Power Play (11 page)

The contour of the seabed thus sweeps up from deep water to a shallow plateau situated about 36 feet from the surface. On top of this, rising 20 feet higher, stands a narrow ocean mound, about 330 feet long on the chart.
Gepard
had driven head-on into this small underwater mountain and stopped dead.

A couple of Royal Navy frogmen were currently taking a long, hard look at the acoustic cladding on the hull of the submarine. They thought it looked good, very good, but no better than the British or American
tiles, which were based on the ones that formed the heat shield around the forward fuselage of the space shuttle returning to earth.

Inside the submarine hull, the Faslane technicians were stripping out any computer hard drives that they believed may contain electronic information pertaining to British or American submarine activities in the area.

For a start, Captain McKeown had driven straight through a critical submarine training area on his way up the Kyle Rhea. Just north of the
Gepard
there was another huge submarine area, either side of the 14-mile Raasay Island, which lies between Skye and the Scottish mainland. This comprises some 50 square miles of submarine country, dark waters, varying in depth from 300 to 1,500 feet, and marked on all charts.

These were clear warnings to fishermen and yachtsmen to take care and to steer either side of Raasay, and stay close to the shore, out of the way of the biggest and most ruthless monsters of the deep. Kapitan Konstantin Tatarinov’s navigation staff had misjudged this detailed Admiralty chart when they reached the southernmost waters and careened out of the marked channel, for no real reason except lack of care.

Nonetheless, the Faslane sonar men found a major amount of data in
Gepard
’s computer systems, and they were able to remove it. They were not able to ascertain whether the data had already been transmitted back to Russia. Besides, it all needed to be downloaded, and the engineers also had to dismantle other electronics to ensure that
Gepard
pressed on home without any more spying.

As for towing her all the way back to Faslane, this was becoming increasingly unlikely. There was little more to learn from the boat, which had now been rendered harmless. So in the opinion of Admiral Ryan and the Admiralty, they might as well tell her, in naval parlance, to bugger off home and stop being such a bloody nuisance.

The engineers assessed they had another five hours’ work to do, and they proposed staying aboard to finish, while
Gepard
dropped anchor in deeper water at the edge of the channel. The navy estimated she would be released sometime after 2200 hours.

The armed Royal Marine guard stood watch inside the hull while the work continued. The Russians were forbidden to lay hands on any working part of the boat, except for the cooks in the galley, who were busy making soup and toasted sandwiches for the crew and the British visitors.

Angus Moncrief stayed on station until the towing was completed, and
this was a major anticlimax. With the blue-twisted steel of the towing lines firmly attached to the submarine bow and the stern of the
Sutherland,
the process was carried out almost in slow motion.

Captain McKeown supervised it personally, ordering his frigate’s mighty 31,000-hp gas turbines to take the strain as the lines went taut and then increase speed very slightly. The high water helped to lift the bow as soon as
Gepard
had moved six feet. And then it was twenty feet, then fifty, and suddenly she was floating for the first time in more than twelve hours.

She dipped her bow as the water deepened, and as the stern slipped off the sand, she sagged down in the calm sea, and then came up on the tide. McKeown ordered more power, and the huge submarine dipped forward, along the surface. The danger was that too sudden a pull may have caused her to run faster than
Sutherland
and blunder into her stern. But wily McKeown did nothing sudden. With immense skill he maneuvered her to the edge of the channel and signaled for the towlines to be unhooked and to drop the anchor into eighty feet of ocean.

Only then did the Royal Marines and the Faslane submariners give permission for the Russian rods to be pulled, firing up
Gepard
’s nuclear reactor in readiness for her long journey home . . . almost two thousand miles, north around the gigantic coastline of Norway, into the Barents Sea, with a sharp right turn down the White Sea to the shipyards of Severodvinsk, where she was originally launched in 1999.

