Power Play (12 page)

“Sir, do you wish to interview Kapitan Tatarinov when he returns?” asked the Northern Fleet commander.

“I do not think that will be necessary. But there is one further question I would like to ask everyone in this room: has anyone lost their appetite for Project FOM-2, or are we still of accord?”

No one spoke, and no one moved. This was a moment that required great nerve and steadfastness. At least with this president it did. Russia had
received an enormous humiliation on October 6, 2016, when the Israelis had penetrated and then knocked the hell out of the vaunted Russian antiaircraft and missile shield, which was supposed to protect Iran’s main nuclear plants.

It was not just a shattering defeat for the ayatollahs, the known staunch allies of Moscow; it represented a terrible setback for the entire Russian international arms industry, which, after oil and gas, represented the nation’s most important export.

That October attack by the Israelis, in their US-built fighter-bombers, represented a total eclipse for the fabled S-300, Moscow’s revered long-range surface-to-air missile. This had been the great unstoppable specialist antiaircraft and antiballistic system, designed, built, and originated in Soviet Russia and relied upon for defense by so many Eastern European and Asian nations. This was the system that had been ordered by China. And now everything was, in every sense, up in the air.

Russia had armed Iran. The United States had armed Israel. And it had turned out to be “no contest.”

“Washington has it coming to them,” said Admiral Vitaly Rankov. “We must somehow even the score. And this time there will be no mistakes.”

“Just as long as we stay out of submarines, eh?” said President Markova, without even a semblance of a smile.

 

Lieutenant Commander Nikolai Chirkov hurried through the gathering gloom of the late afternoon. There was treason in his heart, and this, he thought, was one heck of a place to be planning it, directly beneath the great gilded dome of Ivan the Great’s Bell Tower, still the tallest structure in the Kremlin.

The meeting in the rotunda had dragged on for several hours while the Russian Navy and its political masters endlessly probed and questioned the events of that day in October 2016, when the air wings of Israel had pounded Iran’s nuclear production facilities to a pulp.

It had been a major blow to the Russian defense industry, resulting in several cancellations and even more postponements to international orders for the Almaz-Antey aerospace designs. The vision of the US-built Israeli fighter jets raging through the skies above the Zagros Mountains, avoiding, with apparent ease, the elaborate Russian S-300 defensive system, had shocked many a defense department in countries all over Asia.

And now, in Lieutenant Commander Chirkov’s view, he was seeing Russian paranoia on the grandest possible scale. The president was convinced the entire thing was to be blamed on the United States. They
had planned the strike, armed the Jews, provided both the hardware and the electronic know-how, and masterminded the operation. Israel had smashed the Iranian nuclear factories because the United States wanted them smashed.

It was a grotesque oversimplification. Israel, surrounded by its Islamic enemies, had
believed
the Iranian president when he’d said he planned to wipe them off the face of the earth. And Tel Aviv was not going to allow Tehran to have an atom bomb with which to achieve that aim.

That was a better simplification. Israel would have hit Qom and Natanz with or without American aircraft and explosives. The United States was perhaps a coconspirator, but by no means a principal. And even if Washington had been up to its ears in the plot, it was never proven. There was no reasonable cause for a Russian president to try to organize a clandestine military strike against the United States.

Yet President Markova was determined to hammer the United States of America, to strike against them, to demonstrate the folly of any nation being involved in any military action against Russian interests.

He was still in that old, tired Cold War frame of mind in which revenge was everything, even if that revenge was justified only in his own mind. In Lieutenant Commander Chirkov’s opinion, President Markova was a near-deranged and vindictive old man who would steer Russia into a lunatic confrontation with the United States for no reason at all.

So what if America, with its large Jewish population, was in cahoots with Israel? They always had been, and nothing was ever going to change that. But was that a reason to come barreling out of the shadows and strike at Washington? At the most powerful military nation on earth, on behalf of a bunch of religious maniacs who were essentially dressed in sheets?

