Power Play (46 page)

“I do understand it’s likely to be more difficult in the dark, and it will take us longer. But in terms of safety and victory, we wanna go in at night.

“In addition, all members of the assault teams will wear helmets with special mounted lights at all times. These are being constructed in Dublin right now and will be with us by tomorrow night. In the
Koryak
environment we have the beginnings of mass confusion. Remember, we are taking out the radio, satellite communications, electronic masts, and the entire comms system, if we can get at it.

“During this time we may hit a main electric circuit or any other power point. That’s just a hazard of our trade. Those helmet beams will be valuable to us, showing the way and lighting up both the enemy and our own guys. If anyone’s interested, they were personally designed and ordered for us by Admiral Arnold Morgan.”

At least five
“WOW!”
s could be heard in the hall. “When they arrive, you will also see each helmet contains a built-in radio and ultraslim microphone,” said Mack. “That will enable any man to communicate with any other individual, anytime during the operation. You’ll be issued with small cell phones, and you just punch in the first couple of letters of anyone’s name.

“It’s quick and simple. You hit
CH
and you’ll hear, ‘Chief Charlton,’ right inside your helmet.
CA
gets Shane.
SH
gets Cody.
BE
gets me. And remember,
BE
also stands for ‘bedlam,’ and that’s what it’s likely to be. But
I know you guys, and you’ll stay cool. Just remember your training, and, when you have to, shoot to kill.

“Questions?”

Silence, as expected. All SEALs think that kind of pontification is for the lower orders (anyone who’s not a SEAL). They pride themselves on getting it the first time. And they believe their commanders have told them all that they need to know. If you’re confused after a brilliant briefing by Captain Mack Bedford, go work in a bank or somewhere where the pace is slower. That’s the philosophy.

Their creed, preoperational, is curt:
This is no place for men in short pants. In the next few weeks every one of us will put his life on the line for the United States of America. We don’t have weak links. And we don’t have guys who need to ask damn fool question
s.

 

The Irish patrol ship
Róisín
rose and fell on her lines, moored alongside Jetty Number 1, beneath the steel roof of the covered dock. Not even a local passerby could see her. You needed to be in a boat out in the bay to get a look at her, and even then identification was more or less impossible. And the sudden appearance in the bay of an Irish Coast Guard cutter, appearing to guard St. John’s Point, was a somewhat off-putting presence.

There was a small group of SEALs all wearing civilian clothes on the dock, talking to the Irish Naval CO, Commander Joe Farrell. The issue here was how many of the Irish crew would accompany the Americans on the mission. There had been an edict from the Irish government that the navy should provide all possible assistance to the US Special Forces.

However, the Irish Navy, like the rest of the armed forces, had always been neutral in any conflict involving a foreign enemy. The truth was, Commander Farrell’s crew had not signed up to engage in some kind of bloodbath in the middle of the Atlantic with a boatload of mad, homicidal Russian nuclear scientists.

Commander Farrell said he would ask his men for volunteers, but that Captain Bedford would have to explain to them precisely what the mission
entailed. Meanwhile, the SEALs offered him six or eight sailors to occupy critical positions in the
Róisín
’s crew, helming and navigation, during the approach and contact phases.

Commander Farrell was more than glad to have them and said he would work on a final crew list sometime in the next twenty-four hours. He would command his ship throughout the mission.

He suggested the Americans come out for a trip down the bay later, to familiarize themselves with the ship and to work alongside other members of the crew. Right now there was a team of engineers aboard, fixing four heavy tanks down the starboard side below the waterline, so they could be flooded with seawater. They were also fixing pressure pumps to get rid of the ballast when they started for home.

He’d given thought to the problem of accommodation and had the ship’s small gymnasium emptied to provide space for sleeping. He intended to dispense with half of his crew and to find room for all of the forty SEALs.

He wanted to know if Mack thought they would need the mounted gun on the foredeck, but the SEAL boss thought not, as there would be plenty of American firepower on board, and the sight of that mounted weapon might be like a red sheet to a bull in the opening moments of the attack. Mack thought the
Róisín
should look like a stricken and harmless vessel for as long as possible.

