‘It was a judgement call,’ Koslov said, ‘and we did consider doing that. But our concern was that if we stated openly that our men were looking for Pavlov, and he was identified by the police on Svalbard, then he would have been imprisoned by the Norwegians and probably flown back to mainland Norway, where he would have been out of our reach. And, of course, there was the very real fear that whilst in custody he would demand political asylum based upon the information that he had in his possession. And no doubt the Americans would have then become involved, and the next time Pavlov surfaced he might well have been in New York or Washington, not Moscow.’
‘But we could still stop that ship,’ the admiral emphasized.
‘We could,’ Yasov agreed, ‘but it wouldn’t do us any good. The Americans would shout long and hard about piracy on the high seas, and complain about the kidnapping of a passenger on board their vessel. And even if we weathered that storm, we would also be too late. Whether Pavlov lives or dies, or is held in custody or is a free man, is now largely irrelevant. Without any doubt, one of the first things the crew on board that ship would have done, once they had sailed away from the island, would have been to use some sort of secure communications to pass on a report about Pavlov and copies of everything he had recorded to the CIA headquarters in Langley in Virginia and, if the Englishman is an intelligence agent as we believe, probably to London as well.’ Yasov shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid that particular genie is already out of the bottle.’
‘But luckily,’ the minister said, ‘it actually doesn’t matter. Not any more.’ He looked across the table at the admiral who had spoken a few minutes earlier. ‘Where is the Semyon Timoshenko right now?’ he asked.
‘I cannot give you exact coordinates,’ the admiral replied, ‘because I do not have its latest position to hand. But just over two hours ago, the ship reported that it was then approximately ten nautical miles behind its planned position and back on track. As you will recall, the vessel was forced by bad weather to take a detour a short distance to the south of Iceland, and has been making up time ever since. According to the navigator on board, and based upon the present and forecast weather conditions, it is expected to reach the target area more or less on time, but we will get that firmed up over the next two days.’
‘And that is why it doesn’t matter,’ the minister said again. ‘Unless the Americans and the British are both remarkably slow on the uptake, which is unlikely, by now the intelligence services of both countries will be aware of at least some of the details of this operation. But I do not believe that they will have enough time to put the whole thing together, and certainly not enough time to do anything about it.’
‘It’s worth remembering,’ General Yasov said, ‘that the information we have released through deliberate leaks and other means has emphasized the submarine performance of the Status-6 weapon, and even suggested which of our nuclear-powered guided missile-carrying submarines were intended to be the launch platform. So even if by some miracle the Americans do discover the extent of the plan, what they will be looking for will be a large submarine – the Project 949 and 949A boats are about the fourth largest class of submarines afloat – not a small and properly registered civilian container ship making its way to a port in Africa with legitimate goods to deliver.’
‘This project,’ the minister said, sounding supremely satisfied, ‘began with a timescale measured in months. During our meetings, we have seen that shorten to weeks, and now to days. But now, my friends and colleagues, we are almost at the point where we are looking at no more than a matter of hours and minutes. If the last estimate from the ship is accurate, and they have no mechanical problems and don’t encounter any bad weather, deployment of the weapon will take place on Tuesday next week as planned.
‘In other words,’ he added, glancing at his watch, ‘the destruction of a major part of America will take place in a little under seventy hours from now.’
Chapter 30
Saturday
RV Thomas G Thompson, at sea
‘Any brilliant ideas coming out of Langley?’ Richter asked, putting his coffee cup and a rolled-up chart secured with an elastic band on the table in front of him and sitting down opposite Steve Barber.
The American shook his head.
‘In my opinion, and not to be repeated to anyone,’ he said, ‘brilliant ideas and Langley don’t kinda go together real often. Last I heard, they had a whole bunch of Russian linguists working their way through the recordings. Given them each a twenty-minute or half-hour segment, I suppose, and when they’ve all finished, I guess someone’ll try and knit the whole thing together and hope it makes sense. Not really sure that’s such a great idea, but there you go. Anything new from your end?’
‘Not a lot. I talked to my people a little while ago, and basically nobody has any clue what could be going on. In fact, some of them don’t think anything is going on at all, and they believe we’re stuck in the middle of a really clever and really subtle Russian exercise in disinformation, and we’re all just too stupid to realize it.’
‘They could be right, but I doubt it. We’ve got a few guys who think like that working back in Virginia, but at least the Company is taking what Pavlov got from the dacha, and what he’s told us since, real seriously. The problem is, we really don’t know where we should be looking, or what we should be looking for. And the other kinda related problem is that as far as we can tell, and we do have like a million satellites spinnin’ round the world peerin’ into people’s backyards, and especially people who live in Russia, there’s nothing going on over there that could mean they’re up to anythin’ dodgy.’
Richter nodded.
‘We don’t have your satellites, but our intelligence people can’t detect anything either, which really doesn’t make sense. If the Russians are genuinely planning some kind of a first strike, then they would also have to be planning a second strike and maybe a third strike as well, and perhaps even an invasion. There’s no doubt about that. Otherwise, what would be the point in hitting America at all?’
