Kilo Class am-2 Page 26

  “Short straw again,” said Ray. “I probably ruined my knife scraping the bottom…just hope I’m not asked to assassinate anyone else tonight.”

  “No, I hope not anyway,” said Rick. “But right now it’s going to start getting lighter by the minute…we have to get back across the road and into the woods…Angela, by the way, has gone, as planned…we’ll catch up with her later.”

  The SEALs emerged from the water, crouched, and observed the empty road. Then they bolted across, free now of their forty-pound weights of explosive, and, clinging to their attack boards and flippers, they jogged through the woods to the spot where the canisters were buried. Angela had left one uncovered, with their new street clothes, chocolate, and water right on top.

  They stripped off their wet suits and Draegers, and placed them with the two machine guns, ammunition clips, and attack boards inside the canister. Then they dressed in socks, shoes, jeans, shirts, and jackets. They each ate some chocolate, drank some water, and piled everything else inside the last canister. Rick Hunter set the incendiary booby trap and placed it inside, against the door handle, and closed it carefully. If anyone in the next fifty or so years ever found that canister and tried the door, it would blow to smithereens with everything in it. Right now, Ray Schaeffer shoved the old bush back into the loose earth and took the last shovel and covered the disturbed area with soil and dead leaves. He and Rick twisted and turned the bush back into place, and the four of them left, carrying the last shovel and armed with their Kaybars and pistols.

  They did not head back to the dirt road but went farther west, walking softly along the edge of the wood in the early morning light. They found the highway after one mile and hid on the steep bank that led up to it from the forest. A couple of hundred yards to the right, they could see an old Russian peasant woman wearing a shawl, sitting on the roadside, awaiting a lift, and they too waited.

  At 0655 an old Volkswagen bus pulled up, collected her, and then drove on to a spot right above their hiding place. Angela’s face peered out from under the shawl, through the passenger seat window…“Okay guys,” she said, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The SEALs came up off the bank like bullets and hurled themselves and their surviving shovel into the vehicle. Angela Rivera spoke freely. “This is young Vladimir,” she said, nodding at the driver. “He’s a colleague of mine, works for us in Moscow. All our clothes, papers, and passports are here. Vladimir will take us straight down to the M18, then south all the way to St. Petersburg. For the record, in case we’re stopped, we all work for a citrus-growing outfit in Florida…you all know the cover…go through it all in your minds one more time.

  “Vlad’s taking us straight to St. Petersburg airport…then we’re going by private corporate jet to London. Everything’s fixed. The Russians never bother with commercial executives on private planes these days. Specially Americans.”

  “Beautiful,” said Lieutenant Commander Hunter.

  “By the way, did you fix the Kilos?”

  “Sure did,” said Ray Schaeffer.

  9

  Captain Volkov moved the kilos northeast across Lake Onega at 0830 on June 11. This was the regular departure time for cargo moving at five knots. The journey to the White Sea was one of approximately twenty-four hours, the 0830 departure would see them comfortably into the canal by 1030, and to Belomorsk for refueling just as the port came to life the following morning.

  The big Tolkach freighters always pulled out at this time after their overnight stop, and there were no surprises in Fort Meade shortly after 0200 when the satellite photographs showed them doing exactly that.

  Admiral Morgan was pleased. No communication had been received from the SEALs by midnight, which meant everything had gone according to plan. Arnold Morgan was even courteous to Charlie as they made their way back to Washington from Fort Meade in the small hours of the morning. A thin smile played around the edges of his mouth as he contemplated the mayhem due to erupt in both Moscow and Beijing around seven o’clock (EDT) that evening.

  “You’re driving beautifully, Charlie,” he observed. Which almost caused his nerve-racked chauffeur to run straight up the back of a Greyhound bus.

  It was 1300 local time when Lieutenant Commander Hunter and his men, having changed clothes during the journey, arrived at the St. Petersburg airport. They disembarked the van, leaving Vladimir to get rid of the clothes, combat knives, and pistols, which he would do at the US Consulate, on Petra-Lavrova Street.

