Shadow Hunter (18 page)

‘GUARD! SALUTE!'

The naval infantryman pinned his fingers to his forehead as the Zil limousine rolled to a halt outside the operations centre, its pristine black paint spattered with mud.

The Senior Lieutenant in charge of the guard opened the car door and saluted too, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

The Vice-Admiral ignored the young officer and strode briskly up the steps to the heavy, blast-proof, iron doors, eager to be out of the arctic wind. He heard the electromagnetic bolts click back, and the door swung open.

He entered the command centre of the Red Banner Northern Fleet. Built into a rocky hillside overlooking the town, the bunker was deep enough under the granite to withstand the megatons of nuclear destruction which the Americans had earmarked for it.

‘Did you get a good catch at the weekend, Comrade Admiral?' fawned the Captain 2nd Rank staff officer. ‘Some fine salmon for your dinner, perhaps?'

‘No such luck,' Astashenkov growled, remembering the alibi for his weekend in Moscow. ‘Nothing you could even feed to a cat! I shan't fish again until the spring.'

‘The days are getting shorter.'

‘I hate winter. It's at this time of year I wish I was commanding an
Eskadra
in the Mediterranean.'

Their footsteps echoed in the bare concrete tunnel. Ahead was the inner door, beyond which the air was filtered and recycled to exclude nuclear fallout or poison gas.

As they approached, there came again the click of
opening bolts and the door swung towards them, driven by hydraulic rams powerful enough to push back rubble if the tunnel collapsed as the result of a direct hit.

Beyond lay another corridor lined with offices; then a corner, and the door to the operations room. The Captain 2nd Rank tapped his personal security code into a keypad, then opened the door for the Admiral to enter.

Two dozen uniformed men and women saluted. Astashenkov acknowledged them with a nod. He strode to the podium in the centre of the room. Admiral Belikov's staff officer hovered in wait.

‘Good day, Comrade Vice-Admiral,' the young man bowed. ‘The Commander-in-Chief is detained. An important telephone call from Admiral Grekov. He can't attend this briefing. He asks that you report to him in his office afterwards.'

Astashenkov nodded curtly, disguising his unease. Belikov talking on the phone to the Admiral of the Fleet? It must be urgent. Normally Grekov preferred to write.

Had they got wind of his meeting with Savkin?

He sat at the small desk. Another nod. The briefing could begin.

The wall was covered with a map of the northern hemisphere, the Pole at its centre. The Captain Lieutenant briefing officer was young, blond and enthusiastic. Astashenkov remembered himself being like that many years ago.

‘This was the situation at 06.00 today,' the youth began, using a torch to project an arrow onto the map. ‘
Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya Raketnaya Ballisticheskaya.
We have eight PLARBs on patrol.'

These were nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile boats, their rockets targeted on the major cities in the United States. The newer ones were
Taifun
class, at twenty-five thousand tons the biggest submarines ever built. Each boat carried twenty missiles with a range of four thousand eight hundred miles, seven warheads per missile. Each boat could destroy one hundred and forty American towns or military bases.

This was the main reason for the Northern Fleet's
existence; to keep operational forty submarines, carrying six hundred missiles with two thousand warheads.

So, eight were at sea. Not bad, Feliks thought, considering the maintenance they needed and the amount of shore leave for the crew.

‘Four in the Barents Sea, four under the Arctic ice.'

The torch pointed to eight rings on the map. No precise positions, just the areas where the boats would patrol slowly, waiting for the orders they hoped would never come.

‘Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya,'
the briefing officer went on. PLAs were the nuclear-powered attack boats. ‘Fifteen operational.'

Out of fifty? Not so good, thought Feliks.

‘Three are in the Mediterranean, and two are currently returning from there. One is to the west of Scotland gathering intelligence on the British Navy, and one returning. Two more are on long-distance Atlantic patrol off the United States coast, and two transitting home. One of those is shadowing the US aircraft carrier
Eisenhower
. That leaves four on the barrier between North Cape and Greenland.'

