by DJ Scott
At first, Alexei was content simply to chat with the vivacious young woman, but in time he wanted to know her better. Three years ago he had asked her to join him at a performance of a balalaika band. To his astonishment and relief, she had agreed to the date. Following an evening of Korobienki and Zaporozhian, they retired to a small bar where they sipped vodka and exchanged the stories of their lives. Anna had been mesmerized by Alexei’s intellectual achievements and awed by his rapid progress in the highly-secret and prestigious Russian nuclear weapons program. Alexei found himself speaking of highly-classified matters to this woman without the slightest regard for security.
Over the following months, as they spent increasing amounts of time together, he went into some detail about his engineering work at Lesnoy, in central Russia, where bombs and warheads were actually produced. For the first time, he was able to share his pride in mastering the awesome complexity of these devices. He went into even greater detail about his plan to perform warhead maintenance for the Northern Fleet in the Arctic and to run the facility himself. This, he thought, would be his ticket to a senior post in the Defense Ministry.
As he courted Anna Voronina, however, his world view began to change in unexpected ways. The first time they had sex, for example, Alexei was utterly stunned by her beauty and her passion, and even more by the passion she aroused in him, feelings of which he had never imagined himself capable. During their long evenings of lovemaking, he found himself utterly uninterested in his work or in the Defense Ministry. If, at the end of the day, he had given Anna pleasure, he felt he had accomplished all he ever wanted.
As Anna shared her small apartment with her brother, Boris, it was inevitable the two men would meet socially. Alexi found that he liked the younger man. His disregard for authority should have outraged the plant manager, but it did not. Alexei found him something of a rogue, and when he learned about his connections to the Chechen mafia, he was thrilled at knowing someone who had lived so well outside the system. If his superiors in Moscow had known about his relationship with these two marginal citizens, they would almost certainly have disapproved. Fortunately, they did not know.
Alexei began to talk with Boris about his desire to provide for his sister a much better life than they had in this isolated Arctic outpost. At first they talked about small plans, pilfering of scrap metal and instruments, which Boris could sell through his underworld connections, the kind of thing that was common, almost expected, of management all over Russia. Then, one bitterly-cold evening, Boris and Alexei were talking over glasses of mediocre vodka when the older man said, “You know, Boris, so far what we have been talking about is what the Americans would call peanuts.”
“Peanuts?”
‘Yes. Small change. Sure we can sell bits of scrap metal, but what’s that worth? A little vacation to Prague? So what? What do we have that could allow us all to live in style, away from this freezing rat hole, for the rest of our lives? You, Anna, and me.”
Boris looked at him blankly for a moment, then his eyes opened wide. “A warhead? Are you talking about selling a nuclear weapon?”
“Six, actually.” Alexei poured more vodka into his glass. “And the first thing I’m going to do after that is to stop drinking this shit!” He drained the glass and slammed it onto the table top.
“Alexei, you’re drunk. They will kill us.”
“No, no, no. We will be long gone before they even suspect the warheads are missing. It’s actually very simple. We will build six fake warheads using extra re-entry vehicles. I can get them easily.”
Boris leaned forward, his elbows on the small table. “You really can make the Northern Fleet missile officers believe they’re real warheads?”
“Sure, the testing they do at the time of assembly is quite basic. I have already constructed a small circuit board that will respond correctly to their tests. Only when the missile is loaded aboard the submarine, and they try to integrate it with the onboard weapon system will they have problems. By that time, they will be at sea and to discover the fakes they will have to return to port, off-load the missile, and remove the warheads. If you, Anna, and I all leave as soon as the fakes are shipped, it will take weeks before they’re discovered.”
“Yes, I see. And the real warheads will be out of the country and already delivered to the buyer. We can send them out in shipping containers.”
“Exactly. But we will need to do a lot of work. I will need your help in fabricating the extra shipping boxes—I’ll assign you to that work group next week—and I will also need your contacts to help with financial arrangements. We will need accounts impossible to trace back to us. We are going to move a large amount of money, a very large amount.”
“How much?”
“About a hundred-fifty million euros, twenty-five million a unit. Hard to say though. As far as I know—or should I say as far as the SVR knows—no one has actually sold an intact nuclear weapon before. We will be the first. We will set the price, so to say.”
The younger man inhaled sharply “Who are you going to sell these weapons to, Alexei?”
“High bidder, I suppose. I would prefer not to deal with Muslim terrorists, but we probably can’t be too selective. I do have a contact in Prague who has some useful connections. He believes this to be a realistic number.”
“Who is this contact?’
“He is known simply as Janos now. He was once quite high up in the procurement section of the Defense Ministry. I worked with him when I was at the old Arzamas-16 laboratory. He acts as a go between on weapons deals, big deals. He has a lot of contacts.” The two men sipped vodka, and they planned.
