media by the slang term ‘the Big E’ – had erupted for almost a week, blasting some 140 million cubic metres of tephra into the air. Tephra is a generic term that means any material produced by a volcanic eruption, and in the case of Eyjafjallajökull, most of the ejecta comprised fine-grained ash. This can have a devastating effect upon aircraft, both from the sandblasting effect of the ash on windscreens due to the speed of an aircraft flying through a cloud of tephra and, much more seriously, the heat generated by a jet engine can melt the ash and cause permanent damage to the engine, causing it to shut down.

  Unfortunately, the ash cloud didn’t remain over Iceland, but was carried east across much of Europe by the westerly jet stream. As a result, enormous disruption was caused to air travel in western and northern Europe, with some 20 countries simply closing their airspace to all commercial aircraft for safety reasons.

  Again, Bykov felt he was being educated rather than informed. He had previously read something about the Kamchatka volcanoes, and like most other people he well remembered the problems caused by the Icelandic eruption. But none of this was either particularly interesting or in any way classified, so why had the file been sealed?

  He read on to the summary notes written by the officer at the Ministry, Colonel – Polkóvnik – Viktor Mikhailovich Alexeev, who had concluded that the scientist Semenov had been seeing something that simply wasn’t there. Despite Semenov’s suspicions, the cause of the eruptions was well established by geology and plate tectonics, and there was no evidence of American interference. Furthermore, if the Americans had somehow managed to create an eruption of a volcano on the Kamchatka, the generally prevailing winds from the west would have been more likely to blow the resulting ash cloud towards America, not deeper into Russia. So an American-engineered eruption would be more likely to damage the United States than Russia. Bykov could sense Alexeev’s frustration over what he correctly saw as a complete waste of his time, listening to a man describing a demon that didn’t exist.

  But in the final two pages of the summary, the word that Bykov had been chasing through the millions of documents held in the central registry – freaticheskiy – appeared again.

  Possibly in an attempt to convince Semenov that he was taking what he said seriously, Alexeev had asked the scientist what mechanism he could suggest the Americans might be using to create a volcanic explosion, and had himself suggested the old standby of conspiracy theorists: doing something like detonating a nuclear weapon in the San Andreas Fault or exploding one in the presently dormant super volcano that lurked underneath Yellowstone National Park, whose 3,500 square miles of territory covered large areas of the western states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

  Semenov’s response had been surprisingly definitive.

  ‘Dropping a nuclear weapon down the cone of an active volcano would achieve absolutely nothing,’ he had explained, shaking his head, ‘because it wouldn’t even explode. The heat from the magma chamber – anything from about 500 to over 1,100 degrees centigrade – would melt the bomb, or at least boil the electronic components. The melting point of steel is about 1,500 degrees centigrade, so the casing would probably remain intact, but steel is a very good conductor of heat, and plutonium melts at only 640 degrees centigrade. So even if by some miracle the firing circuits remained in one piece, the plutonium wouldn’t, and so couldn’t cause a nuclear explosion. And if the weapon was set to detonate as an airburst within the cone, while it would definitely explode it would do remarkably little, if any, damage.’

  Alexeev had reasonably asked why, and as a supplementary question, how and why Semenov seemed to know so much about nuclear weapons. The scientist had explained that he had only been interested in nuclear devices because of his fears about American involvement on Kamchatka, and he had only learned the basics. And the reason an airburst nuclear weapon would do so little damage if it exploded inside the cone of a volcano was quite simple: it had little to do with the yield of the weapon and everything to do with the fireball radius.

  ‘Let’s take two extremes,’ Semenov had said. ‘The crude nuclear device that the Americans dropped on Nagasaki in 1945 was called Fat Man. It had a yield of around 21 kilotons and a fireball radius of about 200 metres. If you detonated a weapon like that inside the cone of a typical volcano, something like the Mount St Helens volcano in Washington State in America, which has a height of about 2,500 metres, at the most the blast might blow some small lumps of rock off the mouth of the cone. It would produce a mushroom cloud, but the massive thickness of the rock of the volcano would contain the explosion and there would definitely be no eruption or change in the behaviour of the volcano, because the blast would not be big enough to have an effect on the magma chamber. If you like, the cone would act like a kind of giant blast chamber, able to absorb the detonation without suffering much, or perhaps even any, damage.’