Lieutenant Commander Chirkov thought it was madness. And it must surely end in tears. The trouble was, old Markova was so dominant in Russian politics, and thus in military matters, that he could not be argued with. If he wanted to hit Washington, show ’em who’s boss, humiliate them in front of the world, well, here we go . . . Nikita Khrushchev all over again, a half century later.

From what Chirkov could tell inside the rotunda, the Russian admirals and generals were going to help the president in his foolishness. That’s
how it was in modern Russia. One word from the Great White Chief, and it shall be done.

Crazy, crazy people,
muttered Nikolai as he hurried across the square.
How could any act of war against the United States possibly do any good for even one person in the whole of Russia? And here they all are—a bunch of very stupid, elderly men, acting like Ivan the Terrible getting ready to conquer Siberia four hundred years ago. And it’s not even our damn war! It’s Iran’s.

The thirty-six-year-old naval officer pressed on toward the staff car that awaited him. It was raining now, and turning cold, and he wracked his brain to try to understand what the ridiculous Markova was up to. The whole damn meeting he had just attended was conducted in code—
Project FOM-2
! What was that all about? Nikolai had not the slightest idea what anyone was talking about.

And yet . . . and yet . . . he knew it was important. And he sensed it might be something truly earth-shattering, so rigid was the secrecy surrounding it. Even armed as he was with so little information, he sensed he must do something. The only action he could take was to contact Rani. And that might prove very difficult.

When finally President Markova had called the meeting to a close, he had agreed to produce a set of notes for Admiral Alexander Ustinov, who was leaving immediately for a two-day visit to the Black Sea Fleet with Admiral Rankov.

The Northern C-in-C was then flying immediately to Severodvinsk to inspect the work on the destroyer
Admiral Chabanenko,
Chirkov’s own ship. It was thus agreed that Lieutenant Commander Chirkov should take the late-afternoon train back to the White Sea and spend a couple of days writing up the Moscow notes, preparing the ground for his new boss on Friday.

Which left him precious little time to blow President Markova’s insane plans out of the water. Especially since he did not even know where Rani Ben Adan was. It was almost five thirty, and Moscow was busy. He had to cover his tracks: there were no bounds to the diligence of the FSB, and, as a new aide to a highly placed naval admiral, they may very well track him—just to be certain.

He ran through the rain, trying to avoid the temptation to look back and see if anyone was tailing him across Red Square. He found the navy driver and told him to cover the two-and-a-half-mile journey up to the
Yaroslavskiy railway terminal as quickly as possible, since he was trying to make the Archangel Express and there was not another one until midnight.

But the traffic was heavy. Nikolai finally got out because of a serious jam in Komsomolskaya Square, and he sprinted through the driving rain, past the huge statue of Lenin, and into the Yaroslavskiy entrance with its steep, fairy-tale roof.

Nikolai headed not for the ticket windows but for the intimidating granite bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which made the old Bolshevik look even grumpier than the statue outside the station. The lieutenant dived around the back of the enormous plinth and pulled out his cell phone, dialing the memorized number of the man from the Mossad.

“Rani, it’s me. I need to see you right now.”

“Where are you?”

“Yaroslavskiy train terminal, Moscow. Where are you?”

“I’m in the embassy. Just got in.”

“Pick a spot. Midnight. I may have been followed, and I need to get on a train. Just in case my driver’s checking me out.”

“Okay, how about that old restaurant out near Dynamo Stadium—stays open half the night? It’s called Novy Yar. We met there, once before. See you there.”

The line went dead. The conversation had stayed inside the thirty-second limit regarded as safe within the espionage trade. In this time, government agents who might be listening in Moscow were unable to trace telecommunications even between public pay phones, which might be routed through the Lubyanka.

Emerging from behind Vladimir Lenin’s granite glare, Lieutenant Commander Chirkov headed for the ticketing area on one side of the huge central hall. The place was seething, and there were lines at the windows, Yaroslavskiy Station being the final terminal on the longest railroad on earth, the Trans-Siberian Railway, 5,772 miles, Moscow to Vladivostok, half a world and eight time zones away, on the Sea of Japan.

