* * *
At least the SEALs in the Zodiacs were able to keep moving, which meant that the helmsmen could steer the boats and pick the smoothest possible passage through the waves. Richter and the other five men of Team 1 did not have that luxury. In the small dinghy they were crammed in together, essentially stationary on the ocean and at the mercy of the sea, waiting for Tango One to appear. No ships were visible in any direction and the only sign of life, apart from the usual handful of gulls demonstrating their impressive flying ability, was the Merlin helicopter, then a distant dot in the sky a dozen or so miles away out to the east.
‘You sure this is going to work?’ the soldier sitting in the stern of the dinghy asked Richter.
‘Would you believe me if I said yes?’ Richter asked.
‘Probably not.’
‘There you go then.’
Just under ten minutes later, the SEAL sitting beside him in the dinghy tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the south, where a distant shape was slowly becoming visible on the horizon.
‘That could be the Greek ship,’ he said.
‘I bloody well hope it is,’ Richter replied, ‘because I’m getting fed up with bouncing around like this.’ He raised his voice slightly. ‘Keep your eyes peeled to the north. As soon as we see the Russian ship, we have to make sure we’re in the right place for the intercept.’
For several minutes the northern horizon remained completely empty, but then the unmistakable shape of a ship slowly materialized.
‘This looks like showtime,’ Richter said. He still had the satellite phone with him, with an open line to the pilot controlling the Reaper, and he knew that there were no other vessels in their immediate vicinity, and certainly not within visual range, apart from the Russian and Greek ships. ‘Now we just need to make sure that he’s heading straight for us.’
Richter had a small compass in his hand, the kind used by people doing orienteering or outdoor pursuits of that kind, a simple and foolproof instrument. He opened it up, located north and then took as accurate a bearing as he could on the approaching Russian ship. Then he waited about five minutes and took another bearing on the ship, which was now more clearly visible in the distance, though probably still at least ten miles away.
His logic was simple enough: if the bearing of the approaching vessel remained constant, then it was heading directly towards them. If it changed, even by a degree or two, then it was going to miss them, and that wasn’t what they wanted at all. Richter checked the second bearing, which was a little under one degree to the east of the first one, a barely detectable change, particularly in view of the circumstances, using a handheld compass in a boat that was entirely at the mercy of the waves.
‘We need to move?’ the helmsmen asked.
‘Not yet. I’ll take another bearing in a few minutes.’
The third bearing was about a degree to the west of the original, so the only choice they had was to do nothing until the readings showed a clear direction of movement. The other factor they needed to be aware of was that although the rubber dinghy could not possibly reflect a radar wave, and the electric motor was specifically designed to be invisible to radar, there would undoubtedly be men with binoculars on the bridge of the approaching ship. The dinghy presented a small visual target, but it was still big enough to be seen even in the fairly choppy waves that they were then experiencing. The safe range, as far as Richter was concerned, was probably about five miles. Any closer than that, and they ran a real risk of the dinghy being spotted.
The next two bearings showed a slight but distinct drift towards the east, and the helmsmen steered the dinghy about a hundred yards in that direction, the motor virtually silent as it drove them along. They refined the position over about the next ten minutes, and the next three bearings showed no sign of drift in either direction.
This meant two things. First, that the ship was now heading directly towards them, and second, that they all needed to get wet.
‘Do it,’ Richter ordered.
One of the soldiers took out his combat knife, drove the point into the inflated side of the dinghy next to him, and then repeated the treatment all the way around the perimeter. Air rushed out and quickly, without any fuss, the dinghy vanished stern first beneath the waves, the weight of the electric motor taking it down to the bottom of the sea.
‘You did tell us you could swim,’ one of the soldiers, just his head showing above the waves, said to Richter.
‘More or less, yes.’
In fact, Richter was a reasonably powerful, if only occasional, swimmer, but the weight of equipment he was carrying made him glad of the variable buoyancy life vest he was wearing. As well as the Smith & Wesson revolver he’d borrowed from John Mason back in Longyearbyen what seemed like weeks ago, which he was now carrying in a nylon belt holster because he knew the saltwater would have little effect on its simple and reliable mechanism, he also had a Heckler & Koch 416 fitted with the ten-inch barrel and a suppressor, supplied by the DEVGRU team, in a waterproof case, plus four spare loaded magazines in another sealed bag. All of the Americans were carrying a pistol, a SiG P226, and a suppressed HK 416 and extra magazines in waterproof pouches. As a precaution, each 416 had the over-the-beach or OTB modification, meaning drainage holes cut into the bolt carrier and buffer system so that the weapons would still fire safely even if they were immersed in water before being used.
Now they were in the water, they knew that there was almost no chance of anyone on the Russian ship detecting their presence, their heads being too small to be easily seen against the waves and swell. And they weren’t all in the same place, because getting on board the ship was going to need a coordinated effort involving all of them.
The other factor in Richter’s plan then came into play.