  By 1500 the SEALs were on board the American Learjet, ready to take off for London. Five hours later they would be traveling business class on the American Airlines 747 making its daily flight to New York. Rick calculated they ought to be somewhere over the coast of Maine when the barges blew up in the narrow northern reaches of the Belomorski Canal.

  Pieter, the steward, and Torbin, the head waiter, were not due to report for duty on board the Yuri Andropov until lunchtime. When they failed to show up, the matter was reported to the Captain and to Colonel Borsov. The senior officers ordered a thorough search of the ship, which took almost two hours, and at 1400 the executives decided the two men were undoubtedly missing.

  The ship was heading south down Lake Onega now, and the Captain couldn’t decide whether just to inform the nearest police, or whether to return to the Green Stop. It was hard to imagine that anything had befallen the men in that lonely rural area. But the search had revealed that one of the ship’s rubber inflatables from the upper deck was also missing — several people knew it to be the very one Pieter had been using to take passengers on late-night sightseeing excursions.

  Colonel Borsov decided something was a foot. He ordered the Andropov to come about and headed right back to the Green Stop, where all members of the crew would be expected to assist in the search for their lost colleagues.

  The four old gentlemen from Minnesota and their nurse, Edith Dubranin, were also missed at lunchtime. Their table was empty; they had not been in for breakfast, and no one had seen them. Colonel Borsov himself had noticed they were not at lunch and ordered a steward to go to the upper deck and check the two suites.

  The steward used his master key and found the rooms intact, but found no sign of the old gentlemen. Colonel Borsov suddenly understood that the Andropov had somehow left seven people at the Green Stop, which was precisely when he ordered the ship to come about.

  All day long, Captain Volkov pushed north at his normal slow speed. There would be no more stops before the White Sea, and he always found the 120-mile journey laborious. He had made the trip many times before, in various ships, but the presence of submarines completely blocked his forward view, and the trip seemed endless as a result. He just had to sit and keep the engines steady, driving forward and relying on his son to steer from the wheelhouse on the bow of the lead barge. Young Ivan was good at that.

  By sundown, or what passes for a sundown in the season of the White Nights, he was running through the long wide lakes toward the town of Segeza. They reached the town around midnight, and then turned into the narrow inland canal that begins south of Nadvojcy. It was a four-hour run on this very slow stretch up to the next lake, and the master of the Tolkach was glad both he and Ivan had slept for most of the evening while the first mate and the navigator had taken over the helms.

  At 0258 on June 12, lit by the bright glow in the northern sky, the Kilos were just four and a half miles south of the lake, and six miles south of the town of Kockoma. The water was flat, there was no breeze and little traffic when Captain Volkov sensed a long and distant rumble beneath the keel. He had heard such a noise before, and he knew what had happened. “FUCK!” he shouted. “WE’RE AGROUND…”

  Reaching for his phone he yelled for Ivan, uncertain whether there had been a steering failure. He heard a truly sensational thundering sound again right beneath the keel. “CHRIST! WE’VE HIT SOMETHING…JESUS…IVAN!! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”

  But there was no reply, and Captain Volkov put his engines
to stop as he left the bridge and rushed down the companionway, running along the deck beneath the port side of the Kilo. When he reached the bow, where the two Tolkach freighters were joined, he could not believe what he was seeing. The lead barge was listing to starboard before his eyes, the deck now at a forty-five-degree angle.

  He could see the guard hanging on to one of the great wooden blocks that held the submarine in place. Suddenly there was another thunderous roar from under the keel, and the front barge twisted farther to starboard. As it did, two-and-a-half thousand tons of Kilo Class submarine swayed, and then toppled sideways, smashing into the barge’s deck edge before hitting the water with a gigantic splash, and disappearing almost immediately beneath the surface.

  But the Kilo vanished for only a split second before it surged upward again with terrifying force, like a giant breaching whale, before settling on the soft bottom of the canal, with the lead barge capsized on top of it. Deep beneath the surface the waters of the canal rushed through the huge split in the submarine’s hull caused by the impact with the deck edge and began to fill the Kilo with water.