‘Four PLAs to try to stop the NATO SSNs from tracking our missile boats? It's not enough!' exploded Astashenkov in exasperation.

They all knew it wasn't enough; they also knew that the American
Los Angeles
class submarines and the British
Trafalgars
were so damned quiet, it would be difficult to detect them, however many PLAs they had on patrol.

‘Permission to continue, Comrade Vice-Admiral?'

Feliks raised a hand.

‘The surface fleet. In defensive positions facing the west, the
Kiev
and the
Moskva
are co-ordinating antisubmarine tactics, with five escorts.'

‘What about the two
Sovremenys
in the harbour?'

‘Due to sail tomorrow morning. Taking on final stores.'

The Captain Lieutenant rattled off a list of ships deployed further afield, then handed over to the intelligence briefer. Astashenkov concentrated his attention.

‘The tactics in NATO's Exercise Ocean Guardian are
as predicted – what we'd expect them to be in the prelude to war.'

The boy had learned the jargon well, Astashenkov mused.

‘The US carrier battle-groups have yet to threaten the
Rodina.
One is in mid-Atlantic, the other closer to the motherland, but still near Iceland. It's the British who are nearest our shores. Our radar satellite is tracking the
Illustrious
group in the Norwegian sea. And we have reports locating one or two of their submarines in the past twenty-four hours.'

Astashenkov's eyebrows arched in anticipation.

‘The first came from a
Vishnya
intelligence vessel, north of Scotland. It heard a British helicopter trying to radio a submarine. There was no response and in desperation the pilot broke the code. He called “in clear” to
HMS Truculent
.

‘The second may have been the same boat or another
Trafalgar,
west of Trondheim, travelling northeast at speed. A PLA tracked it for over an hour.'

‘A PLA near Trondheim?' Astashenkov growled. ‘I don't remember anything from last week's. . . .'

‘Admiral Belikov, sir. The boat is under the personal orders of the Commander-in-Chief.'

‘Ah, yes . . .' he nodded, pretending to know. ‘And what do you conclude from these two – unusual – reports?'

‘The communications security breach was carelessness,' the Captain Lieutenant answered a little too quickly.

‘Or deliberate. . . .'

A silence hung in the air as they pondered the significance of the Admiral's remark.

‘Indeed, sir.'

His eyes searched the chart. It was rare for NATO submarines to be detected so easily; he'd have liked to capitalize on the situation, and maintain the tracking, but the PLA near Trondheim had lost the target. He wasn't surprised.

Admiral Andrei Belikov, Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Fleet, had a square, lined face, with dark hair,
thick at the sides but absent on top. He pushed his heavy-framed spectacles onto the bridge of his nose as Astashenkov entered his large, windowless office in the command centre.

Belikov gestured to a chair.

‘Sit down, Feliks. Interesting briefing?'

‘Nothing you don't know already, I imagine,' Astashenkov replied pointedly.

Belikov looked momentarily discomfited.

‘Meaning?'

‘I'm sure you know what's going on without having to attend a briefing, Andrei.'

‘You're annoyed that you didn't know about that PLA in the Norwegian Sea. I'm not surprised; I would be too, in your place. But Grekov insisted on secrecy.'

He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He'd planned to involve his deputy in the KGB operation, but later rather than sooner. The chances of failure had always been high and if the plan came to nothing, the fewer who knew about it the better.

‘Feliks, there's a little scheme underway, involving us and the intelligence departments which, if it's successful, could be the most significant since James Walker gave us US Navy submarine secrets.

‘The British and Americans have developed a new mine which they believe is undetectable and unbeatable. If it came to war, they'd use them to close our harbours. They call them “Moray” mines, after that eel with the sharp teeth . . .'

‘Yes. I know about them, of course.'

Belikov paused for effect.

‘We think we're about to get our hands on one!'

‘What? How?'

‘The boat detected near Trondheim was
HMS Truculent.
We were expecting her. That PLA you hadn't been told about – it was there to pick up her trail, so we'd be ready to receive her and her little gift!'