The Merlin had been flying around some distance away from the Russian ship, but now, when the aircrew calculated that the vessel was approaching a mile from the position where the DEVGRU team had been offloaded with their small dinghy, the helicopter began tracking over towards the Semyon Timoshenko.
When the target vessel reached an estimated range of two miles, Richter and the five other men made their preparations, swimming steadily away from the exact course the ship was following so that three of them were on one side of its approach path and three on the other. And between them was the first tool they were going to use to latch on to the ship: a length of buoyant high-tensile strength rope, the centre section of which was fitted with half a dozen powerful magnets, and the trailing lengths with numerous loops. That wasn’t how they were going to get on board, but it would get them into a position from which they could begin to climb up the side of the hull.
They hoped.
* * *
‘What is he doing?’ the captain of the MV Semyon Timoshenko asked, watching the Merlin helicopter through a pair of binoculars. He had been called to the bridge as soon as the chopper had been detected by the ship’s radar.
The officer of the watch, observing the same aircraft through a similar pair of binoculars, assumed this was a rhetorical question, until he lowered the instrument to find Captain Vadim Pankin staring straight at him, a scowl on his face.
‘I think,’ he said, recovering quickly, ‘that it’s on some sort of training exercise. I think it’s military, but it’s clearly not armed, only a search and rescue aircraft. It’s harmless to us.’
As they watched, the Merlin began a rapid transition down to a low hover, perhaps about a mile or so off the ship’s port beam, remained there for about 30 seconds, then climbed away and repeated the manoeuvre a couple of hundred yards further south.
‘You may be right,’ the captain said, ‘but I feel uncomfortable about this. We are so close to weapon deployment that we can take no chances. Whatever that helicopter is doing, it’s a long way from the nearest land, and I can see no sign of a ship that it could have come from. It is more or less paralleling our course and it also seems to be matching our speed. Get the Spe
tsnaz men up on deck, weapons out of sight but available, just in case.’
That, the officer of the watch thought, was a ridiculous over-reaction, but Pankin was the captain, and his word was law, so he simply nodded, picked up the internal telephone and passed the message down to the quarters occupied by the guards.
Minutes later, the watertight door at the base of the aft superstructure was opened from the inside and the first of the Spetsnaz troopers stepped out onto the deck of the ship to stare at the Merlin.
* * *
At a mile, the approaching ship still looked quite small to Richter, but the closer it got the bigger it seemed, the steel hull seeming to tower above him. At roughly a quarter of a mile and about 90 seconds before it reached them, it looked huge.
‘Brace, brace,’ somebody called out, but in truth they were all already hanging on with all their strength, waiting and anticipating the sudden wrench they would experience once the ship passed between the two groups.
Just over a minute later, the bow of the ship passed Richter and he saw and even thought he heard the magnetized central length of the rope snap into place, the magnets slamming against the sides of the bow as it ploughed into the floating rope.
And then he didn’t think about anything else as it felt as if both of his arms were being pulled from their sockets as the floating rope was accelerated from completely stationary to a speed of about 12 knots in less than a quarter of a second.
‘Hang on, spook,’ somebody yelled helpfully.
Richter didn’t respond. He was too busy just clinging on for dear life. Luckily, he had placed his right foot in another of the loops tied in the rope before the ship reached them, and that meant the strain on his arms was almost bearable as his leg – much stronger than his arms – was taking most of the force.
And about a second later, he was smashed into the steel side of the hull as the rope swung him inevitably towards the ship, and what little breath he had left was knocked from his body. But he didn’t let go, just hung on. Twelve knots, the speed the team controlling the Reaper had calculated the ship was maintaining, didn’t sound very fast, but being pulled through the incompressible medium that was the saltwater of the Atlantic Ocean at that speed was far from a pleasant experience.
He was the second man on the starboard side of the ship, and as he looked forward, trying to dodge the waves smashing into his face, he saw the soldier closest to the bow take what looked like a large pistol from one of his bags and aim it vertically upwards. He fired it and a grappling hook, a rope attached to it, shot up the side of the bow. The rope went taut as the soldier tugged on it, and in moments he released his grip on the rope wrapped around the bow and started climbing up the near vertical rope with swift and economical movements.
In less than two minutes, the rope the soldier had climbed began snaking towards Richter as the soldier above repositioned it.
‘Climb it, now,’ the other DEVGRU SEAL hanging on next to him shouted.
That meant releasing his death grip on the bow rope, but Richter knew he had no choice. He unclamped his right hand as the rope swung within reach and grabbed it. There were, he instinctively noted, knots every couple of feet, which would make the climb slightly less arduous, but he knew it was still going to take pretty much all his strength to do it. From where he hung, half in and now half out of the water, the outward curve of the hull looked like an impossible obstacle.
‘Come on, spook, move it. Climb it, or let go and get the hell out of my way.’
Not exactly the most encouraging words he’d ever heard, but he fully appreciated the sentiment. He kicked the loop off his foot and then grabbed the rope with both hands and started to climb.
