Understrike

by James Barrington

  ‘They might have had a completed Status-6 super torpedo ready for use,’ Simpson pointed out, ‘and just taken it off the shelf.’

  ‘No. We’re pretty sure this one was modified,’ Richter said, and explained about the slightly lower yield warhead and the unspecified ‘billet’ that had apparently been fitted to the weapon and which he believed had been designed to blow a hole into the magma chamber under Cumbre Vieja.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Simpson said sharply.

  ‘Nor did I until about an hour ago, and I’m still not completely certain that we’re right, but it does seem to make sense. We haven’t actually heard any of the Russians saying that that was the purpose of the billet, but if it wasn’t a specific modification for this one task, it’s difficult to see why they would have reduced the yield of the warhead. You would have thought they would need the biggest bang they could manufacture, just to ensure that they would breach the magma chamber.’

  ‘You’re right, Richter, that does make a horrible kind of sense. So if you were searching for this unidentified Russian ship, which ports would you be looking in?’

  ‘The least likely are probably places like Rybachiy on the Kamchatka Peninsula, because it would be a long slog around the bottom end of South America and I doubt they would want to go through the Panama Canal in a modified merchant ship carrying an eighty-foot long super torpedo fitted with pretty much the biggest nuclear warhead currently available, just in case anyone noticed. The same applies to the Black Sea ports, as I said before, because of having to transit through the Bosphorus. I also think they would try to avoid transiting busy seaways, because of the increased danger of collisions and the fact that there are more eyes in those areas that could see something wrong, or at least something different, with the ship.

  ‘So where I would look is around Murmansk. The main base of the Northern Fleet is at Severomorsk, but there are half a dozen more harbours there including Polyarnyy and Olenya Bay. I’d also look at shipyards in the same area, because they’d have needed a competent workforce to make the changes necessary to the ship, so I’d check the most likely ones like Murmansk and Polyarnyy and Severodvinsk.’

  ‘Got that. An obvious question, but will it be sailing under a Russian flag?’

  It might have been obvious to Simpson, but Richter hadn’t even thought about that, and it was a few seconds before he replied.

  ‘Probably,’ he said, ‘because if it’s a Russian registered vessel flying the Russian flag and with a Russian crew, then for officials or representatives of another nation to board it for an inspection or whatever would probably cause all sorts of legal problems. It would probably just be easier all round if it was a Russian vessel.’

  ‘Understood. Right, any other insights or pearls of wisdom you’d like to share with me?’

  Richter shook his head, an instinctive but pointless gesture as he was talking on a mobile phone.

  ‘Not at the moment. I’m just going to throw some food down my throat, then I’ll brief the other two on what’s happening this afternoon.’

  ‘Right,’ Simpson said. ‘Call me when you land at Tromsø with your estimate for Lajes, and I’ll let you know if we’ve got anywhere looking for this bloody ship.’

  Chapter 37

  Sunday

  Lajes Field, Air Base No 4, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal

  Lajes Field was constructed in the 1930s after the Achada Airfield on the island of São Miguel in the Azores was abandoned. The mid-Atlantic location of the island group meant that Lajes became strategically important during the Second World War, with both British and American aircraft being based there, which allowed attacks to be carried out against German submarines in the Atlantic. At the end of hostilities, Lajes was handed back to Portuguese control, but the Americans quickly came to an arrangement with Portugal that has endured to the present day, allowing them to operate from the airfield on a tenancy basis. In recent years, the increased use of air-to-air refuelling by military aircraft has meant a reduction in the number of movements at Lajes by the Americans, although they still have a limited permanent presence on the island, and military aircraft from both NATO and non-NATO nations continue to use the airfield on a regular basis.

  The Americans hadn’t sent a Lear to Tromsø for the five passengers, probably because most of them wouldn’t have had the range to do the hop down to Lajes without stopping for a suck of fuel somewhere on the way, so the transport they’d selected was a Gulfstream V Turbo – a ‘GV’ – an aircraft that could almost have done the journey down to Lajes and back again to Tromsø without refuelling.