‘A British submarine? Coming here?' Astashenkov gasped. ‘To
give
us a secret weapon?'

Belikov folded his spectacles.

‘We
need
that mine, Feliks! They say it's undetectable by sonar. If the Americans and the British were to seed our coastline with those weapons, they could destroy the Northern Fleet before it fired a shot!

‘Grekov himself ordered the KGB to give it top priority.'

‘But how has this been done?'

Andrei Belikov savoured his reply.

‘The key's in the hands of a very old man who lives near here –
exists
might be a better word. A prisoner of the State. He's close to death now, but he has a son. A son who'll do almost anything to see his father free before he dies.'

* * *

The Moscow correspondent of the American Broadcasting Corporation couldn't stop the grin spreading across his fresh, Nordic face.
Glasnost
had opened countless doors for foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, but he'd never imagined the day would come when he'd be sitting inside the long, silver fuselage of a TU-95 maritime reconnaissance bomber, wearing the flying suit of a Soviet naval aviator.

Known as the
Bear-D
to NATO, the plane carried four giant turboprop engines, with double rows of contra-rotating propellers. The nose of the aircraft was glazed for observers to watch the sea below, and large bulges below the fuselage contained radar for locating shipping.

The pilot introduced himself simply as Valentin. He led the correspondent and his cameraman up a narrow, aluminium ladder into the cramped interior, followed by a technician from Gostelradio.

‘When there's something to see, I'll tell you,' Valentin explained. ‘Your camera can film through the glass.'

The compartment was crammed with radar scopes. There was nowhere to sit.

‘Until then, you will be more comfortable in the back. There are seats there.'

He pointed to a narrow hatch.

‘Jeez! Are we sure 'bout all this, Nick?' the American cameraman whispered from the side of his mouth.

‘I guess we do as the man says,' the correspondent replied.

Passing the video camcorder ahead of them, they squeezed through the tunnel across the top of the bomb bay to the compartment behind the wing, which was equipped with seats as the pilot had promised.

It was going to be a long day. They'd left Moscow at 5 a.m., flying to Murmansk on a scheduled Aeroflot run. It was now 8.30 a.m. and they had to be back in time to catch the 3pm flight to Moscow, for a press conference with Admiral Grekov. Their material had to be on the satellite to New York soon after midnight if they were to make the evening news programmes on all four US networks.

It had never happened before – American journalists taking pictures of the US Navy from a Soviet spy plane. When offered it as a pool facility the networks had jumped at it.

They strapped themselves in as the first turboprop fired. The crewman thrust headsets into their hands, indicating that it was going to get noisy in there.

They were facing rearwards, and the seatbelts bit into their stomachs as the
Bear
accelerated down the long runway. Heavy with fuel for the long flight, it seemed to race ahead eternally before lifting sluggishly into the air.

There was no window in the rear compartment – just one dim, neon tube set into the roof. Claustrophobia gripped the two Americans, and from the expression on the face of the Russian cameraman, they knew he was similarly affected. It wasn't going to be fun, this assignment.

They slept a little. Two full hours passed before the pilot called them.

Forward of the crawlway, the radar operators turned from their screens to stare with unrestrained curiosity. Having Americans aboard their plane was an idea as alien to them as to the TV team.

‘In five minutes you'll see something,' Valentin shouted through the intercom. He'd connected their headsets to the internal circuit.

‘Where are we?' the correspondent called back.

‘About five hundred kilometres east of Iceland.'

‘There's a lot of water down there. Looks pretty empty to me.'

‘Empty to you, but not to me,' the pilot boasted. ‘We can
always
find your ships when we want to.'

‘Oh, yeah?'

The two cameramen squeezed onto the single seat in the forward observation bubble and adjusted their lenses.

‘You have a little microphone?' the pilot enquired.

‘I've got a neck mike, if that's what you mean.'

‘Put it inside your earphone. I'm switching to the frequency the Americans use. If they speak, you will hear.'