It was a hellish journey. The strain on his arms and the strength needed to simply pull his body weight up the rope, not to mention the extra bulk of the waterproof packs he had draped around his body, was extraordinary. Without the knots in the rope that he could clamp between his boots and push against, he doubted if he could have made it.
But he did reach the top of the steel deck, where strong hands and arms reached out for him and more or less lifted him, panting and gasping for breath, the last couple of feet and over the top of the hull.
‘Take a break, get your breath back,’ a friendly voice said.
Richter staggered across the steel deck to the side of a white metal container and slumped down beside it. He had always kept himself fit, but that climb had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. In complete contrast, the two DEVGRU soldiers standing next to him didn’t even seem to be out of breath.
Perhaps three minutes later all six men were standing in a group right at the bow of the Russian ship, their immersion suits dumped in a pile behind them. Richter was almost breathing normally again. The containers that covered the deck of the ship formed a solid barrier behind which they were completely invisible from the bridge.
‘Right,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘This is your party, spook, so what do we do now?’
‘That’s simple,’ Richter replied. ‘We prep our weapons, and then we wait.’
* * *
On the bridge of the Semyon Timoshenko, the captain was looking even less happy than he had done before, though nothing seemed to have changed. The Merlin was still apparently carrying out a training flight about a mile away over on the ship’s port side, alternating between coming to the hover and just flying around. It was close enough to watch, but not close enough to be a realistic concern. And, in any case, what could danger could be posed by an obviously unarmed search and rescue helicopter?
About two or three miles out to the east, a freighter with what looked like a Greek name painted on the bow was tracking north at slow speed.
‘Everybody stay alert,’ the captain ordered. ‘Something is going on here. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.’
* * *
Richter had asked the Portuguese pilot of the Merlin to carry out one final manoeuvre as the Greek freighter passed the Russian ship and began to open further to the north, working on the assumption that once the Greek ship had moved past, nobody on board the Semyon Timoshenko would still be watching the other vessel, if anybody had been taking any notice of it beforehand.
It was in some ways like driving a car. On a two-lane road, a driver will pay careful attention to a vehicle coming towards him, but once it’s moved past he will essentially forget it. Richter hoped the same kind of behaviour would apply at sea.
Right on cue, the pilot flared the Merlin above the surface of the ocean, but this time he lowered the boat-hull shaped fuselage of the helicopter right onto the waves, the rotors creating a virtual cloud of spray that surrounded the aircraft as it settled. It was a sight that was virtually impossible to ignore.
And that was the point, really.
* * *
As the stern of the Greek ship passed the stern of the Russian ship, Reilly started a mental countdown, but one based upon relative movements rather than time. When he thought the moment had arrived, he chopped his right hand down in a sharp and decisive movement, and the helmsman responded immediately, turning the wheel and slamming the throttles forward on the twin outboard engines.
The Zodiac leapt ahead, the second craft right behind it, swinging around the rear of the Greek ship and angling across towards the stern of the southbound Russian vessel.
* * *
On the bridge of the Semyon Timoshenko, the captain was watching the Merlin helicopter, just like the Spetsnaz soldiers on the deck below and the three other men on the bridge: the helmsman, officer of the watch and a lookout. But the captain was getting more concerned with every second that passed.
‘This is just a distraction,’ he muttered, almost to himself, ‘but a distraction for what?’
Then he clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention and issued his orders.
‘Ignore the helicopter,’ he said. ‘Keep alert and concentrate on what you are supposed to be doing. Lookout: anything in v
iew?’
The man immediately switched his attention to the view ahead and on both sides of the vessel.
‘Nothing, sir,’ he reported.
‘Radar contacts?’
The officer of the watch strode over to the screen, which was fitted with a metal shade to allow the display to be viewed even in bright sunlight, and looked down at the picture.
Radar sets, by default, place the origin of the picture – the ship or aircraft on which the equipment is fitted – at the centre, and the timebase rotates clockwise around that point. Each contact shows up as a bright dot, though the set does not emit a ‘beep’ every time a contact is illuminated. That only happens in movies made by people who know nothing about the technology they are depicting. But very often users will shift the point of origin from the centre to use the radar in offset mode, so that the display shows that part of the area around them in which they have the most interest. On a ship, this will normally and obviously be the sea in front of the vessel, and that was precisely the way the watch-keeping officers on the Semyon Timoshenko had set up their display. The radar was selected to a 20-mile range, but the origin had been shifted down almost to the bottom of the screen, so the picture displayed roughly 35 miles of the sea in front of the ship and only about five miles astern of it.
‘Nothing, sir,’ the officer of the watch said, looking at the completely clear picture of the sea to the south of the ship and echoing what the lookout had said just a few moments earlier.
But as he looked up from the radar screen to stare through the bridge windows, something else attracted his attention, almost subliminally. For a moment, he did nothing, wondering what, if anything, he had seen.
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