Vulcan's forge m-1

by Jack Du Brul

  Born in the tumult of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, Department 7 had been established by Stalin himself to help assimilate captured enemy technology into the Soviet army. As the Russian forces advanced into Germany and liberated various factories and laboratories, members of the newly formed Scientific Operations were there to see that secret works were preserved and brought back to a huge facility near the Black Sea port of Odessa.

  If a site was deemed important to the members of Department 7, they gave the order and whole buildings were dismantled, packed up and shipped back to Russia, oftentimes with the original staffs kept as virtual slave labor. In this fashion, a deuterium plant was taken from outside Berlin and reestablished, giving Russia her first source of heavy water, a critical component in the building of fission bombs. A factory outside of Warsaw that produced Zyklon-B, the nerve agent used in the death camps, was shipped to a remote site in the Ural Mountains and began stockpiling gas weapons by the summer of 1945. Officers of Department 7 seized a Heinkle workshop just as the staff were destroying their accumulated research. The papers and models captured from that raid led to the development of the MIG-15, the Soviet’s first jet fighter.

  Since the strategic rocket site at Penemunde was liberated by the Western Allies, Department 7 lost out on that windfall of missile technology, yet still managed to secure many top scientists and designs for their homeland. By far, their greatest boon came during the occupation of Berlin.

  While the Western Allies busied themselves searching the city for war criminals, the Soviets searched for secrets. A safe in the home of a Messerschmitt engineer yielded the formula for a synthetic oil necessary for turbine engines. The diary of a Krupp manager held the key to the metallurgy of the exhaust nozzle of the V-2 rocket.

  In this fashion, Department 7 brought secrets home to Russia and gave Soviet scientists the facilities they needed to adapt them to the Red Army.

  By the summer of 1952, all of the captured German technology had been evaluated, much incorporated, and some abandoned. With its primary mission complete, the head of Department 7, Boris Ulinev, decided to change the objective of his section.

  Scientific Operations had been a passive agency; it had no agents in the popular sense, nor did it create anything original. Ulinev set out to change all that. Because Scientific Operations had always dealt with technology that was ahead of its time, Ulinev began setting up operations that would only come to fruition far into the future. Spending millions of rubles supplied by the Soviet government, Ulinev directed the eight hundred scientists on his staff to concentrate their efforts leap-frogging current technology and developing devices far more advanced than anything on any drawing board in the world.

  Like Kelly Johnson’s “Skunk Works” at Lockheed, which developed the SR-71 spy plane long before the materials were available to build it, Scientific Operations began designing and testing rudimentary multiwarhead ballistic missiles even before Sputnik was conceived. A Department 7 theoretician came just a couple of molecules away from discovering carbon fiber. And a team of experts began working on circuit boards for computers while the rest of the world still marveled at the power of the vacuum tube.

  One project in particular became the pet of Boris Ulinev and subsequently the potential triumph of Ivan Kerikov. Presented to Ulinev by an intense young geologist named Pytor Borodin, the project was as audacious as anything yet attempted by Department 7. In fact, it might rival the greatest feats of mankind.

  The undertaking, code-named “Vulcan’s Forge,” had its genesis on Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946, when the United States conducted the first underwater nuclear test as part of Operation Crossroads. It took four years, until 1950, for the data from that test to reach Department 7, stolen by a female agent who seduced a lab technician at the White Sands Testing Grounds in New Mexico, where the volumes of information and tons of samples were warehoused. Pytor Borodin became involved due to a happenstance comment from a colleague, who mentioned that a hitherto unknown alloy had been created by the Bikini explosion. Borodin quickly became obsessed, going so far as to request a clandestine submarine reconnaissance to Bikini in late 1951 in order to collect additional samples of sand, water, and debris from the seventy-four ships the U.S. intentionally sank as part of the test.

  For eighteen additional months, Borodin labored at his task until he was able to present a far-reaching plan to Boris Ulinev. It seemed tailor-made for the new direction Scientific Operations was to take.

