Power Play (43 page)

The Great Environmental Mutiny, which began with such fervor in the tiny parish of Bruckless, ended where it had started, in the Mary Murrins, over a couple of pints of stout. It petered out before an avalanche of US cash, after a protest meeting that lasted just one minute and thirty-seven seconds.

The shellfishermen were not the only local businessmen to start profiting from the oncoming presence of the United States Navy. Admiral Morgan ordered the local gas station to be given the franchise for the dockside fuel pumps that would be built in the new base. This more or less ensured that Raymond O’Connell and his family would become millionaires inside a year.

He also ordered the village store to begin preparations to provide all supplies to what would become a busy terminal in the coming months. No other store would be involved. Arnold also ordered a donation be made by the Irish government to the local school and a new emergency wing to be constructed for the nearest local hospital.

He made a five-thousand-dollar donation for new gear for the local soccer team, and by Christmas, with the main jetty almost complete, the Irish government and its new construction partners were the most popular organizations in the history of Donegal, whoever those new partners might be.

 

Captain Bedford and Admiral Andy Carlow were in deep conference on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, inside the compound where the Navy SEALs practice their daily exercise regimen—the one that ensures they remain the hardest men who ever lived, at least since the Stone Age when the cave dwellers needed to throttle a wild mountain lion in order to have lunch.

While lines of would-be SEALs slogged it out, pounding along the edge of the surf, Mack and Andy walked slowly along the dunes in the
early sun, wrestling with a tricky naval warfare problem that would surely unfold in the next few months, half a world away.

The task that lay before them seemed to belong to the eighteenth century, to the days of sail when great wooden ships of the line battered each other into submission with heavy cannon fire. In that era, boarding a crippled warship was an essential part of ocean warfare, especially if you happened to be a pirate or any kind of privateer.

The normal tools of the trade involved grappling hooks, ropes, lines, ladders, and cutlasses. The musket men tended to stay in the sail rigging and fire down on the enemy as the ships closed together for the short-range stage of the battle. Admiral Lord Nelson, victor of Trafalgar in 1815, lost his life in that way, shot down on his own quarterdeck by a French marksman, within sight of his greatest triumph.

Andy Carlow was not altogether sure the coming mission in the North Atlantic was going to be a whole lot different. If there was one thing the SPECWARCOM boss hated, it was losing his SEALs, especially having them shot by snipers or any other foreign marksmen lurking in the rigging.

The plan for the forthcoming action was already refined. The target was the big Russian freighter that US Naval Intelligence suggested would steam from Murmansk to Panama with a lethal cargo on board specifically designed for a nuclear-missile hit on the United States’ most precious building at Fort Meade.

The guided missiles were already on the ship. The huge TELAR mobile launchers were also on board, plus all the electronic guidance and jamming equipment required for such an outlandish plan. To Admiral Carlow it still seemed unreal. But Captain Bedford knew better, since it was one of his oldest friends, the Mossad agent, who had uncovered the plot. SEAL Team 10, Mack Bedford’s command, had been chosen to stop that ship dead in its tracks, to put it on the floor of the Atlantic with no survivors, no one to talk, no one to run to some newspaper or magazine with stories of US brutality on the high seas.

This required a boarding. The powers in the Pentagon had decreed that this Russian intruder, steaming south to an unannounced missile launch site, could not be hit hard with a torpedo, or missile, or bombs, and sunk. Too darned noisy, too darned messy, and too darned public. In this modern world of satellite surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, that kind
of thing is very nearly prehistoric, especially among nations as big as the United States and Russia.

Everyone who was aware of the Russian treachery understood that freighter, with all of its deadly cargo, had to go. But it had to go quietly. Very quietly. As if it had never been there. And that was the task that now faced SEAL Team 10—how to get rid of it, silently and without a trace, in such an icily clandestine manner not even the Russian Navy would ever know what had happened.

It was, by any standards, a tall order. But then Navy SEALs hardly ever attempt anything that is not a tall order. “And the fact is,” said Mack Bedford, “we have to board the goddamned ship. And there’ll be Russian military guards, armed and permitted to fire at will in the event of an attack. Andy, we’ll be sitting ducks, worse than Admiral Nelson was.”

“Then we’ll have to take out the guards first, right?”

“Correct. We’ll flood the buoyancy tank on the starboard side of our ship, so we’re heeling maybe thirty-five degrees, appearing to sink. We’ll come in toward them for the rescue, port side nearest, which will be the high side. Our own marksmen will shoot to kill with silenced rifles, picking off every Russian guard and any crew members who have strayed topside.

“Then we’ll use grapplers and rope ladders, hurling them upward over the rails, and all the while our marksmen will unleash covering fire as we board the vessel. At the same time, we’ll send four frogs over the side to get under the freighter and place four big stickies on the underside of her hull, timed for, say, thirty minutes.

“First SEALs over the rails must slam the radio room before it can be used for any kind of satellite transmission. Then we’ll search the place and get the nuclear stuff off, if it’s possible. If not, we’ll just sink the sonofabitch and fuck off. They can work out what happened any way they like. But there won’t be a trace. That I can promise.”

“I like it,” replied the SPECWARCOM chief. “What do you need now?”

“A darned great freighter, four thousand tons minimum, to practice boarding.”

“And how many SEALs for the operation?”

“Ten marksmen, four frogs, fifteen boarders, and four seamen able to handle the crane. That’s in addition to a twenty-man Irish team to handle the ship.”

“No problem,” said Admiral Carlow.

“You hope,” grinned Mack.

 

The
Koryak
was moored alongside one of the biggest jetties in the Russian Naval yard, right next to the heavy-duty crane. Work on her hull had continued for weeks, and as the new year dawned, the two TELAR mobile launchers were on board, with the twin Iskander-K missiles already embarked on the flatbed of the giant trucks, bolted into position for the voyage and the disembarkation in Panama.

