Richter jogged over to the black object the junior officer had indicated. He glanced out through the window. The double doors on the end of the double-length container – they had obviously welded two of them together, end to end, to accommodate the vast size of the super torpedo – were about half open.
He looked at the black control unit, but the only thing on it was a small metal lever incorporating a keyhole, which was pointing to a label marked зажигание – zazhiganiye, or ‘ignition.’ He gripped the lever and tried to turn it back, but it wouldn’t move.
‘You need the key,’ the junior officer said, ‘and the captain threw it into the sea when the first shot hit the bridge door. Just before you came in.’
That at least explained why the captain had only been getting into his seat when Richter had walked in. He’d just triggered the mechanism and thrown away the key.
‘But,’ the officer added, a nervous quiver in his voice, ‘even if you had the key and turned the lever, it wouldn’t stop it. Once the switch has been made, the process is irreversible. The weapon has a separate power supply and is isolated from all the ship’s systems. That’s the way the captain wanted it. A kind of insurance policy.’
Richter looked again at the black box, aimed the Smith and fired two shots straight at it. The massive impact of the .44 Magnum round blasted the box into oblivion, but when he stared through the window he saw that the container doors were still steadily moving open.
He wrenched open the starboard side door and stepped out onto the bridge wing.
As he stepped into view, two of the SEALs on the deck below looked up, raising their weapons as they did so, before immediately lowering them again.
‘What the fuck is this?’ one of them said, pointing at the canted container. The supporting legs were fully extended, and the double doors were now almost completely open.
‘That’s the Status-6 torpedo,’ Richter shouted back. ‘Blow the crap out of it, right now.’
Both SEALs braced themselves and levelled their HK 416 assault rifles at the object inside the container, which they could see but Richter couldn’t because of the angle.
The racket was deafening, but whether the bullets were having any effect was a different matter.
And then there was a muted roar, and a huge black, red and silver object, looking almost exactly like a ridiculously oversized conventional torpedo, shot out of the double-length container, the nose already dipping under the force of gravity, and splashed into the sea about 20 yards off the starboard side of the ship and immediately disappeared beneath the waves.
Richter stared down at the now empty double container with an expression of utter disbelief on his face.
Despite all they’d done, they’d failed at the eleventh hour.
Chapter 49
Monday
HMS Artful, Eastern Atlantic Ocean
‘High speed screw,’ the sonar operator called out urgently. ‘Possible torpedo.’
‘What do you mean "possible"?’ Commander Neil Forrest demanded, striding across to the man’s console. ‘Either it is or it isn’t.’
‘It’s not in the database, sir,’ the sonar operator replied, ‘but that is what it sounds like.’
‘Range? Bearing? Speed? Active sonar? Heading?’
The sonar operator was analysing the signal as it was automatically recorded, and he plucked readings and deductions from the data he was receiving to try to answer the captain’s questions while he was doing so.
‘Bearing is Red zero four,’ he reported. ‘Range uncertain but not closer than twenty miles. Speed based on the bearing shift so far is around sixty knots. No active sonar detected.’
Heading was the big one, obviously. Had the weapon been launched towards HMS Artful? Did they need to take evasive action or deploy counter-measures? Forrest didn’t think it likely, his boat being among the quietest and most covert submarines ever built, but the high-speed run he’d been forced to undertake to reach his present position was obviously a concern. That could have compromised his location.
‘Bearing is changing rapidly from port to starboard,’ the sonar operator said, ‘now Green zero one, so assessed heading is one eight zero to one nine five. No threat. Wherever it’s headed, it’s not coming anywhere near us.’
Chapter 50
Monday
Eastern Atlantic Ocean
There was nothing else they could do. The weapon had been fired, and sooner or later the warhead would detonate and change the world forever.
Reilly used the satellite phone to initiate warning messages, which would almost certainly achieve nothing useful. Evacuating the American eastern seaboard was clearly not going to happen, and there wasn’t even time to do much for the people of the Canary Islands or the Azores, which would face the biggest and most destructive waves because they were so close to the epicentre of the detonation point.
While the American SEAL commander did that, Richter questioned the junior officer on the bridge. The man spoke no English, and Richter was the only Russian speaker on the team. The injured captain had stopped screaming, but it was obviously going to take him quite a while to die, which Richter thought was entirely reasonable.
What he wanted to do was to get the officer to open up, and that was really the easy bit because he was clearly terrified of what was likely to happen to him.
‘You do realize,’ Richter began, ‘that none of you were expected to survive?’
The young Russian didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘Think about it,’ Richter went on. ‘You were given a location near La Gomera as the launch point, and then you were going to launch a weapon with a yield of about eighty megatons that would explode just a few miles away. The resulting blast would probably have blown the ship to pieces. And if it didn’t, the tsunami it would generate would do the job. And if by some miracle you’d survived both of those, the radiation would have killed you, just a lot more slowly. If you’d been meant to survive, your masters in Moscow would have told you to launch it from a safe distance, probably well over two hundred kilometres away, and even that might have been too close.’
