Grachev looked up, uncertain.
"Go ahead," Kolov said. "Open it." But Grachev had known. The envelope contained orders to take command of K-898, the Black Sea Fleet's brand-new Project 885/Severodvinsk-class submarine Vepr —Russian for "boar."
Grachev had reported a week later to the Kola Peninsula, to the city of Severomorsk in the northern Russian Republic, training on the systems of the Russian-built Project 885/Severodvinsk-class submarine, along with his prospective crew. They'd returned after six months, Grachev finding Martinique pregnant and miserable. Since then he had
grown into his command, Martinique had become a mother, and young Pavel had come. Grachev realized, as he shook Kolov's hand at half past three on a Saturday morning, that he was happy, that this was what he'd always hoped his adult life would turn out to be.
"Admiral. Good to see you. Even at this hour on a Sunday. I suppose you'll be telling me what's going on?"
Kolov's smile faded as he waved the younger officer to a seat.
"We're going to have company in a few minutes. Two visitors to President Dolovietz's office left Kiev about the time I called you at your house, and—"
"Kiev's three hours away."
"They've got a corporate jet."
"Fine. And who are these people?"
"Consultants from a firm named da Vinci. Same people who did the submarine pen conversion, with the underwater egress tunnel. They did the Project 885 drydock hull decoy, and they did the design and installation of the Antay sensor and the Shchuka system."
Grachev lifted an eyebrow. Vepr had been placed in the drydock earlier in the year to have her tail-mounted sonar pod removed, to be replaced by the Antay sensor, an Optronics device that resembled the sonar pod but could float to the surface on a cable like a buoy and record visual light spectrum images, a sort of buoy-mounted periscope. The Shchuka system was a large sonar array that was deployed from a torpedo tube. It had an inflatable
foil device using the revolutionary acoustic daylight physics. Both systems had seemed a waste to Grachev, since neither one could be used while moving—the ship would have to be bottomed out or hovering for either unit to work, and when did that ever happen? The sonar pod was one thing, but taking away one of Grachev's torpedo tubes was unforgivable. He had secret thoughts of jettisoning the Shchuka device once they cleared restricted waters on the next mission, but he made sure Kolov didn't hear about those ideas.
"Where is the drydock decoy?"
"At the old submarine piers, tied up where we used to dock Vepr before the submarine pens were completed this month. We even have the hatches open, and sailors and officers going to and from the hull. From the outside, it is practically indistinguishable from the real Vepr."
Grachev laughed. "Do the pier workers know it's a decoy? It couldn't fool me."
"They say mothers can tell their twins apart, but no one else can. As long as none of the workers tries to enter a hatch, that decoy hull is a Project 885 submarine."
"Hell of a lot of trouble to go to for the sake of security."
"Anyway, the consultants will be here any minute. I thought I'd tell you something first. The mission you were slated for—the sortie with the fleet to the South Pacific—is canceled. You're going to Hampton Roads."
"Off Virginia? The U.S. East Coast?"
"Right."
"What's that mean to the mission to the South Atlantic? And who's going in our place? Not that bastard Dmitri and his Tigr. That boat may be a Project 885 but it's a bucket of bolts, and Dmitri's in worse shape."
"Not your concern. The consultants are coming to brief you, Pavel, and it's classified most secret. And before they get here, you need to know one of them will be going to sea with you."
"A rider? From a consulting company?"
The phone on the side table rang. Kolov answered it, listened, and put it down. "They're here." He stood, Grachev standing as well.
Karina escorted in two men and a woman. One of the men had a large frame and a beard running to gray. He had animated and intelligent eyes and wore an expensively tailored charcoal-gray suit. The second man was much thinner, with an athlete's build, a craggy, hollow-cheeked face beneath a mop of graying hair, piercing eyes, and a stiff— almost military—carriage. He wore an Armani double-breasted suit. The woman was a stunning Chinese dressed in a black suit with a tight skirt. Introductions went around the room.
