Nimitz Class

by Patrick Robinson

  “You’re a terrible man, Arnold Morgan. What do you want, as if I don’t know. The Kilo, hah?”

  “Will you tell me about it, Vitaly?” said Morgan, his voice softening. “As a friend. I have to know.”

  “Will you tell me why?”

  “I will. This is on the record, and I expect you to convey it to your superiors.” He continued in a flat monotone. “Vitaly, we think someone got ahold of your Kilo, ran it out of the Black Sea, and sank the Thomas Jefferson with a nuclear-headed torpedo.”

  Admiral Morgan heard the Russian’s sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. Admiral Rankov’s shock was unmistakable. “Jesus Christ!” said the voice from Sevastopol. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, old buddy, I’m not. And you’ve got about five minutes to convince me that a United States carrier with six thousand men on board was not vaporized for no reason at all by your fucking Navy. And if we happen to believe that is what took place, you won’t need to think of reducing your Black Sea Fleet any more. We’ll carry that little job out for you, real quick. You guys wanna buy some cheap crash helmets?”

  “Arnold, please. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we did no such thing. You must believe that. Why would we? We’re friends, aren’t we? You have to believe what I say. Look at our history…we’ve never been that stupid. We are not under the control of fanatics.”

  “Matter of fact, Vitaly, I do not believe you guys had anything to do with it. Mainly because I never thought you had anyone that clever! I want you to help me, and I want you to tell me the whole truth about that Kilo, right now.

  “After that, I probably want you to do a few other things. You say you are our friends, as we are yours. Right now I need you to prove it. My country will not forget your response, either way.”

  “Very well, Arnold. I will tell you what I know and you may judge for yourself. Our search for the Kilo revealed nothing. We worked below the surface for three weeks, used every electronic device we have to sweep the bottom of the sea. Nothing. We now believe it is not there, and never was. The drowned crewman on the Greek island was a member of the ship’s company of Kilo 630.

  “His name was very clearly on the next-of-kin list. But there we have a problem. When the Kilo left, it did not relay its next-of-kin signal. Therefore the whole list is now suspect. As you know, there are always three or four changes, men going out as replacements for two or three other men who are not going. So I could not swear the man was in the crew, though the odds are he was.

  “We believe the submarine escaped, and absconded with a crew of about fifty. We have heard nothing since she left port. There’s been much financial hardship in the Black Sea Fleet, and we guessed these guys decided to make a break, probably took their wives and made it to some island in the South Pacific or South America. The fact is, Kilo 630 has vanished without trace. And I’m sure you can understand why I was too embarrassed to call you back.”

  “Yes, I can. Not many navies as big as yours lose submarines. That kind of thing only happens in Third World countries, eh?”

  “Yes, Arnold, like Iran.”

  The American ignored that one. And then he said, “You don’t think another country could have bought the submarine, do you? From some Naval agency in the Ukraine?”

  “Hell no. We might be short of cash. But not that short. We’ll fulfill genuine export orders for submarines for almost anyone, the Arabs, China, the Warsaw Pact nations. But we would not just flog off a diesel-electric submarine with a fully operational crew to some guy dressed in a sheet and carrying a sackful of cash. Give us some credit. We have to live in the international community, like everyone else.”

  “Well, Vitaly, if you guys are innocent, and Kilo 630 just went missing, there are but two alternatives. Somebody rented it. Or somebody hijacked it.”

  “I know you think we are very inefficient compared to the mighty USA, Arnold. But our investigations here in Sevastopol indicate nothing unusual occurred in the three days preceding her departure. Preparations were normal. The captain filed the correct documents for an exercise in the Black Sea, following a refit. Members of the crew made the usual phone calls to wives, three substitute crew members did not leave their homes until the morning of departure. Our security around the submarine jetties is always very high, and no one saw anything to suggest the captain was coerced, or that he left with a gang of armed terrorists on board.

