While all that was going on, Reilly, Richter and Carole-Anne Jackson spent over three hours together, working out their strategy. The easy bit, in some ways, was calculating where the ship more or less had to be if it was going to reach what they assumed was the weapon release point a short distance south of the island of La Gomera sometime on Tuesday.
What they knew with a fair degree of certainty was that the ship had to be approaching from the north or the north north-west, simply because they knew it had sailed from Severodvinsk on the southern shores of the White Sea. Almost as soon as Pavlov had spotted the name Semyon Timoshenko on the listing of ships, Richter had called Simpson and told him to get as much information about that particular vessel as he could. He had called back a little over an hour later, having discovered through one of Legoland’s support agents – meaning somebody who collected information on behalf of the British Secret Intelligence Service, but who wasn’t normally paid for what he was doing – only two additional bits of data. First, he had the sailing date of the ship from Severodvinsk, which wasn’t particularly useful information because Richter had already calculated that the ship’s average sailing distance, based upon the known cruising speed of a standard SA-15 ship, was a little under 300 nautical miles per day, and that in turn had allowed them to estimate how far away the vessel had to be – both a minimum and a maximum distance – to reach the weapon release point south of La Gomera on Tuesday. Because they didn’t know when on that day the deployment was supposed to take place, the block of ocean within which they would have to search for the ship was huge, but it was all they had.
Second, the support agent in Russia had provided a bit of gossip, overheard in one of the waterfront bars over a year ago. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, and he hadn’t passed it to his handler and so Vauxhall Cross knew nothing about it, but he had made some notes at the time, and in response to the question Legoland had asked, he had an answer. A couple of crewmen from the MV Semyon Timoshenko had been complaining bitterly and in their cups about their peremptory dismissal from the ship when they were only about halfway through their contract periods. The man they were talking to had obviously assumed that they had been guilty of some infraction of the rules on board, and had been unwise enough to say so. A heated argument had followed, which had ended up in the alleyway alongside the bar with a couple of cracked heads and at least one bloodied nose, but from all the yelling and shouting, the support agent had extracted the undeniable fact that the ship had been sold without warning, and apparently to the Russian Navy.
That, as much as anything, confirmed Richter’s belief that they were looking at the correct vessel, both because of the long period of time between the sale of the ship and its reappearance on the White Sea, and the fact that it had apparently spent all that time at Severodvinsk and, at least by implication, in the hands of the highly skilled workforce there who spent a good part of their time building nuclear submarines.
‘I don’t know what modifications the Russians would have needed to make to this vessel,’ he said, ‘but whatever they were, the shipbuilders at Severodvinsk would certainly have been able to do the work.’
Chapter 40
Monday
Lajes Field, Air Base No 4, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal
The first formal briefing of the day took place in the same room at 05.15 the following morning. In fact, it wasn’t so much one briefing as two briefings and a round table – or in this case an oblong table – discussion.
Zack Reilly waited until his entire DEVGRU team, augmented by the three CIA agents plus Paul Richter and Dmitri Pavlov, had taken their seats around the table and poured the coffee that they all clearly needed as a matter of some urgency, and then started.
‘The first thing you need to be aware of,’ he said, ‘is that two people involved in this mission are absent this morning. To save you looking round and wondering if you’ve miscounted, none of you know either of them. You may not have noticed, but we had a team of eight men arrive here last evening in a C-17 Globemaster III. Four of them, two pilots and two SSOs, went to bed as soon as they arrived, and the other four started work straight away. They had an MQ-9 and a GCS to prep for this morning. They finished about nine hours later, hauled one of the pilots and a Sensor System Operator – an SSO – out of their scratchers and put them to work. Then these four men went to bed. Anyone here not know what I’m talking about?’
‘Some kind of aircraft, obviously,’ Barber said. ‘But I don’t know what the goddamned acronyms mean.’
‘Definitely a kind of aircraft,’ Reilly responded. ‘The General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ MQ-9 is better known as the Reaper. It entered service in 2007, replacing the earlier MQ-1 Predator, and luckily for us in 2013 AFSOC, the Air Force Special Operations Command, specified that we should be able to break down a Reaper and the associated Ground Control Station, which looks like a kind of video arcade game but which is actually the control suite for a Reaper, in eight hours, sling everything into the back of a C-17 Globemaster, fly it where it was needed, and get it ready to fly again in another eight hours. And that’s what these guys did. The Reaper got airborne a little after four this morning at first light, and it should reach the north-western end of the search area in about another forty minutes. It’s up at around thirty thousand feet and doing about two hundred and fifty knots to get on task as soon as possible. Then it’ll reduce height to about twenty-five thousand feet and drop the speed back to its normal cruise of one hundred seventy knots and start flying a grid search up and down the area we identified last night. And it’ll keep on doing that until its cameras identify the Semyon Timoshenko.’
‘Or it runs out of fuel,’ someone said.
That comment might almost have been scripted, because Reilly simply shook his head and smiled.