  But Captain Volkov had more immediate worries. The lead Tolkach had now broached, and the clockwise pressure on the coupling that attached his own rear barge was immense. They were swinging right across the canal, and he could feel his ship twisting to starboard. She lurched right just as the force on the coupling became too great. The entire barge rolled right over, in massive slow motion, sending the Captain hurtling to his death, across the deck and into the tortured, fractured coupling area under the bow. More spectacularly, the second Kilo hurtled off the deck onto the right-hand eastern wall of the canal.

  The Kilo hit the bank with crushing force, smashing the concrete and destroying the hull. The submarine rolled back into the side of the barge, then down into the water with an impact almost equal to that of the first one. Split wide open below the sail, she lay half submerged, with water gushing in, pinned to the bottom to the great Tolkach that had carried her halfway across Russia. Ivan Volkov had somehow survived and fought his way to the shore, not yet knowing that his father had died.

  He clambered out just in time to hear the muffled underwater roar of Lieutenant Ray Schaeffer’s slightly later Semtex charges blast eight gaping holes along the underside hull of the rear Tolkach. He heard the dull thunder, as his father had done four minutes earlier, and then he stood and stared as the six-hundred-foot following barge began to list and then to lurch dramatically as the water rushed in below. She seemed to rise, and then groan her way onto her port side, just as John Bergstrom had planned.

  From Ivan’s perspective, the barge seemed to roll with agonizing slowness, and he watched in horror as the rear Kilo wobbled, then crashed majestically, plunging down from her keel blocks, twenty feet above the water. The Kilo hit the surface of the Belomorski Canal with breathtaking reverberations before rebounding back into the water with a gaping hole behind her tower, and a giant split all the way aft, through which water gushed, short-circuiting and wrecking the battery, flooding the diesels, ruining the computerized firing systems, wiping out the sonar, the radar, the operations center, and flooding every compartment.

  No crane would ever be able to lift even one of the Kilos out of the water. In under six minutes the explosives set by Admiral Bergstrom’s SEALs had destroyed three Kilo Class submarines worth $900 million, sunk three of the biggest freighters in Russia, and completely blocked the Belomorski Canal for months, or even a year. At least until the Russians could begin to bring in frogmen, lifting “camels,” and start raising the hulls off the bottom.

  Ivan Volkov was the sole survivor. As he stood on the chilly, battered banks of the canal, shivering with cold and shock, miles from anywhere, the waters settled slowly and quietly over the wreckage. To the northeast he could see the sun, glowing pink at 3 AM, on the distant horizon. But there was no movement anywhere, and he knew instinctively that no human being could have survived such a crash.

  He also knew now why he had survived. As his Tolkach had listed to starboard, he had sensed the danger and dived straight over the bow of the lead barge, from the area directly in front of his wheelhouse. He had plunged into the dark water, out to the left, swimming away from the hull, kicking off his boots as he did so. At the moment she capsized, he was forty yards clear…and safe.

  In all of Russia’s northern territories, Ivan was the only man who knew the disaster could not have been an accident. He had heard the thunder beneath the surface, not only on the articulated “double” barge, which he was himself steering, but also from the quite separate rear barge. Young Volkov knew something diabolical was afoot. Someone had blown up the convoy. Of that he was certain.

  He had no recollection of having passed any sign of life in the previous few miles before the barges overturned, so he decided to walk north to look for help, taking off his soaking-wet shirt and jacket, deeply regretting losing his boots. Sometimes he walked, sometimes he ran, trying to keep his circulation going until he reached a waterside village. But it was a long way.

  Meanwhile, moving slowly north up the canal, some twenty-two miles south of the disaster, was the 1,700-ton river cargo ship Baltica, laden to her gunwales with timber from the central Volga and bound for the northern shipyards. It took her more than four hours to reach the site of the catastrophe, and it was shortly after 0730 when the first mate spotted the completely unexpected wreckage in the water nearly a mile up ahead. He called for the Captain to return to the bridge: “Look out, sir…what the hell’s that…in the water right on our bow?”

