Kilo Class

by Patrick Robinson

  “It would be more embarrassing,” said Morgan, “if the goddamned Chinese get a hold of enough of those fucking Kilos to shut us out of the Strait of Taiwan. Right then we’d have to go to war to restore the peaceful trading rights of all Western nations in those waters.”

  “I haven’t taken my eye off the ball,” said Bergstrom. “I just hope we have enough data to make it happen.”

  Admiral Morgan patted his briefcase. “I have some good stuff in here,” he said. “Pour me a cup of coffee and I’ll show you. By the way, the President asked me to pass on to you his kindest regards.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of him,” said John Bergstrom. “I’ve only met him two or three times.”

  “This President just happens to like military men a lot more than he likes politicians. He makes it his business to befriend all of his senior commanders. He actually takes pride in the fact that he knows the first name of his SEALs’ C in C. As I left the plane he just said, ‘My best regards to John.’”

  “Hope he’s still saying that a couple of months from now,” replied the SEAL chief.

  Arnold Morgan opened the briefcase and took out the manila envelope that had been delivered to him two days previously by the much-abused Charlie. He walked over to the detailed map of European North Russia, which was laid out on a wide sloping desk with a green shaded light curved over it.

  He traced his finger up the left-hand side of Lake Onega, past Petrozavodsk. Here the lake is cut in half by two large peninsulas, forcing through traffic to the eastern side of the waterway. He ran his finger past the lakeside town of Kuzaranda, and then twenty-five miles farther north through the narrow gap between two other peninsulas.

  “About another twenty-five miles on,” he said, “we come to one of the loneliest spots on the whole journey. See this town, Unica, which looks like it might be on the lake? Well it’s not; it’s about eight miles west—all the way up here. There is nothing but a few small farms.

  “And right here,” he said as he pointed to the map with the sharp end of a pair of dividers, “is where these submarine barges stop. If you draw a line due northeast from Unica right across the lake to Provenec, where the canal comes in, top right-hand corner, that’s where the barges stop, on that line about a mile offshore.

  “Follow the western shoreline of the lake for about a mile due north of where that line first reaches the water…right here…and we have something even more interesting. Along here…right on this desolate coastline is where the big tourist boats pull over—they call it a Green Stop—the boats ease over to the port side and park alongside the tall grasses that line this shore. They let down a long fifty-foot gangway, like you get on a car ferry, and everyone can get off and take a look at the virgin Russian countryside.”

  “Jesus, Arnie. You might be a genius. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Well, I can’t claim credit for arranging the Green Stop, but I sure as hell claim credit for finding out about it.”

  “Was it difficult?”

  “Murder. I had someone call the Odessa-American Line right here in the States, and tell ’em he was a bird-watcher. I had him ask if he would get a chance to go ashore for a while at the northern end of Lake Onega. I was so careful I actually booked him on the ship before he made the call. Now the sonofabitch thinks he’s going on a ten-day paid vacation.”

  “Whatever it costs, it’s cheap,” said Admiral Bergstrom. “That’s some kind of a break, right?”

  “You make your own breaks in this game.”

  “Which brings us to problem number one: how are we going to get the guys onto the precise tourist ship that will be parked up there when the barges stop for the night? And where the hell do the tour boats start from anyway?”

  “They mostly run out of St. Petersburg.”

  “St. Petersburg? Remind me, what’s the route up to the lake from there?”

  “Through Lake Ladoga, then the River Svir, and into the canals that join Lake Onega. The route of the tour boat converges with the barges in the southern half of the lake. I expect our tour boat to pass the barges somewhere in the northern half. Then I think they’ll both make an overnight stop within a mile and a half of each other.”

  “Right. But how do we get our guys on the right boat? How often do they run?”

  “That’s the least of the problems. There are a lot of tour boats operational since Russia opened up. There’s one leaving just about every day. Sometimes three or four on weekends. They all seem to end up at the north end of Lake Onega for their Green Stops sometime in the early part of the evening. Remember it never gets dark up there in summer…you know, the White Nights and everything.”

