Pavlov and ‘John’ met three evenings later in a large and busy café on the bank of the Moskva River, the unmistakable spires and ornamentation of the Kremlin visible about a mile away on the opposite bank.
In fact, to describe it as a meeting was inaccurate. They already knew each other by sight, and now that the flow of information – they both hoped – had started, it was important for their own security that they were never seen together. It was always possible that the two Russian surveillance officers assigned to cover John might have broken with their usual routine and decided to watch him that evening as well. The American would obviously have taken precautions to ensure that he had not been followed to the café, but even so any kind of direct contact between the two men would clearly have been an unacceptable risk. So they were in the building in the early evening at about the same time, but not together.
Pavlov had arrived first, purchased a coffee and found a seat at a table beside one of the grubby windows that looked out towards the river. He took a copy of the Novaya Gazeta out of the pocket of his leather jacket, opened it up on the table in front of him and read a couple of the articles. The newspaper had acquired a reputation for promoting free speech and arguing for democracy, both extremely dangerous stances to take, even in modern, post-glasnost Russia.
He had finished about half his coffee, then got up and walked through the café to the male toilet at the back behind the bar. There, he entered the right-hand of the two stalls, as previously agreed with ‘John’, locked the door, and then performed a series of actions that he had rehearsed in the privacy of his own apartment at least half a dozen times.
He had taken out his smartphone – a cheap and basic model but which importantly had a slot for a micro SD card as well as for the SIM – and used his thumbnail to extract the data card. He took a single sheet of toilet paper, placed the SD card on it and carefully wrapped it so that the plastic was entirely enveloped by the paper. He placed the tiny package on top of the toilet roll holder, slipped the phone back into his jacket pocket and then took a sealed condom from another pocket and ripped open the wrapper. He unrolled the condom, tucked the paper-wrapped data card into it, and then tied a thumb knot near the open end to seal it. He encased the condom wrapper in half a dozen sheets of toilet paper, dropped it into the pan and flushed the system, making sure that it vanished. When it had refilled, he stood on the toilet seat, lifted the metal top of the WC cistern and dropped the condom inside, where it floated on the water because of the air inside it.
Less than three minutes after walking away from his table, Pavlov had sat down again and read another article. Then he checked his watch, because timing is everything, finished his coffee, picked up his newspaper and walked out of the building.
Precisely seven minutes later, Mark Rawlins – ‘John’ – had approached the café from the opposite direction, stepped inside, walked across to the counter and ordered and paid for a small beer, his Russian fluent and with a distinct Moscow accent. While he was drinking it, he surreptitiously observed the door to the male toilet, checking who went in and came out again. When he was certain that the toilet was vacant, he left his half-empty glass of beer on the counter and walked over to the door.
Inside, he entered the stall on the right, locked the door, lifted the seat and stood on the toilet bowl. He lifted up the lid of the cistern, reached in and pulled out the condom. Then he essentially unwound the actions Pavlov had carried out just a few minutes earlier, tearing a hole in the condom to extract the paper-wrapped data card – he had told the Russian to encase it that way to prevent any possibility of the edges of the card ripping the condom – and undoing it. He inserted the card in the data slot of his own mobile phone, wrapped the destroyed condom in toilet paper, dropped it in the bowl and ensured that it flushed away.
Less than a quarter of an hour after he’d entered the café, Rawlins was back out on the street and walking unhurriedly towards his apartment building, reflecting on the strange turn of events that had begun when the young GRU man had first approached him in the lobby of his apartment building a little over a week earlier. From his posting to the Embassy in Moscow as nothing more than an analyst, he was now directly involved in running an agent in the heart of the city. Granted, the operation belonged to ‘Richard’, real name Walter Burdiss, the case officer who had been, perhaps fortuitously, spending a couple of weeks in Moscow before returning to Langley, but Rawlins was the man out there doing the legwork and who had brought the case to Burdiss in the first place.
And it had provided him with a frisson of excitement to realize that the contents of the SD card sitting in the data slot of his Samsung phone were enough to get him immediately arrested should any Russian official guess what he was carrying. He believed that the chances of that happening were slim in the extreme, but even so the technicians at the Embassy had installed a high-speed secure delete application on his mobile that he could access simply by pressing a couple of keys, and that would wipe the card completely in less than a minute.
* * *
The following day, having taken his usual route to work because Burdiss had emphasized the importance of making no changes to his routine to avoid attracting attention, Rawlins had handed over the data card and then gone to his desk to make a start on his usual daily workload.
Within a couple of hours that recording had been played, translated into English by one of the Embassy’s resident Russian translators, a grey-haired and slightly dumpy woman in her 60s known to everyone as ‘Lucy’, although her real name was Geraldine, and one of only a handful of Americans in the building who possessed a CTS – Cosmic Top Secret – security clearance. She had handed over the typed transcript to Walter Burdiss, then took him to a secure briefing room and explained to him what she had heard and, more importantly, what she had deduced about the identities of the participants on the recording.
