by Mark Greaney
Mary Pat did not respond to Chavez directly. Instead, she turned and looked at Hendley. “I had something else in mind, actually. Branyon is cultivating a fair-sized network of agents in the east of Lithuania. These people are absolutely crucial to our understanding of what the Russian or Belarusans are doing along the border. And in case of an invasion, we’ll need good intel behind the lines.”
Gerry raised his eyebrows. “Behind the lines? We are just giving up any pretense that we can hold the Russians back?”
Mary Pat said, “I am not a battlefield commander, but I am told that unless NATO agrees to move forces into Lithuania before an invasion begins, the Russians can take Vilnius at will.”
“That bad, huh?” Dom asked.
Mary Pat nodded somberly. “That’s why a good intelligence picture on the ground is critical. Branyon has a good team, but there are only a dozen case officers, many of whom are new to the region, or even new to the Agency. We simply don’t have the experienced manpower available to assist him. The people who could be helpful are already in Ukraine, in Moscow, in Estonia, in Moldova, in Georgia. Other places just as hot, or nearly as hot, as Lithuania.”
Ding asked, “What is it you need us to do?”
She said, “If you agree to go, I’m going to send you a file. I’ll send a duplicate to Dominic. It’s a list of GPS coordinates, all near the Belarusan border. A big list.”
“What’s at the coordinates?”
“Now, nothing. They are street corners, building rooftops, ditches, fields. Parking lots. To be honest, I don’t know what all you’ll find at the coordinates. But I need you to go to each of these locations and take pictures using a device we will provide you.”
“Pictures of what?”
Mary Pat said, “Of whatever is there.”
Ding cocked his head. “What on earth for?”
“You’ll have to forgive me for this, but I’m not at liberty to say.”
Gerry was taken aback. “You can’t tell me what I’m sending our men to do?”
“It’s for their own good. As you all know, the Russians’ modus operandi before an invasion is to send troops over the border with no markings. Little Green Men is what they call them in the media. They intimidate the populace, hold roads and fortified positions for the follow-on troops. But even before they do that, they send over plainclothed operatives. Our guess is there are already foreign infiltrators in Lithuania. If that is the case, and they should, God forbid, take you by force, I don’t want you knowing about the operation you are undertaking.”
That sunk in for a moment, until Mary Pat said, “Obviously, the best situation would be if you didn’t get caught.”
Dom said, “Okay. How many locations are we talking about?”
“There are over four hundred.”
“Wow,” Ding said. “That’s a lot of photography.”
“It is,” Mary Pat agreed. “But you’ll just have to trust me. It is important.”
John Clark said, “We’re not actual members of the intelligence community. How do we do this without raising red flags with CIA station?”
Mary Pat said, “We have an established cover for you. You go in as private intelligence gatherers. You are a private enterprise working with the CIA under contract, which means you can collect atmospherics and data. You can’t run agents, you can’t take part in any sort of direct-action work, officially speaking, of course, but there is no reason you can’t go over there and take some pictures under contract for the ODNI.”
Clark asked, “How are we going to be able to take four hundred photographs out in the open without drawing attention to ourselves?”
Mary Pat said, “I think I can help in that department as well. From time to time we work with an American company that does business in Central Europe. They are electronic technicians, laying fiber-optic Internet cable all over Lithuania, both underground and aboveground on poles. It’s a real company, so the work is real, and twenty-five percent of the workers are from the U.S. Ninety-five percent of the techs working over there have no affiliation with the U.S. intelligence community, but we have a good relationship with the owner of the company, so we can fold you into his operation and you can travel all over the country with no one batting an eyelash. It will get you into buildings, on the streets, wherever you need to go.”
Chavez said, “Excellent. We’ll study the requirements for the job and be ready to hit the ground running when we get there.”
Off a look from Caruso, Mary Pat said, “Dom, is something wrong?”
Caruso gave a half-smile. “That sounds like real work.”
Chavez slapped him on the back, well above his wound. “Don’t worry, kid. As my apprentice, I’ll take good care of you as you enter the exciting world of the fiber-optic field service technician. Of course, you will have to do most of the heavy lifting, dirt digging, and pole climbing. I have to supervise you.”
“Why the hell can’t I be the supervisor and you be the apprentice?”
Chavez said, “I’m older. Seniority has its privileges. Not very many, that’s for sure. But enough to keep me off a pole and out of a ditch.”
Clark had been entertaining the idea that he could go to Lithuania as well, but he realized there was no way he could pass himself off as a cable technician. Sure, he could dig a ditch and drive a truck, but there would be aspects to this physical work that would make it too hard for him to fit in.
Gerry Hendley looked to John Clark. “You’re the director of operations. What do you think?”
Clark didn’t hesitate. “I think the DNI is asking us for help. Ryan is in the field on an analytics job, so Dom and Ding can go. I’ll stay here, help in any way I can from HQ.”
Chavez said, “You sure about that, John? You’re a Russian speaker. We could use you over there.”