In fact, they were both ready to be fired, the erectors all set to come slowly from horizontal to vertical. All that was required for a major launch was the electronic guidance system to be activated and the homing device locked on, with GPS numbers punched in, accurate to about four feet . . . not bad after a couple of thousand miles.

One more week, and it would be impossible to see those missiles anywhere on the tank deck of the former Russian Navy landing ship
Korolev,
with her new name, new paint, and new gunnery system. This was a last-minute single 76mm deck gun, 120 rounds per minute, fitted to the for’ard forecastle. By modern naval warfare standards, this did not make her by any means lethal to an enemy, but it did mean you’d want to be darned careful before you got into her line of sight.

The new, improved
Koryak
was 370 feet long and stood quite high off the water. Loaded, she displaced forty-seven hundred tons, and right now she was being fitted with a false wall at the aft end of the tank deck that would render the TELARs invisible. The wall would be painted dark blue along with the inside of the entire hull in that section.

No one, unless they were searching and had studied a detailed plan of the ship, would even dream there was anything behind that carefully fitted section of the hull—never mind four missiles, designed to pack a big-enough nuclear high-explosive wallop to knock down the towering Building OPS 2A in Crypto City, Maryland.

Parked on the dockside, not yet embarked, was an eighteen-wheel red-and-white
Mercedes truck, with hard, high sides and rear doors but a soft top. Down the side of the truck were the words
LYON GENERATEUR L’ÉLECTRONIQUE.
On the driver’s side door:
400 Boulevard Laurent Bonnevay, Lyon, France.

Admiral Ustinov had ordered this leviathan to be parked and anchored, so it almost obscured the blue wall, which would discourage even the most zealous Central American customs inspectors from prying too deeply into the hidden secrets of the eighteen-wheeler.

Anyone wanting to search the truck on its long journey north from the Balboa docks in Panama would hardly notice the relatively small jammer attached electronically to an industrial-size generator bearing the correct metal identification plates of the French corporation that built it, plus a set of papers, instructions, and sales documents showing it was bound for the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora.

The
Koryak
would also transport a detachment of Russian Navy guards, armed but with weapons stowed, in case the vessel should be boarded at any stage by customs or military officials.

The most secretive section of the
Koryak
’s cargo, however, contained the four hidden nuclear warheads, which would eventually be fitted to the Iskander missiles. Admiral Ustinov’s advisers suggested it would not be too smart to subject them to a long and possibly rough sea voyage of many thousands of miles.

Nuclear weapons do not go off on impact, but need their computers to be programmed. Nonetheless, all nuclear weapons scientists dislike rockets being transported around the world with their nuclear warheads fixed. There have been accidents, and it was infinitely preferable to have the warheads completely disarmed and, if possible, hidden.

This precaution also represented the difference between being accused of transporting forbidden missiles and transporting obviously harmless ones, merely going for test firings, to test guidance systems.

The biggest problem of all was that US warships, and probably even US satellites, seemed to be able to locate any nuclear cargo stowed inside any ship. The Americans steadfastly denied any such thing and claimed they could not see straight through the steel hulls of the world’s heavy cargo ships.

But no one believed this. There were a good few instances of ships being apprehended by warships—not necessarily American—and thus
being caught red-handed moving weapons-grade uranium around the world’s oceans.

Sophisticated naval organizations were certain that somehow the Americans could penetrate cargo ships with X-ray beams sensitive to nuclear material and that if anyone wanted their intentions to be kept secret, they’d better take serious steps to camouflage their uranium 235.

Admiral Ustinov’s men had been working on this for several months and had constructed two boxes made of solid lead almost six inches thick. Each side was around five feet long and three feet high. The box was almost three feet across. It was so heavy, Admiral Ustinov thought it might “sink the damn ship.” It was so heavy no one ever weighed it. Each of the boxes would carry two of the Iskander-K nuclear warheads.

The project to hide the critical components was nothing short of brilliant. The boxes were to be situated right below the main deck hatch and both lowered and raised by crane. They would be bolted to the hull and a false-front elevation fitted to make them look like storage lockers.

More important, the massive strength of the lead casing, similar to that surrounding the nuclear reactor in a US warship, would surely fend off prying beams and rays, from either US satellites or patrolling warships.

So they lifted the boxes, both empty, off the dockside and lowered them into the hold of the
Koryak,
directly below the main foredeck hatch
.
The next step was to transport the nuclear ’heads onto the dockside and have them, too, lifted, lowered, and fitted into their transport casing.

Everything went extremely smoothly. Except for one problem. The Americans caught them red-handed, with their devastatingly effective military spy satellite US-224 KH-11 sliding through space twenty-two thousand miles above. This optical masterpiece, constructed in California by Lockheed, was the size of the Hubble Telescope, hurled into space in 2011 by a Delta IV-H heavy rocket at a staggering cost of around $4.4 billion, courtesy of the colossally secretive National Reconnaissance Office.

Firing off photographic shots every five seconds, KH-11, its secondary mirror moved to take in unusual angles, lasered in on the Severomorsk dockside almost right on time and collected one of the best selections of totally incriminating snapshots ever received by the NRO. The data were transmitted through a network of US communication satellites to an NRO facility so secret it’s known only as US Area 58, a
kind of lost land of cast-iron military secrets. No one had ever guessed the location correctly, although some believed it was located at another rigidly classified US military establishment, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, south of Washington, DC.

The data ended up in the top-priority section of Air Force general Jack Myers’s desk in Chantilly, Virginia. And there, before him, was incontrovertible evidence that nuclear material was being loaded onto the very Russian freighter everyone had been watching for many weeks, the one out of the port of Sevastopol on the Black Sea, the
Koryak.