The one named Rafael smiled. "Pleased to meet you finally, Captain Grachev. I have the good fortune of knowing who you are. Unfortunately, so does the intelligence network of the U.S. armed forces. That's why you're here."
"It is?"
"Captain Grachev, at da Vinci Consulting we have our fingers in a lot of pies. Electronic intelligence is one of them. We were doing some contract
work for your government when we found we were hearing a lot of information about your submarine. What concerns us, and your President, is that the British and Americans will know the instant that your Vepr deploys. They know not only when it leaves, but where it is going, its mission, weapon loadout, and more."
Grachev looked frustrated. "How can that be?"
"I'll prove it to you." Rafael handed a disk to Kolov, who put it in.
Grachev watched in shock. For the next five minutes he watched a pornographic movie, several men with two women, but the background of the discussion was about the Vepr, when it would sail for a torpedo exercise. One of the men Grachev recognized as the machinery division warrant officer. He bit his lip, wondering how he'd look the man in the eye now. The disk would seem to prove Rafael's case. Eventually, Rafael turned it off, but not before one of the women asked one of the men—a sonarman who had since left the ship—how the ship's sonar worked, and he had begun to tell her things that were classified secret. Grachev could feel his face flushing in anger.
"This is unacceptable," Grachev growled. "I will have a very painful meeting with my crew."
Rafael waved off his demonstration. "Don't bother, Captain. Those women work for us—as I said, we have our hands in a lot of pies, and one of the things we market is intelligence. We're under contract for a number of projects, but one of ours was to see if we could find out Vepr's next mission. But before you go out to abuse your crew, you
should be aware that we—and the foreign intelligence services—get most of their information from the ship's commander. My regards to your pretty wife on her thirtieth, by the way."
"What—?"
"This is where the best information comes from." Rafael switched disks. Grachev watched himself walk in the door of his own house. An embrace with his wife, and the usual husband-wife chatter about their days. When Grachev told his wife about his ship's plans to leave in a week to go join the remaining vessels of the fleet for a deployment to the South Atlantic, even telling her how little he thought of the plan to support Argentina's invasion of Uruguay, Rafael stopped the disk.
Grachev's face was a dark thundercloud as he stood up from the conference table. Admiral Kolov waved him back to his seat.
"Relax, Pavel," he said. "If they have this on you, imagine what they've got on me."
"Sir, these bastards have invaded my home. They've—"
"This is the original disk," Rafael said, pulling it from the machine and handing it to Grachev. "It's the only disk. It was reviewed only by our computer, which identified keywords programmed in and flagged them for review. Otherwise we'd have to spend countless hours reviewing footage. The only footage we've seen is what I just showed, and this was the first time I've seen it—I only heard the audio at the computer's flag. And this was the only item the computer came up with. I would not presume to spy on you outside of this demonstra-
tion, Captain. And in case you're wondering, the surveillance equipment was installed for a period of only two days, immediately after you were given orders and an operation briefing on the South Atlantic."
"Fine," Grachev said, the top of his scalp sweating. "Is that what you came here for, to show me
the security leaks of my ship, and to embarrass me?"
"Hold on," Kolov said, his hand on Grachev's shoulder. "There's more to listen to."
"More?"
For the first time the Chinese woman spoke, her odd pronunciation of Russian lilting and melodic.
"We have spent five years establishing a capability in electronic interception. Cel phone calls, microwave computer links, UHF and VHF military radio signals. We have interception stations in key places bringing in data at an enormous rate. Our computers have been sifting through the harvest and correlating the desired intelligence."
The speech must have been practiced, Grachev thought, the Chinese woman stumbling through the Russian phrases.
"Wonderful for you," Grachev said, although his tone was not as severe as it had been moments before. Kolov was holding up a finger, so Grachev fell silent.