But as he said that, Richter suddenly remembered something he’d heard in Pavlov’s recordings, something that hadn’t made sense to him at the time, but which might possibly have a bearing on this aspect of the possible attack.
‘I just had a thought,’ he said.
Barber looked at him hopefully, but Richter shook his head.
‘No, it’s nothing significant, or I don’t think so anyway. It’s just a remark on one of the recordings that didn’t make sense to me at the time and, thinking about it, it still doesn’t make sense to me now, so I’m wondering if I misunderstood it. The only way to find out is to go back and listen to it again.’
‘Why don’t you haul the laptop in here? You can bounce ideas off me, and if it’s idiomatic Russian, maybe we should get Dmitri to sit here and listen to it as well.’
‘Good thinking, Steve, I’ll pick him up on the way back from my cabin.’
The biggest problem Richter had was finding the remark he was looking for in the hours of recordings Pavlov had obtained. He hadn’t transcribed the recording, or attempted to write down verbatim what the voices were saying, or translate it into English. When he had listened to the recordings, he had been thinking in Russian, because he found it easier than trying to switch between two very different languages, and had just been trying to get an overall feel for what the men had been talking about.
All he could recall was that it had been a throwaway, an off-the-cuff, remark, and it had certainly not been in the first three or four recordings. Even with Dmitri Pavlov sitting opposite him and also trying to remember the expression – the Russian had listened to the recordings several times before he ran to the West – it still took Richter nearly an hour to find it. And when he did, it still didn’t make sense. He played the recording through the small speaker of the laptop, so he and Pavlov could both listen to it, and then he offered the Russian the headphones so that he could concentrate on the w
ords and the inflection. Only then did Richter attempt to explain and translate what he had heard for Barber’s benefit.
‘How would you put that into English, Dmitri?’ he asked.
Pavlov shrugged.
‘I think the Russian is мы могли бы даже предложить помочь,’ he said, writing down the words on a piece of paper as he spoke them. ‘There’s quite a bit of background noise, other people talking, that kind of thing, but I think that’s what the speaker said. In English, I suppose I would say the sentence means "we can even offer help" or "we can even try to help." Certainly it’s something like that, and there is what sounds like another man laughing just after he’s finished speaking. But to me that really doesn’t make very much sense.’
‘Nor to me,’ Richter said. ‘I wonder if he was talking about something else, something entirely different.’
He played back the section of the recording that immediately preceded the remark, but neither he nor Pavlov could isolate any comment that might have prompted such a response, and it looked as if it had been uttered in isolation, just something that one of the men sitting around the table had felt he wanted or needed to say.
‘It couldn’t have been this guy just talking ‘bout stuff in general?’ Barber suggested. ‘Like a regular conversation with a neighbour or something like that.’
‘I doubt that,’ Richter replied. ‘These men are sitting around a table discussing what we presume is some kind of brand-new Russian secret weapon that they’re about to launch at America. They’re all focused on that, talking about different aspects of both it and the target. I really don’t see how any of them there would suddenly make a remark about helping his neighbour mow his lawn or paint his house or anything else friendly and domestic and harmless. And if the man was going to make a remark like that, he was using the wrong pronoun. He should have said "I can even try to help," not "we can even try to help," unless he had plans to rope in one of the other men around the table to assist him.’
‘That’s the way I read it too,’ Pavlov said.
‘The problem is,’ Richter added, ‘that the remark makes no sense in the context we’ve just been discussing, and even less sense in the context of a Russian first strike against America. If the Russians really do intend to sling a whole bunch of nuclear weapons across the Atlantic, absolutely the last thing they are going to do is then offer to provide help to the incinerated residents of the radioactive wasteland that would result. Sorry, Steve. I know it’s your home, but that’s the reality.’
‘Unless they’re just being ironic,’ Barber suggested, ‘and the kinda help they’ve got in mind would be another few salvos of nukes. But then you’ve got the problem that there’s no sign of their military hiking up their alert state a notch or three. And even if the Russkies were planning on just hitting us with nukes fired from their boomers, they would know we’d get a retaliatory strike into the air first thing, and for sure we’d see them prepping their anti-missile defences and stuff. And of course,’ he finished, ‘we’ve seen nothing like that.’
Pavlov shook his head.
‘I’m Russian,’ he said, stating the obvious, ‘and I really don’t think any Russian would use that kind of expression if what they meant was a second or third strike. But I agree that the speaker does sound as if he’s being ironic, or even funny, because we do hear that short burst of laughter immediately afterwards.’
They clearly weren’t getting anywhere with that particular bit of the recording, so Richter moved on to something else.
‘Another thing that puzzles me,’ he said, ‘is that quite a lot of the time in these meetings they discuss a particular location. In fact, they talk about two locations in the eastern Atlantic, and they keep on changing, or maybe refining would be a better word, their geographical coordinates. The obvious assumption is that these two spots, which they just seem to refer to using the numbers one and two, are the positions from which the attack will be launched. Otherwise, I have no idea why they would be talking about them. The other thing I’ve noticed is that position number two seems to be more or less fixed, or if they have altered its coordinates I must have missed that, but they keep on tweaking the location of position one. Not by much, but over the course of these recordings it has been altered slightly.’