  “Where?” asked the Captain, peering north at the jutting hull of the rear Tolkach. “JESUS!..FULL ASTERN!”

  The freighter was slow to stop when she was empty, even at seven knots. But now, weighed down by hundreds of tons of timber, she was almost impossible to bring to a halt in the short distance remaining. Her ancient engines slowed, then stopped, then restarted in reverse, seeming to take forever. The ship shuddered from end to end as her screw fought to slow her forward momentum as she slid inexorably toward the half-exposed propeller of the rear Tolkach. She bumped hard, hardly saved by the heavy tractor half-tires Captain Perov had fixed on his bow to avoid damage in the often-crowded Russian trading ports. The engine pulled her off, and there was no real harm done, but the Captain and his small crew were completely overwhelmed by the sight before them. There was wreckage all over the surface of the water. There was another colossal barge overturned on its side just up ahead. There was yet another, jutting out of the water still farther ahead. And on the left near side of the canal was the unmistakable shape of a submarine, its stern visible, slammed against the obliterated bank of the canal.

  To the right Captain Perov could see a second submarine. Sunk, but with her stern, after planes, rudders, and screw out of the water, she rested against the eastern bank, which looked as if it had been blasted by a mine. On the same side, but farther forward, there was yet a third hull, rigid and still. He did not know that this was another submarine, hard aground on its own sail, which was dug into the bottom of the canal. Its hull was split, and it was full of water. The lead Tolkach was pinning it upside down. If Captain Perov had not known better he would have assumed he was in a war zone.

  Of life, there was no sign. And for a river cargo captain there was but one salient point…the Belomorski Canal was completely blocked. Both ways. And it was liable to stay that way for some time. Captain Perov picked up the radio handset and contacted the river police. It was 0736 on the morning of June 12.

  By 0900, news of the devastation on the canal had reached the Kremlin. In the office of the Chief of the Main Navy Staff there was an atmosphere of scarcely controlled fury. Vitaly Rankov, the massive ex-Soviet international oarsman, was a full Admiral now, and he wielded enormous power. As Chief of the Main Staff, he was the third most important man in the entire Russian Navy. He was right behind the C in C, who also held the position of Deputy Minister of Defense; and the Deputy C in C of the N
avy.

  Each of the two men who outranked Admiral Rankov was involved in the machinations of the various ex-Soviet fleets in the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Pacific, and the North. But in the day-to-day running of the 270,000-strong Russian Navy, Admiral Rankov was the name most feared above all others. Straightforward situations, where major decisions needed to be made, ended up on his desk very quickly indeed. Situations where any threat to national security was suspected arrived for his attention instantly. And now the ex-Naval Intelligence Chief sat staring at the brief report in front of him…the wrecked Tolkach barges, the ruined Kilo submarines, the blocked canal.

  There were a thousand questions to be asked, and most of them, he suspected, would never be satisfactorily answered. But there was one question he could answer immediately, though he might have trouble proving it.

  Who was responsible for this outrage?

  The answer, he knew, was: Admiral Arnold Morgan, National Security Adviser to the President of the United States of America. “I KNOW THAT BASTARD,” thundered the Admiral to the vast and empty room. “He virtually threatened our Ambassador in Washington…THAT FUCKING MANIAC HAS DESTROYED A TOTAL OF FIVE KILO CLASS SUBMARINES. TWO IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC, AND NOW THREE IN THE CANAL.”

  It took him a full ten minutes to regain his composure, pacing from one end of his great vaulted office to the other, the steel tips on the heels of his polished shoes clicking on the marble floor as he walked. He tried to order his thoughts coherently. Politically, he had no idea what would be decided, and plainly it would be absurd to alarm the populace with wild accusations involving the USA. At least it would without a great deal of hard evidence.

  No, that was all out of the question. The entire matter must be treated as an accident, and maybe it would not be necessary to make anything public, except for news of a cataclysmic crash in the canal. There were after all very few casualties, and the entire incident happened in an extremely remote area. IT WAS JUST THE SHEER BRASS BALLS OF THAT LUNATIC IN THE WHITE HOUSE…THAT WAS THE INFURIATING PART.