The Red Collusion Read online

  “These triangles along the route are reporting points. The submarine must report home when it arrives at any such point along the route. Of course, we will catch it between two reporting points, and I think that will be here.”

  Dimitri tapped his finger on a certain point on the map.

  “Exactly here, northwest of Norway, approximately two hundred nautical miles south of this not very small island called Svalbard. From this place they turn south on their navigation route and sail away.”

  “And what are these tables?” Yevgeni asked again.

  “This is their duty roster, their work schedule. It says which submarine goes out to sea for navigation and when, and their times of arrival at the reporting points. This is simply perfect. I think we have just received the most important brick in the wall that we are about to build.”

  Yevgeni motioned for his colleagues to leave the derelict hangar. I think I have good reason to contact the Minister of Defense and to report to him on the great headway that we have made, Yevgeni thought. This is the first time that the conversation between us is on my own initiative, but maybe it will be better to wait until the end of the test tomorrow. Who can guarantee that the results will meet expectations? Yevgeni continued to walk besides his teammates as these thoughts raced in his mind.

  In a hangar at the ordnance section, Nazarbayev received them with his broad smile. But the Colonel’s face showed signs of fatigue; he hadn’t had any sleep for two days and nights.

  “My friend the Colonel”, Yevgeni said to him. “I need you strong and alert tomorrow morning. Have you finished your work here?”

  “Yes, I can say that we have finally completed the work. Here, the bomb is ready, and in one or one-and-a- half hours it will be loaded on to the boat. Don’t ask me what we went through tonight. We dismantled the bomb, but we couldn’t empty it of the explosive, as it was really corroded inside. If I’d used your idea and welded the cone to its top, half of the base would have been demolished in an explosion.”

  “But I see that the steel cone is installed on the top of the bomb”, Yevgeni said quizzically.

  “Yes, you see it is connected, not welded. We used special adhesives for metal that I hadn’t known existed. They are as strong as welds”, Colonel Nazarbayev explained.

  Yevgeni approached the Colonel and gave him a brief hug.

  “Well done. Come with us. We are going to see the trawler and then you can go and catch a few hours’ sleep. We are finished here”, said Yevgeni.

  Lieutenant Alexey led the team, which was now joined by Colonel Nazarbayev, to an out-of-the-way pier almost hidden from view, where the trawler was moored. The boat was painted black, with a diagonal white stripe adorning its prow. On its stern, its name was printed in Cyrillic letters, and in Latin letters underneath; its name was “Zlatoya Klatzo”, meaning “Golden Ring”.

  Dimitri approached Yevgeni.

  “Listen, I’m pleasantly surprised. This is quite a new boat and it looks in very good condition. I also see that it has a modern radar. The Minister’s letter has worked wonders. By the way, isn’t more fitting to name it Fire Ring rather than Golden Ring?”

  Commander Vitaly Dobrinin, whom Marshal Budarenko’s team had met just a short time ago, greeted them on the trawler’s gangplank like old friends. General Okhramenko took the lead and led them to the communications room, where a few technicians were still working. The General ordered them to leave the room and shut the door behind them. The team members saw four metal cabinets, each the size of an average washing machine.

  “Now”, the general said, “they are finalizing their link to the antennas that they installed at dawn, and we will be ready for tomorrow.”

  Yevgeni motioned Dimitri to come closer to him and the General.

  “Tell me, Dimitri”, Yevgeni said, “When a submarine arrives at the reporting point, to those triangles on the map, you said that they report to their home base on the East Coast of the United States. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “General Okhramenko”, Yevgeni said quite severely, “we have not finished our work. Please get a receiver or a listening device from the intelligence section here for those strangely low frequencies that Dimitri mentioned. I can’t be sure that the American submarine will navigate exactly according to the schedule printed in the tables here. Perhaps the data is erroneous, and perhaps it is fabricated, and in any case, it can be changed at any time when the submarine is at sea. We must hear for ourselves, with our own ears, the real-time reports from the submarine. Isn’t it obvious that this instrument is not sufficient for our needs?”

  The General, who was clearly not comfortable being managed by a Colonel, especially one who looked like a university professor, was quite impatient.

  “I don’t understand you, Colonel; what is not enough for you?”

  “Who will operate this instrument? Your communication people or your electronic warfare people?” Yevgeni countered with his own questions. “There must be an intelligence officer here who knows how to listen to naval messages in English. Our friends from Naval Intelligence know exactly who should sit here. It is important that this person is in position during the test tomorrow, even though it is not an integral part of the test.”

  Yevgeni and Dimitri left the radio room, followed by the General. Yevgeni seemed preoccupied. He looked at Dimitri.

  “Tell me, do you think that everything is ready for tomorrow and we aren’t forgetting something? It’s going too smoothly. I am not supposed to be calm in such situations, and it worries me.”

  Dimitri was quite confident. “It is only because you are an incurable pessimist”, he said.

  “You know what the definition of a pessimist is”, Yevgeni answered. “A pessimist is an optimist with experience. By the way, do you think we should initiate a call to the Marshal today and keep him updated about our progress?”

