‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s what I mean by lateral thinking. The Russians would have known that simply detonating explosives in the magma chamber would never work. So what they’re going to try and do is use the massive power of the warhead of the Status-6 weapon to blow a hole in the side of the magma chamber directly underneath Cumbre Vieja and below sea level. That will allow an unlimited volume of seawater to pour inside, and I have no doubt at all that the phreatic explosion that would follow would be quite enough to blow apart the island of La Palma. That’s their plan, I’m sure of it.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Jackson muttered, then fell silent for a few moments. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘As sure as I can be because of what we know already, yes.’
‘OK. But based on what?’ Jackson demanded, after a moment. ‘I mean, I have a lot of respect for your intuition, Paul, and I can’t think of anyone else who could have linked the unexplained disappearance of a racehorse in Saudi Arabia with an assassination attempt in Dubai the way you did when we were together over there, but what actual facts are you going on now?’
‘It’s all in the recordings that Dmitri Pavlov made in the dacha. The trouble is, when he got involved it looks as if most of the operational planning had already been completed, and what they were talking about was getting updates on various phases of the attack, and refining some of the details, so it’s all kind of fragmented and incomplete. But what we have got are quite a few references to La Palma and Cumbre Vieja, and a couple of grid references, one a short distance away from the island, and another one near a neighbouring island called La Gomera. Granted, that’s circumstantial, but to the best of my knowledge the Russians have no political or other interest in any part of the Canary Islands, so if you’re going to dismiss this evidence you have to come up with a good reason why a top secret committee in Russia is talking about it. And I don’t believe it’s because they’re picking their next winter holiday destination.’
‘I’m not dismissing anything,’ Jackson replied, ‘but I need to know your reasoning, because I guess the next thing I’m going to have to do is sell this to Langley. You mentioned two positions. What do you think they are? Launch positions? Something like that?’
‘The one near La Gomera could be a launch position, and that’s remained pretty static during all the meetings that Dmitri was able to record. But the one just off La Palma has been changed very slightly at almost every meeting, and that suggests it’s going to be the aiming point for the Status-6 weapon, and they’re tweaking it based on information and reports that their own geologists and volcanologists are providing. It’s probably the point on the island that they have calculated will provide the biggest inrush of seawater, the place where the rock surrounding the magma chamber is the thinnest and would be the easiest spot to blow a hole through.’
‘I’m making a note of all this,’ Carole-Anne Jackson said, ‘and that does make sense. But there has to be more than that. Langley’s a bit like an overloaded eighteen-wheeler. Once it’s moving it’s real difficult to stop, but it takes a hell of a lot of effort to get it moving in the first place. I’m going to need more.’
‘When we talked before I mentioned some of the other things on the recordings, like the claim that America would be finished as a world power, but to me the references to Cumbre Vieja and to the Status-6 weapon – that’s the "oceanic system" that’s been mentioned several times – can only mean one thing. I can’t think of any other reason why the Russians would talk about a brand-new doomsday weapon and an island in the Canaries at the same meeting unless the two things were linked, and usually when they talk about these aspects, they’re not mentioning La Palma itself, only Cumbre Vieja, the volcanic south of the island. So we have the world’s most powerful and destructive weapon and an island where the volcanic landscape has the potential to create a massive wave that would travel straight across the Atlantic to America. And that, in my opinion, is a simple case of two and two adding up to four. And I suppose the clincher as far as I’m concerned is that throwaway remark by one of the Russians about them even being able to offer help.’
‘But that’s a hole in your theory, isn’t it? If they do go ahead and detonate this weapon off the coast of La Palma, won’t the DSP birds and other surveillance satellites detect the explosion? If we are right and the Status-6 super torpedo does have a one hundred megaton warhead, that’s going to create a bang that will be heard all around the world.’
‘If it was just the warhead exploding, you’d be quite right. But if they’ve done their sums correctly, that explosion would be followed in a matter of seconds by the phreatic eruption when the seawater floods into the magma chamber, and that would be a hell of a lot louder than the weapon itself. I’m quite sure they could find a handful of seismologists or volcanologists who would argue that the first explosion was simply the precursor to the major eruption that followed at almost the same instant. Don’t forget that as far as I know the Russians have never tested the Status-6 warhead, so we have no idea what its explosive signature looks like, so proving it was enemy action would be really difficult. And in any case, the only nation that would be able to argue the toss with Moscow would be America, and you’d all be far too busy trying to recover from the impact of the tsunami to do anything about it. It’s not a perfect plan that they’ve come up with, but it’s pretty bloody good.’
There was a short pause while Jackson reviewed her notes.
‘You’ve convinced me,’ she said, ‘and I think I’ve got enough to get the wheels turning over at Langley. So the obvious question is how the hell do we stop it? Because that’s what we have to do. And to fire this massive torpedo they have to have a launch vessel, so what are they using? It can be carried by submarines – the Oscar-class boats if I remember rightly – but sending one of our hunter-killers after one of those in a peacetime environment is never gonna fly with the guy sitting in the Oval Office at the White House. Not without hard and incontrovertible proof. I mean, he actually likes the Russians.’