  ‘But that was a tiny and inefficient weapon,’ Alexeev had objected. ‘In fact, today you could almost class it as a tactical weapon rather than a strategic device. Surely you could produce an eruption by using a multi-megaton weapon?’

  Semenov had shaken his head again.

  ‘As I’m sure you know very well, Polkóvnik Alexeev, we Russians detonated the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed, the Tsar Bomba, in October 1961. That had a yield of 50 megatons, and we’ve calculated the fireball radius at about 3,000 metres. Using the same scenario as before, if you air-dropped a weapon with that yield into the cone of Mount St Helens, the explosion would blow apart a substantial area of the cone. It would reduce the height of the volcano by, probably, hundreds of feet, and produce a massive mushroom cloud, but what it wouldn’t do would be to trigger an eruption.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘When most people look at a volcano, they assume that the cone is filled with bubbling lava just waiting to explode out of it and devastate the surrounding area, but nothing could be further from the truth. The visible cone is just the very tip of the volcano, and usually consists almost entirely of s
olid stone, formed from countless previous eruptions. If the volcano is erupting, then lava will be present in the cone and may even be running down the sides of the volcano or escaping from vents. But the heart of the volcano, and the place where detonating a large nuclear device would certainly cause an eruption, is the magma chamber. That’s assuming you could get the weapon into the chamber without it melting first, which you couldn’t, as I’ve explained. The point to remember is that this chamber will be anything from about one kilometre to ten kilometres below ground, deep under the cone. That’s why the idea of using a nuclear weapon to make a volcano erupt is simply nonsense. The blast effects would never get anywhere near the magma chamber.’

  And Alexeev had then asked the obvious question.

  ‘You said you believed the Americans might have been trying to create volcanic eruptions in Kamchatka using nuclear devices. If nobody can actually do that, then why were you concerned? In fact, why are you here at all?’

  ‘Because there is one way that a major volcanic eruption can be triggered by a large explosion, a nuclear device or something similar, but only indirectly.’ Semenov had paused for a moment, apparently working out how best to explain it.

  ‘In August 1883,’ he continued, ‘an estimated 36,000 people died when the Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra exploded. We’ve talked about Mount St Helens. When that volcano erupted in May 1980 and the north face of the mountain collapsed, killing thousands of animals and 57 people, that was categorized as a Vesuvian or a Plinian explosion, meaning that it resembled the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 [AD], an event described by Pliny the Younger, hence the two names. But before the major eruption in 1980, Mount St Helens exhibited hundreds of smaller explosions from the top of the mountain. What links the main eruption of Krakatoa and those smaller eruptions at Mount St Helens is their cause. They were known as phreatic or ultravulcanian eruptions, and the important point is what caused them.’

  Semenov had stopped, clearly waiting for Alexeev to ask the question, and so the colonel had obliged, if only to encourage the scientist to get to the point.

  ‘So what were they caused by?’

  Semenov’s response had come as a complete surprise.

  ‘Water,’ he had said briefly, and lapsed into silence again.

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Yes, water, but a particular thing that happens to water in certain circumstances.’

  The next couple of paragraphs of the notes explained what a phreatic eruption was and how it occurred, or how volcanologists believed it occurred, which wasn’t quite the same thing, because clearly nobody had ever been inside a volcano when such an eruption had occurred and been able to observe it. But the science made sense. It even made sense to Alexeev, which possibly came as a surprise to both men.

  And then Semenov had explained exactly how an external explosion, a very large external explosion, could in certain circumstances be used to trigger a phreatic eruption, as long as the geology of the site allowed it. And there were, he had continued, at least half a dozen volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula which appeared to have the right – or the wrong, depending on your point of view – geological features to allow that to happen.

  Almost as an aside, the scientist had then mentioned another location, a long way from Moscow and even further away from Kamchatka, where he believed the conditions were almost ideal, and while the eruption that would result would probably be comparatively minor, again due to the peculiar geology of the site, the secondary effects would be extremely impressive, if not devastating.

  And at that moment, reading that paragraph, Bykov suddenly put it all together. He slumped back in his chair.

