SPECWARCOM is the acronym for the US Navy’s Special Warfare Command. Its Commander, Rear Admiral John Bergstrom, was the latest in a line of outstanding officers who had served in its ranks, after having trained as a Navy SEAL. Often working undercover, usually in life-or-death situations, SEALs are the equivalent of the British SAS or the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service—they are highly trained killers, experts with explosives who possess a thorough knowledge of dozens of weapons, systems, and demolition techniques. Though they operate behind enemy lines, SEALs do not, normally, expect to die. In the words of General Patton they expect “the other poor dumb bastard” to take care of that part.
It’s more difficult to become a SEAL than to graduate from Harvard Law School. A brutal indoctrination course awaits those who make it through SEAL training—BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL), also known as “The Grinder.” To survive, a man must be a paragon of physical, intellectual, and emotional strength: aside from speed and a natural agility in the water, he also needs a first-class memory.
The BUD/S course is designed to eliminate anyone who may be suspect either mentally or physically. It comprises days of running along the five-mile-long beaches that guard San Diego Bay. Recruits are periodically driven into the freezing ocean by instructors, then made to roll in the sand, and forced to continue running up and down the dunes, ignoring the agonizing pain of the sand inside their wet shorts. “Keep moving, son…I’m probably saving your life.”
As the course moves on, exhausted men drop out, and the instructors drive those who remain harder. During “Hell Week” men on the verge of collapse are again driven one more time through an underwater tunnel, one more time out onto the dunes, into the ocean, and one more mile home. Half of the men who enter “Hell Week” never make it through. The instructors seek only those who are shattered but still defiant—those who think they have nothing more to give but still, in desperation, find more. That’s a US Navy SEAL.
The United States runs six teams of SEALs. Teams Two, Four, and Eight of Little Creek, Virginia, and Teams One, Three, and Five from Coronado. Admiral John Bergstrom, a veteran of Team Two, was the overlord of all SEALs. From his office in Coronado he over-saw every SEAL operation worldwide.
Each SEAL team comprises 225 men, of which 160 are active members of the attack platoons. Twenty-five people, including technicians and electronics experts, work as support and logistics staff. Forty more are directly involved in training, command, and control. The SEAL strike squadrons require enormous backup. These are valuable men, with a code of their own; in their short but valiant history they have never left a colleague on the battlefield. Neither wounded nor dead, not even in Vietnam.
Admiral Arnold Morgan was shown into the office of Admiral John Bergstrom shortly before 1000. The two men greeted each other warmly. They were old friends, who had a lot of respect for each other. They were both tough and ruthless in the execution of their duties, and fiercely protective of the men who served them.
Whereas Arnold Morgan had allowed his career to destroy his two marriages, John Bergstrom had suffered the agony of watching his wife of thirty years die of cancer only twenty-four months ago. Alone now in his official base residence, Admiral Bergstrom was considered a major asset by innumerable West Coast hostesses. Like all SEALs, he carried a mystique about him. He stood six foot two and still had retained the hard, athletic physique of a platoon commander. His sleek, dark hair had not yet grayed, despite his fifty-seven years. He had big hands and gray, sad eyes. It would not be true to say he laughed a lot, but he chuckled, the deep, amused chuckle of a man who had operated in the face of danger, and who now regarded all the rest of it as, essentially, kid’s stuff.
Arnold Morgan not only liked John Bergstrom, he also trusted him, and there were not many who fell into that category. “Good to see you, John,” he said. “It’s been a while. I have a few goodies here to show you, and I think we’re about to get this show on the road.”
Admiral Bergstrom grinned and shook his head. “I’m telling you, Arnie, this is not as goddamned simple as it looks. Quite frankly, I’ve never worked on a Special Ops project deep inside Russia. It’s a minefield of problems, and if my guys get caught it would be the biggest embarrassment to the United States since the U2 pilot back in the 1960s.”
“It would be more embarrassing,” said Morgan, “if the goddamned Chinese get a hold of enough of those fucking Kilos to shut us out of the Strait of Taiwan. Right then we’d have to go to war to restore the peaceful trading rights of all Western nations in those waters.”
“I haven’t taken my eye off the ball,” said Bergstrom. “I just hope we have enough data to make it happen.”
Admiral Morgan patted his briefcase. “I have some good stuff in here,” he said. “Pour me a cup of coffee and I’ll show you. By the way, the President asked me to pass on to you his kindest regards.”
“That’s very thoughtful of him,” said John Bergstrom. “I’ve only met him two or three times.”
“This President just happens to like military men a lot more than he likes politicians. He makes it his business to befriend all of his senior commanders. He actually takes pride in the fact that he knows the first name of his SEALs’ C in C. As I left the plane he just said, ‘My best regards to John.’”
“Hope he’s still saying that a couple of months from now,” replied the SEAL chief.
Arnold Morgan opened the briefcase and took out the manila envelope that had been delivered to him two days previously by the much-abused Charlie. He walked over to the detailed map of European North Russia, which was laid out on a wide sloping desk with a green shaded light curved over it.