  “The first thing to arouse suspicion was the absence of the next-of-kin signal. And of course no one reported that for three days. We just assumed the submarine comms had forgotten. It was another twelve hours before we became concerned there had been no communication whatsoever from Kilo 630. Then we found the bits of wreckage, which we now believe were planted.”

  “So where does that leave us, old buddy? I agree with you, theft is out of the question. Your submarine was not hijacked. There would be some clues if Kilo 630 had left Sevastopol at gun point. And they would surely have got a SATCOM signal away. No, I think your submarine may have been rented.”

  “From whom? The President?”

  “No, Vitaly. From the captain.”

  “Admiral, he only drives it. He doesn’t own it.”

  “But what might he say if someone approached him, and asked him to undertake a mission? To bring his submarine, and fool his crew into taking part? In return for which he would be given ten million American dollars?”

  “But he would know he could never come home, not if he stole a Russian submarine.”

  “Home? To what? A run-down apartment in a dockyard town on the Black Sea where everyone’s broke? Bullshit, Vitaly, I could buy a Russian submarine captain. So could anyone with a vast amount of money. And that money would also buy you the crew and the boat.”

  “But, Arnold, these men have wives and children. We have checked them all. No one knows anything. They just believe their men are dead. We have not made public our suspicions that this may not be so.”

  “Let me ask you one thing, what kind of torpedoes was this Kilo equipped for?”

  “Her basic inventory was for the SAET-60’s—you know, 533 millimeters, 7.8 meters long. They run at around forty knots, with a fifteen-kilometer range. Regular stuff, antisurface vessel. She was fairly new, a Granay Class, Type 877M. She was fully loaded with about twenty of them, with a couple of tubes specially for wire-guidance.”

  “How big’s the regular warhead?”

  “Four hundred kilograms.”

  “Can they take a nuclear variant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did this one have any on board with that variant?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because everyone involved in our internal inquiry knows every fucking thing there is to know about Kilo 630.”

  “May I now assume you will do what you can to help us?”

  “Arnold, you can count on us to help find her, and to share information. Any information. I assume you also will share with us if you find her before we do?”

  “We will find her first.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There’s an old saying in the States—because we want it more.”

  “You’re a terrible man, Admiral Morgan.”

  “I’ll tell you what I do want. I want you to keep a clear eye on the families of the crew of Kilo 630. See if anything might be going on…you know, anyone spending a lot of money, or anything.”

  “You mean you think someone paid every member of the crew to go and blow up the carrier?”

  “No. I don’t think you would need to. You just have to present the captain with a cash fortune. Let him con the crew into believing they are on some secret mission on behalf of the Russian Navy. What would the crew do? Take a huge payoff, possibly a half million dollars apiece, and run, if they have any sense. Make a new life somewhere. Just watch the widows and orphans for me, willya?”

  “Sure I w
ill. What else?”

  “Not much. Except I would like to send one of my men over to Sevastopol when you are in town, maybe a coupla weeks. You could show him around, give him the updates, and he will tell you personally what’s happening in our own investigation.”

  “Okay. Let’s try to find Kilo 630, shall we?”

  Admiral Morgan tossed his old coffee cups and paper sandwich plate into the wastepaper basket, pulled on his coat, and checked the time, 0256. He was about to switch off the lights and his computer, when the phone unexpectedly rang.

  “Morgan, speak.”

  The voice on the end of the line was foreign and struggled for English words. “Admiral Morgan. I am Israeli Intelligence. Ask to speak you by General Gavron. I am in Istanbul, and I find your man. He leave here on Black Sea ship, November 26. Bought ticket for cash, Turkish lira to Odessa. His name, Adnam, on passenger list. Ship docked November 27, 1300. He no jump overboard, he get there too. General Gavron hand over to colleague in Odessa now. Don’t think your man come back here. Bye, Admiral, I go now.”

  The line from Turkey clicked dead. For a change Admiral Morgan was still holding the phone. “No, he didn’t go back there. He went straight past—right through the harbor, at periscope depth,” he said to the empty room.

