Overkill pr-1

by James Barrington

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Thursday

  Gibraltar Harbour

  Richter sat on a pile of wooden boxes on the North Mole and called London on his mobile telephone. Simpson was asleep on a camp bed in his office, but was in on the conference call within two minutes. Richter felt bone-weary, and it showed in his voice. ‘The Gibraltar weapon is disarmed,’ he reported.

  ‘Any casualties on our side?’ Simpson asked.

  ‘Yes. One dead and half a dozen minor injuries. The opposition,’ he added, ‘came off rather worse than that.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this,’ Simpson said, after a pause, ‘but we need you back here as soon as possible. We have another problem.’

  ‘What problem?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Not over an open line,’ Simpson said. ‘Your friendly RAF pilot is waiting for you at the airfield – we got him out of bed half an hour ago. Get back here as quickly as possible. There’ll be a car waiting for you at Northolt, and you can come into the building at the back, through the secure garage.’

  ‘Colin,’ Richter said, putting the phone in his pocket, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘OK,’ Dekker said. ‘Come and do the Fan Dance next time there’s a Selection.’

  Richter smiled at him and shook his hand. ‘Not, if I can help it,’ he said.

  Reilly was waiting at the airfield when Richter got there ten minutes later, and he had the Tornado airborne fifteen minutes after that. They landed at Northolt fifty-three minutes later. Richter climbed into the waiting Rover, still wearing the g-suit, leaned back in the seat, and closed his eyes.

  Camp David, Maryland

  The President was dozing in the leather armchair in the corner of the bunker when the message came through. ‘Mr President,’ the Army colonel shook him gently by the shoulder.

  ‘What is it?’ The grey-haired man was instantly awake.

  ‘A secure telex message from CIA London, sir.’ The Colonel handed over the flimsy. ‘Yesterday the British intercepted a nuclear weapon in transit through France which was intended for positioning in London, and about an hour ago they also located and disarmed another weapon in Gibraltar Harbour, aboard a Russian freighter.’

  ‘Did they now?’ the President said, scanning the paper quickly.

  ‘Perhaps more importantly, sir, an attempt was made to detonate the Gibraltar weapon by remote control, presumably by the Kremlin. The trigger was actuated as the British were removing it from the weapon.’ The colonel shook his head at the President’s unspoken question. ‘No, sir. No casualties – it was an electro-mechanical trigger.’

  The President stood. ‘Inform the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs,’ he said, ‘and everyone else on the Command Net. Then locate Ambassador Karasin and tell him I want to speak with him.’ The President paused and smiled grimly. ‘And then,’ he concluded, ‘I’ll have a little chat with the Kremlin and see what they have to say about all this.’

  Hammersmith, London

  Simpson’s office was large enough to include a small conference table, and when Richter got there Simpson was sitting at the head of it, the Intelligence Director to his right and a long-haired, bespectacled man wearing jeans and a CALTECH T-shirt, and who looked faintly familiar to Richter, on his left. The only vacant chair was at the end of the table, facing Simpson. Richter had changed out of the g-suit in his office, where he kept some spare clothes. ‘Do you know James Baker?’ Simpson asked, by way of introduction.

  ‘I think I’ve seen you around the place,’ Richter said, stood up and shook his hand.

  ‘Probably. They usually keep me locked up in the basement.’

  ‘Of course,’ Richter said. ‘You’re one of our computer experts.’

  Baker grinned at him. ‘They normally call me the computer nerd.’

  ‘Well done,’ Simpson said, ‘in France and Gibraltar. Both were handled very competently.’

  ‘You can thank the SAS for that,’ Richter said. ‘I was really only along for the ride.’

  ‘If you say so. Right, that was the past; now we have to look to the future. I’ve asked Baker along because I hope he’ll be able to help, but first things first. We will be re-routing the London weapon as you suggested. It should be in place within four or five days.’ The Intelligence Director looked disapproving. ‘Second, the word Modin insisted you remember – Krutaya. We’ve run it through our database, or rather Baker has, and we came up with nothing, or almost nothing. We tried SIS, MI5 and GCHQ – all negative. A tame source in CIA London tried it through the CIA, DIA and NSA systems with the same result. It’s not a code-word that we know about, and it isn’t the real name, or the work-name, of any known Russian operative.’