  “Right. But I still can’t see how we get the guys on the right boat.”

  “Well, if you can’t, maybe the Russkies won’t figure it out either. The tour boats run about four times faster than the barges, which tend to make a steady five knots from Nizhny right up into the lake. And they don’t stop. Which means we can get a very accurate fix on what time they’re going to reach the shoreline near Unica. We watch the barges on the overheads all the way, then the guys get on the tour boat we know will come sliding past the submarines around 1700 hours in the north of Lake Onega. That Green Stop represents the end of the line for the tourists. The ship turns round then and heads back to St. Petersburg the next morning.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t just get on a tour lasting several days. You have to book cabins and Christ knows what,” said Admiral Bergstrom.

  “Yup. No sweat, John. We take a coupla suites on the upper deck on all of the probable boats, day after day. We book ’em right here in the USA.”

  “Yeah. But there’ll be a lot of suspicion when we keep canceling.”

  “What d’you mean, canceling? We’re not canceling anything. We’ll get people in to take up the reservations. Secretaries, boyfriends from embassies and American corporations all over Europe. Give ’em a free vacation for a few days. The boats are packed with Americans. I have a survey here…of three hundred passengers on the last three Odessa-American Line boats, an average of two hundred and eighty-four were Americans. The worst thing that can happen is we have to change four or five names when we put our own team in. But we’ll be giving them several days’ notice because we’ll know the precise time they’re gonna reach the north end of the lake—we’ll know it the moment the satellites spot the barges leaving Nizhny.”

  “Jesus, Arnie. We’re really gonna do this, aren’t we?”

  “We have no choice.”

  The two Admirals sat in silence for a few moments, each momentarily stunned by the enormity of the may-hem they were about to unleash.

  “Your guys have a headache packing the kit and transporting it?” asked Arnold Morgan.

  “Huge,” replied John Bergstrom. But he did not propose to get into the complicated details of such a mission…the semantics of preparing the men’s requirements, the four underwater breathing Draegers, their helmets, masks, flippers, and wet suits. The four attack boards. The well-balanced, effective Soviet-designed RPD light machine guns with their distinctive sound, which Bergstrom hoped would confuse a Russian guard should it come to a fight. Their sidearms, Sig Sauer 9mm pistols. The piles of ammunition clips. The Kaybar combat knives. The medical kit with codeine, and morphine, and battle dressings. Water purification tablets, radios plus batteries, plus a GPS. And five ponchos with liners and ground sheets, just in case the SEALs were forced to shoot their way out and take refuge in the countryside until they were rescued.

  “I’ve made one change to our original plan, Admiral. We’re sending in a backup SEAL caretaker to nanny them. CIA agent, worked behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. Very tough character, Angela Rivera.”

  “ANGELA!” yelled Admiral Morgan. “Is this a girl? On a mission like this?”

  “Yes. Makeup and disguise expert. Finished first in the CIA Tradecraft Class at Camp Peary. Highly trained and unobtrusive.”

  “What if she gets hurt, o
r can’t cope with a getaway?”

  “Arnie, remember when that bastard Aldrich Ames was in the process of shopping all these US agents working in East Germany, Russia, and Romania?”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Well, he blew the cover on the slim and clever Angela Duke in some Berlin hotel. And the KGB sent a couple of spooks to her room. They apparently decided that one should go in after her and one should keep watch. When the first one didn’t come out, the second one went in himself, stupid bastard. He just had time to find his mate dead on the floor. It was the last thing he ever saw. She garroted ’em both. And got away, back to Langley. She’s up to it. Trust me.”

  “Jesus,” said Arnold Morgan. “Guess we’re gonna need a lot of explosives?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “According to my calculations, each of the four swimmers is going to need eight small, shaped charges, weighing around fifty-one pounds each. These things make a fairly small bang but blow a big hole…a kind of cylindrical shape to the explosion forces it just one way, rather than an outward/inward blast. Each charge has its own timer…very, very accurate. That’s forty pounds of explosive for each man, and I don’t think they want to carry more.”

