Power Play (33 page)

When the infrastructure was added—cranes, couple of tugs, harbor launch, gangways, water lines, fuel tanks, electronics, office equipment,
accommodations, forklift loaders, ammunition storage, much of which could be shipped from Norfolk—the bill would probably approach $1.4 billion. In major military spending terms, very little, not in return for a brand-new, secret base in a different country, northeastern Atlantic, right on the edge of the GIUK Gap and its SOSUS guardian.

“Not bad,” muttered Mack Bedford. “Not half bad at all.”

 

It was much quieter this time as the transporter erector launcher lurched across the causeway to the tiny island of Bolshaya Muksalma, headed for the clearing from where the second Russian test launch would take place.

There were, again, two Iskander-K missile cones protruding from above the tarpaulin warhead covers, and the big overhead swing doors were tightly sealed. Behind the TELAR there was one jeep containing a team of just four missilemen, all from the monastery. Inside the cab of the TELAR were four launch technicians, two of whom would not be required so long as the first Iskander-K lifted off correctly and swung onto its homing course.

There were no guests, no VIPs, no one who was not absolutely essential for an accurate and trouble-free launching. Dr. Chon himself was in the main laboratory with Dr. Yang, both pacing, watching the screens, praying there would be no blip when the lead missile streaked across the Kanin Peninsula and then ducked south and north for its two crossings of Novaya Zemlya.

The driver maneuvered the TELAR into place, facing northeast, and the missilemen punched the final numbers into the rocket’s guidance system. The gates to the launcher opened, and the first Iskander-K rose slowly upward into a vertical position.

The technicians moved swiftly into the countdown phase, and in the soft, cold early-morning light, the Iskander-K ignited. With a deafening roar of pure combustion, it moved at first slowly and then accelerated toward the heavens, cleaving its way into the rose-colored sky, its afterburners leaving a fiery red trail in its wake. The few onlookers stared as it
swerved and then settled on its course of zero-four-zero, racing northeast, straight for the narrows that lead directly out of the White Sea.

Back in the basement of the monastery, Dr. Chon watched white-knuckled as it cleaved its way across the screen, running at four thousand miles per hour, directly at the Kanin headland. He knew the missile’s built-in system was scanning the empty skies, flashing out the radar beams, watching for any form of impediment.

And now it was scanning the high land all around Kanin Point, where the Russian Navy spotter had his camera aimed high, with his cell phone open directly to the monastery.

The missile hurtled through the skies right above him, and he snapped three pictures. Back in the lab, Dr. Chon’s wide Korean face was split by an enormous grin. There had been no blip on the screen; the radar on the Iskander-K cruise had made no distinction between sea and land.

This looked like a triumph. Twice more, and it would be perfect. Within moments, the second and third tests were under way, and the results were the same. No change. The radar flashed onto the Novaya Zemlya landmass without breaking stride, and then it did it again.

The Iskander-K, the modernized veteran of a thousand battlefields, was setting the pace into the twenty-first century. Dr. Chon knew precisely the adjustments he had made, and now he was watching living proof of his success.

“Yes,” he told himself, “that is a job very well done. If the Russians get this thing into the air somewhere along the Panama Canal, there is no way the Iskander-K can miss the biggest building in Fort Meade.”

He turned once more, with satisfaction, to the tiny paint flashing across his screen. He watched it change to a more northerly course, up toward the ice cap. He watched it racing over the Arctic Ocean, now making a beeline up the forty-degree easterly line of longitude.

Dr. Chon saw it race over the final Arctic waters and then flash across the ice floes, with their peaks and valleys, rippling ice fields and ridges, flying critically low at the highest possible speed. “That’s a very nice missile,” he murmured to himself. “Very obedient, very well prepared. I’d be surprised if even the Americans could stop it.”

 

Captain Bedford had been shopping in the local diving store and purchased a couple of dark-blue scuba tanks, mask, and air line, all of which he wore with the practiced ease of an underwater professional.

