Power Play (17 page)

His outlook deepened as the Lufthansa flight made its way over the Central European plain toward the Russian capital. He understood his objective had been gained. Mack Bedford was about to get the right people onside in the United States. If Mack said the surveillance should be stepped up, and he advised the satellite observations to be adjusted and instructed the CIA to investigate Shenzhen Technology, then it would be done.

But deep within Rani’s soul there was a fear: that things were moving faster than he understood, that Nikolai might find himself behind the eight ball, and that Moscow was even further advanced with this plan than either he or the Russian lieutenant commander realized.

For now he could only wait, and watch. But his heart was heavy as the Lufthansa Boeing came screaming down, over the flat fields to the northwest of Moscow, toward Sheremetevo-1 Airport.

 

Nikita Markova was one hell of a long way from home, his vast Kremlin apartment he regarded as a temporary pied-à-terre in Moscow. His real home, in his own mind, was a picturesque small town near the Crimean coast of the Ukraine, Massandra, famous for its wine making, its fabulous Louis XIII–style châteaus, and its subtropical climate fanned by warm breezes off the Black Sea.

President Markova could perhaps have been forgiven if he’d gone into acute shock as he walked through the cold rain, fourteen hundred miles from his homeland, almost as far north as possible that one could go and yet still be in Russia. To his left stretched the chilly White Sea. Beyond that the even colder waters of the Barents Sea and then the Arctic ice cap.

President Markova, wearing one of those dark-green Australian cattle drover’s raincoats over his heavy sweater, plodded gamely through the mud, crossing the long dam between the two islands, flanked by his staff and by Admiral Ustinov and navy chief Admiral Rankov. There were at least twenty more members of this working party, all walking, heads down into the rain. The wind came in from the North, and the Russian president,
from the warm South, felt like a total stranger in his own land. But his heart was alight with anticipation.

Up ahead, trundling over the rough causeway built by monks two hundred years ago, was a large army truck, high and wide, with a major construction on its rear bed. For anyone who had ever attended Russia’s May Day Victory Parade through Red Square, it was an unmistakable sight—the Mobile-TEL, the Red Army’s most advanced missile launcher. Clearly visible were the conical heads of two medium-range rockets: the business end of the top secret Russian 9K720 Iskander SS-26, their most lethal tactical ballistic missile.

Up ahead of this slow-moving convoy was the cold, desolate island of Bolshaya Muksalma. Behind them was Solovetsky Island. Just out of sight, back through the pine forest, was the Solovetsky Monastery, where many of the walkers had lived for the past eighteen months.

The mobile-theater Iskander system had been for many years in almost perpetual stages of development and improvement. The missile was always world class and appeared to have not only a cluster-munitions warhead but also a fuel-air explosive-enhanced blast version, plus an earth penetrant for bunker busting.

It hurtled into its target at supersonic speed, following a quasi-ballistic path, with brilliant evasive maneuvers if necessary, pulling up to thirty Gs to evade an antiballistic missile. It flew a relatively flat trajectory. At speeds of almost four thousand miles per hour, it traveled low, never leaving the earth’s atmosphere.

The Iskander was twenty-four feet long and weighed close to four tons. Its accuracy was near legendary among the world’s missile technicians and scientists. The Americans had a better one, but not that much better. No other nation had a missile anything like the latest Iskander. With its superb accuracy, reliability, and ability to launch virtually from anywhere, it brought a whole new approach to precision bombing, even in the face of superior enemy fighters and air defenses.

The Iskander was designed to destroy anything. It had a near-flawless, failure-proof record both in launch preparation and in its automatic-computation flight. The transportability of its system vehicles made it unique among ballistic weapons for every friend of Russia.

There was only one glitch. International treaties for guided missiles ban nations from increasing the range of the unmanned rocket-propelled
flying bombs. The Iskander-M was for years restricted to a distance of between four and five hundred kilometers as the principal system being used by the Russian armed forces. But rumors abounded that Russia had the capability for flying the Iskander much farther.

