Power Play (36 page)

Baikonur was a place both the Soviet and the Russian authorities had attempted for years to claim was merely a spacecraft station for peaceful exploration of the planets. Indeed, its history had been punctuated with now legendary missions—Vostok-1, the first manned spacecraft in human history launched from here in 1961 with the Soviet Air Force colonel Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin at the controls. The first man-made satellite, Sputnik-1, launched from Baikonur, and so did Luna-1. Generations of Soviet spacecraft, from Soyuz onward, made this isolated launch site their home base.

But so did the chilling R-7 Semyorka, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. And this was the primary purpose of Baikonur—to test liquid-fueled ballistic missiles. The secret name for the place was State Test Range No. 5, and it was known to only a select few, even in the Soviet
Union. The US Air Force U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance plane photographed the notorious desert missile test range on August 5, 1957.

Over and over, the Russian authorities had claimed it was dispensing with Baikonur as a military facility and intended to utilize it only for the peaceful exploration of space. But in 2018 it was still there as a missile base, although it was run as the Joint Venture Space Center with Kazakhstan. Nonetheless, even the Russian Air Force had never denied it might be deployed militarily under special circumstances.

Admiral Bradfield considered it was entirely his business to know all about the mysterious test range in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And he’d made certain the satellites were properly aligned to photograph it at all times.

He’d already made some fairly basic calculations: if America had to launch a retaliatory strike against an attempt on Fort Meade, he would, on reflection, suggest an immediate US strike not only on Chekhov Command and on the Northern Fleet bases
but also
on Baikonur. Because if Russia was
that
serious about conflict, the one surprise it might spring would be a sudden ICBM land-based launch, sending a cruise missile straight over the North Pole to Fort Greely, Alaska, home to some of America’s most brilliantly engineered interceptors.

Mark Bradfield had no intention of putting up with that. He’d more or less decided on a preemptive navy strike on Baikonur, calculating it was only fifteen hundred miles from the northern reaches of the Persian Gulf to the significant part of Kazakhstan. There were constant US submarines patrolling off Iraq and Iran. It would take a well-targeted Trident less than twenty minutes to reach Baikonur.

And it was only two thousand miles from the eastern Mediterranean—and twenty-four hundred miles from the Barents Sea, both regular patrol areas for the US Navy. The Kazakh test range was such an obvious objective, in the event of a dire emergency, that it would be not much short of negligent to allow it to remain operational. No, a strike on that historic but sinister Russian facility was unavoidable.

It was a whole lot of history to blow up. But, in Admiral Bradfield’s opinion, President Markova should have thought about that before he came up with this lunatic plan to hit Fort Meade.

The US Navy CNO picked up the telephone and asked to be connected, encrypted, to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Zack Lancaster.

 

Admiral Ustinov had run into a dead end halfway along Bolshaya Ordynka Street, south of the Moscow River. The Israeli Embassy, almost under siege from officers of Russian Naval Intelligence and strong-arm agents of the FSB, had resolutely refused to reveal anything about the identity or whereabouts of Mr. John Carter, paint salesman.

Embassy officials had dealt with Russian inquiries with a combination of deadpan ignorance, mystified disbelief, and mock helpfulness. They had reacted to threats, persuasion, and even bribes with the same cool self-righteousness.

The Russian argument could loosely be described as loaded. They wanted to know, in words of one syllable precisely, who was this Carter? This British businessman who had arrived at Talagi Airport, Archangel, and met for more than an hour with a Russian Naval lieutenant commander who had, that same evening, been shot dead for spying?

And not just regular spying. This hitherto trusted naval executive was in the process of betraying some of the innermost secrets of the Russian Northern Fleet. That included data about guided-missile ships, missile tests, classified Russian plans to deal with their enemies, scientific developments in nuclear weapons, and top secret plans, known only to the fleet commanders and the president of the Republic of Russia.

In fact, the Russian field agents were guessing about most of the above. Their objective was not to be right or even correct about anything. It was mostly to express outrage and to appear so furious with the naval spy that they would stop at nothing to identify his Western contact.

None of this phased the Israelis in any way, their principal stance being that Mr. Carter was British, and how could they possibly know, or even verify, one fact about him? The counterattack of the Russians was that the private aircraft used to transport John Carter out of Archangel had been
chartered by the Israeli Embassy, and did they normally go around chartering expensive Learjets for foreigners about whom they knew nothing?

Also, they wanted to know who paid for the aircraft. They had already checked with the charter company and ascertained for themselves that the embassy had paid the bill. Now they wanted to know who had repaid the money, and how, and from where, had the funds arrived?

Again, the Israelis had answered with practiced smoothness. The head of the paint corporation, in Birmingham, England, was Mr. Morris Goldman, a Jewish tycoon whose parents had fled Poland in World War II. Morris had been brought up in North London in the Orthodox faith, attended Carmel College in Oxfordshire, and served in the British Army as a lieutenant in one of the Hussar regiments.

When the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, Lieutenant Morris Goldman, now in the family business, had raced to Israel and signed on to help General Moshe Dayan in the Armored Division, as did many young Jewish officers from all over the world. As a former British army tank commander, he served with distinction and became a quiet supporter of the state of Israel, one of the
sayanin—
those of Jewish blood who would do anything in their power, at any time, to help their spiritual home in the Middle East.

The Israeli Embassy in Moscow had received, via Tel Aviv, a request from Mr. Goldman to assist his chief sales representative, John Carter, who was coming to Moscow for a few days. They had complied with the request and chartered an aircraft for him to leave Archangel at an awkward time.

Beyond that, they knew nothing. They had asked to see his travel documents, which were all in order. But they had never even spoken to him, having simply provided the aircraft and e-mailed the boss, Morris Goldman, in Birmingham. The flight was, of course, domestic, not flying beyond Russian borders.