  “I see that you miss our daily meetings with him. No, don’t call him, for two reasons. The first is that tomorrow we will be much wiser, and the second is that our friend, the sixth man, is probably reporting to Moscow every few hours. Forget it. Don’t call him today.”

  “Yes, you’re right”, concluded Yevgeni. “Let’s wait for tomorrow.”

  Chapter 9

  An hour had passed since Brigadier General Dimitri and Colonel Yevgeni had boarded K-219, the Navaga class nuclear submarine. In the ship’s belly, they were standing beside Captain Yashin, who was sitting in the captain’s chair, raised on a metal platform, and looking into the periscope. The submarine had made its way out of the port, slowly sailing from its pier, still above water.

  Unlike the chilly atmosphere of their first meeting at Rear Admiral Leonov’s headquarters, the submarine Captain now displayed camaraderie, and even friendship, towards his guests. While leaving the port, the Captain had even invited the two officers to spend some time with him on the submarine’s upper deck. From the height of the deck, five stories above the water, they looked on with amazement and awe as the submarine’s huge hull cut through the water with great power and grace.

  Now, the preparations for the dive were frenzied. The sound of a whistle, intermittent and hoarse, filled the dense air of the submarine’s belly with urgency. The duty seaman, who sat at his position closest to the commander’s post, wearing headphones, read various numbers loudly and quickly; data received and summarized from the submarine’s various sections. Loudspeakers were installed the length and width of the ship, and the call Dive-Dive-Dive was broadcast throughout. The submarine commander leaned over the periscope eyepiece, carefully examining the sea into which his awesome war machine was about to sink.

  “Five meters, ten meters, seventeen meters”, the duty seaman called out the depths into which the submarine was diving.

  “I don’t like this, Dimitri”, whispered Yevgeni.

  “You’ve probably see
n too many movies with bursting pipes and flooding inside old submarines. I can promise you that this won’t happen to us. Even statistically, the probability of exposure to nuclear radiation here is much higher than the risk of sinking.”

  “Good, thanks. You’ve really calmed me down. Do you also know what the probability is for these two things to happen exactly simultaneously, exactly today and exactly in this submarine?”

  “No, I don’t know, but if we are playing statistics this morning, then the probability of our Minister of Defense having our heads today is so much higher than the probability of something happening to us and to this submarine”, Dimitri concluded.

  Yevgeni, still terrified, decided not to continue the conversation so as not to give his mate Dimitri the chance to play on his weaknesses.

  “One hundred meters, one hundred and ten meters”, the duty seaman continued counting out the diving data.

  Dimitri looked again at Yevgeni, who had been silent from a depth of thirty-five meters.

  “Are you all right?”

  “More or less, considering the circumstances. You know that all is relative, and here is a story. A fellow who wants to commit suicide, throws himself from the twentieth floor. On his way down, on the tenth floor, a neighbor sees him and asks, “How are you doing?” The fellow committing suicide answers: “So far, so good”.

  Dimitri gave a short bark of laughter, then spoke to Yevgeni quietly.

  “I am intentionally not taking you around the submarine to show you the instruments that will measure the blast’s data. I don’t want any one of the operators to understand that later on, they might encounter such an event. As far as they’re concerned, we are totally transparent, no more than tourists.”

  “You’re absolutely right. Everything should be done in the most natural and routine way, as if we were not here at all.”

  Dimitri looked at his watch. “Very soon we’ll be arriving at the point that we set for the submarine, and five minutes after that, the explosion will take place, exactly at 1005 hours.”

  The Captain summoned them to him with a motion of his hand.

  “We will be arriving at the location point that you gave us within two minutes, and there we’ll stop. Actually, we’re already stopping. You can see here right in front of you, on the diving meter, that we are already at the depth that you requested, two hundred and ninety meters.”

  “Thank you, Captain”, Yevgeni replied, and turned to his mate Dimitri, who seemed restless and preoccupied.

  “What’s happening, Dimitri? You seem worried. Have you become me?”

  Dimitri did not seem to hear Yevgeni’s words. He looked at his watch again, then suddenly leapt at Captain Yashin, clutching his arm.

  “Quickly, quickly, captain! Change direction to three hundred sixty at full steam and maintain a speed of twenty-one knots. Now!”

  The submarine commander and Yevgeni had no idea of what had come upon Dimitri at that moment. The captain looked quizzically at Dimitri before responding.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, yes. This is critical. “Go, go now”, Dimitri called out, his voice high-pitched and urgent.

  Colonel Yashin took the microphone and the loudspeakers throughout the ship broadcast his order in his quiet and authoritative voice: “Full steam, direction three hundred sixty.”

  Dimitri looked at Yevgeni with relief. It seemed that a huge load had just been lifted from his shoulders.

  “We are three minutes from our test”, he said.

  “Then explain to me in half a minute, why the sudden outburst?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly why. I suddenly realized that if the submarine were motionless, our test would not take place under real-life conditions. When the submarine is in motion, there are many environmental noises. For example, the propellers’ noise, or the friction between the submarine’s girth and the water. Then, if we did the same with the American submarine, it would be in motion. Therefore, I want us to test in real conditions, with noise and vibrations, not under controlled laboratory conditions, while we are standing still and everything around us is quiet.”