“Are you restricted to small arms, Mack?” asked Farrell.

“No,” he replied. “We have a couple of heavy machine guns, which we do not intend to use except in a dire emergency. I would, however, like to have them mounted up there, firing from our port side directly at the
Koryak
’s upper deck. I might use one of them to blast their comms mast if the circumstances are right. Otherwise, we’ll slam in with an RPG.

“I just don’t want to alert the whole fucking ship too early. The guys’ve got to have the best possible shot at getting on board, and it’s not going to help them by making a diabolical din before the Russians know what’s hit them.”

“No, I see that,” said Commander Farrell. “May I assume you’ve done some of this stuff before?”

“Coupla times,” said Mack.

“I was getting that impression.” He grinned. “You want to go aboard now, and we’ll find a spot for your heavy guns?”

“Good plan,” said the SEAL commander. “I’d like ’em high and out of the way, difficult to see.”

“No problem. I’ll have the water guys fix ’em up, soon as they get done with the tanks.”

With that, the two commanding officers headed up the gangway to the Irish warship. Mack Bedford cast his mind back to that late-September day, only six months ago, when first he had chugged down the bay in company with Michael O’Malley.

He’d checked the water depth every few yards, and he’d swum through the clear waters, examining the undersea terrain. And the Royal Navy’s Admiralty chart of the seabed had shown him that this was indeed the ideal spot for US Naval Base Donegal.

This was the tiny spot on the map where President Nikita Markova’s grandiose plans for world supremacy would begin to crumble.

They trained in secret all along that lonely stretch of Donegal coast, running in formation at night. Prime Minister McGrath ordered the N15 road along the shore under police control at 2:00 every morning. With three patrol cars holding up traffic and escorting the very occasional late-night local car home, the SEALs were hardly seen by anyone.

In the daylight they underwent the traditional iron regime of push-ups, and despite the coldness of the water they ran in pairs, splashing through the shallows along a lonely part of the shore, which was now virtually inaccessible because of the base.

Every other day selected groups went out in
Róisín
for a couple of hours, familiarizing themselves with the layout of the ship, standing in tight formation in the precise spots they would occupy when they foundered into the attack, the boat listing heavily to starboard, tanks flooded, SOS signals flashing, rifles and grapplers at the ready, SEAL marksmen at Action Stations.

It continued, day after day, night after night, every man maintaining a level of fitness and strength beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, more on the level of a Bengal tiger than a human being. There’s a compulsory exercise all SEALs undergo called a straight pull-up, where the man grasps an iron bar fixed above his head. A normal fit man in his twenties or thirties might do two of these, possibly three, pulling himself up until his chin rises above the bar. A trained athlete might do eight, or
maybe nine. SEALs do thirty-four, minimum. As previously mentioned, they are not like other people.

The vagaries of Russian intentions were beginning to wear on everyone as March turned into April, and US surveillance was still observing the
Koryak
moored alongside in Severomorsk. The electronics truck from Lyon, France, was now aboard, along with the TELARs and the warheads. They had watched the ship being supplied, with crates of food, drinks, weaponry, and most likely clothing.

The
Koryak
would be traveling from a bitterly cold northern Russian spring, nine thousand miles directly to the tropics. If US intel was accurate, the voyage would take twenty-eight days, from the Murmansk Inlet to the great port of Cristóbal at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal. This superefficient harbor comes under the Panama Port Authority, in association with the Chinese-owned corporation that administers it.

The Russian ship was then scheduled to make its way up through the three giant canal locks, across the Gatun waterway’s tropical forest, and on through the narrows of “the Cut” to the port of Balboa, where the Lyon Generateur l’Électronique truck would disembark, along with the “jamming” staff, in search of the US president’s nuclear football.

But the calm of the huge navy yard’s northern dockside area remained undisturbed through the first three days of April, except for a heavy snowfall, which required a convoy of snowplows to clear the jetties.