‘Steve Barber has already confirmed that your people are tracking the movements of Russian submarines, and now they’re looking at their warships as well. But if you think about it, launching it from an acknowledged Russian Navy vessel would be a really stupid idea, because if it was a surface ship it would certainly be visible to the people living in the Canaries, and if it was a submarine we would probably be tracking it anyway, and the Russians would know that. I know SOSUS is old hat now, but I’ve heard that your satellite-based and airborne blue-green laser detection systems are getting pretty good at finding submarines that don’t want to be detected. My guess is that they’ll be using some kind of a merchant vessel, maybe under a false flag. I’ve asked my boss to sort out shipping records of everything anywhere near the Canaries or heading that way.’
‘And that’s the other obvious question,’ Jackson said. ‘Once you’ve identified the vessel carrying the weapon – that’s assuming you can pin it down, and I’m not convinced about that – how are you going to stop it?’
‘I’ve tried to put a kind of insurance policy in place. We have one of our own hunter-killer submarines on patrol in the Atlantic, and with a bit of luck it’s already heading towards the Canaries with the pedal to the metal. If it does turn out to be a Russian Oscar that’s carrying the weapon, our boat can take it out, if it can find it, of course, and if we can persuade some British politician equipped with both enough brains and big enough balls to actually make a decision. I still think it’s more likely to be a surface ship, and again our sub can cope with that as well, but that really would be a last resort scenario. We can’t really formulate any kind of an attack plan until we know exactly what we’re up against.’
‘No, but if it is going to be an assault on a surface vessel, we’ll need to get a bunch of people moving really quickly, and that means today rather than tomorrow. At the very least, we need to get them in place in the right kind of area, like maybe Lajes
in the Azores.’
‘That was what I was going to suggest,’ Richter said. ‘We could get the SAS down there, but we would need confirmation from the American government that they wouldn’t be treading on anyone’s toes.’
‘They would probably be trampling on an awful lot of feet, frankly,’ Jackson replied. ‘We have a member of the Russian GRU who defected to America; we’ve lost one CIA agent in trying to get him out, and we have a clear and really serious threat to America – assuming that you’re right about all this, of course – and I think the wheels in Washington would find it a little difficult to swallow if your SAS men then turned up to sort out our problem for us. This is an obvious threat to America, and my guess is they would say that America needs to sort it out. And we do have a bunch of people who are actually quite good at this kind of thing.’
‘SEAL Team Six, at a guess,’ Richter suggested.
‘These days, we’re supposed to call them DEVGRU, but that is who I’m talking about, yes. And no doubt the SOG will want a share of the action as well.’
Chapter 36
Sunday
RV Thomas G Thompson, at sea
Far from being a day of rest, Sunday involved a great deal of frantic activity, though it started quietly enough.
As they’d done the previous day, Richter and Pavlov spent most of the morning in the mess, playing the digital recordings of the meetings in the dacha over and over again through a set of auxiliary speakers plugged into the laptop that Richter had borrowed. Steve Barber sat on the other side of the table listening and helping when he could, but his lack of more than a few words of Russian meant that his input was inevitably limited. Not that the other two were achieving much anyway, hampered by the problem that Richter had already identified: the simple fact that the Russians sitting around the table were discussing only the fine details of the operation, and not the operation itself.
When they broke for lunch, about the only new piece of information they had gleaned was that the calculated yield of the Status-6 warhead was slightly less than they had anticipated, the figure under discussion being 80 megatons rather than the 100 they had feared. But based upon a couple of comments Pavlov identified, that wasn’t exactly good news.
It appeared that the warhead size had been slightly reduced to accommodate an unusual modification which one of the participants referred to as the заготовка, the zagotovka or ‘billet’. Obviously they couldn’t be certain what they were referring to, but if the intention of detonating the weapon was to blow a hole through the rock at the southern end of La Palma then providing some sort of billet or bullet – a massive lump of steel or other material that could be driven into and through the rock wall on the submerged portion of the island by the colossal force of the nuclear explosion – did actually make sense.
Richter knew that modern armour piercing rounds like the Raufoss Mk 211, a .50 calibre round often used by snipers in the Barrett M82 rifle and just as popular in the M2, the ‘Ma Deuce’ Browning heavy machine gun, used a somewhat similar technique. The Raufoss bullet included a solid tungsten carbide penetrator designed to power through armour plate. If it would work in a round like that, he couldn’t see any particular reason why it wouldn’t also work if the propellant was a nuclear detonation rather than conventional smokeless powder. As long, that is, as the Russians had done their sums and had worked out that the billet, whatever it was made from, would survive the explosion and remain intact long enough to penetrate the rock wall underneath Cumbre Vieja.
That seemed to him to be just the final confirmation of what he had feared was the Russian plan, but it didn’t really change anything. Whether or not the Russian Status-6 weapon had a yield of 80 or 100 megatons didn’t make any difference. What they had to do was stop the delivery vessel before it could get into the correct position for launch, which was presumably what the Russians had been referring to as Position Two, near La Gomera. Then its yield would be completely irrelevant.
Richter grabbed a lunch tray in the mess, but as he sat down again his mobile rang.