‘It won’t,’ he replied, ‘because this Reaper is carrying two one thousand pound external fuel tanks, and that gives it better than thirty hours endurance even allowing for its initial high speed run and the fact that it’s carrying a couple of five hundred pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs, just in case our only realistic option is to sink this fucking ship. And if this mess isn’t resolved in thirty hours, it’ll be too late for all of us. The bottom line is that we will find that ship, no question, but the people on board won’t know that we’ve found them, because the Reaper is going to be as near undetectable as makes no difference. At twenty-five thousand feet it’s too small to be seen with the naked eye, much too far away to be heard, and well above the acquisition lobes of a ship’s navigation radar.’
That was really good news, and Richter said so.
‘Just remind me,’ he added. ‘What’s the radar and camera fit on those?’
Reilly grabbed a piece of paper from the table in front of him and glanced at it.
‘OK, the radar is the Raytheon SeaVue Marine Search Radar, and that’s designed to pick up small surface craft in rough seas, and it can even detect SPSS vessels, self-propelled semi-submersible craft, so it’ll have no trouble detecting a container ship. That’d stand out like a dog’s balls. It’s got a thermographic camera, plus a real high-resolution unit and a bunch of other sensors. Once it sights a target, confirming the identity of the vessel will be quick and positive.’
‘And these guys are controlling it locally, from here at Lajes, not from somewhere like Creech Air Force Base out near Vegas?’ Richter asked.
‘Yes,’ Reilly replied. ‘There’s always a slight delay in the command link between a US mainland-based Ground Control Station and the drone, and somebody above my pay grade decided local control made better sense in this scenario. Maybe they thought us using a remote GCS would just be one more thing, another link in the chain, that could go wrong. Anyway, these guys have direct, line of sight radio communication with the Reaper, and the normal satellite link as a back-up if they need it or the Reaper moves out of radio range. So that part of the operation is in hand and now outside of our control. At some
point today, we will find out exactly where that ship is. What we have to decide now is what we do once we locate it. Dick, over to you.’
Rogers stood up and moved to the head of the oblong table as Reilly sat down.
‘We’ve got three obvious problems,’ he said, without preamble, and ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke. ‘First, we don’t know the exact layout and deck plan of the ship, because the only plans we’ve been able to access are those of a standard SA-15, not one converted into a container ship. Second, the area that the ship has to be transiting through is a long way down to the south-east, and so we’re going to have to stage out there soonest to be in the right place at the right time. I’ve already sorted that, and I’ll cover what we’re going to do in a couple of minutes. Third, and by far the biggest challenge, will be getting on board the Russian ship without getting our fucking heads blown off, and that’s still a bit of a grey area, frankly.’
Rogers used his laptop computer to display a PowerPoint presentation, clearly cobbled together in a hurry, but clear enough for all that. The first slide showed the likely sea area where he expected the Russian ship to be located, a huge slanted oblong shape to the north north-west of the Canary Islands.
‘Like I said,’ Rogers continued, ‘this is a long ways off, so once we’ve wrapped this up we’re climbing into the back of that Gulfstream you folks arrived in’ – he indicated Richter, Pavlov and the CIA agents – ‘and flying over to Madeira. I guess that won’t be a problem?’
Jackson shook her head firmly.
‘No problem at all,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘The aircraft’s under contract to the Agency, and I’m the ranking senior agent. Because we’ll be with you and your men I can authorize the flight to the new destination.’
That clearly wasn’t the response Rogers had been expecting.
‘There’s no need for any of you to be involved any further,’ he said. ‘You’ve presented us with the problem, and we’re in the business of solving problems like this. That’s what we do.’
‘That’s not the way we see it,’ Jackson said. ‘We’re the people who put the Russian plan together, thanks to Dmitri here. And we’re the people who took down the assassins who’d been sent up to Svalbard to kill him. And it was Richter here, who’s British and not subject to the authority of any American organization, who actually worked out exactly what the Russians are planning to do. So we’re in it for the long haul, and if you people want to travel over to Madeira in my Gulfstream, then we’re all going to be sitting in the back.’
‘We could requisition another aircraft,’ Rogers said.
Jackson nodded.
‘Sure you could,’ she replied, ‘and it might be a more comfortable flight if you did, because it’s going to be a bit of a squash fitting all of us in the back of that executive jet. But apart from the fighters, that Gulfstream is the fastest aircraft out there on the tarmac, so if you did hitch a ride in a Hercules or something, you’d find us waiting for you when you got to Madeira. But it’s up to you.’
‘To put it another way,’ Richter said quietly, adding his voice to the argument, ‘in the past, SEAL Team Six worked as a kind of executive arm of the CIA. I know you’re now calling yourselves DEVGRU or Task Force Blue, but you’re still the same outfit, and the reality is that you take orders from the CIA, in this case from Chief Special Agent Jackson here, and not the other way around. If you want to kick this shit upstairs, I’m pretty certain that your bosses stateside will tell you exactly the same. But whatever, we’re going to be there at the kill.