That had clearly never occurred to the man.
‘What do you know about the weapon?’ Richter asked.
What he learned didn’t provide any encouragement. Richter had hoped that their distant location from the Canaries would mean the super torpedo would run out of fuel before it reached its target, but the Russian junior officer explained that it had a small nuclear power plant that gave it a range of about 5,000 nautical miles, could dive down to some 3,000 feet, and had a built-in GPS and inertial navigation system that meant it would always find its pre-programmed target. It was a remarkable weapon, by any standards.
‘And,’ the officer added, ‘I don’t think the bullets your men fired at it would do any damage to it, because the warhead is located behind a solid steel penetrator, and that’s what they would have hit. I’m sorry.’
‘What about abort codes?’ Richter asked. ‘There must be some way of stopping it once it’s been launched.’
‘There is,’ the officer said, ‘but only if the launch vessel is a submarine. The weapon we had installed on this ship was specially modified because it was being launched from above the surface of the sea, and there is no system on this ship that can communicate with it once it is running.’
He questioned him further, but Richter learned nothing useful, or nothing that made him doubt that the weapon would do exactly what it had been intended to achieve. The only good thing was that when the devastating series of waves hit America, there would be no doubt that the Russians had been responsible, and that it wasn’t a natural disaster. Whether or not that would prompt a retaliatory strike by America against Russia was an entirely different matter that nobody wanted to think about.
But as he turned away from the officer, something he had said made Richter ask another, different, question, and the answer surprised him.
‘I think t
hat’s right,’ the Russian said, ‘but that is not really my field. I don’t think anyone bothered to include it, because the attack profile wouldn’t need it.’
And that was the first glimmer of light in the appalling darkness that had enveloped them since the super torpedo had been launched.
Richter borrowed the satellite phone and called Simpson.
‘We were out-manoeuvred,’ he began. ‘The bloody Russian captain, who’s slowly bleeding to death on the bridge floor, managed to get his men to jury-rig an automated firing circuit, and he triggered it as soon as we began the assault. There was no way of stopping it. The weapon had its own power supply and everything else, and it launched a few minutes after we took control of the ship.’
‘Bugger,’ Simpson said, with feeling. ‘I’d better call the PM and explain that southern England is going to be a swamp by early evening. Three to four hours, I understand, for the waves to reach Blighty.’
‘Don’t blow the whistle quite yet,’ Richter said, ‘because there’s something else.’
He explained the tiny additional piece of information he’d gleaned from the young Russian officer.
‘Are you sure about that?’ Simpson asked.
‘No, of course I’m not sure, but we’ll find out in about thirty minutes, if my calculations are correct, so can you make the call? And you need to tell them not to fanny about and stuff their standard procedures because this is fucking long beyond anything that’s standard. We need the answer immediately, as soon as they have it.’
‘Leave it to me.’
Chapter 51
Monday
HMS Artful, Eastern Atlantic Ocean
Commander Neil Forrest didn’t like it, but he had absolutely no option.
He issued a very specific order to the sonar operator, and steered the boat in the direction ordered. At the time prescribed on the Flash signal he’d received, he essentially put the brakes on and brought the Artful to a complete stop in the water so that there was a minimum of submarine-generated noise to affect their passive sonar. And then they sat about a hundred feet below the surface of the Atlantic and just listened.
The sound of the high-speed screw was still being detected, albeit more distantly, and the computers had confirmed that it was not the noise signature of any known torpedo or other surface or subsurface device.
The time they’d been told to expect a different sound came, and then went, with no change in what they were hearing. But just over 11 minutes later the sonar operator sat back in his chair, pressing his headphones firmly over his ears. He listened intently for another minute or so, then turned round to look at the captain.
‘As you said, sir. I’ve just heard it. And the sound of the screw has stopped as well.’
‘Good,’ Commander Forrest said. ‘Well done.’ He turned away and issued the orders that he never expected to give on a normal cruise, instructions that would bring the boat up to periscope depth – although the Astute class boats didn’t actually possess such arcane devices – so that he could defy every submariner’s most basic rule, the one virtually beaten into them from the moment they began their training. The one rule that no submariner would ever, under any circumstances, even contemplate breaking.
He was going to send a signal.
Chapter 52
Monday
Eastern Atlantic Ocean
The waiting was the worst part, and was made even less bearable because Richter wasn’t at all certain that what he hoped was going to happen would actually take place. It depended on a fundamental error that he wasn’t sure that the Russians had actually made, and on other factors beyond both his knowledge and his control, like the precise geographical position of the Semyon Timoshenko when the weapon had been launched, or the depth the super torpedo maintained, or what currents were running in the ocean to the north of the Canary Islands.