‘Listen up, Richter,’ Simpson’s voice was unmistakable. ‘I’ve been talking to the Weegies, the Norwegians, and we have a plan. Or the start of a plan, anyway. Some Royal Navy bloke has given me your ship’s track and speed – for some reason, he called this your MLA, just more pointless bloody military gobbledygook – and your estimated noon position, and you’ll be within easy range of a chopper out of Tromsø this afternoon, so you need to get yourself ready for a transfer.’
‘Good. MLA is mean line of advance, just so you know. Make sure the helicopter crew know that this ship doesn’t have a pad, so it’ll have to be a winch transfer, and from the foredeck because the stern is covered in gantries and cranes and stuff.’
‘Already done,’ Simpson replied. ‘Make sure the defector gets on board as well, and the bloke from the CIA, and I gather you all acquired weapons up on Svalbard, so take those with you. Having a few extra guns is always a good idea. The chopper will be a Norwegian Air Force Sea King out of a base called Station Group Banak, right up in the crinkly bits at the top of the country.’
‘I’ve heard of Banak, but I’ve never been there. Bødø was as far north as I ever got wearing a dark blue suit. So what’s the plan after that?’
‘By the time you climb out of the Sea King at Tromsø, there should be a CIA jet – a Lear or a Gulfstream – waiting on the tarmac for you with a flight plan already filed to Lajes. Your American totty and the other Company man should already be inside it raiding the drinks fridge.’
Richter toyed with the idea of pointing out that Carole-Anne Jackson, while undeniably American, was certainly not the kind of woman who would accept being called a ‘totty’ by anyone, but decided it would just be a waste of breath.
‘And when we get to Lajes?’ he asked instead. ‘What then?’
‘This whole thing has definitely got the attention of some of the wheels at Langley, and the ripples have spread. Men with no hair, sharpened teeth and biceps the size of an entire York ham are being briefed even as we speak, and a whole flock of them will reach the Azores at about the same time that you do. Surface assets are being diverted towards the Canaries. They won’t tell me what they’re doing with their submarines, but no doubt new orders will also have been issued to any hunter-killers within striking distance.’
‘So the forces are gathering,’ Richter said. ‘That’s obviously good news, but we still don’t know how the Russians plan to launch the Status-6 missile. What’s the score with ship movements towards the Canaries?’
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Richter, but the Atlantic Ocean is a sodding big piece of water, and you’d be amazed at the number of vessels that are criss-crossing it at any given time. There’s no controlling authority, and nobody has any idea what route any of the ships out there will follow. About all we do know is that if a container ship, for example, sails out of the Port of London to Lisbon, it’ll steam down the English Channel and at some point turn left to head towards Portugal. It’ll be tracked while it’s in the English Channel because that’s a congested and controlled bit of ocean, but once it’s clear of the separation zone the captain can pick whatever route he likes as long as he makes it to Lisbon on schedule.’
‘So what are you doing about it?’ Richter asked.
‘The Royal Navy chaps at Northwood have a team correlating and analysing merchant ship movements at every port north of the Canaries, including the Mediterranean, which adds an extra layer of complication all of its own, trying to identify every ship with a stated destination either in the Canaries or anywhere on the west coast of Africa to the south of the island group. They’re also approaching the situation from the other side, and trying to obtain lists of scheduled arrivals at African ports, but the expression blood from a stone more or less sums up how that’s going. The officials at most of them either don’t know what ships are expected, which is certainly possible, or they do know but they won’t tell anyone un
less they get paid a handful of folding money first, or they want to know why we want to know and we can’t really tell them. The Navy bods have been trying to suggest they’re looking for a ship involved in smuggling or terrorism, but none of the people they’ve talked to so far seem to give a toss either way. It’s going to be a long job, at best.’
None of that was entirely surprising to Richter. He’d guessed that trying to identify the ship carrying the weapon would be a difficult job, but he had been trying to work out other options and he had come up with an idea that he thought might be worth trying.
‘I’ve got a suggestion,’ he said. ‘If our guess is right and the Russians are using some kind of modified merchant ship as the launch platform for the weapon, what they probably won’t do is call in at commercial ports before they launch it, just in case someone spotted the changes they’d made to the vessel or even detected a bit of leaking radiation from the Status-6 warhead.’
‘Which means what?’ Simpson demanded.
‘It means I think you can forget about tracking every merchant ship that’s sailing around the Atlantic and just look for commercial vessels that have sailed from any port in Russia. That would include places like Odesa and Varna on the Black Sea, though I think those are less likely departure ports because they’d have to pass through Istanbul, which is a natural choke point. You obviously won’t be able to get the information from the Russian authorities, but I’d be surprised if Six didn’t have a few low-level agents sitting and watching the comings and goings at most of the Russian ports, and especially those used by the Northern Fleet and people like that. You can also ask Legoland if they’ve had any historic reports of commercial vessels going missing, or being sold to new owners, crews being unexpectedly paid off, that kind of thing. Whatever their launch vehicle is, it would have taken weeks or maybe months to modify it, and probably even longer than that to prep the weapon.’
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