"And for you," Suhkhula replied. "Our harvest has shown that the U.S. intelligence agencies are fully aware of the planned sortie of the Vepr to the South Atlantic. They know that Monday, July 30, at four in the morning Eastern European time, you will depart, make for Gibraltar at fifty clicks, and I
intercept the surface fleet three hundred kilometers southwest of Brest, France. They know that rendezvous will take place Friday, August 3, at fourteen hundred hours GMT, or thirteen hundred hours local time."
Grachev tried to keep his face impassive, but his own eyes were bugging out in astonishment. This detailed information was revealed only at his and Kolov's level, and it had never been the subject of any discussions with Martinique.
"How exactly do you know that? Did President Dolovietz tell you that?" Grachev could not keep from asking, but the Chinese woman had fallen silent.
"I can see I'll have to prove it to you." Rafael smiled. "Take a look at this." He handed Grachev his pad computer, a flat-panel display the size of a sheet of paper. "Click through to Friday's files."
Grachev maneuvered through the software to the files from Friday, June 29, 2018. There was a message from Kolov to him, giving him his sailing orders for Monday, July 30. It was in the proper format and looked like the message he remembered. Still, it was something Dolovietz could have given up.
"You are not convinced. Take a look at the next file."
Grachev clicked it. It was a video file, and after
la moment it started, two screens flashing up on the
{display. On the left was a man he recognized, the
admiral in command of the American Navy, but
| 'whose name eluded him. The man on the right was
an olive-skinned man in a Navy uniform. The admi-
al was wearing a sweatshirt reading navy 90. The
background was a kitchen done in cedar plank paneling. A date stamp on the bottom of the file read
06/30/18 SATURDAY 15:34 GMT 10:34 EDT. The day after
Kolov's sailing order message.
"Morning, Paully," the admiral's image said. "I was just heading out to the sailboat."
"Engine still giving you trouble?"
"Pulling off the starboard cylinder head today."
"Need any help?"
"Nah. Think of it as therapy."
"I think I need to find something to calm me down. Especially after what Number Four came up with."
"Let's go secure in five minutes."
"I'll call you back."
The screen went black, a blinking series of numbers counting down from ten seconds to zero. The split screen display returned, the admiral's kitchen background gone, the walls of an office behind him. The other man's background had not changed. The speech pattern was warbling and oddly delayed from the movement of the lips of the speakers, as if they were viewing an old movie that had come out of synchronization, the obvious effect of the secure video encryption. The admiral spoke first.
"What do you have? I'm set up to receive."
"On your screen now."
A third screen came up, this one showing Kolov's message inside the body of a forwarding message from a Mason Daniels IV to Rear Admiral Paul White, the subject line reading Ukraine interception 062918.
"National Security Agency comes through again,"
the second man said. Grachev assumed he was the addressee, Paul White.
"Daniels is on the case," the sweatshirt-clad admiral commented. "And the Severodvinsk submarine shoves off Monday, July 30, and forms up with the Black Sea Fleet. So it begins."
"Right after we get back from our cruise. We'll have to spend some time after hours going over this. So much for getting away from it all."
"Actually, Paully, this might work out. It'll put all our best minds on the problem. We can have relaxed meetings with our staff and plan our strategy."
"Any chance this is a deception from Ukraine, sir? To throw us off and make us show our hand?"
"Always possible, Paully. But if that were the case, Number Four would give us an indication. I think we have to assume it's real. The Black Sea Fleet submarine admiral has no reason to think we're reading his mail."
"Kolov," White said. "Sharp cookie."
"We have anything on the captain of the Severodvinsk?"
"Just what we had from the prostitute Number Four put at their first officer's bachelor party. He's a captain second rank, promotion pending to first rank, name's Pavel Grachev. He seems a straight arrow, didn't participate in the hanky-panky—he's got a young wife and a two-year-old at home—just drank and talked to his men in the other room. He can sock down the vodka, but that's not unusual. In his mid-thirties. Seems a little young to command a Severodvinsk top-of-the-line sub. He could be connected, one of Kolov's handpicked guys."
"Does Number Four have him covered?"