Development for the top secret K-model was perhaps the most highly classified area of the entire Russian arsenal. For the past couple of years, there had been silence. Hardly anyone, even deep inside the Russian defense industry, knew when and where the system was being improved to provide the intermediate range the Russian government desired.

However, within the Russian Navy there was one man who guessed what was happening. His name was Lieutenant Commander Nikolai Chirkov, and unhappily for the Kremlin, he did not approve. And now there were two, because Chirkov was a committed spy, and his “contact,” Rani Ben Adan from the Mossad, agreed with him.

If you counted Mack Bedford, there were three, because Rani had guessed Moscow was looking for a slimmed-down nuclear-warhead missile to fly at high speed and for longer than any other missile of its type had ever done. And Mack had believed him.

The two guided missiles, jutting out from under their tarpaulins on the back of that truck rumbling over the rough, rain-swept causeway between Solovetsky and Bolshaya Muksalma, represented months and months of work. The warhead had been worked on, and the aerodynamics had been updated. The letter
K,
in
K-model,
stood for
Krylataya,
meaning “winged,” which sounded awfully good to Nikita Markova.

The scientists were pleased with the progress. The Iskander-K was no longer a five-hundred-kilometer short-range cruise; it was programmed to travel more than three thousand kilometers, possibly twenty-one hundred miles, before pounding into its target with a nuclear warhead packing megatons of explosive power, way beyond the comprehension of ordinary men.

If the forthcoming tests were accurate and running concurrently with the blueprints back in the monastery, this was the breakthrough for which Markova had been praying. This morning he would know. Both missiles had been preprogrammed for speed, distance, and guidance. A massive target had been jettisoned from a Russian Antonov-AN225, the world’s largest and heaviest jet aircraft.

Adjustments had been made to the forward loading ramp, since the
“target” had been dropped from below the nose cone of the aircraft while flying at high speed. A half-dozen parachutes were used to guide it through the ice-cold air, way beyond the North Pole, over which the new missile was scheduled to fly.

The target itself was a long wooden structure with steel-ribbed base beams to protect it from the impact of the landing. Right now it stood high, wide, and frozen on the tundra, six hundred miles beyond the pole. It had no doors or windows to avoid the possibility of a family of polar bears making an entry and finding themselves blown to high heaven by the entry of the Iskander-K.

Its latitude and longitude numbers had been fed into the missile’s computer, although this was not so much a test of accuracy as one of distance. There was no point continuing with the missile experiment if the hardware could not fly far enough.

The rain-battered convoy reached terra firma on the far side of the causeway, where they stepped onto Bolshaya Muksalma, the lonely spot upon which the launch would take place. Not even the US satellites probed here, since there was no human life and no military presence of any description. Until now.

The Mobile-TEL howled in protest as it jolted over the rising ground, its rear wheels spinning in the deep mud as it lurched on, bearing the enormous weight of the launcher and almost eight tons of solid missile, fueled up and armed with high explosive. This may have seemed excessive, as they were only aiming to locate and blast a Russian shed.

The scientists, however, had insisted the voyage of Iskander-K be thoroughly authentic: weight, speed, fuel, warhead, under the atrocious weather conditions that can occur anytime over the polar ice cap. The regular single-stage solid propellant, which drives the missile, had been modernized to a supreme degree. And they were almost ready.

There were just a few hundred yards more to march in this wet and freezing hellhole to watch the launch of the missile that would put Mother Russia back where she belonged in the world pecking order: number one.

When finally the Mobile-TEL swerved to the right onto rough, soaking ground, a young army officer walked in front, holding a GPS and a compass. He signaled the huge truck into position, keeping one eye on the flickering indicator as it searched for magnetic north. When he was satisfied the launcher was aiming in the correct direction, he signaled the
driver to raise the hydraulic gear, lifting the first missile into launch position, aiming due north.

