Understrike

by James Barrington

  ‘Well right now,’ Richter said, ‘that’s pretty much all we’ve got.’

  ‘I know. Call me when you’ve finished your briefing and you’ve had a chance to check the list.’

  Richter slipped the phone back into his pocket and glanced across at Jackson.

  ‘We’ve got a list of ships,’ he said in explanation. ‘Or we will have in a few minutes.’

  ‘How sure are you that we’re looking for a surface vessel?’ Reilly asked. ‘If what you’ve told us is correct, the target of the Status-6 torpedo is below the surface of the ocean, so doesn’t a submarine-launched weapon make more sense?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Richter replied. ‘If this foul little scheme is going to work, and the Russians are going to avoid a retaliatory strike from America that would reduce their homeland to radioactive rubble, they have to have complete deniability. The Status-6 torpedo is designed to be carried by Oscar-class submarines, or that’s what our information suggests, anyway, but the Russians must know, or at least suspect, that you’re able to track their boats using acoustic monitoring, hunter-killer patrols and satellite-based blue-green laser detection systems.’

  ‘That’s classified information,’ Rogers said.

  ‘You can find most of it on Wikipedia,’ Richter replied, ‘and the rest of it’s in publicly available patent applications online, so welcome to the real world. Anyway, irrespective of how much the Russians know or can guess about your tracking capabilities, if the west side of Cumbre Vieja suddenly fell into the Atlantic Ocean, and there just happened to be a Russian Oscar a few miles south of the island, it wouldn’t be that great a leap of logic for somebody like the President of the United States of America, with his nation in ruins, to decide that the two events were connected and press the big red nuclear button. This will only work for Moscow if there is no demonstrable or provable connection between Russia and the fragmentation of the island. So unless I’ve missed something, the only scenario that makes sense is that they’ve modded some kind of a cargo ship, something with a perfect right to be in that part of the world, and cobbled together an above-surface launch system for the torpedo so that they can fire the weapon, dump whatever equipment they used to deploy it over the side of the ship and drop it to the bottom of the Atlantic, and then continue on their way to some port in West Africa carrying an entirely legitimate cargo, and with no trace of the Status-6 weapon or the launch system on board. That’s what I mean by total deniability.’

  ‘So we’re looking for a cargo ship, yes?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ Richter replied, as his phone emitted a tone indicating receipt of a message. ‘And with a bit of luck the ship’s name will be somewhere on this list.’

  Chapter 38

  Sunday

  MV Semyon Timoshenko, at sea

  Captain Vadim Pankin was not used to operating in an autonomous fashion. Throughout his entire naval career he had been accustomed to receiving orders, initially directly from more senior officers and later, as he had ascended through the ranks, from command structures based ashore. He had also become used to giving orders, telling his subordinates exactly what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it.

  But on board the Semyon Timoshenko there was no higher authority. That had been made clear before the vessel had sailed from the shipyard and into the White Sea: as long as the objective of the mission was achieved, which depended totally upon the design and performance of the Status-6 weapon, nobody in Moscow would interfere or issue alternative orders to the vessel. The only circumstance in which the captain was expecting to be contacted would be if the executive group responsible for the planning of the operation suddenly decided to abort the mission, and in his locked safe on board he had a list of about a dozen classified codewords and their plain language meanings. But no such encrypted signal had been received, and nor was he expecting to receive one. The operation was so close to completion that aborting it or failing to complete it both seemed equally unlikely.

  But because he was in command of his own destiny, as well as that of the ship, the captain decided that it was time to make one further minor change to the way the operation would be carried out. By automating the launch procedure, he had already cut down the time it would take to deploy the weapon, so all he had to do was make sure that when he pressed the button, or more accurately turned the lever, on the control box he had ordered to be installed on the starboard side of the bridge, there were no fishing boats, cruise ships, coastal steamers or any other craft in a position to observe what was happening.

  The targeting coordinates were fixed and had been hard-coded into the weapon, and had been firmed up only a couple of weeks before the ship had sailed, based upon the latest and most careful independent analyses of the island of La Palma by two of the most highly qualified and experienced geologists in Russia. Unknown to Pankin, both of the geologists had suffered fatal traffic accidents, orchestrated by a team of Spetsnaz specialists working under the direction of a very senior SVR officer, during the week following the delivery of their confidential reports, so that another couple of loose ends had been properly secured.

  But something else was bothering Pankin as he studied a navigation chart of the Canary Islands in his cabin directly behind the bridge. Using a parallel ruler and a set of dividers, he was measuring distances and angles, and he didn’t much like the conclusion he was coming up with.

  The launch position specified by Moscow south of the island of La Gomera was in the wrong place. Firing the Status-6 weapon from that location would ensure that it had a straight and uninterrupted run directly to the target, but that wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was the warhead, and its yield. The distance between the southern tip of La Palma and the specified launch position was about 40 nautical miles, easily far enough to avoid the damage that would be caused by almost any quantity of conventional explosives. But the warhead on the Status-6 weapon was anything but conventional.