"He's under surveillance around the clock. We'll know when the Severodvinsk is ready to go—he'll walk out his front door with a duffel bag and a kiss to the wife. By the way, where's Colleen?"
"Getting ready to testify before Congress."
Rafael broke in. "The rest is personal chatter. And as you can see, they know every time Captain Grachev blows his nose."
"Which is why you're here, pulled out of your house in the wee hours, Pavel," Kolov said to Grachev. "Prepare yourself, my friend. I have some hard news for you." Grachev looked over, an eyebrow lifted. "You won't be going back to your flat. You're going to the submarine pens. From there K-898 Vepr will get underway, about two hours from now, with the sea scramble plan, through the underwater egress tunnel, reactor dead cold iron, on the battery, until you are below a hundred meters. You'll start the plant and exit Bosporus, then Dardanelles, then Gibraltar, and make way at attack speed on an indirect course along the Newfoundland coast for Hampton Roads, Virginia, U.S.A. There you will execute a covert mission, which you will be given details on after you sail. Any questions?"
"Questions? About a thousand. But the details will be given to me after I sail."
"Yes. In addition, Mr. Novskoyy will be riding Vepr. He will advise you on the ship's military systems and the intelligence harvest from the Americans. You are to offer him every courtesy."
Grachev's face stiffened. He would speak pri-
vately to Kolov about that. He didn't need any consultants to tell him how to fight his submarine.
"Very well, Admiral," was all he said. "Why is that such hard news, by the way?"
Kolov glanced uneasily at Rafael. "Perhaps Mr. Rafael should address that point."
"Captain Grachev, on Monday afternoon, July 2, in the middle of the Black Sea, you will be dead. So will your crew."
The briefing got worse and worse, Grachev thought. His head was beginning to hurt again from the hangover. He took a pull from his spring water bottle and stared at Rafael.
"Not really, of course," Rafael continued. "You see, by Monday you and Vepr will be long gone, but the decoy Vepr will put to sea Monday morning. It has been outfitted with an operational diesel engine and control surfaces. It can make ten knots on its own power, even submerge on its battery under computer control.
Shortly after the computer takes it down, it will sink with great fanfare, a black box buoy rising to the surface and transmitting the last images from inside the submarine before it sank. Admiral Kolov's rescue operation will start that evening. Monday's evening news will carry word that the Navy of the Ukraine is calling the sinking accidental and ruling that Vepr went down with all hands. Friday, July 6, the memorial service will be held."
"The families will know the real truth, of course," Grachev said, his voice deep and menacing, his stomach filling with bile at the thought of Martinique at a memorial service for him when he
was actually still alive at sea. What would this do to young Pavel?
"No," Rafael said. "The families, for all they know, will be widows and orphans. The news cameras of the world will film their tears, the best way to cloak Vepr's departure. It is vital to keep the Vepr plan secret—"
Rafael wasn't prepared for the specter of Grachev coming across the table at him, and Kolov was not quick enough to stop the young submarine commander from grabbing the consultant's Indian silk tie hard enough to strangle him, Grachev's other hand forcing Rafael's forehead all the way down to the wood surface of the table, Rafael's large hands pawing the air fruitlessly trying to get free.
"My wife and son will know the truth," Grachev spat, "or else Vepr goes nowhere."
Kolov pulled Grachev away. Rafael gasped for breath, while Novskoyy glared at both of them, Suhkhula staring wide-eyed.
"My apologies, Mr. Rafael. I'd like to take a moment alone with Captain Grachev, if you don't mind." Kolov's voice was iron, his face beet-red, his hands clenched around Grachev's shoulders. Rafael, breathing heavily, his eyes bugging out, nodded and went out with Novskoyy and Suhkhula. The door shut solidly behind them.
"What the hell are you doing?" Kolov bellowed. "Don't you realize those people have the ear of the President? What will you do when Dolovietz calls me and tells me to lock you up? Don't you get it, Pavel? You're being sent on the mission of the century, and if you're good, you'll come back.
Threat vector Page 15