  “Not with a mile, or even a little more to swim. Anyone looked at the water depth yet?”

  “Since I only found out seven minutes ago where the operation was taking place, not hardly.”

  “Jesus, you guys are getting slack,” said Morgan in mock seriousness.

  “Well, on that note, let me tell you what I think is going to be a bit of a roadblock right here,” replied Admiral Bergstrom. “And I’m not at all sure how to solve it…How the hell are we gonna get all the stuff into Russia, and then transport it to that northern wasteland? We’re going to end up with around seven hundred and fifty pounds of gear—that’s a third of a ton. We’re talking forklift truck, minimum.”

  “Christ…so we are. I’d kinda assumed we could somehow run it over the border from Finland, up in the Karjalan Lanni area.”

  “Arnold, there are no roads that cross the old Soviet border up in that area. There’s a long border road running north-south, but it doesn’t cross into Russia. And a couple of roads just come to dead ends. There’s a railroad, but even today the Russians keep a careful eye on it. We can’t start running cargoes of fucking Semtex all over the place.

  “Of course there is a regular freeway that runs straight up from St. Petersburg to Petrozavodsk. But it would be just about impossible for us to bring in a cargo of this size under the eyes of the Russian Customs and port authority guards. And if they found it, there would be an unbelievable uproar.”

  “You’re right. How about an airlift from some remote spot in eastern Finland, straight over the border and right into the area we need it?”

  “We can’t chance that, Arnie. The Russians are still pretty hot about any air transport crossing its borders. Specially after that Chechen bullshit.”

  “Well, how about by the waterways?”

  “Too risky. The canal traffic is subject to checks at various points all along the routes. The truth is we cannot get caught.”

  “What do you consider the best chance of success?”

  “It’s all a bit worrying, Arnie. I suppose the chopper over the border…flying very low, right under the radar. If one of their military listening stations picked it up, they’d shoot it down. If push comes to shove we might just have to accept that risk and go for it.”

  “Christ, if that happened there’d be all hell to pay.”

  “I know it. But I don’t know any other way round the problem.”

  By this time, both men were pacing the room, deep in thought. Neither spoke for several minutes. Then John Bergstrom said, “Arnie, there is something in the back of my mind…you read about that new HALO development? It’s not perfected, but my guys in the industry say it’s gonna work.”

  “HALO,” replied Morgan. “That’s High Altitude, Low Opening, right? A free-fall situation from above twenty thousand feet. You’re thinking of dropping a couple of guys out of an aircraft, high over Russia, hanging on to all that kit. Jesus. I’m not sure about that, John.”

  “No, Arnie. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking capsules. Big metal canisters that operate on the same system as laser-guided bombs. We’re gonna pitch ’em out of a military aircraft high over Russia—maybe as high as thirty-five thousand feet, and get ’em to home in on a beam.”

  “Home in on what?”

  “A beam. We just get our guys in there. On the ground, somewhere out in the wilds near the lake, and they turn on their device and wait for the aircraft. The beam locks on and the air crew dump the canisters out. Then the computerized steering activates a small power unit in the canisters and steers ’em right in.”

  “Christ. That’s pretty smart. But I have a few questions.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Do these things just crash into the ground like a bomb?”

  “No. They fall like stones for thirty-four thousand feet. Then the ’chutes open, and they float in the last eight hundred feet at around twelve miles per hour. From the moment the ’chute opens it’s about forty-five seconds before they hit the ground. And barring a gale, they come in within thirty yards of the beam. The guys will not only see them floating down, they’ll hear them thud into the ground.”

  “How about radar?”