  He walked to his sprawling maps and charts on the big sloping desk. He switched on the light, pulled out the one of the Black Sea coastlines, and went to work with his dividers, muttering as he considered the maps. “Istanbul to Odessa…375 miles…at fifteen to twenty knots he’s in the next day.”

  The admiral then measured the distance from Odessa, across the water to Sevastopol. “Two hundred miles to the southern headland of the Crimean Peninsula. Did Benjamin Adnam make that journey…to meet the captain of Kilo 630?” he asked aloud.

  He returned to his desk, thinking deeply. “Let me stand in his shoes. I’m in Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. I intend either to keep an appointment, or find the captain of a Russian diesel-electric submarine. What do I need? I need cash, a ton of it, that’s what I need. And I can’t get it in Odessa or any other Russian city, not without attracting a great amount of attention to myself. Same with Cairo. But I could have gotten it in Istanbul.”

  Admiral Morgan picked up the phone and told the operator to connect him to the CIA immediately. The admiral asked to be put through to the senior duty officer, and told him to get Major Ted Lynch on a secure line to the Director of the National Security Agency.

  He slammed down the phone before anyone was tempted to remind him what time it was. He sat back in his chair and waited. The CIA major was on the line inside five minutes. “Admiral, hi, Ted Lynch.”

  “Hey, sorry to wake you, but I have a lead you might be able to help with. I think our man may have picked up a very large bundle of cash, probably American dollars, more than 5 million, maybe up to 10 million, in Istanbul on November 26 last year. Any way of getting close to that?”

  “Istanbul is a very cosmopolitan place, but they value United States business. They’ll probably cooperate. We’re almost certainly looking for someone in Buyukdere Street, the place is full of international banks—Bankapital, Iktisat Bankasi, Garanti Bank. They are fairly secretive, but we have connections there. And they mostly have branches in New York.

  “I doubt if they’ll give us names or anything—but if we ask for an unusual amount of U.S. dollars being picked up that day in cash, like a suitcase full, they’ll probably give us a straight yes or no. We’ll decide where to go from there. I’ll get moving 0200 tomorrow, that’s Monday, right?”

  “Hey, thanks, Ted. Good luck, I’ll wait to hear from you, early tomorrow morning. I’m in 0600. G’night, pal.”

  “Hey, Arnold, one thing.” The voice of the CIA man rose, trying to stop the admiral from putting down the phone. “I gotta question…you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Admiral, if I am going to pay a Russian submarine captain a huge bundle of cash to take his submarine out of the Black Sea in early to mid-April, I sure as hell am not going to give it to him in late November.”

  “Beautiful call, Ted. You sure as hell are not. You’re probably going to give him twenty grand, earnest money, in November. And then arrange to give him the big payment…maybe five million for himself, which would travel on the submarine with him, and another five million to take care of the crew, which would also be carried on board.”

  “Sounds much more like it, Admiral. But there’s no way I could get a trace on a small sum like twenty grand on November 26. What we’re really after is maybe 10 million U.S. dollars, say between April 7 and 13. There’s got to be a record of that somewhere.”

  “That’s it, Ted. Second week in April is much more likely. Do what you can. I’m grateful.”

  The admiral replaced the receiver, picked it up again, and dialed the Maryland number of Bill Baldridge. The clock on the wall now said 0338. But the Kansas scientist answered swiftly in a reflex action honed by years of coming on watch in the smallest hours of the morning. If he was not alone, he sounded alone. “Yessir, that’s me. Hi, what’s hot?”

  “Bill, we are making progress. The Russians recognize their Kilo was probably hired by an operative from an Arab state. They are on our side and you are going to visit a buddy of mine who heads up the office of Naval Intelligence, Vice Admiral Vitaly Rankov. Not till after your stuff in London and Scotland. Then I’m sending you down to the Black Sea, so pack plenty of things. You may be gone for several weeks.

  “Meantime the Mossad are seriously on the trail of Adnam. They have traced him to Odessa. He went by sea from Istanbul on a Russian passport. He also had a stamped Turkish visa. I’ll say one thing, that guy has no trouble with documents. Right now it looks like he went on to Sevastopol with a moderate bundle of cash and paid a Russian captain to prepare a mission with his submarine and crew.”