  Chapter 21

  Friday

  Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen, Svalbard Archipelago

  ‘As far as I can tell from the passenger lists of arriving aircraft,’ Carole-Anne Jackson said, ‘there are six men in the Russian team. That’s the only group of people I can find who were travelling together, who arrived here after Pavlov and Burdiss, and who are now staying in Longyearbyen. Interestingly, they are all travelling on German passports which were all issued the day after Pavlov flew out of Moscow, according to Langley. They’ve tried to back-track their movements for me, and it looks as if these men used their Russian passports to get to Helsinki, then went to the Russian Embassy there and picked up the German passports, so they could travel anywhere else in Europe without needing to apply for visas. I suppose it was either that or Moscow would have to give them diplomatic passports, which might have raised more questions.’

  ‘That does make it look as if there’s some kind of a link between the German and the Russian authorities that I wasn’t aware of,’ Richter said, ‘and it might be worth your while for your Company to run some checks and do a bit of digging. I’ll get my people to do some probing as well. At least now we know what we’re up against.’

  ‘That wasn’t all I found out,’ Jackson went on. ‘There’s another group of six "German tourists" with brand-new passports due to arrive here early tomorrow afternoon on the SAS flight via Oslo and Tromsø. We have to sort this before they get here, otherwise we’ll be surrounded by fucking Russians and we’ll lose Pavlov.’

  ‘No sign of our people getting here, I suppose?’ Barber asked. ‘I’ve had no emails about it but I wondered if you’d maybe had a call.’

  The four of them were again sitting in the lounge at the Radisson Blu, around a different table to the one they’d used the last time, just in case the opposition had managed to place a bug near them. Barber and Mason had both checked under the table and all the chairs before they’d sat down, doing a quick visual inspection for listening devices. At a table near the entrance, two of the men who’d watched them before were clearly observing them again.

  ‘They’re still negotiating about the direct flight for the team with weapons, but I do know that the first group from Langley, the ones travelling as tourists, is en route. They’ll get here tomorrow as well, but not until the 20.20 flight because they won’t reach Bergen until this evening, and that’s after the last aircraft heading for Svalbard has left.’

  ‘With more people, it’ll only get messier and louder,’ Richter said. ‘We need to do this today, not wait any longer. I’m quite sure we can sort out six Russians between us.’

  ‘You got that right,’ Barber growled. ‘So how do we do it?’

  Jackson, Barber and Mason all looked somewhat expectantly at Richter. He stared back at them, then shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I can only see one way to do this, and it’s nothing like a perfect solution, so if any of you’ve got any better ideas let me be the first to hear them.’ None of the three Americans responded in any way. ‘Right, then. The way I see it, it’s a numbers game. There are four of us, and if Carole-Anne is right, there are six of them. So if we do what we did before and walk out of the hotel and split in different directions, we’re each going to find one of our friendly neighbourhood Russians dogging our footsteps a few yards behind. They’ll have to follow us because, as Carole-Anne said to me earlier, the only way they’re going to find Pavlov, unless he does something stupid like showing his face, is to keep watching us.’

  ‘I see where you’re going with this,’ Mason said. ‘That ties up four of the Russkies, and I guess it’s possible that one or even both of the others might be getting a few hours in the sack ready for a late watch tonight, or maybe watching the hotels or something. Whatever, once we’ve dragged the four Russians well away from the road leading to the jetty, we call Pavlov and tell him to wrap up warmly, a hood over his head and a scarf round his face, that kind of thing, and then he leaves wherever the hell he’s been hiding and heads for the ship.’

  ‘That was exactly what I had in mind,’ Richter said. ‘The only danger is if one of the last two Russians happens to spot him on the way, but if he’s wrapped up like John suggested, that should be a very slight risk. I don’t like the idea of him going down
to the ship by himself, but I don’t see any other way of doing it.’

  ‘So when do we do it?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘How about right now? Once we’ve got him on the ship, it can sail immediately, and we can just come back here, pack our bags and head for the hills. He’ll be on a small piece of America, surrounded by steel walls, and about as safe there as anywhere.’

  ‘That works for me,’ Barber said. ‘I reckon I’ve done Svalbard, and it’ll be good to get somewhere where I don’t have to wrap up like a goddamn Eskimo every time I step outside the door, and where I don’t need to carry a rifle and a pistol just in case some polar bear wants to invite me for lunch.’

  Richter heard the double tone indicating that his mobile had received a message.

  ‘Probably Simpson again, wanting to know what I’m doing,’ he said, pulling it out.

  He looked at the screen, and his expression changed instantly.

  ‘It’s Pavlov,’ he said. ‘He thinks the Russians have found him.’

  Chapter 22

  Friday