Power Play (19 page)

The duty officer called for every kind of technology to lock onto its guidance system, to try to identify what was plainly a ballistic missile of some description. It was not an emergency situation, since the missile was going nowhere important, just due north, headed over the Kola Peninsula and across the Barents Sea toward the permanent ice cap that covers the Arctic Ocean.

But it was making four thousand miles per hour, and unless it changed direction or stopped altogether, it would reach the North Pole in about twenty minutes.
After that, God knows.
Right now the first satellite was running out of real estate, and the NRO technicians were switching to new pictures. There was a substantial satellite gap over the North Pole, but there was surveillance over northwestern Canada, Alaska, and west to the narrow Bering Strait, which divides the North American continent from the far-eastern limit of Russia.

The NRO computer estimates, now operational, suggested the missile would eventually travel due south down longitude 130 degrees west. If it stayed on that course, it would cross the Beaufort Sea and head south across Alaska and straight out into the Pacific.

No one in the Chantilly ops room, however, thought it could possibly last that long at that speed. And twenty minutes later, during which all eyes in the now-crowded ops room were concentrated on the screens, they watched the tiny “paint” vanish as it honed in on the pole.

For five minutes there was nothing. Then it showed up again, now flying south, still very fast, before, quite suddenly, it dived nose first, straight into the tundra, smashing straight through the ice floor of the Arctic. There was a substantial explosion, which caused the screens to go fuzzy . . . and then everything went quiet.

The conclusions were obvious. The Russians had test fired a small, very fast ballistic missile, which had traveled approximately eighteen hundred
miles under its own power, and then blown up on the ice in a deserted stretch of the tundra known as the Alpha Rise. No harm done. Yet.

The interesting aspect of this was the launch site: a tiny island in a southern corner of the White Sea, a place cut off from the mainland for several months of the year, a place ten thousand miles from absolutely nowhere, except for another slightly larger desolate island upon which there was nothing except a sixteenth-century monastery that, eighty years ago, had been one of Stalin’s prison camps.

There was no runway, no lights, no control tower, no radar installations, or even a launch scaffold. By any standards, even Russian, this was the skid row of the space world, about a million light-years from the slick professionalism of the Cape Canaveral AFC, home of US Air Space Command’s 45th Space Wing with its two-mile runway.

The missile, however, in the opinion of the Chantilly experts, was almost certainly a variation of Russia’s 9K720 Iskander. The big surprise was its range. No one had ever seen these twenty-four-foot ballistic missiles travel that far before, not even half that distance.

This morning’s flight had probably been illegal under international law, but it had been launched from the very spot designated last week by the US Navy SEAL commander Captain Mack Bedford. Of all the millions of square miles in Russia, the updated Iskander-K had taken off in the shadow of Solovetsky Monastery. And that was a coincidence too far. Someone, somehow, needed to get to the bottom of this.

It was a military matter. After all, the Russians were not threatening anyone, at least not publicly. But the warning of the man from the Mossad, the urgency of his call to meet his trusted friend Mackenzie Bedford, could not be ignored. Something was going on. Captain Bedford thought it was highly sinister, and the anonymous Rani Ben Adan was certain there was a diabolical plot inside the Kremlin to hit, and hurt, the United States and probably Israel as well.

The director of the NRO, a US Air Force general, was awakened by his staff at 0430 and was sufficiently concerned by the Bedford-Solovetsky coincidence to issue an instant alert to the Pentagon and the CIA. He also fired an e-mail to Admiral Andrew Carlow, for whom it was only 0130 in Coronado. Andy was sufficiently on edge to phone Mack personally and tell him the Russians had launched a brand-new ballistic missile from
“that fucking little island you were going on about.”

Big Mack came hurtling out of bed the way you’d expect a SEAL to do. He woke up Annie, and Tommy, as he charged down the stairs to locate his encrypted cell phone. He called Rani, who answered swiftly, but had to call back because he was on his other line, talking to Nikolai Chirkov, who was on yet another cell phone, facing the wall in a deserted bus shelter in the remote fishing village of Solza, twelve miles along the coast from Severodvinsk.