He traced his finger up the left-hand side of Lake Onega, past Petrozavodsk. Here the lake is cut in half by two large peninsulas, forcing through traffic to the eastern side of the waterway. He ran his finger past the lakeside town of Kuzaranda, and then twenty-five miles farther north through the narrow gap between two other peninsulas.
“About another twenty-five miles on,” he said, “we come to one of the loneliest spots on the whole journey. See this town, Unica, which looks like it might be on the lake? Well it’s not; it’s about eight miles west—all the way up here. There is nothing but a few small farms.
“And right here,” he said as he pointed to the map with the sharp end of a pair of dividers, “is where these submarine barges stop. If you draw a line due northeast from Unica right across the lake to Provenec, where the canal comes in, top right-hand corner, that’s where the barges stop, on that line about a mile offshore.
“Follow the western shoreline of the lake for about a mile due north of where that line first reaches the water…right here…and we have something even more interesting. Along here…right on this desolate coastline is where the big tourist boats pull over—they call it a Green Stop—the boats ease over to the port side and park alongside the tall grasses that line this shore. They let down a long fifty-foot gangway, like you get on a car ferry, and everyone can get off and take a look at the virgin Russian countryside.”
“Jesus, Arnie. You might be a genius. Did I ever tell you that?”
“Well, I can’t claim credit for arranging the Green Stop, but I sure as hell claim credit for finding out about it.”
“Was it difficult?”
“Murder. I had someone call the Odessa-American Line right here in the States, and tell ’em he was a bird-watcher. I had him ask if he would get a chance to go ashore for a while at the northern end of Lake Onega. I was so careful I actually booked him on the ship before he made the call. Now the sonofabitch thinks he’s going on a ten-day paid vacation.”
“Whatever it costs, it’s cheap,” said Admiral Bergstrom. “That’s some kind of a break, right?”
“You make your own breaks in this game.”
“Which brings us to problem number one: how are we going to get the guys onto the precise tourist ship that will be parked up there when the barges stop for the night? And w
here the hell do the tour boats start from anyway?”
“They mostly run out of St. Petersburg.”
“St. Petersburg? Remind me, what’s the route up to the lake from there?”
“Through Lake Ladoga, then the River Svir, and into the canals that join Lake Onega. The route of the tour boat converges with the barges in the southern half of the lake. I expect our tour boat to pass the barges somewhere in the northern half. Then I think they’ll both make an overnight stop within a mile and a half of each other.”
“Right. But how do we get our guys on the right boat? How often do they run?”
“That’s the least of the problems. There are a lot of tour boats operational since Russia opened up. There’s one leaving just about every day. Sometimes three or four on weekends. They all seem to end up at the north end of Lake Onega for their Green Stops sometime in the early part of the evening. Remember it never gets dark up there in summer…you know, the White Nights and everything.”
“Right. But I still can’t see how we get the guys on the right boat.”
“Well, if you can’t, maybe the Russkies won’t figure it out either. The tour boats run about four times faster than the barges, which tend to make a steady five knots from Nizhny right up into the lake. And they don’t stop. Which means we can get a very accurate fix on what time they’re going to reach the shoreline near Unica. We watch the barges on the overheads all the way, then the guys get on the tour boat we know will come sliding past the submarines around 1700 hours in the north of Lake Onega. That Green Stop represents the end of the line for the tourists. The ship turns round then and heads back to St. Petersburg the next morning.”
“Yeah, but you can’t just get on a tour lasting several days. You have to book cabins and Christ knows what,” said Admiral Bergstrom.
“Yup. No sweat, John. We take a coupla suites on the upper deck on all of the probable boats, day after day. We book ’em right here in the USA.”
“Yeah. But there’ll be a lot of suspicion when we keep canceling.”
“What d’you mean, canceling? We’re not canceling anything. We’ll get people in to take up the reservations. Secretaries, boyfriends from embassies and American corporations all over Europe. Give ’em a free vacation for a few days. The boats are packed with Americans. I have a survey here…of three hundred passengers on the last three Odessa-American Line boats, an average of two hundred and eighty-four were Americans. The worst thing that can happen is we have to change four or five names when we put our own team in. But we’ll be giving them several days’ notice because we’ll know the precise time they’re gonna reach the north end of the lake—we’ll know it the moment the satellites spot the barges leaving Nizhny.”
“Jesus, Arnie. We’re really gonna do this, aren’t we?”
“We have no choice.”
The two Admirals sat in silence for a few moments, each momentarily stunned by the enormity of the may-hem they were about to unleash.
“Your guys have a headache packing the kit and transporting it?” asked Arnold Morgan.