  The opening phase of Vulcan’s Forge called for the detonation of a nuclear weapon deep under the Pacific Ocean. Because all atomic materials were under the direct control of the army, Ulinev had his team secretly build one. This alone took more than a year. Department 7 also established a large dummy corporation and secreted money in various accounts in Europe and Asia. All in all, Vulcan’s Forge wasn’t ready to commence until the spring of 1954.

  Once the opening gambit had been played, the only thing left to do was wait for nature to take her course. For forty years the waiting dragged by, through the height of the Cold War, through the opening of Eastern Europe, and through the collapse of the Soviet Union herself. During this time, Boris Ulinev died and was replaced, and his replacement was himself replaced, and so on, until Ivan Kerikov reigned as the head of a much diminished department. Of all the plots and projects launched by Ulinev in the 1950s, only Vulcan’s Forge remained viable.

  Unfortunately, its raison d’etre had vanished. The mighty struggle between communism and capitalism was all but over. The massive arms race during the 1980s had brought the Soviet Union to her economic knees. Though gamely trying to keep pace in conventional and nuclear forces, Reagan’s gamble on Star Wars technology had chimed the death knell for Russia. The Soviet Union had no response to SDI but capitulation. America paid for the arms buildup with a four-year recession, but Russia paid with her very existence.

  Bit by bit, Russia began withdrawing into herself. Aid to Cuba was slowed to a trickle, then shut off completely. Troops were pulled from the fifty-year occupation of Berlin. Aeroflot suspended most international flights. Within Russia, programs and departments began to vanish. The state-run diamond mines at Aikhal in central Siberia were surreptitiously sold to a London consortium linked to the Consolidated Selling System. The Blackjack bomber, the MIG-29 Fulcrum, and Russia’s aircraft carrier program were all shelved. Officers began committing suicide because they were worth more to their families dead than alive. The staff of the KGB was cut by more than fifty percent.

  Bold projects like Vulcan’s Forge had no place in the New World Order. During his first four years as head of Scientific Operations, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kerikov had guarded and nurtured Vulcan’s Forge for pure patriotism and duty. But now, the very fabric of what he believed had torn through, and Kerikov started to protect the project from the auditors for simple greed. He planned to steal Vulcan’s Forge for himself in a coup as brilliant as the original plan laid down by Pytor Borodin forty years before.

  Time, once so abundant, had run incredibly short for Kerikov. The Bangkok Accords had seemed a providential gift when first proposed, but now it had become necessary to delay them at a substantial cost in bribe money paid to the ambassador of Taiwan and to Gennady Perchenko and Perchenko’s superior in the Foreign Office.

  Department 7 could ill afford the huge payoffs. Kerikov had been able to dodge the auditors for months, but now they were here, in his office, asking questions that he was unwilling to answer.

  “Ah, here we are,” the ferret said, pulling a sheaf of notes from his briefcase. “It seems that your department paid for the refitting of a refrigeration ship called the August Rose four years ago at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars. An affidavit from a shipyard foreman in Vladivostok states that the sonar system installed on the ship is far superior to anything he’s seen on our strategic submarines. Would you care to comment on that?”

  Kerikov felt a pressure building behind his eyes, a f
orce that threatened to blow apart his entire head. Security concerning the refit of the August Rose had been airtight, yet here was the entire story being laid out before him. The constraint of time he’d felt a moment ago had just tightened with the relentlessness of a garrote.

  Kerikov opened the top right-hand drawer of his desk. “I happen to have something here that is very pertinent to that.”

  The accountant leaned forward in his chair, eyes bright with anticipation.

  There was only one round in the Makarov semiautomatic pistol, the one round Kerikov had planned to use on himself if the need ever arose. It blew a perfectly round hole through the accountant’s forehead, then splattered the contents of his skull onto the wall and door behind his slumping body.

  Kerikov rummaged through his desk until he found a flimsy cardboard box of ammunition. He loaded one round into the pistol and slipped it back into the drawer. He pressed the intercom button on his black telephone.