Nikolai knew less than Rani, who had been in the embassy when the Israelis had detected the launch on one of their own satellites. They were not quite so advanced as the Americans and had not yet pinpointed the launch site. But they knew a ballistic missile was in the air, “from somewhere in the south of the White Sea.” Nikolai knew only that his boss, Admiral Ustinov, had gone by navy helicopter to the Solovetsky Islands.

Rani knew also of the presence of a director of China Shenzhen Technology arriving in Russia and leaving Moscow by military aircraft, destination unknown. Lieutenant Commander Nikolai believed he would understand much more in the next twenty-four hours since his boss was due back on board the
Admiral Chabanenko
later this afternoon.

It would, however, be impossible for Nikolai to get away to Moscow, or even Petrozavodsk, for a rendezvous with the man who paid him so handsomely. They would need to meet somewhere in the North, close to the Russian warship. Rani would have to do the traveling. Nikolai could take off, but he could not be gone for longer than five or six hours.

Rani said quickly, “Sunday afternoon . . . call me on the secure cell, two thirty to three o’clock. I’ll give you directions. I’ll be close.” Then the line went dead.

The Israeli agent, using his embassy’s encrypted line out of Moscow, immediately called Mack in Coronado. He was not surprised to learn how much the SEAL commander actually knew about the launch—the make of the missile, its name, speed, route, and crash landing. And, above all, where it had come from.

Rani was succinct. “Mack, I’ll know a lot more Sunday night. We’d better meet on Monday. I may be pushed for time, but I’ll get there. Frankfurt Airport, midafternoon. Call me.”

“Roger that.”

Rani went immediately to his private apartment in the embassy and began to pack for a minimum of four days away. He gathered up his “John
Carter” documents, passport, and clothes, warm for the North, and summoned an embassy driver to get him to Yaroslavskiy railway station ASAP.

Running through his mind were all the steps that a master spy should follow—the main one being “unobtrusive,” an art form in itself, the paint salesman traveling by train from Moscow to Archangel, a twenty-four-hour haul, more than seven hundred miles. On board the train he would speak to no one unless compelled to do so. He would travel first-class, a normal procedure for visiting Western businessmen, sleeping in the warm, comfortable compartments the Russians have perfected for long-distance travel.

He would have liked the instant speed and convenience of a private jet straight up to Archangel and back. But there was something ostentatious about that: a businessman flying into a very sensitive area, on a Learjet, which the Israeli Embassy favored, parking it overnight, and then flying out.

Archangel was only twenty miles from the “closed” port city of Severodvinsk, which was forbidden to foreigners, mostly because of the secretive nature of the Russian Navy. It was also the home base, for the moment, of Lieutenant Commander Nikolai Chirkov.

Rani wanted nothing about his arrival or departure to attract any attention, which was why he had elected to spend an entire day on a train. The embassy travel staff had booked him into the Zelyony Hotel, a couple of miles from the Archangel train station. He planned to spend the night there, since, even then, it may be several more hours before a rendezvous with Nikolai was possible.

However, boxed into another meeting with Mack Bedford in Frankfurt on Monday, he would need to move fast when his business with the Russian officer was concluded. And he would need a private plane to transport him directly from Archangel’s small commuter airport, Vaskovo, situated a dozen miles southwest of the city, to Moscow’s Sheremetevo-2 on Sunday night.

But that was a far less obtrusive procedure. He would arrive at Vaskovo completely unknown and blend in with the rest of the passengers in the private section. There would be no customs or passport control for an internal journey, not even check-in. He would board the just-arrived Learjet and take off immediately. No one at that airport would have the slightest idea who he was, just another Western businessman in a hurry.

Meanwhile, his driver was fighting the Friday-afternoon traffic in Moscow, trying to weave his way to Yaroslavskiy Station. They made it just before three thirty, and Rani purchased his ticket with his embassy American Express card for the long journey north, nearly three hundred miles up to Ivan the Terrible’s old hometown of Vologda and then on through the mountains and lakes of northern Russia to the White Sea.