Burdiss had interrupted a conference Roger Squires, the CIA Chief of Station, was holding in his office, had the room cleared and checked for bugs as a basic security precaution, and then told him briefly what had happened. Just over an hour later, a meeting was convened in the smallest and most secure of the basement briefing rooms.
This was a box about 30 feet square made entirely from steel that rested on massive springs secured to the concrete foundations of the building, and which was approached by a retractable pathway. The room had its own dedicated air conditioning system, a separate power supply, and was sheathed in copper wire, which turned it into a large Faraday cage. It was the one place in the building that everyone was completely certain was totally secure from any form of eavesdropping.
Every part of the room, from the steel to the air conditioning unit, had been purchased from companies in America, companies that had been vetted before the orders were placed, and a team of contractors from another vetted company had been flown out to Moscow to put the whole thing together. The American government has a long memory, and had no wish to repeat the enormous embarrassment caused back in 1951 by what became known as The Thing, which had provided the Russians with almost seven years of high-level, Grade-One intelligence from the heart of the American Embassy in Moscow.
Although he was a visitor to the Embassy, the man chairing the meeting had been Walter Burdiss, and the attendance list was extremely small. In fact, it was about as small as it could possibly get: Roger Squires, the CIA Chief of Station, because he pretty much had to be there; Sarah Cox, the Deputy COS, for the same reason; Mark Rawlins, because although he didn’t have the right security clearance he was the person who’d started the operation running and that meant he was entitled, Geraldine, in case any questions were asked about her translation from the Russian, and Burdiss himself.
‘What we have here, ladies and gentlemen,’ Burdiss had begun, ‘is pure gold.’
Chapter 15
Thursday
MV Semyon Timoshenko, at sea
On a flat calm sea, the MV Semyon Timoshenko steamed steadily south at
13 knots, making an almost direct track towards the distant island of Madeira, although the navigator had already plotted a diversion, a course change of only a couple of degrees, that would ensure the ship passed well clear of the island, at least 30 miles out. That course change would take place later, in the early hours of the following morning.
Now, with only five or perhaps six days to go, it was time to perform the final checks on the weapon system, checks that would be repeated every day until they reached the deployment site. Everyone on board knew precisely what had to be done, and what part they themselves would play, but nevertheless the captain believed that constant drilling and repetition made it much less likely that any mistakes would be made in the crucial minutes prior to weapon deployment. In most matters involving military activities, practice did indeed help to make perfect.
‘Anything on radar?’ the captain asked for the second time in five minutes.
‘Still clear of all contacts on maximum range, sir,’ the bridge watch-keeping officer responsible for radar surveillance reported.
The captain strode out onto the starboard bridge wing, brought his binoculars up to his face and checked the horizon from right forward to right aft, then crossed to the port wing and repeated the process before returning to his seat in the centre of the bridge.
‘Very well. You may begin.’
Another of the bridge officers walked out onto the wing, raised a whistle to his lips and blew two sharp blasts.
Immediately, the deck below and forward of the bridge, where the containers were stacked, was filled with precisely directed but urgent activity as a swarm of men appeared and began performing their individual tasks.
A ladder was propped up against the end of the container behind the two modified units on the starboard side of the ship, and three men quickly climbed up it, one after the other. At the same time, another ladder was positioned against the short container in front of the double unit, and another three men climbed up that. Their actions at each end of the joined double container were identical: one man opened the double end doors and fixed them into place. The second man stepped inside the container and pretended to lift out the two steel pins that prevented it from swinging. When he’d done so, he shouted out ‘For exercise, forward two pins removed,’ and then stepped out of the container. Moments later, he heard the same shout from the other end of the container, but referring to the aft pins.
When they performed the evolution again, for real, the next step would have been to swing the double-length container about its central axis, so that one end projected over the side of the ship, and then to lock it into place using the same steel pins that located it at present, but obviously in a different set of holes. After that, the hydraulic legs would have been lowered to the deck to brace and support the extended container, ready for weapon launch.
The captain had vetoed performing this operation for exercise, just in case a coastguard plane or maritime patrol aircraft suddenly appeared. Opening a shipping container’s doors whilst underway at sea could just about be explained away – perhaps the contents had caught fire, or something like that – but seeing a double-length container swinging to point out over the side of the ship was an entirely different matter. Containers never did that, for perfectly obvious reasons, and the captain had decided that the risk of being observed, whilst extremely remote, was still significant.