This was an excellent labyrinth of extraordinary untruths, since Mr. Morris Goldman did not exist
.
Neither did the paint corporation in Birmingham, beyond being a shell company registered in London. The Israelis used it often to cover up various activities of a nefarious nature.

They fervently wished they could assist the Russian authorities. Indeed, they had tried to contact Mr. Goldman, but he was, sadly, unwell and convalescing at his home in Barbados. As for John Carter, he had left no trace after arriving at Moscow’s international airport on that apparently fateful Sunday evening of September 2.

The Israeli cover story was watertight. The Russians could not crack it, no matter how they approached the problem. At the rougher edges of this strange encounter in Bolshaya Ordynka Street, the agents came very close to confirming that the men who worked in the Lubyanka did have the legal right to undertake “targeted killing” if they deemed it in the overall interests of Mother Russia.

To one or two Israeli officials, this did induce vivid illusions of their Moscow embassy being taken out with high explosive by the obviously very angry and very disbelieving Russians. But the ruthlessness of these Israeli guardians of their beloved country was a truth known the world over. Even the Russians understood that the chances of their own embassy in Hayarkon Street, Tel Aviv, surviving more than seven minutes after any kind of attack on Israeli personnel in Moscow, was, well, somewhere between remote and out of the question.

So the Russian intelligence chiefs found themselves quivering with fury in front of an opponent who was feigning peace and honesty, but for two bits would have opened fire, as it were. And just what did they know? If Nikolai Chirkov had reported to them before he died, did that mean the Americans now understood all of the ramifications of FOM-2?

Admiral Ustinov had promised Admiral Rankov he would find the identity of this John Carter. He had failed to do that. It was almost impossible to create a dossier on a probable spy when it was not even clear what country the man was in. Where to start? That was the question that plagued the head of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

So far he had berated Military Intelligence, and Naval Intelligence, and the FSB, to no avail. The admiral had ranted on about a simple task, with all the mighty resources of Russian intel backing them, and the result was a “big, fat, fucking zero.”

Admiral Ustinov informed them all that he had no wish to return to Admiral Rankov with this news, since it would require several of the agents and intelligence officers to start looking for new places of employment, and he understood how unsettling this could be.

He did not mention his own likely fate in this connection because, as a resident of sunny Volgograd, he did not wish to start contemplating Siberia and the probable discomfort of a salt mine. In truth, he felt sorry for all of the Russian investigators because this John Carter was one cunning foreign bastard, and these fucking Jews in the Moscow embassy were several steps worse.

The fact remained, whoever he was, this Carter had somehow made the journey north from Moscow to Archangel, almost certainly on the train, since station staff claimed they may have seen him, and Russian field staff had talked to a taxi driver, the one who had picked up Carter and driven him to Vaskovo Airport, where the Learjet was waiting.

They had, naturally, checked out the hotel where the cabbie had picked him up, and there they had drawn yet another complete blank. Yes, a Mr. John Carter had stayed one night, paid in cash, and left. No forwarding address.

Which left Admiral Ustinov wondering, like everyone else, who really was this fraud British businessman who had driven out to Talagi Airport and met the same Russian Naval officer the FSB had shot dead later that same night? The one thing Admiral Ustinov guessed he was not doing was selling paint.

And the great, shuddering question he had to face was precisely how much did Lieutenant Commander Chirkov tell the West about FOM-2? Maybe nothing, because the agents who tracked him to Café Lesnaya in Vologda had watched him every second and swore to God he had made only one call on his cell phone, and that had been to the Hotel Vologda, where he booked a room, confirmed by the hotel.

According to the highly experienced agents, there was absolutely no possibility he had revealed anything during his ill-fated stay in Vologda. They’d picked him up at the train station and never once let him out of their sight. The words they heard suggested, more likely, a girlfriend being informed Nikolai’s boss had released him for a few days. The call could not have lasted more than five seconds before they blew his head apart.

It just didn’t seem like a master spy’s conversation. Nonetheless, thought the admiral, those agents were jumpy enough to kill him instantly, before he could say one more word. And the smashed mobile phone revealed nothing.

The key remained, as it had always been, John Carter. He had vanished and was likely to stay vanished. However, there was one aspect of the entire FOM-2 scheme that pleased Admiral Ustinov. If Chirkov had revealed anything about the mission, there would surely have been some reaction from the Americans.

Perhaps some complaint on a diplomatic level, maybe a clear and obvious example of US satellite interference, maybe CIA men being apprehended on the shores of the White Sea, maybe the sighting of a US
submarine somewhere in the North, watching and observing. God knows, decided Admiral Ustinov, if we had been tipped off the United States was planning to hit the Lubyanka with a cruise missile, we’d have played hell . . . Foreign Office to US ambassador, Russian president to US president. We’d probably have gone to nuclear alert.

As a general rule, the admiral considered the West a complete puzzle. There had not been the slightest hint of US concern throughout the FOM-2 project. Not one of the vast army of Russian “spooks” in the United States had come up with one suggestion that the United States knew anything. Not even from the two Romanian moles, inserted into the CIA in the past two years.

The silence of the Americans was most unusual. And Admiral Ustinov was torn between two conclusions: (1) that they knew nothing, suspected nothing, and intended to do nothing; (2) that they knew plenty and were preparing a gigantic hit on the Republic of Russia at the first sign of aggression from his own hawkish president.

He knew as well as anyone that the Cold War was still here. He knew the size of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. He knew that the Americans would be more quickly into their stride if it ever came to a conflict. He most certainly knew that almost every day American reconnaissance aircraft probed Russia’s borders, trying to locate gaps in the air defenses.