On the evening of April 4, however, shortly before midnight, US satellites picked up an unusual number of lights on the dockside where the
Koryak
was moored. The poor weather obscured visibility, but one satellite picked up at least eight uniformed Russian Naval officers moving on and off the ship. Unknown to the Americans, Admiral Ustinov had issued an order so all-encompassing it not only achieved Russian purpose, but achieved American purpose as well.

Admiral Ustinov had banned cell phones from being used by anyone aboard the ship
—
and that included Captain Gromyko, the entire rocket-launching staff, the ship’s crew, the electronic technicians going to Colorado, drivers, cooks, and deckhands. The admiral understood that one careless phone call home to Russia could cause a forest fire of information—
the Russians are staging a nuclear strike against the United States
. That was a chance he could not take, and officers stood by, on the dockside, as every cell phone was handed over.

The
Koryak
would be without personal communications, and the only way to make contact was through the ship’s main comms center, which had been expensively transferred ten yards forward from its own room to the bridge, where Captain Gromyko and his second officer were personally responsible for every word spoken. The entire system was encrypted; every call was hooked up to a recording device and permanently connected to a direct satellite link to Northern Command HQ.

No ship had ever traveled in such silence, so cut off from the outside world. Aside from the regular ship-to-shore radio system to harbormasters, docking facilities, and coast guard call centers, there would be no contact with anyone, all the way to the Panama port of Cristóbal. There was just one cell phone on board, and that was locked in a desk drawer on the bridge, and only the commanding officer had the key. Only in the event of a dire and life-threatening emergency was he authorized to use it.

The US satellite could photograph the crowded dockside activity clearly enough. But the angle from space was not quite good enough to pick up the navy commander in chief, Admiral Vitaly Rankov, and the Northern Fleet C-in-C, Admiral Alexander Ustinov, who were both there.

Neither could the satellite see them on the bridge saying farewell to Kapitan Sergei Gromyko and his staff. When they finally left and stood back on the dockside to watch the departure, Admiral Ustinov perceived his ultimate boss, the former Olympic oarsman Vitaly Rankov, was in the best possible spirits. He was treating this stupendous international mission as if it were a sports game.

“This, Alexander,” said the admiral from southern Russia, “is probably the world’s ultimate power play.” Ustinov knew enough about Admiral Rankov’s near-fanatical devotion to Russian ice hockey to recognize the warm glow of certain victory that dwelt within him.

“The power play, Alexander,” he said determinedly, “when you have the big advantage, when your opponents cannot match you. That’s when it matters. That’s when you strike.”

All Admiral Ustinov knew about “power plays” was that they happened when one team on the ice had an extra player or two . . . and needed to turn on the heat. He wasn’t at all sure that Rankov was correct about the Americans being shorthanded. But if the idea made the C-in-C happy, then that was just fine.

Even as Admiral Ustinov pondered the intricacies of the power play,
KH-11 was still whispering through space, snapping the
Koryak,
over and over, for the Americans. Recording the wide Russian tugboat, pulling her off the dock and turning her north, out toward the icy Barents Sea, bound for the Panama Canal.

The American surveillance system was on high alert, as it had been for weeks, and the data from KH-11 whipped into the satellite grid and flashed down to the National Surveillance Office, Chantilly. It was 4:50 p.m. in Washington. General Myers sounded the alarm to both the NSA in Fort Meade and to the office of the CNO in the Pentagon. Within moments Admiral Bradfield had Admiral Carlow on the line in Coronado, and the message was flashed instantly to Captain Bedford in Donegal:

Captain Bedford NAVFAC Donegal. Russian freighter
Koryak
(heavy) cleared Severomorsk 2345 (local), Thursday, April 4. Now headed northwest three-one-five, at 14 knots, Barents Sea. 70.29N 34.00E. Satellite tracking—
Koryak
ETA latitude 55, 230 miles west of Arranmore Island, Donegal, 2100, Wednesday, April 10. Carlow.