In the normal course of his duties, the hefty tanks strapped to his back would signify the imminent destruction of a foreign warship. The SEALs’ great hallmark of achievement is, after all, known as BUD (basic underwater demolition). As Mack himself was apt to illuminate,
No bullshit.

But today was more relaxed. None of the large freighters moored alongside were in any danger. The SEAL commander was just sightseeing, chugging out of the harbor with driver Michael O’Malley at the controls of a twenty-foot Boston whaler.

They were headed around the lighthouse at St. John’s Point and into the outer waters of Inver Bay. Somewhere along that north shore, Mack planned to go over the side and take a careful look at the ocean floor, especially down near the village of Bruckless, where Donegal Bay becomes, very briefly, McSwyne’s Bay.

This was the place Mack Bedford was recommending for the new base. There were a couple of hundred people in Bruckless who might not think
much of it. But Americans were highly skilled at making people rich, and, generally speaking, the poor Irish residents of this near-bankrupt country, even those who had a nice view of McSwyne’s Bay, would jump through seven hoops in exchange for a million bucks.

They chugged on along the leeward side of the six-mile peninsula. Mack was amazed at the clarity of the water. It had an Atlantic chill to it as autumn approached, but it was so clear, and inshore it was like crystal, all the way to the bright, sandy bottom.

Three times Mack went over the side, kicking downward with his big SEAL flippers, and now as he prepared for his fourth dive, they were right off the village, with a clear view of the ancient round tower in the grounds of St. Conal’s Church.

Mack glanced up, then tipped over backward, out of the boat and into the bay. There was some swaying eel grass toward the shore, but the water remained clear and unpolluted. Mack thought it was the best ocean water he’d ever dived in. And the seabed was not littered with trash.

There were no wrecks, no discarded bikes or machinery. In fact, this ocean floor was pristine. No other word did it. Mack swam around underwater for twenty minutes and returned to the surface with an unmistakable feeling of mission accomplished. If the US Navy could not build a new base here, they probably couldn’t build one anywhere.

He climbed back into the whaler and stripped off his wet suit and flippers. Dressed comfortably in a sport shirt and dark-blue Aran Islands sweater, he took a drive along the coast road to the distant headland of Glen Bay. Far from finding himself stumped as to a suitable location for a SEAL base training area, he found it hard to locate anywhere that wasn’t almost perfect.

The land on the north side of Donegal Bay had everything: Long sandy beaches, most of the time sparsely occupied. There were undulating country roads and lanes to run and train. A little farther inland the twenty-two-hundred-foot Blue Stack Mountains rose almost sheer from the long, wide flatland below.

As a place to maintain the fitness of US Navy SEALS, it could scarcely have been better. Mack decided that this was some kind of omen, that he had stumbled upon the greatest SEAL training landscape he had ever seen, and it was pure destiny, since he had been searching for something else.

As he and Michael were driving home at the end of the afternoon, he
stumbled upon something that proved his journey to Donegal had indeed been touched with stardust. In the little town of Mountcharles, midway between Donegal Town and Inver, he ran headlong into the world headquarters of one of the biggest stone-quarrying operations in Ireland. In this half-pint village were the offices of the nationally renowned McMonagle Stone, the largest importers and stonemasons in the business, proprietors of five Donegal quarries.

Mack could not believe his luck.
“STOP THE CAR!”
he yelled, and Michael was so startled he almost ran into a bus.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing. Lemme out.”

Mack charged across the street and into the offices of the giant stone corporation. He scanned a handful of brochures and shoved them into his pocket. The headline on the brochure stuck in his mind:
A product riven from the rugged landscape adjacent to Ireland’s Atlantic coastline.

Mack charged back across the street and dived into the Mercedes, explaining briefly to Michael O’Malley, “When you’re building harbors, you gotta have stone, right?”

“Well, I think that would be correct,” said the driver.