In the meantime, the remainder of the preparations for deployment continued. The precise GPS location of the target was already hard-coded into the computer system built into the cylindrical weapon; the ship’s current location then had to be provided to it, so that it would have a definite start and finish position loaded. To achieve this, an extra long telebrief lead was connected to the ship’s GPS system on the bridge, and the end simply tossed over the wing, where it was picked up by another crewman and handed up to those standing beside the container. Careful not to snag the cable, he then walked into the container and plugged the lead into the appropriate socket on the side of the weapon’s computer module. To a certain extent, this was a redundant action, because the weapon’s computer already had access to a dedicated GPS unit built into the upper part of the cylinder. But duplication, particularly in navigation systems, was never a bad idea. Once the position had been transferred, the lead was removed.
At that stage, the cylinder was ready for launch, which would be achieved by closing the rear doors of the container behind it, doors that had each been fitted with steel blast shields back at the Sevmash facility, and then firing the propellant charge mounted at the rear of the cylinder. That would be sufficient to drive it along the rails, out of the container, and over the side of the ship. Once in the water, its own propulsion system would automatically start and drive it with unerring accuracy to the target, the GPS navigation system being backed up by an entirely separate inertial navigation system. In test runs in the Barents Sea, dummy weapons fitted with the same navigation kit and similar propulsion system had consistently impacted their targets with a position error of less than one quarter of 1 per cent. And despite the massive yield of the weapon, pinpoint accuracy was absolutely crucial.
Again, when the weapon was fired for real, a number of safety interlocks would have to be removed from both the warhead and the propulsion system, and because of the vital importance of this part of the preparation, this operation would be conducted by two of the non-commissioned officers supervised by two of the officers, the latter two reading from duplicated printed checklists before all four would individually count that the correct number of interlocks had been taken out. In the exercise scenario being conducted on deck, the interlocks would be left in place for safety reasons, but the two men went through the motions methodically, pretending to perform each operation under the direct supervision of the two officers.
The doors on the containers were closed, but the ladders were not removed, because the final part of the operation required the ship’s company to permanently dispose of the evidence. So while one man climbed into the cab of the deck-mounted crane, four others lifted the ladders up on top of the lowest level of containers, and climbed up onto the roof of the upper joined unit. The crane driver swung the jib, a set of four chains already attached to it, over the top of the double container and waited while the men on the roof attached one chain to each corner. He waited until they had all climbed off the container and were a safe distance away, and then slowly increased the tension until the chains were taut. When they had deployed the weapon, he would lift the now-empty double container over the side of the ship and then, using the hydraulically-actuated quick release hook on the end of the lifting cable, one of the modifications made during the ship’s stay at Sevmash, he would release it, with the chains, to sink down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Once he had repeated the operation with the lower joined container, there would be absolutely nothing left on board the ship to connect it or the crew with the events that would by then already be unfolding some distance to the north. The crane driver released the tension, lowering the chains to the roof of the container, and the same four men climbed up onto it to release the ends from the corners.
Once this stage had been reached, and the supervising officers were satisfied that all the men had performed their jobs correctly, albeit in an imaginary fashion, one of them blew a single blast on his whistle to signify endex, the end of the exercise. A few minutes later, the entire team assembled on deck for a debrief and to discuss any feedback and comments that they might wish to raise. Then they all dispersed and returned to their normal duties.
On the bridge, the captain had watched the evolution with critical eyes and a stopwatch in his hand. When the whistle sounded to end the rehearsal, he nodded his satisfaction. His men had been steadily shaving seconds off the time it took them to complete each stage, despite the fact that when the time came for weapon deployment there would be absolutely no need for haste: whether it would take them five minutes or an hour to launch the device was completely irreleva
nt. The only thing they had to do was to complete the operation unobserved. But speed and competence were important criteria in any military operation, and the captain was pleased with the efficiency being shown by his men. He had no doubt that when they reached the launch site there would be no delays or problems. Just as importantly, the two officers responsible for the cylinder’s propulsion system and its GPS and INS navigation fit had both confirmed that the self-checking routines had run with no errors or faults being detected.
‘Navigator,’ he ordered, ‘prepare a signal to Moscow giving as accurate an estimate as possible for our arrival in the target area, and for weapon deployment. Confirm that all checks on the device are in the green.’
The exercise completed, the MV Semyon Timoshenko continued its steady progress south. Its first scheduled port of call was Nouadhibou in Mauritania, where six of the containers on board were to be delivered. After that, it would continue south to Dakar in Senegal, Freetown in Sierra Leone, south-east to Luanda in Angola and make a last stop in Walvis Bay in Namibia before sailing around the southern tip of Africa. Then, the ship would head north, making calls in South Africa, Mozambique and Tanzania before entering the Red Sea to transit the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean before finally ending its voyage in Murmansk.
Most of the second part of the voyage, after the stop in Mauritania, the captain had already decided, would be little more than a pleasure cruise, and a just reward for all the work they had done, and what they would have achieved. He was in no doubt that a number of honours would be awarded to him and his men on their return to Russia.
The only unfortunate thing was that because of the nature of the mission on which they were engaged, no public acknowledgement or display of those honours would ever be permitted.
Understrike Page 14