He removed the elastic band from around the rolled-up chart he had brought with him and spread it out on the table in front of him, holding down the four corners with a couple of empty coffee cups and the salt and pepper shakers from the condiment set.
‘I borrowed this from the bridge,’ he said. ‘It’s just a standard Admiralty plotting chart showing the Canary Islands and a part of the west coast of Africa. These,’ he pointed at some pencilled notations, ‘are the two positions I’ve been talking about. As you can see, what the Russians have been calling Position One is down here off the southern tip of the island of La Palma.’
On the chart Richter had drawn a figure ‘1’ in pencil inside a circle, and with a line extending from the edge of the circle to a point just south of the island. Further to the south was another pencilled circle, this one with the figure ‘2’ inside it, and with a line pointing to a position about five nautical miles to the south of the almost circular island of La Gomera.
‘And that is Position Two, which is the one that seems to be fixed, as I’ve said. The Canary Islands are volcanic, obviously, and the water around them is really deep, so the islands are like the tops of submerged volcanoes. So we have two deep-water locations being discussed by a secret and secretive Russian committee, but both close to inhabited islands in the Canaries. It seems to me that those locations rule out, say, a ballistic missile attack launched by a couple of submarines, because the launches would be quite obvious. Nobody on the islands who was awake could possibly miss the sight of a few salvos of sub-launched ICBMs shooting up out of the sea. If that was the Russian plan of attack, then their boats would obviously find somewhere well away from inhabited locations, somewhere right out in the middle of the Atlantic, and certainly a hell of a lot closer to America. And even then there would be a problem.’
‘You got that right,’ Barber said. ‘Our DSP birds would pick up the heat blooms from the launches within a few seconds, they’d calculate the threat fan in less than a minute, and we would have a retaliatory strike on its way to Moscow before the Russian missiles had even landed.’
‘And what we’d be looking at then would be a conventional first strike, exactly the kind of scenario that we envisaged during the dark days of the Cold War. In that case, the same arguments apply. We would definitely be seeing some kind of preparations by the Russians for a second or third strike. We’d see land forces movements as well, and a whole lot of other very obvious activity in Russia. All the same,’ Richter added, ‘it might be worth asking Langley to check on the positions of Russian boomers and cruise missile boats, just in case any of them are heading towards the Canaries right now.’
‘It’ll do no harm to check,’ the American agreed. ‘I’ll get the Company to call the roll.’
He pulled out his mobile phone, dialled a number and had a brief conversation with whoever answered his call.
‘They were already doing it,’ he said, as he put the phone down. ‘A standard prep every time it looks like the shit’s getting anywhere near the fan.’
‘Both of you have a lot more experience in these matters than I have,’ Dmitri Pavlov said, ‘but if Moscow was planning to launch a conventional first strike against America and the West, I do know that that decision would be made inside the Kremlin, and the tactics would probably be discussed inside ministry buildings in Moscow and at the various military establishments at places like the Naval Headquarters in St Petersburg. And there would be unmistakable movements by military units. But what would not be happening, in my opinion, would be a group of men from different branches of the military and intelligence services meeting in secret in an unofficial location.’
Both Richter and Barber
nodded.
‘That’s the real point,’ Richter said. ‘Everything about this screams unconventional assault. Maybe it’s not any kind of a Russian government-sponsored plan. Maybe it’s some kind of a freelance operation, being run by a bunch of disaffected people who have decided to target America for their own reasons.’
Pavlov shook his head again.
‘I’m not sure that would work, Paul,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how they would manage to get senior politicians and men at the very top of the intelligence and military organs of the state to work together on something like this. In my limited experience, these different units will only ever work together if they are ordered to do so by a higher authority, a bit like us and the SVR providing security at that Moscow dacha. I think this operation, this so-called kotel or cauldron, is being run by someone or a group of people at the very highest level in the Kremlin, and the reason it’s so secret is because they want it to be deniable, or something like that.’
That did seem to make sense to the other two men.
‘You could be right about that, Dmitri,’ Richter said. ‘And that means we definitely have to be missing something here.’
‘The information you got from your other source,’ Barber said, pointing at one of the islands marked on the chart. ‘That mentioned this Cumbre Vieja place, and that’s right here on this La Palma island, right? And I guess he wouldn’t have given you the name unless it was real important, so what is it?’
‘It’s a volcano that’s erupted a few times over the last five hundred years or so, but at the moment it seems to be pretty quiet, at least according to Wikipedia. I’ve even done a bit of research on the web about the possibility of the Russians trying to trigger a new eruption there, but everything I’ve found tells me that that just won’t work, which is just as well because there is one fact about Cumbre Vieja that worries a lot of volcanologists. If it did suffer a major eruption, there’s a possibility that the western side of the island might collapse into the sea, and that would be bad news for anyone living out to the west of it, like people in America, for example. There’d be a tsunami, a tidal wave, that would hit the east coast of the States and probably flatten a lot of it.’
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