  “Yes, Mr. Kerikov,” his secretary answered.

  “There has been a slight change in my plans, Anna.” Kerikov lit another cigarette. “Inform Evad Lurbud that I want him in Cairo as soon as possible; I believe he is still at my dacha. Also, I want you to get me the earliest flight to Bangkok. I’ll travel on the Johann Kreiger passport.”

  “What about the KGB accountant?” Anna asked. Kerikov assumed from her tone that she had heard the shot.

  “He’ll be resting here for a while. As soon as you’ve reached Lurbud and booked my flight, leave the building. When you’re questioned, tell them that you took an early lunch and know nothing. Good luck, Anna. And good-bye.”

  “I understand.” If she was disappointed that their four-year affair was ending, she gave no indication.

  Kerikov took some time going through the secure files in his wall safe, pulling out a select few that might one day prove useful or profitable. He knew after he boarded the flight to Bangkok, he’d never again return to Russia.

  The Pacific

  Valery Borodin bolted upright in his bed, a muffled gasp clutched in the base of his throat. His lean body was slick with nervous sweat, his dark hair plastered to his neat head. His chest heaved and his heart pounded as he fought to regain control of himself.

  It took nearly two minutes to realize he was no longer the frightened six-year-old boy of his dream, being told by faceless uniformed men that his father had died in a laboratory accident. He was a man now, a respected scientist in his own right. Yet the haunting sobs of his mother still lingered in the quiet of his cabin aboard the motor ship August Rose.

  That dream had tortured him since the day those events actually occurred. It woke him most nights, but he had always remained silent, because his mother was grieving in the room next to his in the small Kiev apartment that the Department of Scientific Operations had allowed them to retain as recompense after the accident.

  To Valery, that had been the worst, stifling the scream that always rushed through him, suppressing it, crushing it so he would not disturb his mother. To Russians, grief was something to be worn openly, passionately, yet he could not express it. He did not believe that his pain was worth encroaching on his mother’s. Years later, retelling this story always evoked sympathy from the listener, but never understanding. Somehow he got the feeling that people thought there was something wrong with him, some flaw.

  It wasn’t until last year, in Mozambique, that Valery found someone who finally understood, an American girl who was herself a victim of losing a parent young.

  He swung his legs off the narrow bunk of his private cabin. Had the Soviet government not developed a keen interest in his mind, Valery surely would have found a career in the ballet. There was not an ounce of extra flesh on his frame; muscled plane blended with supple joint in the perfect symmetry that comes not from hours spent in gyms, but the blessing of genetic inheritance.

  He raked his fingers through his hair, pulling it back from his forehead, and at once a thick cowlick sprang up and hung over his right eye.

  The dream which had haunted his childhood had returned just last year in the office of Ivan Kerikov, a man whom Valery had never heard of, but who seemed to know everything about him. Valery learned that this man was the current head of the department that had employed his late father. Kerikov calmly explained that Scientific Operations had watched Valery with interest over the years and in fact helped him along at times. As Valery incredulously tried to digest this piece of information, Kerikov dropped another bombshell.

  He pressed a signal buzzer on his desk and a man walked into the room. Valery barely heard Kerikov introduce Dr. Pytor Borodin. Thirty years had aged his father, filling out his body and silvering his wild hair and beard, but he was still the man who stared from the photograph hanging over the dinner table in his mother’s apartment.

  That night Valery had the dream for the first time since his early teens.

  It wasn’t until their next meeting that Valery had recovered enough to actually listen to the things his father and Kerikov were discussing.

  The elder Borodin had faked his own death so many years ago as a security precaution. His work at the time had been so secret that only such drastic measures would ensure protection. After most of Borodin’s coworkers were summarily executed in the summer of 1963, Borodin had worked alone monitoring his secret project, nurturing it along to its now fast approaching conclusion.

  Kerikov explained that they needed a new staff of scientists to see the project concluded. Would Valery be interested in joining as second-in-command?