The Portuguese Merlin was parked on top of the container stack; until they knew what was going to happen there was no point in it flying back to Funchal, because the airfield might well not be there when it would have reached it. The safest place at that moment, paradoxically, was probably on board the Semyon Timoshenko herself, which was still heading slowly south but still over 200 nautical miles north of La Palma, the Russian bridge crew driving the ship under the watchful eyes of two SEALs. The SEALs injured in the assault had been lifted on board the ship for first aid treatment, and the Zodiacs craned on board as well and lashed to the deck. The SEAL who’d been shot in the leg was conscious, and two of his companions who had medical training were working on him. He was expected to live. Two other SEALs, caught by the Spetsnaz troopers in the spaces between the containers in the latter stages of the firefight, hadn’t been so lucky, and their bodies, zipped inside body bags, because Reilly had been planning for every eventuality, no matter how unpleasant, rested on the deck in front of the accommodation section. Eight of the Russian soldiers had survived, and they sat in an uncomfortable group close to the starboard side rail, wrists plasticuffed behind their backs and their ankles lashed together. Whether or not any of them would still be on board or alive by the end of the day was something of a moot point, most of the SEALs being of the opinion that just lobbing them over the side to join their dead companions, whose bodies had already been disposed of, was probably the best and most satisfactory option. If the Russian weapon detonated, that would almost certainly be their fate.
Jackson and Barber were sitting with Richter at a table in what they thought was the officers’ mess on the Russian ship, Reilly, Mason and Rogers in nearby seats. Their conversation was stilted and difficult as they analysed what they’d done and what they could or should have done differently. But post-mortems never solved problems, only allowed people to apportion blame, and Richter really wasn’t prepared to sit and listen.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this was doomed from the start because of that bloody Russian captain. Because of the way he’d ordered the system to be automated, it wouldn’t have mattered when we reached the bridge or which of us got there first. According to the junior officer I talked to, as soon as the firefight started on deck, he walked over to the control unit, stuck the key in the lock and just stood there waiting. Even if we’d known what he was doing, all he would have had to do was turn the lever as soon as any one of us appeared on the bridge. And that would have started the ignition sequence, and there would still have been no way of stopping it. We did all we could.’
‘Yeah,’ Barber remarked sourly, ‘but too little, too late.’
‘The captain said the same thing,’ Richter said.
‘So all we can do is wait, and hope the bloody thing malfunctions or something,’ Jackson said.
‘It’s not a good feeling,’ Reilly commented. ‘I like to fight people I can see, not wait for some piece of fucking Russian technology to flatten the place I call home. And I’ll tell you this,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘if that bloody bomb does go off, I’m going to go round this ship and kill every fucking Russian I can find, starting with those Spetsnaz bastards out on the deck.’
‘Not if I get there first, you won’t,’ Barber said.
Richter glanced at his watch. It was already later than he had expected, and well beyond the time he had mentally calculated, and so far Simpson hadn’t called, and that wasn’t good news.
‘You expecting a call?’ Barber asked.
‘Yes,’ Richter said shortly, and instantly grabbed everybody’s attention. ‘I’m waiting for a call right now from my boss in London, because there is just the slightest chance that the weapon won’t detonate, but not because of anything we did. I think the Russian builders of that particular Status-6 device made a single crucial mistake in the programming, and if they did—’
He broke off as the satellite phone buzzed. It was over 15 minutes later than Richter had expected Simpson to call, but he doubted it would be anyone else.
‘Yes,’ Richter said, pressing the phone to his ear. Everyone in the mess stopped talking
and stared at him.
‘You’re going to need to get back here soonest,’ Simpson said. ‘A number of people are going to want to talk to you about this.’
‘What happened?’
There was a longish pause, which Richter didn’t like at all, before Simpson responded.
‘You were right, which really means that you were just bloody lucky. The submarine detected the sound you predicted, but almost a quarter of an hour after the time you suggested. Then we had to wait for it to get up to a depth where it could send a signal, which is why it’s taken so long to get back to you.’
‘That estimate was just a guess, Simpson, with a whole raft of fudge factors included.’
‘I know. It was a good guess, as it happened. Anyway, as I said, get yourself back here as quickly as you can. Well done.’
‘I’ll do my best. First, I need to tell people here what happened.’
‘Tell us what?’ Reilly asked, as Richter ended the call. ‘That we’re all about to drown?’
‘No.’ Richter shook his head. ‘In fact, you can relax, because about half an hour ago one of Her Majesty’s submarines heard something on its passive sonar that provided the answer to a question I had asked.’
‘What?’
‘I asked that young officer up on the bridge if the GPS system on the Status-6 device included geographical mapping, and he told me he didn’t think it did. So through my boss I asked if our submarine could listen out at a specific time, a time that I supplied after I’d done a few calculations. And, thankfully, the sonar team on board heard what I hoped they would.’
‘Which was what?’
‘The sound of the Status-6 weapon smashing into the northern end of the island of La Palma at around sixty knots. There was no nuclear detonation because the warhead was programmed to arm only when it was about a mile from the target, according to the Russian officer. And it ploughed into the island because its GPS system was taking it directly towards the coordinates of the target in a straight line, and it didn’t know that there was a sodding great lump of land right in front of it. If it had launched from the south of the island, the plan would have worked, so we did – I suppose – manage to stop the Russian plan after all. Just not the way we expected.’
Understrike Page 38