  Richter interrupted him. ‘You said we had almost nothing on it. What did you find?’

  ‘The only Krutaya listed was in the gazetteer,’ said Simpson. ‘It’s a small settlement in the Komi district of Russia, at the southern end of the Timanskiy Kryazh. It’s virtually at the end of a road that leads to another settlement called Voy Vozh but goes nowhere after that.’ He was looking absurdly pleased with himself.

  ‘Yes?’ Richter said, encouragingly.

  Simpson was determined to spin it out. ‘We checked the BID (CIS) and found nothing, and we checked with JARIC at Brampton. No major developments, nothing of apparent military interest. Apart from what appear to be new telephone cables and some renovation work on a couple of buildings, nothing of any interest appears to have happened in the past year or two – or perhaps for the last two hundred years – at Krutaya.’

  ‘Simpson, stop grinning like a Cheshire cat,’ Richter said. ‘Stop telling me what you haven’t found, and tell me what you have found.’

  ‘Where do you think Krutaya is near?’

  ‘I seem to have forgotten to bring my pocket atlas of the world with me,’ Richter said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Ukhta,’ said Simpson triumphantly.

  Richter sat in silence for a moment. The name rang a distant bell, but he couldn’t place it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That means nothing to me. Give me a clue.’

  He seemed to have spoilt Simpson’s moment. ‘Your memory’s going, Richter. What about Sosnogorsk?’

  Light dawned. ‘Where Newman’s deputy went as a translator?’ Richter said.

  ‘Exactly. Krutaya is about fifty miles to the south-east of Sosnogorsk.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Richter asked.

  ‘More or less, yes.’

  Richter stared at him. ‘I’d hoped for something a bit more interesting than that,’ he said. ‘As far as I can see, we’ve been given the name of a town in Russia. A town which appears to have no military significance whatsoever. The only possible link, which could be entirely coincidental, is that last month an SIS operative visited a town about fifty miles away.’

  Simpson was still smiling. ‘Baker has a theory,’ he said. Baker was grinning too. Richter was beginning to feel like the only one in the room who hadn’t understood the punch line of the joke.

  ‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘Let’s have it.’

  ‘First,’ Baker said, ‘let me take you back to the French autoroute, when you talked to General Modin. A question. When he gave you the word Krutaya, did you think he was serious? I mean, did he toss the word out to see if you’d catch it, or did he really emphasize it?’

  ‘He was serious about it, no doubt,’ Richter replied.

  ‘Did you think he was trying to help you, or was it a ploy to mislead you, to force you to waste time looking in the wrong place?’

  Richter thought for a few moments. ‘I think he was trying to help, not hinder.’

  ‘Right,’ Baker responded. ‘Now let’s take the situation a stage further. If we accept that Modin was genuine, then the word or the place Krutaya must be important. Because of his position in the SVR, Modin probably has a reasonably good idea of the data held on allied intelligence service computers, and he would have been able to assume that the only Krutaya we would find would be the village
at the foot of the Severnyy Urals.’ Richter nodded. ‘So, a reasonable working hypothesis would be that Krutaya the place, rather than, say, Krutaya the code-name, is important, despite what the BID and JARIC say.’

  ‘I don’t see where you’re heading, but I’ll accept that for the moment.’

  ‘JARIC reported only building renovation work, and new telephone cables being laid. The telephone cables were laid underground, in a trench. The Russians usually run them using telegraph poles.’

  Richter was beginning to get confused. ‘Maybe it’s an attractive area. Maybe they decided not to cover the landscape with telegraph poles. Maybe they’ve run out of bloody trees to make the poles – I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Baker, ‘but there could be another reason. They could be important telephone cables. Cables that they didn’t want to string from telegraph poles in case some drunken peasant drove his tractor into one and brought the lot down.’