  The five of them had walked onto the dispersal at Tromsø to board the aircraft after a somewhat bouncy flight in the SAR – search and rescue – Sea King from the Thomas G Thompson, Jackson and Mason having been waiting airside at the Tromsø Lufthavn when the chopper touched down.

  But when Richter had seen the Gulfstream’s tail number he did a double-take.

  ‘What?’ Carole-Anne Jackson had said.

  Richter had pointed at the aircraft’s registration – N379P – and looked at her.

  ‘Don’t tell me you don’t recognize it,’ he’d said.

  ‘It’s a North American registration,’ she’d replied, ‘but it doesn’t mean anything special to me.’

  ‘Well, it does to me,’ Richter had said, heading towards the aircraft. ‘That’s the bloody Guantánamo Bay Express. I hope the pilot’s got orders to fly us to Lajes, not take us to some CIA-run black site in Jordan to have our fingernails pulled out. I didn’t sign up for extraordinary rendition. On the other hand,’ he added, ‘I’ve still got John’s Smith & Wesson, so I’d definitely go down fighting.’

  ‘It’s just an aircraft,’ Jackson had responded, ‘and it’s our ride out of here, so stop moaning.’

  The interior of the aircraft was set up as a kind of airborne office, with display screens for computers and desks, rather than the stripped bare cabin that Richter had expected, bearing in mind the former tasking of the Gulfstream. On the other hand, it was quite big enough to cope with half a dozen bound, gagged, hooded and sedated prisoners chained or strapped to strong points on the floor, while still providing seating for their captors and escorts, so he supposed that the layout did actually make sense.

  Jackson and Mason already knew much of what Richter and Pavlov had deduced from repeated listening to the digital recordings, but being face-to-face rather than having a telephone conversation meant that it was a lot easier for Richter to provide full explanations and answer the various questions they had. By the time the Gulfstream lined up on final approach to Lajes, the five passengers had talked the situation almost to death, and had also consumed most of the sandwiches and snacks that had been provided in the small galley of the aircraft, along with two pots of coffee and a selection of soft drinks.

  ‘No alcohol,’ Carole-Anne Jackson had instructed when Barber had opened the drinks fridge. ‘We’ve got no idea how soon we’ll have to move or act, so we’ll stay sharp and sober. All of us.’

  The American military may have stopped using Lajes quite as much as they had done during the years at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, but when the Gulfstream touched down smoothly just beyond the piano keys on the nearly 11,000 feet of asphalt of the single runway, Richter could see at least a dozen military aircraft parked in the main dispersal area in front of the USAF hangar. Due to the prevailing wind, they were approaching runway 33 from the south-east, and he had a very clear view of this part of the airfield through the windows on the right-hand side of the Gulfstream. The pilot slowed the jet rapidly once on the ground, took the taxiway more or less at the midpoint of the runway, and steered it towards the same dispersal, following the instructions of the ground controller.

  There were perhaps half a dozen heavy aircraft in the dispersal – Richter was more into fighters, but even he could recognize a KC-10, two KC-135s and a couple of C130s – and the rest of the aircraft parked
in front of the hangar were F-18s and F-16s. All very impressive, but the fighters wouldn’t be of much help in trying to locate a ship because they had such short endurance. Even the heavy transport aircraft wouldn’t be ideal, because the Russian crew of the ship they were seeking would certainly be alarmed at the unexpected sight of a USAF military jet overflying them at relatively low level in the middle of the Atlantic. What they really needed, he knew, was some kind of a drone, a Predator or a Reaper that had tremendous endurance and excellent cameras and which could survey the ocean from a height at which it would be virtually undetectable by eye, and only in intermittent contact, if it could be detected at all, on a ship’s navigation radar.

  The Gulfstream braked to a halt, and they heard the unmistakable sound of the two rear-mounted Rolls-Royce turbofan engines spooling down. A couple of minutes later one of the flight deck crew stepped into the passenger cabin and opened the fuselage door to admit a sudden waft of hot, dry air.