“You’re a Russian speaker, too. They speak Lithuanian in Lithuania. If you find yourself needing your Russian very much, that probably means you are in a whole lot of trouble.” There were chuckles around the table, except for Chavez, who only smiled. He looked at John for another moment, clearly surprised he wasn’t sending himself along for this trip. Finally, Ding extended a hand to Mary Pat Foley. “Sounds good to us. Dom and I will get everything together here and get going as soon as possible.”
Mary Pat shook Ding’s hand and looked to Gerry again. “Obviously, Gerry, if you agree to send your men to Lithuania, you need to be prepared to get them out of there. If an invasion happens, I don’t want Dom and Ding caught behind the lines.”
“That makes three of us,” Dom quipped.
Gerry said, “I’ll have our plane ready to go over there at a moment’s notice. If things look really bad I’ll keep the aircraft at the airport in Vilnius twenty-four/seven so we can exfiltrate them in an hour if necessary.”
“When do we go?” Dom asked.
Mary Pat smiled as she stood. “I’ll leave you boys to work out the details, but as soon as possible would be my choice. I’ll notify Pete Branyon’s station that you’re coming. I want you to know I appreciate your help, and my secure phone is always on me. I’m available whenever you need me.”
Gerry drummed his fingers on the table. “Mary Pat, I’m going to go ahead and address the elephant in the room here. This seems important, maybe more important than we are able to understand at this point, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of crisis that would bring the head of all the U.S. intelligence agencies out on a weekend to make a personal appeal for two operatives to go into a theater to collect data. Are we missing part of the puzzle here?”
Mary Pat shook her head. “I’m not hiding part of the mission or anything like that. I could have done this over the phone with you, Gerry, and left you to task your men. But I wanted to come in person, as a sign of respect for all The Campus did for us in Mexico . . . and what you lost in the process.”
The men of The Campus nodded at this.
Gerry said, “We’re a small outfit. Losing one of our own hits us in the gut, that’s for sure.”
Mary Pat looked to Dom Caruso now. “The Campus has paid a terrible price in the past several years, and yet you all keep showing up in the most dangerous situations. This country can’t know what you are doing, but I know, and I want to convey my thanks.”
The men thanked her, then Chavez and Caruso each immediately began a well-practiced routine of prepping and packing to leave town.
16
A deckhand hard at work clearing fishing nets of their mackerel just happened to look up and off the starboard bow of his fifty-foot trawler. It was sunrise, thirty-eight miles northwest of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, and there were no other fishing boats or cargo ships in sight. This meant this boat should have had the sea to itself, because no pleasure craft ever came up here, since there was not one thing pleasurable about bobbing and rolling and freezing to death on this stretch of the North Atlantic.
The deckhand glanced away from the bow and back down to his work, but then his head lifted back up quickly and his eyes focused on a point less than a mile distant. It took a second to pick out the anomaly in the waves that caught his attention, but once he found it again, he knew what it was. The fisherman was still a young man, and his eyesight was excellent. The low form was gray like the water around it, but a few shades darker, and its edges were unmistakable. Man-made. It was also massive, easily the length of a train car and three times the height.
He looked out across the water by himself for a moment, ignoring the fish falling out of the net and onto the deck behind him, but soon he grabbed the man next to him and pointed.
This deckhand was much older, his eyes weren’t so sharp, and he agreed only that he saw “something.”
The younger man said, “It’s a bleedin’ submarine.”
“You’re bleedin’ daft. That out there is not as big as a submarine. Haven’t you seen one?”
“It’s the . . . It’s that hat thing on the top of the cigar thing. I don’t fuckin’ know what they call them.”
The young fisherman waved his arms up toward the bridge of the trawler, where the captain sat on the other side of a pane of glass. When the captain noticed the movement, the deckhand pointed toward the squat form off the starboard bow.
Quickly the captain stopped the nets, grabbed his binoculars, and looked out into the early-morning waters.
But not for long. After just a few seconds he flipped a switch on the console in front of him and his voice came high and flat over the speaker over the deck. “It’s a fuckin’ sub, Danny. Big bloody deal. The Brits have submarines. Back to work!”
Danny dropped his shoulders, the excitement robbed from him, and he bent down to scoop up the mackerel flopping around on his deck, but the captain lifted his binoculars back to the big conning tower moving through the water off his bow, now just crossing over to the port side. The captain assumed the sub was British, but he saw no markings on the black form, so it was only a guess. It ran like a knife’s blade through the rough water on a southwesterly course, and he knew in minutes he’d lose sight of it.
As he told the young man below, military vessels here were normally nothing to get excited about, but a year earlier, a fishing boat off the Orkneys had reported a sighting of a periscope, and the British Navy had reacted with alarm. They claimed to have no boats in the area and, even though an exhaustive search had turned up nothing, the final conclusion by the Royal Navy had been that it was a Russian submarine patrolling off the Scottish coast.
Of course, the captain of the mackerel boat could not imagine why a Russian submarine would sail with its conning tower proudly on display to a Scottish trawler if it wished to skulk around the United Kingdom, but, the captain thought, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to officials in the area, just to let them know he’d seen an unidentifiable sub.