  Richter thought this through for a minute or so. ‘The road goes nowhere,’ he said slowly, ‘apart from running to the other settlement. If we assume that these cables are important for some reason, they must link something in Krutaya with somewhere else. They can’t just be vital telephone links that simply pass through the village.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Baker. ‘And so?’ he prompted.

  ‘So if we accept that Modin was on the level, then there is something in Krutaya that we need to find out about.’ Richter looked at Simpson. ‘I’m not going tramping round the bloody Urals disguised as a Russian potato farmer, if that’s what you’ve got in mind,’ he said.

  ‘There won’t be any need for that,’ Simpson said, and nodded to Baker.

  ‘So what is it?’ Baker asked. ‘What could the Russians put in a nowhere village that’s important enough to link to the outside world with armoured telephone cables? OK,’ he said, as Richter opened his mouth to challenge his assumption, ‘I don’t know that they’re armoured, but I think that they probably are.’

  Richter shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just assume I’m a congenital idiot and tell me what you’re leading up to. I’ve been up all night and I want to get to bed some time today.’

  Baker looked disappointed. ‘A computer,’ he said. ‘A big computer.’

  Simpson interrupted. ‘Put it all together, Richter. Modin’s insistence on you investigating the clue he gave you; the Russian plan; the underground cables; the fact that Krutaya is way out in the sticks, well away from any strategic target, and the visit to Sosnogorsk by Newman’s deputy. Add that lot up, and what do you get?’

  ‘A headache,’ Richter said.

  ‘You get,’ said Baker slowly, ‘the very real possibility that one of the buildings in Krutaya houses the computer that controls the satellite that controls the weapons that the Russians have planted.’

  The Walnut Room, the Kremlin, Krasnaya ploshchad, Moscow

  The Russian President put down the telephone and grimaced. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have the expression “plausible denial”. I think we are getting very close to the point where nobody is going to believe that we knew nothing about Podstava. That,’ he added, ‘was Karasin. The American President has told him that the British intercepted a nuclear weapon in France, obviously the one General Modin was escorting, which was destined for London. More significantly, British Special Forces boarded the Anton Kirov in Gibraltar Harbour last night and disarmed the weapon it was carrying.’ He looked round the room. ‘That would be bad enough,’ he said, ‘but the British also reported that an attempt was made to detonate it.’

  ‘By whom?’ Yuri Baratov asked.

  ‘That is not known,’ the President replied, ‘but the weapon was linked to a satellite communication system on board the ship.’

  ‘Trushenko,’ Ryzhkov said.

  The President nodded. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘General Sokolov told us that the Gibraltar weapon was to be detonated as a demonstration only after the London weapon had been positioned and twenty-four hours after the Podstava ultimatum had been delivered.’ He paused. ‘So that means that somebody must have told Trushenko that things were going wrong. We have to find this person.’ He turned to Baratov. ‘Nothing from St Petersburg?’

  The SVR chief shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘The address Trushenko claimed he was staying at does not exist. We have widened our search, but so far without success.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Konstantin Abramov said, tentatively. ‘Someone must know where he is, and that someone must have been contacted either by the London convoy escort, or by the crew of the Anton Kirov when the vessel was attacked. Nobody else knew.’

  ‘That is obvious,’ Baratov said. ‘So?’

  Abramov leaned forward. ‘Finding this man could be almost impossible, because if he is simply sitting in a building with a short-wave radio, he could be anywhere in the country. But he must have a means of communicating with Trushenko, and that could be the link we are looking for. Trushenko has a mobile telephone. I know, because all requests for ownership of such equipment have to be approved by the SVR – even requests from ministers. And all—’

  ‘Yes, of course!’ Baratov almost shouted. ‘I should have thought of that myself. All calls to and from mobile phones are logged automatically. We can find out exactly who Trushenko has been talking to, and we can place him anywhere in the world to within about ten miles, because of the cells.’

  ‘What cells?’ Ryzhkov asked.

  ‘The mobile telephone system operates using cells. All the time a mobile phone is on, it’s in communication with the local cell and, through the cell, with the central computer system. And the numbers of all calls to and from every mobile phone are recorded.’