The project ran into problems almost immediately. First, Boris allowed his enthusiasm to get the better of him, and he revealed the entire plan to Anna. She was horrified, not so much at the idea of stealing nuclear weapons, but of getting caught. The sense of constantly being watched is deep in the Russian genes, and the transition from the old Soviet system to the new Russia under Putin had done nothing to change that reality. It took some time, but her confidence in Alexei, plus the inevitable blindness of love, calmed her nerves. She began studying Portuguese at a local language school, as did Boris and Alexei, though they had no intention of going to Portugal. She dyed her normally blond hair very dark and grew it long. After a few months, she applied for a new identity card, claiming to have lost her old one. As she smiled for her new photograph she recalled how Boris had discovered the system did not retain the old images, but simply replaced them with the new ones in its digital memory. A few days before their departure she would have her hair cut and dyed back to its original straw blond.
Boris did something similar by growing a full beard and reporting his identity card stolen. He had hit himself in the face with a piece of pipe and filed a police report to give credence to the ruse, and to further hide his identity with the new picture. Only Alexi Kovolenko needed no disguise. Already wearing an enormous beard worthy of a Patriarch, he would need only a close shave after they departed to entirely change his appearance.
The second problem was potentially more serious. In order to build the massive transport boxes, Alexei had to order twenty-five thousand kilograms of specialty stainless steel from a mill in Sweden. The steel was delivered in three standard twenty-foot shipping containers which Alexei failed to return. The large purchase raised questions in Moscow, and it took several telephone calls for Alexei to explain he was preparing both for increased production demands, and to ship several containers to other facilities to copy. Both were blatant lies of course, but he was fortunate, and none of the bureaucrats ever followed up. They could not imagine what else he could do with that much stainless steel and were ultimately convinced the purchase was legitimate.
It took almost a year, during which Alexei procured a small workroom in the plant for his private use. He had a cipher lock installed, and he then gradually accumulated spare re-entry vehic
les, test instruments, and a basic set of electronic tools. Such was the authority of managers that not a single person questioned what he was doing. Likewise, the lucrative overtime work given to his girlfriend’s brother was nothing more than would be expected. Authority was suspicious only when not abused.
Boris was also busy arranging documents and untraceable bank accounts through his Chechen contacts. Alexi wanted genuine identities, not forgeries. To do this, however, required money—a lot of it—and to get the money, Alexei had to involve Janos. This gap in their security worried Boris and Alexi, but they had no choice. In the international arms business, cash was king, and Janos seemed to have plenty of it.
At last, the fake warheads were ready. They had been loaded into transport boxes with identical serial numbers—etched onto them by Boris—and security locks—also identical to those with the real warheads. On the night of August 10, Alexei and Boris stayed late. They waited until most of the security staff was eating a late dinner and there was no security in the area of his workroom. Using special heavy-duty forklifts, Boris and Alexei moved the fakes into the secured holding area where the real warheads were awaiting shipment the following day. They then loaded the real weapons into the three twenty-foot shipping containers, still sitting at the plant’s loading dock. A few quick spot welds secured them to the floors of the containers. They then covered each with crates which they quickly labeled, ‘machine tools’, in three languages.
Alexei knew the crates would, at best, stand up to only a superficial inspection. But he also knew that only a miniscule number of shipping containers, out of millions crossing the globe on a daily basis, were ever inspected, and that most of those were in America or Western Europe. He also felt the risk of being found by a radiation detector was low; the massive steel shipping boxes would conceal the weapons from gamma ray detectors. Neutron detectors were another matter, but these were rare.
In the morning, trucks would pick up the shipping containers and begin a long journey back to Sweden via Tallinn, Estonia. A port official in Tallinn would, for the modest sum of ten-thousand euros, replace the container numbers and reroute them to a new destination. Anna, Boris, and Alexei would travel the next morning by air to St. Petersburg, and from there by train to Tallinn where they had reserved flights to Warsaw, and then on to Prague. They would miss their flights. And that would be the last trace of Alexei Kovolenko, Anna Voronina, or her brother Boris Voronin.
At the same time the trio of thieves departed St. Petersburg, Anatoly Grishkov, having programmed the cipher locks with his personal code, was supervising the loading of six warhead containers onto six trucks of the Northern Fleet for the short trip to the missile assembly facility.
Chapter 4
August 18, 2017 1045Z (1445 EDT)
National Security Agency Ft. Meade, MD
Lt (jg) Zach Miller was well into his fifth cup of coffee for the day. As action officer for the newly activated Project Bearpaw, his job was to sit in a cubicle at the sprawling National Security Agency complex at Ft. Meade and listen to intercepts from telephone conversations at the Northern Fleet Submarine Base at Gadzhievo. He would translate them, and write summaries for his commanding officer at the Submarine Warfare Operations Research Division, or SWORD, of the Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center. A Russian Studies major at Georgetown, he had received a direct commission as a Reserve Intelligence Officer. During a brief mobilization the previous year, his work had been so exceptional that his request for transfer to fulltime active duty was readily approved.
Bearpaw was not a typical Navy operation—normally it would have been run by the CIA. It was the CO of the Nimitz Center, however, who had been the only person in the vast American intelligence apparatus who saw enough potential in the proposal from British MI-6 to fund the required hardware.