  “With those things hurtling through the air, straight down, from thirty-five thousand feet, the chances of the Russians getting a good fix, before they disappear, are pretty remote. And even if they did, it’d be a bit late to do much about it. On a screen I guess they’d look like meteorites or something.”

  “What would they weigh?”

  “Around two hundred and fifty pounds each, specially fitted with handles, of course, to make it easy for two guys to carry.”

  “Then what? Bury ’em somewhere near the edge of the woods?”

  “Exactly. And as soon as the SEALs open ’em up, the first thing they take out are a couple of spades. Then they lock ’em up and bury ’em, all ready for the night when they’ll be back for ’em.”

  “I got another problem, John. How are we going to send a military aircraft over Russian airspace without them asking all kinds of questions?”

  “That’s pretty simple. With sensible care, there’s nothing to identify a military aircraft from a commercial one, unless they just happen to put up an interceptor for a visual ident. And that’s most unlikely.”

  The SEALs Commander walked over to a large globe in the corner of his office and ran a length of a tape measure across the top, edging it into position. “There you are,” he said, tapping the globe. “The polar route from Los Angeles to the Emirates, right on the Gulf. Passes directly down the right-hand side of the lake. We bring in the chief executive of whichever American airline flies that route, and have him file a commercial flight plan with the Russians for that night. No one would think of questioning it. The only difference is, it’ll be a high-altitude echo-enhanced military aircraft making the journey, five miles up there, instead of a regular Boeing.”

  “Did I ever mention the fact that you might be a genius?” said Arnold Morgan.

  “Not lately,” said Admiral Bergstrom.

  “Have they actually tested this system?” said Morgan. “In the desert, and it happened just as you are saying?”

  “I have no hard report, but a couple of my guys were out there, and they said it was a goddamned miracle. Those things just came floating in from thirty-five thousand feet and landed right there, just a few yards from the beam.”

  “John, old buddy, we got ourselves a plan. That’s the way we’ll go. Where are the guys right now.”

  “They’re in a hotel in Helsinki, waiting for the word to move into one of the tour ships across the bay in St. Petersburg. They have excellent papers and passports, as we agreed before.”

  “Sounds good. Now, I’ll get the CIA to take care of all of those tour ship bookings. I
think we better start those four days after the Tolkach barges actually arrive off the Red Sormovo yards. In theory, they could load and depart right away. Although I don’t think that will happen.”

  “Right. I’ll send a veteran chief petty officer into Helsinki, and he can go with two SEALs up the lakes on a ship right away.”

  “We need to move fast. They’d better get the canisters made and trucked down here in a couple of days. We’ll load them, and have ’em ready to go that same day. I’ll get the chief on a flight to Helsinki tomorrow morning. We’ll almost certainly have a couple of weeks to spare, but we wanna be ready.”

  “One thing, John, are we going to need good timing to get the recce team away from the tour ship and out to the drop zone?”

  “Not really. You see we’ll know the exact time they’re scheduled to arrive at the Green Stop before the ship departs. We just need to get the dropper overhead, say, two hours later. That way the guys can just appear to take a walk and set up their beam, and we’ll make sure the aircraft is up there right on time. If he’s late, it just means the guys will have to hang around for an hour. Which doesn’t matter. The thing is, he can’t be early, because he cannot slow down much during his approach through Russian airspace. But I’m not seeing a problem there.”

  “No, John, neither am I. The key to this lies in our ability to organize it without a hitch. And then it’s in the hands of the SEALs. By the way, how do we get ’em out? They’re not going back on the ship are they?”

  “The recce team will…the ship makes very fast time back, running nonstop at around twenty to twenty-five knots all the way to St. Pete’s. Of course, the strike squad will not return to the ship. We’ll have them out in a small truck, but there will be nothing incriminating about them. Just a small group of tourists trundling around in the land of their forefathers. No problem to anyone. It’s very rural up there. Nothing much for anyone to be sensitive about.”

  “Until the charges go off. That might change things a bit.”

  “So it might, Arnie, but we’ll be long gone by then.”