  ‘I do not fully understand what you are saying,’ the President said, ‘but do you mean that you can find Trushenko?’

  Baratov nodded. ‘We can quickly find out more or less where Trushenko is. We can also identify everyone he has called or who has called him, and we can pull them in for questioning. And,’ he added, ‘once we know Trushenko’s approximate location, we can instruct the local cell to disable his mobile telephone. That will force him to use a landline phone, and once he does that, we can take him.’

  The internal telephone rang and the President answered it. ‘I will come down,’ he said, and replaced the receiver. Baratov looked enquiringly at him. ‘The Americans want to talk to me on the hot-line,’ the President said. ‘This time, I think I will have to tell them about Podstava. And,’ he added, with a wolfish grin, ‘I can explain that the traitor Trushenko will shortly be apprehended.’

  Hammersmith, London

  Richter sat up straighter. ‘Proof?’ he asked.

  ‘None yet,’ said Baker, ‘but I might have something soon.’

  ‘Clue me in on this,’ Richter said. ‘How exactly can a computer stuck in a building in a hick town like Krutaya control these weapons?’

  Baker switched to lecture mode. ‘First, as it looks like this was what you might call an unofficial plan and not one officially sanctioned by the Kremlin, the computer has to be somewhere like Krutaya. If it was in the Lubyanka or down at Yazenevo, somebody who wasn’t privy to the plan would be certain to notice it and start asking awkward questions. Second, with the data transfer facilities available today, the controlling computer could actually have been placed anywhere – not even necessarily in Russia.’

  He paused and checked to see if Richter was listening. He was. ‘Now, there are two major components of this system, plus the weapons themselves. The most important component is the Krutaya computer itself. That contains a big and complicated program that controls every aspect of the system, from the functioning of the weapons to the positioning of the satellite in geostationary orbit over the middle of the Atlantic.

  ‘The second crucial component is the satellite, because that actually controls the operation of the weapons, acting on instructions from the computer. The satellite and the computer are inextricably linked. The computer will be
constantly monitoring the weapons via some kind of feedback system, and also watching the station-keeping parameters of the satellite to ensure that it stays in its designated position.’

  Richter had a question. ‘How do they communicate with each other? Where’s the link?’

  Baker shrugged. ‘The how is easy, the where I’m not certain about. They communicate through a facility called an uplink station. That’s basically a big satellite dish pointed permanently at the Atlantic satellite. It sends signals to the satellite, and receives messages back from the bird. I don’t know where it is, but my guess is Pechora.’

  ‘And if they decided to fire the weapons?’

  ‘Each bomb will have a unique identifier, just like the Sky card in your satellite TV receiver at home. If they want to fire the Los Angeles weapon, the operator selects the code for the Los Angeles bomb, chooses “Detonate” or whatever, and a couple of minutes later a substantial part of Los Angeles turns into a cloud of dust. If they want to fire them all at once, they just select all the weapon codes simultaneously and go through the same routine.’

  There was a long silence. ‘The operator?’ Richter asked. ‘Where is he? At Krutaya?’

  ‘He can be anywhere,’ Baker said. ‘That’s the point of the armoured telephone cables. They carry the signals to and from the uplink station, but they also allow authorized access to the computer from anywhere else in Russia, or in fact from anywhere in the world. The guys actually sitting in the building at Krutaya looking at the computer screens will probably be mainly low-grade maintenance staff. Their job is simply to monitor the physical health of the computer, if you like. They’ll be the ones doing tape back-ups of the program and data files, running diagnostic utilities, checking that the air-conditioning is working and that the lavatories aren’t leaking over the power supply, that kind of thing.

  ‘The real operators,’ he continued, ‘are in Moscow, probably at Yazenevo. They log on to the Krutaya computer via the telephone lines, and give instructions to the program from there. They never need go to Krutaya – in fact, there’s no need for them even to know where the computer actually is. All they need is a telephone number, a username and a password. That’s the beauty of the system. That’s its flexibility. It’s also,’ he added, ‘our way in.’