The concept was simple enough. The British had an asset, Stella, well placed within the Russian base, who said he could tap into their secure landlines by placing a special receiver directly over the trunkline as it ran under a small warehouse. The instrument would be placed in an unobtrusive box screwed to the inside of a wall. It would then send a millisecond burst transmission of stored conversations once an hour to an NSA satellite in low earth orbit. All they needed was funding for the receiver/transmitter. The British, having cut their intelligence budgets to the bone and beyond, could simply not afford the costly gadget.
Both the CIA and the NSA were interested in receiving the product, but only Captain Jean Kraus, CO of the Nimitz Center, was willing to put up the funding. The Navy bought it so the Navy ran it.
As Miller listened to officers complain about their wives and praise their girlfriends in between calls about delays in delivery of provisions, he understood why other agencies had passed on Bearpaw. Nonetheless, this little project was good practice for the Russian linguist, and he worked diligently typing out summaries at dictation speed. As a new call began, Miller started a fresh paragraph.
Two sentences into the call, he gave up on the summary, loaded the entire conversation plus all other data not yet translated onto a secure portable drive, made the appropriate log entries, and called his commanding officer for an urgent meeting.
Chapter 5
August 18, 2017 1950Z (1550 EDT)
Office of Naval Intelligence, Suitland, MD
Located in a huge federal campus of undistinguished office buildings just southeast of the nation’s capital, the National Maritime Intelligence Center is home to the ONI and its major subordinate commands, including the Nimitz Center. Miller had made near record time driving down from Ft. Meade, and was now sitting with the director of SWORD, CDR Denise Nguyen, in the Nimitz Center’s SCIF. Both officers snapped to attention when Captain Kraus entered. She was accompanied by a civilian whom Miller recognized as the center’s senior Russian Navy specialist, though he couldn’t think of his name at the moment.
Kraus, a cadaverous woman with pale pasty skin, salt and pepper hair, and absolutely no patience for social pleasantries, nodded at Miller and even before she was seated asked, “Okay, what have you got?”
“Briefly, Captain, we have multiple Bearpaw intercepts within the base at Gadzhiyevo and from Gadzhiyevo to Northern Fleet Headquarters at Severomorsk. Someone apparently stole six nuclear warheads from a reconditioning facility in Severomorsk. Fake warheads were shipped up to Gadzhievo for loading onto their new Liner missiles. There was one call to the head of the GRU office at Northern Fleet Headquarters asking for a Colonel Kepinsky to meet with Admiral Grishkov at the First Light Machinery Maintenance Factory, that’s the warhead reconditioning facility. So far no calls to the FSB or the SVR. I brought the original product with me for review.”
Captain Kraus tented her fingers and thought for a moment. “Interesting that they seem to be bypassing the FSB. Give the originals to Mr. Fletcher,” she jerked a thumb towards the civilian. “Jack, I’ll need translated transcripts and your analysis by the end of the day.”
Jack Fletcher, a retired naval intelligence officer, knew the day would be ending late, very late. “I’ll get right on it, Captain. How do you want to follow up on this?”
“Lt Miller, get back up to Ft. Meade. I want you to monitor what comes in overnight and be back here at 0800 tomorrow. I’ll arrange a helo to bring you there and back; I don’t want you wasting your time in rush hour traffic. She turned back to Fletcher and pointed at him with a long bony finger. “Jack, prepare a briefing, a page—two max—for me and the director on whatever we have regarding Gadzhiyevo and this facility in Severomorsk.”
“Can I talk with the Russian Navy people at Farragut? They have a lot of data on the Russian ballistic missile submarine program.”
Kraus shook her head. “Better keep this close hold for now, at least until we brief the director. Besides, we’re interested more in where those warheads are going, not where they have been.” She then turned her attention to CDR Nguyen. “Denise,
let’s see what else NSA can come up with. Track down someone who can tell us about communications out of Northern Fleet and in particular to the GRU. And see if there is anything out of the regional FSB offices. Just because we didn’t hear them called doesn’t mean they weren’t.”
“Captain, as far as I know, most of those communications are heavily encrypted with protocols we haven’t broken. We get the unencrypted traffic from Bearpaw only because the Russians encrypt and decrypt beyond our intercept point. We can’t decrypt conversations from the GRU.”
“I just need to know if there’s more chatter. We need to know who’s getting involved in this. It’s in their interest—and ours—to keep this off the radar. If there is a lot of traffic with Moscow the chance of a leak goes way up.”
“I’m on it, Captain.” The diminutive Commander scribbled rapidly on a yellow legal pad, paranoia about electronic intercepts having led to resurgence in the use of pen and paper.
Jean Kraus stood, and before her subordinates were out of their chairs, had left the SCIF. Miller could hear her shouting orders to her assistants as she hurried to her next meeting.
Chapter 6
August 19, 2017 1200Z (0800 EDT)
Office of Naval Intelligence, Suitland, MD
Admiral Justin Costello, sharp-eyed, lean, and wearing perfectly-tailored summer whites, strode into the SCIF accompanied by a uniformed aide, and a civilian no one recognized. As he motioned everyone to be seated, he introduced Rick Suarez from the Nuclear Emergency Support Team—NEST, a division of the National Nuclear Security Administration.