  Pankin didn’t know what the blast radius was likely to be for the 80-megaton warhead, which would be the biggest ever nuclear detonation on the planet. But it wasn’t the blast radius he was bothered about: it was the hydrodynamic effects the explosion would produce. The tsunami, in other words. If this wave was going to be big and powerful enough to devastate America’s east coast, thousands of miles away, what would it do to a fairly small cargo ship only about 50 miles away?

  He didn’t know for sure, but he was beginning to wonder if he and his crew, and the ship itself, were surplus to requirements as far as Moscow was concerned. The ultimate deniability of the operation would only be enhanced if the planners could confirm that a Russian vessel had also been lost in the event. And with the twisted and tangled wreckage of the ship somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, nobody would ever be able to prove it had had anything to do with it. In fact, looking at the map, he wondered if Moscow had picked the precise launch position because part of the tsunami would be funnelled directly towards his ship by the space between the islands of El Hierro and La Gomera.

  Pankin sat in thought for a few minutes, deciding what to do, and what not to do. The first thing he wasn’t going to do was to tell any of his officers or crew. They hadn’t signed up for a suicide mission, and if they guessed that was the intention of the Moscow planners they might well mutiny and take over the ship and abort the mission.

  Not that Pankin himself had any intention of going down with his ship. He fully intended to complete the mission, but on his own terms. He spent a few more minutes looking at the chart, then came to a decision and summoned the navigating officer, Lieutenant Kyril Pashenko.

  ‘Have you ever sailed around the Canary Islands, Kyril?’ he asked.

  ‘No sir, I have not.’

  ‘We are likely to encounter a lot of shipping in the area, particularly between the islands, and so I’ve decided to alter the launch position. The location chosen by Moscow is too exposed, and we would not be able to loiter
there while we waited for a gap in the shipping movements. Instead of launching here—’ he pointed at the original location he’d marked on the chart ‘—we will deploy the weapon here, about fifty nautical miles south of La Gomera. That will be well clear of the main shipping routes around the islands, but will still provide a straight track for the weapon to reach its target. And it also means we will be well clear of the island group when the weapon detonates.’

  What Pankin didn’t add was that the revised position would mean the Semyon Timoshenko would be 80 miles from the southern end of La Palma when the weapon was launched and, because it would take the device at least one hour to reach the target, the ship would be another 10 or 12 miles further away when the warhead exploded. And Pankin also planned on altering course to the south-east to place the island of La Gomera between his vessel and La Palma, which should help dissipate the effects of the wave, at least to some extent. And he might even make further changes to the course later, or delay the weapon’s launch until the ship reached a safer position.

  Pashenko didn’t looked bothered by the new orders, just noted the revised launch position, saluted the captain and left his cabin.

  Chapter 39

  Sunday

  Lajes Field, Air Base No 4, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal

  It was a long list, far longer than Richter had expected and far too long to make any sense of on the small oblong screen of his smartphone.

  ‘Any way we can get this printed?’ he asked Reilly, showing him the screen display.

  ‘Is it Apple or Android?’ Reilly asked, looking at it.

  ‘Android,’ Richter said. ‘Is that a problem?’

  Reilly shook his head.

  ‘It’s usually more of a problem with an iPhone. Apple seem to hate the idea of any of their devices actually communicating with anything else.’

  He took the smartphone, accessed the settings, presumably to enable Bluetooth or to check that it was already working, then handed it back and walked over to a large laser printer sitting in the corner of the room on a square desk and switched it on. Moments later, the printer emitted a hum and a faint whirring sound, and a few seconds after that the first of about a dozen sheets of paper appeared in the output tray.

  ‘I didn’t think the list was that big,’ Richter said, looking at the printer.

  ‘It isn’t,’ Reilly replied, ‘but I’ve asked it to print three copies so more people can take a look at it.’

  He picked up the sheets, handed the top four to Richter and put the rest of them on the conference table.

  ‘So what are we looking at here?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘Working on the assumption that the Russians will be using a cargo vessel, I asked my section back in London to collate a list of all ships flying a Russian flag or the flag of a nation under the effective control of Russia with a destination port anywhere to the south of the Canaries.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a broad-brush approach,’ Reilly said.

  ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Richter agreed, ‘but we had nothing much else to go on, and shipping movements in the Atlantic, or in any other ocean for that matter, aren’t regulated once the vessel gets outside places like the English Channel or the Strait of Gibraltar. All we really knew was that if we’d worked this out correctly there had to be a Russian ship, or a ship doing Russia’s dirty work, heading this way to deploy the weapon.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they told you when they were going to launch their attack?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘Oddly enough,’ Richter said, ‘they did. Weapon deployment is supposed to be on Tuesday, and that’s the day after tomorrow, so if we’re going to stop the ship we have to do it within the next twenty-four hours, because we can’t risk it getting into the firing position. If we can’t find it by then, there’s a real chance it’ll be too late, and even if we did manage to intercept it, they’d probably fire the weapon anyway.’