He spent a lot of his travel time trying to think of a suitable place to meet Nikolai, but Archangel was a place of enormous shipyards and state-of-the-art nuclear plants, many designed to produce propulsion power for Russia’s newest submarines. It was a place where he would need to tread very lightly, because the FSB watches this area with immense diligence.

Anyone seeking to unearth Russia’s innermost secrets in naval nuclear development would surely head directly to Archangel and then try to make it into the naval dockyards of Severodvinsk. This was known to be a graveyard for foreign spies, no place for the careless, and really no place for Rani. Except he was likely to hear more priceless information from Lieutenant Commander Chirkov than the last twenty foreign intruders had learned collectively.

Eventually, he decided they would meet at the bigger Archangel airport, Talagi, where neither of them planned to get on a plane. They could sit in a quiet corner, facing the wrong way, and chat. Then leave in separate cars, Nikolai back to the
Admiral Chabanenko,
Rani to Vaskovo Airport.

Meanwhile, Rani settled himself into his empty compartment, removed his jacket, and pulled on his regular traveling gear—a heavy, ribbed-knit olive-drab wool sweater with shoulder patches made of matching suede and buttoned epaulettes. It was the kind of universal sweater used by many national armies, as well as by many hunters and shooters. It was V-neck and made by Sturm of Germany, whose label appeared inside.

He decided to have dinner at the second sitting at around eight thirty and then sleep for as much of the night as possible. Rani slept intermittently through the night and had a halfway decent breakfast in the dining car. They arrived late afternoon, more or less on time, in Archangel, where he removed and repacked his sweater. The cab took only five minutes to run him down to the Zelyony Hotel. Waiting in his room was a note informing Mr. John Carter a private aircraft was due to land at Vaskovo,
Sunday night, at 7:30, and would be ready to leave immediately, or any time during the night suitable to the passenger.

The restaurant in the Zelyony had the highest reputation in the city. It was thus unnecessary for Rani to move until the following day. Nikolai came through on the cell phone right on time, Sunday afternoon at two thirty.

“Talagi Airport, Archangel, six o’clock. if that’s okay with you,” said Rani.

“See you there.” Click.

Espionage, on the periphery, is mostly conducted in spoken telegrams. The rest of the time there is an atmosphere of suspicion, unrest, and nerve-wracked wariness. But Rani was comfortable with Nikolai and was anxious to see him.

They arrived in the Talagi Airport lounge at almost the same time. Nikolai went to a nearby counter and came back with coffee and a plate of sweet Russian pastries. He had much to impart, but he could stay for no more than an hour.

“The admiral’s back, and he needs me later,” he said. “I have a car with me, but I’ll have to leave by seven o’clock.”

“Not a problem. Where do we start?”

“The submarines. There were two sent into Scottish waters. One hit a trawl net, wrecked the boat, and drowned the crew. As you know, the other one wound up on the beach. But I discovered something. They were both transmitting on their sonar. They expected to be detected.

“The sub that dragged the fishermen under switched off everything after they realized something very serious had happened and made its way home. But the
Gepard
kept on transmitting until they ran out of water.

“I found out these were both trial runs to test the British and American SOSUS. Admiral Ustinov thinks they found out exactly what they needed. FOM-2 requires them to transport and deliver some serious hardware somewhere into the western Caribbean. As a result of
Gepard
’s antics, this will not be done with a submarine. Everything will be transported in a surface ship.”

“Are we talking radioactive nuclear stuff?” asked Rani.

“These are four of the most modern, fast nuclear-warhead ballistic missiles ever produced,” replied Nikolai Chirkov. “These are the weapons that
will be fired at the United States. These are FOM-2, and I now know what the code stands for . . . ”

“This can’t be real . . . You are kidding me!” replied Rani.

“While the admiral was out I took a careful look at his computer, which he had not shut down,” said Nikolai. “I didn’t need his passwords.
FOM
stands for ‘Fort Meade’; the
2,
as always in military weaponry, stands for ‘nuclear.’

“Markova and the admirals are intending to smash America’s National Security Agency in Maryland . . . destroy their code-breaking and communications systems with at least two missiles into the main headquarters building.