  ‘Welcome to a rock in the middle of the Atlantic,’ he said, and waited while the five of them picked up their various bags and bits and pieces and walked down the staircase positioned against the side of the aircraft and onto the tarmac hardstanding. A boxy American van fitted with three rows of seats behind the driving compartment was waiting at the foot of the stairway, engine idling and doors closed.

  Barber stepped over to the left-hand front door of the van, Jackson a couple of paces behind him. As he approached, the driver wound down the window.

  ‘You’re Special Agent Jackson, right?’ the enlisted man asked.

  ‘Not even close,’ Barber said, and jerked his head in Jackson’s direction. ‘She’s the boss, and it’s Chief Special Agent Jackson. Where are you taking us?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, ma’am. You have to attend a briefing, right now. They’ve held the start time until you arrived.’

  ‘Then let’s go,’ Jackson said, pulling open the rear door of the van and climbing inside.

  An armed military policeman was standing outside the door of the building only a short distance from the dispersal where the driver pulled the van to a halt. Jackson led the way towards the door, holding her identification in front of her. The MP looked at it carefully before waving her forward, but she just took a step to one side and waited while Barber and Mason showed their documentation to him. Richter only had his British passport, and Pavlov the Norwegian passport he had used to get onto the plane at Sheremetyvo. Neither document impressed the MP, and it showed, which was exactly what Jackson had expected.

  ‘These two men are a part of my group,’ she said firmly. ‘Wherever I go, they go as well, including to this briefing. If you’ve got a problem with that, we’ll all wait here while you make whatever calls you need to, starting off with one to whichever officer is in charge of the briefing we’re supposed to be attending to tell him why you’re making us stand here outside the building.’

  The MP looked at her, then at the four men who had formed up a loose semi-circle around her, nodded and handed back the two passports to Richter and Pavlov.

  ‘Take the stairs to the second floor, ma’am,’ he said, ‘and you’re looking for Briefing Room Six.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Inside the door, the chill of the air-conditioning washed over them like a cold shower. Officers and enlisted men and women – were bustling about, and there was an almost palpable sense of urgency about the place. Even somebody not privy to any knowledge of what was going on would have known that something was in the air.

  On the second floor, the briefing room door was also guarded by an armed MP, but this man only gave their identification documents a cursory glance. Either the principal security was the MP outside the building, or maybe that sentry had called his colleague and told him they were on their way up.

  Barber pushed the door open and the small group filed into the briefing room, led by Carole-Anne Jackson.

  Richter looked around as he stepped inside. About 20 men were sitting or standing around a large oblong table, the centre of which was occupied by a selection of coffee pots, water jugs and soft drink cans, together with cups, glasses, cream containers and wraps of sugar. Most of them had the unmistakable look of fighting men: broad shoulders, slim waists and heavily muscled arms. What they hadn’t got, as far as Richter could tell, were the sharpened and pointed teeth that Simpson had promised, but he had no doubt that these were combat-experienced SEALs from DEVGRU.

  Half a dozen different conversations came to an abrupt stop as the five of them stepped inside, and as they did so a middle-aged man wearing the same combat outfit as all the others stood up from his chair.

  ‘Which one of you is Jackson?’ he asked, his glance finally settling on Barber, who was getting a little tired of being assumed to be in charge simply because he was the biggest of the four men.

  ‘She is,’ he replied briefly, indicating Jackson.

  Jackson took a couple of paces forward and extended her hand.

  ‘Chief Special Agent Jackson,’ she said. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Commander Zack Reilly,’ the officer said, giving her a brief smile and shaking her hand. ‘Call me Zack.’

  Jackson introduced Barber and Mason, then Richter, just giving his name, and finally Pavlov, who immediately found himself the focus of the interest of the other men in the room.

  ‘You’re the defector, right?’ one of the seated men asked him. ‘Do you speak English?’ he added slowly, enunciating each of the four words carefully.

  Pavlov nodded, but it was Richter who replied.

  ‘He speaks it as well as anybody else in this room,’ he said.

  Richter’s English accent caused the focus of interest to shift again, but before any of the American soldiers could say anything, he briefly clarified the situation; it would be faster than the question-and-answer scenario that would otherwise inevitably follow.