“Huge,” replied John Bergstrom. But he did not propose to get into the complicated details of such a mission…the semantics of preparing the men’s requirements, the four underwater breathing Draegers, their helmets, masks, flippers, and wet suits. The four attack boards. The well-balanced, effective Soviet-designed RPD light machine guns with their distinctive sound, which Bergstrom hoped would confuse a Russian guard should it come to a fight. Their sidearms, Sig Sauer 9mm pistols. The piles of ammunition clips. The Kaybar combat knives. The medical kit with codeine, and morphine, and battle dressings. Water purification tablets, radios plus batteries, plus a GPS. And five ponchos with liners and ground sheets, just in case the SEALs were forced to shoot their way out and take refuge in the countryside until they were rescued.
“I’ve made one change to our original plan, Admiral. We’re sending in a backup SEAL caretaker to nanny them. CIA agent, worked behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. Very tough character, Angela Rivera.”
“ANGELA!” yelled Admiral Morgan. “Is this a girl? On a mission like this?”
“Yes. Makeup and disguise expert. Finished first in the CIA Tradecraft Class at Camp Peary. Highly trained and unobtrusive.”
“What if she gets hurt, or can’t cope with a getaway?”
“Arnie, remember when that bastard Aldrich Ames was in the process of shopping all these US agents working in East Germany, Russia, and Romania?”
“Do I ever.”
“Well, he blew the cover on the slim and clever Angela Duke in some Berlin hotel. And the KGB sent a couple of spooks to her room. They apparently decided that one should go in after her and one should keep watch. When the first one didn’t come out, the second one went in himself, stupid bastard. He just had time to find his mate dead on the floor. It was the last thing he ever saw. She garroted ’em both. And got away, back to Langley. She’s up to it. Trust me.”
“Jesus,” said Arnold Morgan. “Guess we’re gonna need a lot of explosives?” he asked, changing the subject.
“According to my calculations, each of the four swimmers is going to need eight small, shaped charges, weighing around fifty-one pounds each. These things make a fairly small bang but blow a big hole…a kind of cylindrical shape to the explosion forces it just one way, rather than an outward/inward blast. Each charge has its own timer…very, very accurate. That’s forty pounds of explosive for each man, and I don’t think they want to carry more.”
“Not with a mile, or even a little more to swim. Anyone looked at the water depth yet?”
“Since I only found out seven minutes ago where the operation was taking place, not hardly.”
“Jesus, you guys are getting slack,” said Morgan in mock seriousness.
“Well, on that note, let me tell you what I think is going to be a bit of a roadblock right here,” replied Admiral Bergstrom. “And I’m not at all sure how to solve it…How the hell are we gonna get all the stuff into Russia, and then transport it to that northern wasteland? We’re going to end up with around seven hundred and fifty pounds of gear—that’s a third of a ton. We’re talking forklift truck, minimum.”
“Christ…so we are. I’d kinda assumed we could somehow run it over the border from Finland, up in the Karjalan Lanni area.”
“Arnold, there are no roads that cross the old Soviet border up in that area. There’s a long border road running north-south, but it doesn’t cross into Russia. And a couple of roads just come to dead ends. There’s a railroad, but even today the Russians keep a careful eye on it. We can’t start running cargoes of fucking Semtex all over the place.
“Of course there is a regular freeway that runs straight up from St. Petersburg to Petrozavodsk. But it would be just about impossible for us to bring in a cargo of this size under the eyes of the Russian Customs and port authority guards. And if they found it, there would be an unbelievable uproar.”
“You’re right. How about an airlift from some remote spot in eastern Finland, straight over the border and right into the area we need it?”
“We can’t chance that, Arnie. The Russians are still pretty hot about any air transport crossing its borders. Specially after that Chechen bullshit.”
“Well, how about by the waterways?”
“Too risky. The canal traffic is subject to checks at various points all along the routes. The truth is we cannot get caught.”
“What do you consider the best chance of success?”
“It’s all a bit worrying, Arnie. I suppose the chopper over the border…flying very low, right under the radar. If one of their military listening stations picked it up, they’d shoot it down. If push comes to shove we might just have to accept that risk and go for it.”
“Christ, if that happened there’d be all hell to pay.”
“I know it. But I don’t know any other way round the problem.”
By this time, both men were pacing the room, deep in thought. Neither spoke
for several minutes. Then John Bergstrom said, “Arnie, there is something in the back of my mind…you read about that new HALO development? It’s not perfected, but my guys in the industry say it’s gonna work.”
“HALO,” replied Morgan. “That’s High Altitude, Low Opening, right? A free-fall situation from above twenty thousand feet. You’re thinking of dropping a couple of guys out of an aircraft, high over Russia, hanging on to all that kit. Jesus. I’m not sure about that, John.”
“No, Arnie. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking capsules. Big metal canisters that operate on the same system as laser-guided bombs. We’re gonna pitch ’em out of a military aircraft high over Russia—maybe as high as thirty-five thousand feet, and get ’em to home in on a beam.”
“Home in on what?”
“A beam. We just get our guys in there. On the ground, somewhere out in the wilds near the lake, and they turn on their device and wait for the aircraft. The beam locks on and the air crew dump the canisters out. Then the computerized steering activates a small power unit in the canisters and steers ’em right in.”
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