  ‘I thought you said the operation had to be deniable, from their point of view?’

  ‘I did, but their deniability will go straight out of the window if we stop the vessel with the weapon still on board, not to mention that that way we get our hands on the latest piece of Russian technology. So I think that if push came to shove, they’d probably fire it anyway, on the grounds that they would have nothing to lose.’

  ‘And then we’re all in the shit,’ Reilly said.

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  ‘Paul?’ Dmitri Pavlov was holding one of the sheets of paper that he had picked up from the conference table, and was studying one particular listing.

  ‘Yes?’ Richter said, stepping over to him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You remember that we talked about that Marshal of the Soviet Union, Semyon Timoshenko?’

  ‘Yes. So what?’

  ‘It’s not just the name of a man,’ Pavlov said. ‘It’s also the name of a ship.’

  Richter looked at the entry the Russian was indicating, and nodded slowly. The listing consisted of five vertical columns, the first for the name of the ship, the second for its nationality, the third for its departure port, the fourth for the date of its departure and the fifth for the vessel’s destination. In the case of the Semyon Timoshenko, the fifth column was blank, but what struck Richter immediately was the name listed for the ship’s departure port: Severodvinsk.

  ‘Well spotted, Dmitri,’ he said, and passed the sheet of paper to Jackson. ‘I think that’s what we’re looking for. Can someone get on the web and pull up information about the MV Semyon Timoshenko, if possible including deck plans and stuff like that?’

  Reilly looked doubtful.

  ‘There are dozens of ship names on those pages,’ he said. ‘How do you know that’s the right ship?’

  ‘I don’t for sure,’ Richter replied, ‘but I’m working on the balance of probabilities here. As well as a lot of other information, the digital recordings that Dmitri obtained included a handful of references to Semyon Timoshenko, but that name made no sense to us in context. Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko was Ukrainian by birth, and he was a senior military officer who became the sixth Marshal of the Soviet Union. Dmitri and I wondered if he was a great tactician or something, but if it’s the name of the ship carrying the weapon, everything really falls into place.’

  ‘It’s a small container ship,’ one of the DEVGRU SEALs reported, holding up a neat tablet computer. ‘It was built in Finland in the 1980s at the Valmet Vuosaari yard in Helsinki. It started out as a general cargo ship but it was converted to carry containers a few years ago. It’s small, only two thousand five hundred tons, and it’s a pretty standard design, what’s called an SA-15 class vessel.’

  ‘You mean it’s a Finnish ship?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘No, sir. It was built in Finland for a Russian general cargo line, and it’s quite a tough ship, able to act as an icebreaker if necessary. I should be able to get deck plans as well, at least for the standard design, though maybe not for the changes they made converting it into a container ship.’

  ‘There’s something else about this listing that pretty much confirms it for me,’ Richter said. ‘It sailed from Severodvinsk, on the White Sea.’

  ‘So what?’ Reilly said.

  ‘Ever heard of Sevmash? Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoye Predpriyatie, to give it its full title? It’s based at Severodvinsk.’

  ‘Nope. Not my field, Russian ports.’

  ‘I thought you might have heard of that one. Sevmash builds nuclear submarines for Russia. If you were going to modify a ship to carry a nuclear weapon, Sevmash would have the knowledge and the technology to do it. I know that’s not conclusive, because it might just be a coincidence that the ship was in that port, but I don’t really do coincidence. I think that’s our target.’

  ‘So all we have to do now is find it,’ Reilly said.

  ‘Yes. And that’s the tricky bit, unless you’ve got any really good ideas.’

  As it turned out, Reilly didn’t just have some – or more
accurately one – really good idea, but he had also organized the hardware they would need to implement it.

  That evening, as soon as the deck plans of a standard Finnish designed and built SA-15 cargo vessel had been downloaded and printed, Richard Rogers and the other DEVGRU SEALs assembled in a kind of Chinese parliament to work out two things: what the ship might look like now that it had been converted to carry containers, which involved a considerable amount of educated guesswork, and how they were going to approach the vessel without being detected by anyone on board, which was clearly not going to be easy. They really had three possible approaches – from above, dropping onto the vessel by parachute, a concept which brought with it a whole raft of potential problems; from the sea, using Zodiacs or some other kind of fast and manoeuvrable boat, which was subject to an entirely different set of problems but almost as many as the airborne approach; or to get on board from the waves themselves.

  At first glance, this idea, to have perhaps half a dozen of the DEVGRU men lurking right on the surface of the ocean directly in the path of the approaching ship and have them board the vessel using grappling hooks and ropes or some other means of ascending its steel sides, seemed to offer a good chance of success as long as they could get on board without being spotted. If they could take over the bridge and so gain control of the ship, they could then call in the rest of the team by fast boat or helicopter as reinforcements and end the Russian covert attack before it had even begun. But there were a fair number of ifs and buts and maybes in that idea, and for much of the evening the DEVGRU team batted ideas back and forth.