Without even a comment on her plight, the Russian Navy would order her immediately into the enormous workshops on the south shore near Archangel—to repair whatever damage the Faslane technicians may have done to her electronics. Thus far, no one had issued any form of a reprimand, which was unusual for Russia’s normally grim Northern Fleet commanders.

By midnight, the saga was over. Line astern with HMS
Sutherland, Gepard
had cleared the lighthouse on Cape Wrath, where her escort departed. The Russian submarine now dived to two hundred feet, heading north, past the Orkney Islands and into some of the deepest water in the world. On the far side of the GIUK Gap, where the North Atlantic flows into the Norwegian Sea, the ocean is more than thirteen thousand feet deep—that’s almost two and a half miles, straight down.

Angus Moncrief had gone home and recorded the day’s events in his harbormaster’s logbook. The Chinook transporting the submariners and
Royal Marines had already landed at Faslane and was on its way to the Helensburgh base. All was peaceful around the great Scottish lochs, except if you happened to catch the television news, during which you would have thought World War III was about to start.

There were Russians, Americans, British politicians, admirals, ex-admirals, a couple of future admirals, ambassadors, ex-ambassadors, naval attachés, military experts, quasi experts, and various frauds, all nattering away about the threat to world peace that had broken out beyond Angus Moncrief’s harbor.

Desperately, Admirals David Ryan and Mark Rowan tried to play it all down. Even the Russian naval attaché tried to assure London’s Channel Four there was, so far as he could see, no harm done. It was a minor accident and, if anything, had cemented even more agreeable relations between the Royal Navy and Russia’s Northern Fleet.

But the journalists and anchormen had even less interest than normal in the lost art of listening. All they wanted was news of
irate complaints . . . emergency meetings with the United States . . . this shocking breach of security . . . possible expulsion of Russian diplomats . . . spying, espionage, nuclear danger, warheads, retaliation . . . anger . . . fury . . .
and, of course
,
the inevitable
midnight crisis meeting, United Nations Security Council in New York.

And in the end the media won the day. There could not have been a member of the public anywhere in the free world who did not have the distinct impression that some kind of truly diabolical international incident had taken place.

Which, of course, it had.

 

The president of Russia, a powerfully built former member of the secret police from the Ukraine, seemed to wear a permanent glare on his craggy, round face. He peered out at the world beneath bushy eyebrows and a thick head of hair, with an unnerving combination of suspicion and general disbelief in his colleagues.

This was, however, a slight misconception, because Nikita Markova was basically a friendly man, although an absolute tyrant when riled, a state of grace occurring approximately now.

He had called this conference personally. And to it he had invited his most trusted ministers to sit in this great domed room on the second floor of the Senate Building on the east side of the Kremlin, among the ramparts of the Senate Tower behind Lenin’s tomb. This was the room that, during World War II, had often been the very heartbeat of the Red Army Supreme Command under Stalin. President Markova loved that.

He was a remarkably proud man, with a deep sense of history, who would never utter one word of criticism against the old KGB or its ruthless activities behind the walls of the Lubyanka.

He had believed in the old Soviet Union. He believed in Mother Russia, and he yearned for the old days of the Politburo, and the enormous brutal power of the old Soviet machine, which dealt so swiftly with “trouble” and various “dissidents.”

President Markova could not be described as a keen exponent of democracy. Which was why incredible power rested so easily upon his seventy-four-year-old shoulders. He appointed his own deputy, and the prime minister, and all other government ministers. He was deferred to on every subject because every person in the entire government was dependent upon him for a life of luxury.

No surprise, then, that he got along just fine with both houses of the Russian Parliament—the Federation Council and the Duma. President Markova believed in the sledgehammer authoritarian approach of the Soviet Union of old. He could match any Russian leader down the ages for a pure, bloody-minded approach to his nation’s problems.