Before he radioed in his sighting, however, the captain grabbed a point-and-shoot digital camera with an eight-power optical zoom. He stepped out of the bridge and into the cold, fought the roiling sea for balance, and took a few pictures with the camera zoomed in as tight as it would go.
After taking the snapshots he returned to his helm on the bridge and reached for the radio.
Within ninety minutes of the deckhand on the trawler seeing a queer sight off the starboard bow of his boat, Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde, known more commonly in the area as Faslane, had the images of the sighting in its possession. And in less than another half-hour, the base went on full alert. Faslane was on the Scottish mainland in Argyll and Bute, a good 450 miles from the incident, but they notified their ships in the area, as well as those along the Atlantic coast, of the general heading of the sub sighting.
The HMS Bangor was a mine hunter, but it was closest, just west of the Orkney Islands and directly on the path of the conning tower. The Bangor headed northeast in search of the mysterious vessel.
The HMS Astute, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was just leaving Faslane on an eighty-day patrol mission of the North Atlantic, so it was ordered to make best possible speed to a position ahead of the submarine.
It would take two and a half days for the Astute to arrive on station, so no one was optimistic about its chances.
A more immediate chance for identifying the sub came from the Royal Air Force. RAF stations in the Scottish Highlands scrambled helicopters with antisubmarine capabilities, but it was known from the outset that the distances required would mean the helicopter missions would be less about search patrols and more about hoping for another sighting from a fishing trawler that could vector the helos in to exactly the right coordinates.
But one after another the helicopter missions returned to base without locating their quarry.
The British used to have the perfect tool for this job, but no longer. The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft had been recently retired from service, a victim of British defense budget cuts. This left few options for the British short of calling up the United States to ask for help.
So they did.
A pair of U.S. Air Force P-3 Orion aircraft were flown from their home station at RAF Mildenhall, up to RAF Lossiemouth in the Scottish Highlands, and from here they began launching on patrols. The Orion could fly racetrack patterns over the sea for many hours and use its high-tech cameras and sensors, built expressly for antisubmarine warfare.
While the Orions flew off the west coast of Scotland and the British naval vessels hunted from the surface, the British submarine Astute closed on its quarry.
By now it was certain the sub had gone deep, since the hunt itself turned up nothing, but the identity of the sub was determined thousands of miles away in an office just southeast of Washington, D.C. The Office of Naval Intelligence Farragut Technical Analysis Center spent days with the photographs taken by the captain of the fishing trawler, looking over each pixel.
Finally, their analysts came to a consensus about just what it was they were looking at.
At the same time, the HMS Astute picked up faint acoustic readings of a large submarine passing to the northwest, but they were unable to catch up to it, and within moments of the dim signals, they lost it. The only thing they were able to determine with near certainty was that it was heading westerly, into the Atlantic Ocean.
From this, inferences could be drawn. The sub seen on the northern tip of Scotland was sailing, almost certainly, to America.
17
President Jack Ryan sat on a sofa in the Oval Office, a stack of photos in his hands. He examined them carefully, took in every bit of the meager intelligence he could derive from them, then laid them down on the coffee table.
Admiral Roland Hazelton, the chief of naval operations, sat on the couch across from him, and next to him was SecDef Burgess. Scott Adler, Mary Pat Foley, and Jay Canfield also were present,
as well as Arnie Van Damm, Ryan’s chief of staff.
The President looked up from the photos. “I used to know subs inside and out. I could still give you specs on Kilos and Ladas and Typhoons, or at least the specs that haven’t changed since I was in that world, but to tell you the truth, all I can see here is a distant conning tower on rough seas. It’s big, but not shockingly so. I’m guessing it’s one of the new Boreis or Severodvinsks, otherwise you two wouldn’t be sitting here looking at me like that.”
CNO Hazelton said, “It took us a couple of days to ID it, but the Office of Naval Intelligence is convinced it is the Knyaz Oleg. It’s a boomer, a brand-new Borei. It’s so new we had no idea it was taking part in fleet ops. From the track of the sightings, it’s definitely heading out into the Atlantic. There’s not much for it to do there in the middle of the ocean, so it is a reasonable assumption that it’s making a crossing.”
Ryan flexed his jaw. “It’s coming here, then.”
With a nod Hazelton said, “That’s why SecDef and I are here looking at you like this.”
“What are we doing to find it?”
“The Atlantic Fleet is on notice. We are moving surface ships and subs out of Norfolk to augment what is already out on routine patrol. We have P-3s and P-8s either en route or prepping on both coasts, and ONI is working to plot possible courses.”
Ryan detected something in Hazelton’s voice. “But?”
“But the Borei will be difficult to detect. Damn near impossible. Frankly, all the advantages in this hunt are in favor of the Knyaz Oleg.”
“Why didn’t we pick it up sooner?”
“Olavsvern, Mr. President. When the Norwegians sold off their Arctic naval base, it hurt our efforts to find, fix, and track subs coming out of Kola Bay.”
Ryan rubbed his eyes under his glasses. “Kill me now. Just put me out of my misery.” After a moment he said, “How many Borei are in the Russian fleet?”