‘And there’s one final thing you need to be aware of,’ he added, crossing mental fingers as he decided to slightly massage the truth. ‘I know the principal victim of the Russian plan would be America, if they did succeed in collapsing the island, but the United Kingdom would also suffer enormous damage from the tsunami. So, because of Britain’s special relationship with our former colonial Cousins, we’ve put a kind of insurance policy in place. We have a hunter-killer submarine lurking in the ocean out to the north of the Canary Islands group, and that boat has orders to sink the Semyon Timoshenko if it reaches a certain geographical limit. The only person who can stop that happening is me, so I definitely need to be along on your party so I can make the call when the time is right. And where I go, my chums from Langley go with me. Dmitri can make up his own mind, but that’s my position.’
‘Did you know about this?’ Rogers demanded, staring at Jackson.
‘Yes. We discussed it some time ago.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell us?’
‘You didn’t ask,’ Jackson said mildly. ‘And if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re never going to get the right answers.’
‘I think you’ve probably been outmanoeuvred, Dick,’ Zack Reilly said, ‘but it really doesn’t matter. In fact, having some more shots along with us on this would be no bad thing, because there are probably going to be more Russians on that ship than the number of people in this room. I’m guessing that you can all shoot? And hit stuff, I mean?’
‘You guess right, Commander,’ John Mason said firmly, and Jackson nodded.
‘OK, that’s settled,’ Reilly said. ‘We’ll work as a group and we’ll see this thing through to the end. Talk us through the assault, Dick.’
Rogers touched the space bar on his laptop and the image on the screen changed to display a photograph of a small cargo ship.
‘This is what the ship looked like before it made the jump to carrying containers,’ he said, and then touched the space bar again.
The picture stayed on the screen, but the second image displayed a very different configuration, the deck of the small freighter now covered in rows and stacks of anonymous white steel boxes, the same image of a container having been overlaid repeatedly on the original photograph.
‘This isn’t a big ship,’ Rogers said, ‘and for it to make economic sense to convert it, they would have had to modify the holds and the deck to take as many containers as possible. So this slide shows what the ship may look like now, but this is just my guess, nothing more. But I do think that we should be looking for a ship with a full or a nearly full container load, because that’s the way this shipping system works. You almost never see a container ship that isn’t fully laden because when they reach port, they expect to offload a couple of dozen containers, or whatever, and pick up almost the same number for onward shipping. And because this is a covert operation on the part of the Russians, the last thing they will want to do is stand out as being unusual in any way at all. And that,’ he added, ‘is one thing that might act in our favour.’
‘Explain,’ Reilly instructed.
‘When you look at some of the big container ships,’ Rogers replied, ‘you find that the containers are stacked up on the deck almost to the same height as the bridge, because that maximises the load and that makes the highest profit level for the shipping company. But what it also means is that the officers and watch keepers stationed on the bridge can’t see the bow of the ship. They know where it is, but they can’t actually see it because they’re looking across the tops of dozens of rows of containers. And that could be our way in.
‘We’ve looked at the three ways of approaching the ship – from the air, from fast boats, and from the surface of the sea – and we’ve discounted the first two. We’re all qualified parachutists, and if this was a night operation we could probably go for something like a HALO – high altitude, low opening – jump to avoid the aircraft been detected, or maybe use steerable chutes and jump from a long distance away, but in broad daylight, which is when this will probably go down, there’s almost no chance the aircraft wouldn’t be spotted, and my guess is we’d be ventilated by a bunch of AK-47s or something as soon as we got within range of the ship. And there’s the other obvious problem of actually landing on the ship, which is a small moving target, covered in obstacles.
‘Pretty much the same kind of objections apply to a seaborne approach. Whatever vessel we
use would be detected on the ship’s radar, because we can be certain that they’ll be maintaining a constant radar and visual watch, just because of what they’re doing, and again we would receive a hostile reception as soon as we got close to the ship. And, not that it would come to it, but they could even argue in a court of law that they were doing exactly the right thing by blowing us out of the water, because they could reasonably assume that we were pirates. So that just leaves us with a surface attack with rapid reinforcement of the assault team.’
‘Reinforcement from where?’ Richter asked. ‘You’ve already explained why an airdrop wouldn’t work, so it would have to be by boat or ship. But whatever vessel you use would be picked up on radar and possibly engaged by the Russians. I’ve no doubt they’ll have assault rifles, Kalashnikovs or similar, but they might also have some heavier stuff like sniper rifles or RPGs, maybe even surface-to-surface missiles, so getting on board would be difficult or impossible unless the assault team managed to take down all the Russians. And if they did that, they wouldn’t actually need any reinforcements.’
‘You got a suggestion here, Mr Richter?’ Rogers asked.
‘I was just thinking, and trying to put myself on the bridge of that Russian ship. There’s going to be a fair amount of maritime traffic in and around the Canary Islands, so even if they’ve been able to keep out of sight pretty much since they left the White Sea, they are now going to start seeing a lot more vessels around them, everything from small private yachts and motorboats up to cruise ships. And it occurs to me that they won’t be paying too much attention to this normal, routine traffic, but there are certain types of vessels that they will certainly be watching out for, like warships. It might be worthwhile finding out if there are any Western navy ships in the area and trying to vector them towards the Russian ship, which would certainly grab their attention, and then try and sneak on board from the opposite direction. On the other hand, maybe that would just be too difficult to coordinate. It was only an idea.’
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