  At the time Valery was working for the State Energy Bureau, investigating the potential of Russia’s tremendous methane hydrate reserves, which were locked in the permafrost of western and central Siberia. His background in geology was as strong as any of the new breed of Russian scientists, men and women whose worth was valued by results rather than the ability to regurgitate party dogma.

  Valery only agreed to join after being assured that his consideration was based on his merits, not on the family connection. Pytor Borodin’s casual dismissal of such a notion was terribly painful, as if Borodin wasn’t even acknowledging his own son.

  Two weeks after those early meetings, Valery was given a holiday in Mozambique under the cover of a marine biology mission, a chance to defrost his body after so many months in Siberia and prepare himself for the work ahead.

  Since then, the work had been nothing short of incredible. Kerikov had managed to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the Russian Federation and place at their disposal the latest cutting edge technology.

  Valery pulled on a pair of American denim jeans and a military green T-shirt. It was just past midnight, but he knew trying to go back to sleep would be futile.

  The ship’s galley, one deck below his cabin, was deserted, but a large urn of coffee was kept warm on a side table. Valery filled a white mug and took a cautious sip of the strong, bitter brew. He nodded to the kitchen hand noisily cleaning pans in the scullery before leaving for the nerve center of the August Rose.

  Built as a bulk carrier designated UT-20 by Hitachi-Zosen in 1979, she had been converted to a refrigeration ship in 1983 when she had been bought by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The 1.13 million cubic feet of bulk storage area had been reduced by nearly thirty percent to make room for massive Carrier refrigeration units and the special cargo-handling equipment needed to transport frozen goods.

  That refitting was well documented by the Japanese shipyard that carried out the work, by Continental Insurance, and by the Finnish bank which floated most of the loans held by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The August Rose’s next refit was kept much more secret.

  She spent seven weeks in a secure drydock in Vladivostok in the spring of 1990. Cosmetically she still resembled the vessel she had always been: 20,000 deadweight tons and 497 feet long, with a sharply raked bow and an aft-positioned superstructure that resembled a four-story steel box. But within her steel-plated hull she was transformed into the most unique scient
ific vessel ever built.

  The cavernous main hold was turned into a geophysics laboratory augmented by smaller labs, offices, and data storage rooms. The refrigeration units were left in place, but now they worked to keep the sophisticated computer system at a constant temperature.

  The computers themselves were huge, taking up nearly two thousand square feet of space for the main-frames and half again as much for the peripherals. There was more computing power aboard the August Rose than at Baikanor, Russia’s equivalent of Cape Canaveral. Enough cargo space remained for the August Rose to operate under the cover of a refrigerator ship, though she could no longer haul enough frozen goods to ever turn a profit, yet the ruse allowed her to sail the Pacific unimpeded.

  Valery reached the main laboratory through a torturous maze of bulkhead doors and narrow companionways. The final door was secured by a magnetic keycard lock. A guard noted his time of entry on a log sheet and took custody of his card, which would have been erased by the magnetic fields created by the equipment in the lab.

  It was past midnight, but nearly a dozen scientists, technicians, and assistants were at work, monitoring the numerous sensors that hung from two towed arrays beneath the vessel’s keel. A large metal plotting table dominated the center of the room. Above it, on an articulating arm, a holographic laser projector hung down like some monstrous dentist’s drill. Bundles of fiber-optic cables ran from the projector to the mainframe computer and to the table itself.

  Pytor Borodin was seated at the console nearest the projection table, his slim body hidden under a voluminous white lab coat. Valery took a deep breath of the filtered, sterilized air and strode across the rubber-tiled floor.

  “Working late again, Father?”

  He might have been the oldest member of the scientific team by twenty years, but Pytor Borodin kept a pace that far surpassed that of all his staff, including his second-in-command. He usually spent thirty-six hours in the computer room before taking a grudging six-hour break for sleep. His crumpled appearance alarmed his son.