  Dimitri looked at his watch again.

  “We have one more minute, and I don’t have any idea what to expect.”

  Yevgeni felt that all their frantic efforts of the last few days were being channeled into one critical moment. The thoughts raced through his mind. We either continue from here proudly, with heads held high, or someone will have our heads cut off.

  “Sir”, the duty seaman called out to Captain Yashin, “Position Four is reporting an earthquake detected at one seventy-five degrees. The magnitude is very low and he is trying to confirm the data with several other sources.”

  “Received”, Captain Yashin said, and looked for any reaction from Dimitri and Yevgeni.

  Dimitri shrugged his shoulders as if not understanding the meaning of the report. Dimitri turned his back to the seaman beside him and pressed his finger to his lips, warning motioned to the Captain not to say a word.

  The seaman called out again.

  “Sir, Captain. Position Two detected a distant sound from the same direction.”

  Dimitri watched Yevgeni’s face, which bore a troubled expression.

  “I was afraid of this. We have obviously failed”, Yevgeni said finally. Dimitri continued watching him without saying a word. Indeed, Yevgeni appeared as if the sky was crashing down on him, and Dimitri tried to think of a way, some way, to lift his mate’s spirits.

  “Look, Yevgeni. The blast provided the right indications of an earthquake or a nuclear explosion far away. Where we failed is in estimating the correct distance from the blast point, because some acoustic noise from the explosion was sensed in the submarine. What we need to do now is get farther away from the American submarine with the blast, and we need to know by how much. If we get too far, they will still not hear the noise of the explosion, but the earthquake effects on the Richter scale would be either too low or borderline.”

  The duty seaman called out again.

  “Sir, Captain, Number Four crossed data and determined that the epicenter of the quake is within the area of our firing range. That can explain the noise received at position Number Two. Maybe they dropped a big depth charge there.”

  The submarine commander looked at Dimitri without speaking.

  “We have finished”, said Dimitri. “We can head back home.”

  “This submarine has never had such a short mission”, Captain Yashin said laconically. He had probably noticed his guests’ low spirits, and was taking advantage of this in his own way, adding insult to injury.

  “Where do we go from here?” Dimitri asked Yevgeni.

  “Most probably, we are already on our way to a gulag in Siberia.” Dimitri wrapped his arm round Yevgeni’s shoulder.

  “Everything will be all right, Mr. Pessimist. We’ll come up with a solution. I think you’re exaggerating; this is not a total failure, because we did achieve the right effect. The problem is with the acoustic noise. This is not simple, as it depends on the water temperature at the selected site and, of course, also on the sensitivity of the instruments on board the American submarine. I don’t think anyone can tell us for certain if their acoustic instruments are more sensitive than those in our own submarines.”

  “Do you really not know? If not, you should know that they are ahead of us in almost every technological development. I think the last time we were ahead of them in anything was about 20 years ago, April 1961, with Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.”

  Brigadier General Dimitri now decided to leave Yevgeni alone to his self-recrimination. He turned to the submarine commander, and the two naval officers started a navy-related conversation, while Yevgeni remained sitting in his position with his thoughts and calculations.

  The five team members sat in the briefing room at the Intelligence Se
ction. It was their first meeting following the sea test, from which they had returned just a few minutes before. Most of them did not yet know the test results. Colonel Yevgeni decided to open the discussion by addressing the Kazakh colonel.

  “Let’s start with you, Colonel Nazarbayev. How did the test go from your point of view?”

  “There were no unexpected incidents. Once the bomb was released from the crane, it sank very quickly, and most importantly, the improvised fuse mechanism and its protective shield worked perfectly.”

  “Excellent”, said Yevgeni, and shifted his gaze to General Okhramenko. The General did not wait for Yevgeni to call on him.

  “On my part, everybody was actually passive. We only checked that the systems are working. We manned the new position for listening to submarine communications and the operator managed to receive some distant communication traffic from American submarines. That is all, really.”

  Yevgeni pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket and lit one. He exhaled some smoke from the corner of his mouth and turned to Brigadier General Dimitri.

  “Please report to our comrades the events that we witnessed in the submarine.”

  Dimitri described the test results to his teammates. He was very careful not to call the outcome a failure, but rather a situation in which several unknowns of an equation would be problematic to solve. Dimitri shared the dilemma with his teammates - that he was not at all sure that detonating the charge on the seabed was the right way to go, saying that the outcome could be better if the explosion happened on the water’s surface. In conclusion, Dimitri said that he thought that the plan was viable, and estimated the likelihood of success at about fifty percent.

  When Dimitri finished his account, the team members noticed that Colonel Yevgeni, unlike his recently acquired authoritarian fashion, was not inclined to speak further, and this resulted in informal chats among the team members.

  “Colonel Yevgeni!” Colonel Nazarbayev suddenly called out in a loud voice, and the other three team members fell silent.