President Markova watched from a distance of one hundred yards, standing in a small group comprising Admirals Rankov and Ustinov, plus the presidents of the Belarus corporation VirusBlokAda and the Moscow-based Kaspersky Corporation, both world experts in the field of cyber warfare.

With them was an unannounced guest, a Chinese executive wearing a massive raincoat and constantly wiping off his rain-lashed spectacles. In answer to Admiral Rankov’s discreet question about the man’s identity, Admiral Ustinov had replied, “Computer interception. He’s here from some Chinese consultant firm. A guest of Vassily Levchenko.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I think it’s Wang or Yang. I didn’t quite catch it. But he smiles a lot.”

“All Chinese smile a lot, just before they rip you off blind and copy all your designs.”

Ustinov chuckled. “I got the impression we were after his designs, not the other way around.”

“Never know with wily Orientals,” replied Admiral Rankov, borrowing a phrase he had learned, and treasured, years ago from his old American friend Admiral Arnold Morgan.

In fact, Mr. Wang/Yang was a great deal more interesting than that. He was head of technical design and development at China Shenzhen GSH Technology Corporation. He was the man who would create the satellite beam that would attempt to zap America’s nuclear football.

President Markova had paid a fortune to have Mr. Wang/Yang move into the Solovetsky Monastery for a month. He and Foreign Minister Levchenko were the only two people who knew the true identity of the Pearl River Delta scientist.

Mr. Wang/Yang had cost the Russians 5 million US dollars, which had subsequently been divided equally with his home corporation. Which was probably why, despite the weather, he was smiling broadly at this unusual view from the pig’s back. It was, after all, the year of the dog. The pig was not scheduled to take center stage until next year, 2019.

All eyes were fixed on the Mobile-TEL. Technicians punched in final numbers on the computer screens in the truck. The Iskander-K’s course and speed were set.

With an ear-shattering roar, the ballistic missile edged slowly up and then thundered skyward, flame blasting from its stern exhaust, scorching trees growing peacefully forty yards in front of the launcher.

Houston would have said coolly, “We have liftoff.”

President Markova jumped up and down in his sea boots, clapping and cheering, as the rocket accelerated into the leaden skies, visible for only a few fleeting seconds before it ripped into the low, gray cloud base and hammered its way into the northern heavens.

They could still hear it, faintly growling and crackling in the no-man’s-land of the earth’s middle atmosphere, adjusting its course, making Mach 6—more than thirty-five hundred miles an hour—and now on a beeline for the North Pole, twelve hundred miles from Bolshaya Muksalma.

The men from the monastery were glued to their cell phones, speaking to the “spotters” posted in two observation posts in northern Russia, watching for Iskander to come streaking through the skies overhead on its deliberately low trajectory, if possible below the clouds, below any radar’s line of sight.

And now it was flashing through clearer skies over the White Sea, driving north at its cruising speed of four thousand miles per hour, knocking off the ninety-mile crossing from Bolshaya to the south shore of the Kola Peninsula in one and a half minutes. The Russian Naval spotter, on the cliff close to the little seaport of Olenica, caught it in the southern sky four miles out, and it was past him in five seconds. He had no time even to raise his camera.

Across the peninsula the Iskander blazed its trail, covering the almost two-hundred-mile span of wilderness, tundra, forest, and low mountains in precisely three minutes before ripping over the headland of Teriberskij, forty-five miles east of Murmansk, on the shores of the Barents Sea. The navy spotter on the headland had even less time to make a proper observation, but he saw it, clear as a shooting star and, he thought, a hell of a lot faster.

He snapped out the agreed wording on his cell:
Teriberskij to Bolshaya . . . Isky running low and fast . . . on time and on course . . .

The missile hurtled north over the Barents Sea, covering the distance of more than four hundred miles across the broad and lonely acres of one of the world’s coldest oceans in less than seven minutes. By now it was
level with the largest of all the Norwegian islands, Spitsbergen, the only populated place on the Svalbard archipelago, the final outpost before the polar cap. North of here, there is only the permanent ice shelf of the Arctic Ocean.