The men who sat at the vast, highly polished rotunda table awaiting his signal to begin the meeting were as follows: the prime minister, Oleg Kuts, from St. Petersburg; the current head of the FSB, Yuri Kasatonov, new, zealous, and only thirty-eight years old; Vassily Levchenko, the minister for foreign affairs, a limited man trying to follow in the footsteps of the great Andrei Gromyko; from the Russian Navy the veteran commander in chief and former C-in-C Fleet, Admiral Vitaly Rankov; the chief of naval staff, Admiral Yaroslav Kietskov; and the Northern Fleet commander, Vice Admiral Alexander Ustinov. There were no secretaries or deputy ministers, but Admiral Ustinov was permitted to bring his
newly appointed aide, Kapitan Leytenant Nikolai Chirkov, since, in the end, this was a Northern Fleet matter. Nikolai, however, was there because he was being groomed for a potential military-political career, courtesy of his very influential father. No one at the table wore a uniform.

“Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” said the president, without looking up from the bound report he was reading. “And I have to say this entire operation is beginning to give the appearance of a complete foul-up. I realize we all knew the
Gepard
would be caught and apprehended for spying, by either the Americans or the British. But I did not intend for the Russian Navy to be made a laughing stock in front of the whole world.”

“She’s on her way home now, sir,” replied the commander in chief. “And we should perhaps bear in mind that no great harm has been done to anyone. No one’s been injured, and the boat is more or less intact except for some electronics.”

“I understand that,” said President Markova, “but I think we should bear in mind why we sent the
Gepard
south in the first place. We wanted her to steam through the GIUK Gap at a good speed in order to find out whether the American SOSUS system was still working in a highly efficient way. Is that not so?”

“Yessir. Certainly, that was our objective. We simply did not include the possibility of an accident at sea as part of the equation.”

“My first question then is this,” replied the president. “Is SOSUS working at all these days, or has it been abandoned?”

“It’s working at about a quarter of its old potential.”

“How do you know? Did the Americans hear the
Gepard
? It certainly did not appear so.”

“Sir, they picked her up. Kapitan Tatarinov was detected by a US nuclear boat, probably fifty miles away, and again, twice in fact, by SOSUS. She definitely released a firm signal on the undersea wires, but we have no way of knowing where those signals were picked up. We’re not even certain they were picked up, because no one wanted to do anything about it.

“That was why Kapitan Tatarinov proceeded straight into the Royal Navy submarine training grounds between the Isle of Skye and the Scottish mainland. To see if anyone cared one way or another whether he was there.”

“But of course that was never put to the test,” said the president, “because our Russian navigation team had put the submarine on a sandbank before anyone had much of a chance to react?”

“Correct, sir. We still do not have all the answers.”

“The issue here appears to be, Alexander, that SOSUS undeniably still works, but it is being manned less diligently than it once was. They picked up our signature, but failed to act. Which is important. However, the antics of the
Gepard
’s navigation team have unknowingly had a profound effect on the future, correct?”

“I do not quite follow, sir.”

“Given the enormous fuss the media are causing, do you not think it likely that the US Navy will get SOSUS back on the top line as soon as they possibly can?”

“Very probably, sir.”

“So, in a way, the blind navigator has almost certainly answered the critical question for us: do we assume that when we launch Project FOM-2, we must proceed with all due care? Because if we risk a submarine through the GIUK, they will surely catch us. And discovery would be unthinkable.”

“Sir, twenty-four years ago they would surely have sunk us.”

“If they ever discovered Project FOM-2, they’d fucking well sink us now.”

“Well, sir, it seems the most difficult question has been solved. Can we move the nuclear hardware for Project FOM-2 in secret, using a submarine, through the North Atlantic? Answer: No. We dare not. They’d catch us in deep water, lock onto the nuclear content, and almost certainly ram a couple of torpedoes right in our guts, no questions asked, no traces of a lost Russian submarine.”

“Before
Gepard
we might have gotten away with it,” said President Markova, “but not now. So, we’ll use a surface merchant ship and sail, strictly in international waters, straight down the Atlantic to the Caribbean. No one has the right to apprehend us when we’re hundreds of miles from shore. Certainly not the Americans.”