“And it’s the main subject been bothering me for a couple of days,” replied Mack. “I mean the distances we might have to transport it. And right over there, I can see enough natural stone to repave the city of Washington.” He stared out at the beautifully chiseled stonework on the McMonagle campus.

Mack decided he’d seen enough and would return to America tomorrow. Michael drove him back to the hotel, and he checked in with Admiral Bradfield’s Pentagon office, requesting an airline booking, Shannon to Washington, unless there was a naval flight going to Norfolk, Virginia, which could pick him up.

Mack spent the early part of the evening writing up his notes and marking the chart he had hijacked from the SPECWARCOM library in faraway Coronado. He dined in the hotel’s excellent restaurant—Irish smoked salmon and then a local shellfish concoction cooked in a creamy white sauce, mussels, lobster claws, and clams.

The SEAL commander from Maine believed he might have eaten better seafood, but certainly not in living memory. He took a phone call at
around nine o’clock informing him he was booked, business class, on an Aer Lingus flight to Washington, leaving Shannon tomorrow at 1:00 p.m.

He did a couple of swift deals with the proprietor, to leave his scuba gear here until he returned, probably with several other naval officers. He ordered Irish sausages, eggs, and bacon for 7:00 a.m. and summoned Michael with the car for a 7:30 nonstop, south to Shannon. He slept the sleep of the righteous, with the sound of Donegal Bay’s quiet waters lapping outside his window.

 

Tamara Burda’s Delta flight from Washington touched down on the long runway just west of the Missouri River shortly before noon (local). It was her first day’s assignment beyond the high walls of the Russian Embassy after more than two years of training.

At twenty-six, she had served her time and was now a qualified Russian field agent (spy). She was obeying one of the cardinal rules as they applied to agents working alone and far from base:
Never, ever, travel directly to your ops area.
Always get a ticket to somewhere different, and make your final approach from an unusual direction, thus confusing the life out of your own paper trail.
Where’s Tamara? God knows, she wasn’t on a regular flight.

Which was why this dark-haired Slavic beauty was standing somewhat bewildered in the airport of the biggest city in Nebraska, hard on the Iowa border, more than five hundred miles from where she was supposed to be, the city of Littleton, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The embassy’s Midwest Desk, down on the lower floor of the building, had arranged her trip, and in her briefcase she carried a document that contained the most valuable information—provided by two of the Russian “sleepers” who had worked servicing the electronics in the Pentagon since 1990.

These two comparatively low-grade technicians had revealed the precise frequencies of the nuclear football, wherever it was being used in the United States. Not the Gold Codes contained on the “biscuit.” No one had ever
seen them. This was just the doorway to the unseen radio highway along which the presidential messages and instructions would always travel.

The numbers were stamped onto what looked like a perfectly harmless, normal credit card. If Tamara should be searched, for whatever reason, no one would dream those figures, stamped where every cardholder’s long number is engraved, represented the key to the frequencies, the ones that kept the innermost secret of the US government private.

Tamara understood the scale of the task to which she had been entrusted. Her training had taught her to tackle each subject, one at a time, as she went through a mission. She had a clear and definite objective: to locate the local radio operator who was to accompany her on the next phase of her journey. They were to rendezvous at the selected car rental desk, prior to leaving for the mountains.

Even that long ride had an element of deviousness about it. She was not to take the direct highway to Denver—Interstate 80 straight across Nebraska, with a left swing to Colorado’s I-76 and into the Mile High City. Tamara’s instructions were different. She would turn off Interstate 80 shortly after leaving the capital city of Lincoln and drive due south to Kansas, making her approach to Denver on I-70, straight across Kit Carson County and over the Big Sandy River into Arapahoe County.

None of this meant much to the Russian girl as she stood on the airport concourse, but she understood it was important and that someone, someday, might attempt to follow her trail across the United States. A major part of every spy’s mission is to make utterly certain that cannot be achieved.