  ‘I work for British intelligence,’ he said, ‘and I got dragged into this mess more or less by accident, up in Svalbard. But I speak Russian, so I’ve been analysing the recordings that Dmitri Pavlov here managed to get, and between us we think we’ve worked out what’s going on.’

  ‘I’m glad somebody has,’ Reilly said, ‘because this all sounds like a crock of shit to me. So maybe you should lay it out for us, then we can decide whose asses need kicking, and who’s gonna wear the boots.’

  ‘Do you want to do this, Carole-Anne?’ Richter asked. ‘You’re the ranking agent.’

  ‘Nope,’ she replied. ‘You probably know more about this than anybody else, so go right ahead.’

  Richter nodded, stepped over to the table and poured himself some black coffee, then walked to the end of the room and put the cup down on a lectern beside a drop-down viewing screen. And over the next ten minutes he explained briefly but succinctly how he had become involved, what had happened in Longyearbyen, and what he believed the Russians were up to. When he explained about Cumbre Vieja and the potentially unstable western flank of the island, several of the men exchanged worried glances. But one man sitting at the back of the room raised an immediate objection.

  ‘Richard Rogers, I’m kind of the number two to Zack up there. Now, unless you know something I don’t, Mr Richter, that’s never going to happen. No nuclear weapons have yet been constructed that are anywhere near capable of causing a volcanic eruption, and that’s a fact.’

  Richter nodded.

  ‘I do know something you don’t,’ he replied, ‘but you’re quite right about that. You can’t use a nuclear weapon to trigger a volcano.’

  ‘Then you mind telling me what in hell we’re doing sitting here on a rock in the middle of the goddamned Atlantic, armed to the teeth and surrounded by jets and choppers?’

  ‘Can it, Dick,’ Reilly said. ‘Don’t talk, just listen.’

  ‘Actually, it’s a fair question,’ Richter said. ‘We don’t believe the Russians have any intention of using the Status-6 nuclear torpedo to try to cause a volcanic eruption, or not directly,
anyway. We think they’re going to let the Atlantic Ocean do it for them.’

  He explained about phreatic eruptions and the eighty-megaton warhead on the Status-6 super torpedo and the two positions in the Canary Islands group, and what their significance was. When he finished and took a couple of sips of his cooling coffee, there was a stunned silence, finally broken by Reilly.

  ‘Jesus H,’ he said. ‘Before we go any further, you are sure this isn’t some kind of disinformation operation, just intended to get us chasing our tails out here?’

  ‘There are very few certainties in the world of intelligence,’ Richter replied, ‘but the composition of the group of Russians apparently running this operation in Moscow, the fact that their meetings were held in a heavily-guarded dacha instead of some ministry building in the city, and the fact that they were prepared to send a six-man kill squad out to Svalbard to eliminate Dmitri Pavlov here, suggests to me that it’s very real indeed. And if it does all turn out to be some elaborate bit of disinformation, at least we’ll be able to have some fun in the sun here while we pick it to pieces.’

  Before anyone else said anything, Richter’s mobile rang, and he immediately answered it. What he and the other men in the room needed at that point more than anything else was information, and he hoped that Simpson had got something useful to tell him.

  ‘Richter,’ he said, as he answered the call.

  ‘Where are you now?’ Simpson demanded.

  ‘Lajes,’ Richter replied. ‘We landed about ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Good. And now I suppose you’re in some conference room somewhere surrounded by a couple of dozen hairy-arsed trained killers from SEAL Team Six all eager to go out and shoot some Russians?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes. Do you have anything for me?’

  ‘I’ve got somebody putting a text together for you right now,’ Simpson said, instantly all business, and with every trace of levity eliminated from his voice. ‘I can’t pretend that it’s comprehensive, but it’s all we’ve been able to find out so far about relevant shipping movements. Most of it came from open sources, but the guys at Legoland put in some bits as well, and you were right about them having covert watchers at most of the major Russian ports, and all the military ones. What I’m not certain about is whether it takes us forward very much, or even at all. Just knowing that a particular ship sailed from a port in Kamchatka or wherever isn’t that much help unless you know where it’s going and when it’s supposed to get there.’