Nikolai Chirkov was not going east, however. He was going north. He swiftly purchased a first-class one-way ticket to Archangel, usable tomorrow. And then he waited to purchase a return ticket up to Sergiev Posad, the old Soviet city of Zagorsk, forty miles northeast of Moscow.

The naval officer’s plan was simple. He would join the throng heading
for the long-distance trains and find one that stopped at Sergiev Posad, a ninety-minute ride from Moscow. At the very last moment, as the train prepared to pull out of Sergiev, heading north, Nikolai would jump out, walk to the Russky Dvorik Hotel restaurant for dinner, and hope to hell any “tail” was still on the train thundering through the Russian countryside to the White Sea.

As it happened, there was no tail, since Nikolai was deeply trusted as the son of a very senior political figure. But he had a pleasant-enough dinner and returned to Moscow on a suburban-line train, which deposited him back at Yaroslavskiy Station at around a quarter past eleven. From there he took a taxi one mile across North Moscow to the designated restaurant, where Rani was already seated at a small corner table, sipping Turkish coffee.

It was crowded in the Novy Yar, which was excellent. Nikolai waited ten minutes for a table next to Rani to free up, which would allow them to speak quietly yet not appear to know each other. There were so many precautions, and nineteen out of twenty were totally unnecessary. But in Rani’s trade no one was bothered about the nineteen. It was the other one.

“I haven’t had time to tell you this,” said Nikolai, “but I have been given a very important promotion.”

“Is this good for us?”

“It is little short of fantastic—I’m the new aide to Vice Admiral Ustinov, C-in-C Northern Fleet.”

“You still have access to all those electronic communiqués?”

“A lot more than that, Rani. Today I was at a meeting inside the rotunda with the president of Russia.”

“Holy shit!” said Rani. “That’s big.”

“I heard incontrovertible evidence that Russia is planning a strike against the USA, in response to the Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear factories.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to strike against the nation that did it? Why America?”

“Because our president is an old-fashioned Cold Warrior. In his mind there is still only one enemy—the United States. In his mind, Washington is both directly and indirectly responsible for a total humiliation that he cannot forgive.”

“Stupid old prick,” said Rani inelegantly.

“Stupid and very dangerous old prick, actually,” replied Lieutenant Commander Chirkov.

“Well, what’s his main gripe? The aircraft, bombs, and missiles, all made in the US of A? Is that it?”

“Correct. But more than that. The Israeli onslaught smashed the Russian S-300 anti–air attack system, which has been sold all over the world and was about to be purchased by China. It was a serious blow to our defense industry, and for that, President Markova blames the USA entirely.”

Rani was bewildered by the Russian vitriol. “Did S-300 really fail that badly?” he asked. “The Israelis lost six aircraft, and Iran’s antiaircraft guns, on the same system, hit several more.”

“I know . . . I know,” replied Lieutenant Commander Chirkov. “But the world grasps only one set of facts—the Iranian head of state threatened to take Israel off the map, and he was devoting his life to building his own atom bomb. So Israel decided to obliterate that nuclear threat, just as they once did to Saddam Hussein, and again to Syria. Result: a clear-cut Israeli victory. Which added up to a Russian embarrassment and complacent smiles in Washington. Old Markova cannot take that.”

“Since I work for the Israeli government, it would be very valuable for me to know how Russia plans to sharpen up the old S-300 system. Any clues?”

“That’s a big part of it. No one knows how the Israelis beat it. It’s a long-range SAM setup with NIIP radar to intercept anything incoming—aircraft, bombs, or ballistic missiles. Iran had it all over the place, as a defense for industrial sites, key government offices, naval and military bases. Its aim is to provide total control of any nation’s airspace.

“Down the years, it’s had almost thirty improvements and upgrades. And it’s the pride and joy of Russia’s May Day Victory Parade through Red Square, right out there on huge eight-wheel trucks. Its radar can detect a ballistic missile at six hundred miles, and it launches straight up with a forward tip to the target. No need to aim it before launching.”