  “Steady, Admiral. You can’t just turn up and start bribing Russian Naval officers to pinch a submarine and bamboozle their crew into doing something diabolical that is going to make them the most hunted men in the world.”

  “Yes you can, Bill. Find me a Russian captain with little money, and I could offer him enough cash to do anything. Just get in the boat, tell his crew they were going on a secret Navy exercise, and then depart. My terms would be simple…carry out the job, here’s half the money. The rest is in a bank in South America, from where you cannot be extradited. Nor, with a bit of luck, even found.”

  “How much are you paying?”

  “How about half a million dollars?”

  “No chance. He’s gotta live on it for the rest of his life, and his family’s.”

  “Okay, three million.”

  “Not enough to wreck a big Navy career and leave your homeland forever.”

  “Five?”

  “Possible.”

  “Ten million dollars.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me.”

  “I’ll make it twenty million, if you like. But I’ll get him. Because my government’s oil money is nothing to me, but it’s everything to him. And to his family. I think we’ve got the answer, Bill. This is how they did it. And I’ll tell you something else. Those new Kilos in the Black Sea have a full complement of torpedoes on board already. Probably twenty. And two of them are nuclear-tipped.”

  “Jesus Christ! How do you know?”

  “Rankov told me.”

  “You mean when that Kilo set sail, Ben Adnam was on board and the killer missiles were already in place.”

  “No. I think they picked Ben up somewhere in Turkish waters. He would not have risked security checks inside the Russian Navy base. But the captain knew that Ben had access to a colossal amount of cash. And he knew that the cash was his for the asking. With another half to come when the mission was completed. Payable in some foreign country. The torpedoes were ready though. The Russian captain saw to that. Part of the deal, right?”

  “Are the Russians sure the Kilo went t
hrough the Bosporus underwater?”

  “No. They just know it’s missing, and they know something very fishy is going on. But they realize it may well have gone through the Bosporus because of the drowned sailor on the Greek island. He was a member of the ship’s company of Kilo 630.”

  “Rankov confirmed that?”

  “He did.”

  “Will I see you tomorrow before I leave for London?”

  “Yes. Come to the office. Early afternoon. We’ll get a final briefing from CNO. Then you can leave straight-away for the airport. Also I would like you to pick up a portable phone scrambler. Do you know how to work it?”

  “Yessir, but we’d better run over the operating procedures. Can I hook it up to you from abroad?”

  “It’ll work from anywhere. And it’s damned important. We cannot risk anyone listening in.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  But Admiral Morgan was already off the line. He was hunched over a chart at his sloping desk with the big light. This time he was poring over a larger-scale map detailing the northern coastline of Turkey, which stretched from the Bulgarian border one hundred miles west of the Bosporus along the seven-hundred-mile coastline which runs east of the Bosporus, out to the old Soviet border at the Georgian city of Batumi.

  He was asking himself the question he always asked himself. “What would I do?”

  The clock ticked on past 0400. Washington slept. Arnold Morgan did not sleep. He lit up a cigar, opened his door, and demanded a cup of coffee.

  Time had no meaning for the admiral, who like many ex-submariners was accustomed to the cocoon of the great underwater ships, which did not distinguish between day and night. Only the watch changes marked the passing of the hours.

  Morgan brandished his cigar theatrically. “Let me start that again,” he said to the deserted room. “I have just arrived in Sevastopol. I am carrying two big suitcases stuffed with U.S. dollars. I have already given one of them to the captain. The other one will be given to him when I step on board. Now when do I do that?”

  Admiral Arnold Morgan begged the empty walls to bear with him while he gathered his thoughts. Then he said loudly, “Right. Now hold it. What would I not do? What would I not dream of doing, if I was about to illegally board a Russian submarine and steal it? Answer: I’d pick up my second suitcase full of cash, and I’d get the hell out of Russia, and board the sub someplace else.”