Mary Pat Foley said, “The most important feature of this program, Mr. President, is the deception element.”
“Deception?”
“Yes, sir. With deployment sped up by a factor of five, we can hold our units in reserve until the moment we know the attack is imminent. The Russians will see no barriers ahead of them, they will formulate their movements accordingly.”
Ryan said, “And then, when they get over the border, they are suddenly up against well-trained Marines who weren’t there four hours earlier.”
“Correct.”
“I want to see how this works,” Ryan said, his fatigue momentarily forgotten in the excitement of this new program.
Mary Pat did not look surprised. “I’d be very pleased to show you, Mr. President. I can have a PowerPoint worked up and I can deliver it myself.”
Ryan shook his head. “You misunderstand me, Mary Pat. I want to go to the Pentagon, right now, or the NGA building in Springfield, if that’s where I need to go. I want to sit at a desk, and I want to see this. I’m not going to micromanage our military in this. If the Pentagon wants to use EARLY SENTINEL, then that’s what we’ll do. But I want to see it for myself.”
Mary Pat nodded, still not surprised that Ryan, an ex — CIA analyst, required raw data in his face to make up his mind on how to proceed.
The Granite was an oil-products tanker hauling kerosene from Houston to Tallinn, Estonia, with a stop-off in Gdańsk, Poland. It had just left port in Gdańsk three hours earlier, and was now steaming northeast in international waters just west of Kaliningrad.
The captain of the Granite was South Korean, and his crew almost exclusively Malaysian. He had strayed east of the regular shipping lanes by design, hoping to avoid the high seas that would come from a storm passing to the east. He kept a keen eye on his marine navigation computers, kept himself clear of hazards and other traffic, as well as national boundaries.
He was vigilant, but he never saw the boat that killed him, nor did he see the instrument of his death. The boat was the Vyborg, a Russian Kilo-class submarine that had been in service for thirty-five years. And the weapon was the Type 53–65, a five-thousand-pound, twenty-five-foot-long torpedo.
The Kilo had been traveling astern of the Granite, not the best place from which to attack, but the massive oil-products vessel was cruising at only twelve knots. The Type 53–65, the captain of the Vyborg knew, would attack at forty-eight knots, and its acoustical homing equipment would have no trouble picking up the signature of the big and loud cargo vessel alone on this stretch of sea.
This was the eleventh boat the Vyborg had tracked in the past two days. The captain’s orders had been to find a commercial vessel skirting the waters of Kaliningrad, ideally straying unequivocally inside, and to destroy the boat. If the boat was over one hundred meters in length, so much the better.
The Granite was 185 meters, it was within two hundred sixty meters of the territorial waters of Russia, and the captain of the submarine knew once it lost its ability to maneuver, its wreckage would drift well within the maritime exclusion zone.
So the Granite would die.
He fired a single torpedo. If the surface vessel had posed any kind of a threat whatsoever, the captain would have launched a salvo of at least two torpedoes, but the ship five thousand meters off his bow was so much more helpless than a sitting duck, because a sitting duck could, if it came down to it, flap its wings and fly away.
The torpedo was designed to defeat all manner of countermeasures, so this shot was akin to shooting fish in a barrel. It homed in on the unmistakable acoustic signature of its target, then as it got closer it began following the wake of the vessel, closed the distance between the submarine and the tanker, and neared the big vessel.
In the last phase of the weapon’s attack, the torpedo dove from a depth of thirty feet to a depth of sixty feet and raced under the Granite to position itself directly under the hull, and then its electromagnetic fuse detonated.
The explosion of the Granite was impressive. The Kilo did not watch it in real time. No, it had followed protocol and dove after firing, it was eighty meters below the surface and far out of periscope depth, but the Kilo’s sonar technicians listened to the detonation and the subsequent death of the vessel.
No one on board knew why they did what they had just done. The specific orders to track and kill had come from the Baltic Fleet commander in Kaliningrad, and in typical fashion no explanation was given for the order. But a rumor passed among the sailors on board was that Russian intelligence had determined that the ship they attacked was an American electronic-intelligence spy vessel, stealing information about Russian naval personnel off wireless communications bouncing through the air this close to the coast of Kaliningrad.
Others — not many, but a few — thought Valeri Volodin had gone insane and was begging the world for a fight.
The Kilo followed its orders and headed to the south, leaving the burning wreckage of the Granite to sink with all hands, and then drift closer to Kaliningrad.
63
The USS James Greer (DDG-102) wasn’t looking for attention; in fact, the captain of the guided missile destroyer, Commander Scott Hagen, would have given a month’s pay to be lurking silently anywhere else in the Baltic but dead solid center, surrounded by civilian vessels, the aircraft of half a dozen nations, and even the rented helicopters of a dozen of the world’s biggest news outlets.
But they were here, finishing their fourth day at the scene of the crash of Swedish Airlines Flight 44, and the big powerful destroyer retrieving wreckage in the center of a very crowded sea had made one hell of an impressive shot for the video crews.
This would have been bad enough for Hagen, a realization of his worst fear of losing the element of surprise in an ocean full of very real threats, but now the officers’ mess of his ship had been turned into an impromptu location to hold a press conference. Right now twenty reporters, photographers, and audio technicians were crammed tight, while three young sonar technicians, two male and one female, sat wide-eyed and uncomfortable at a table.
Three sailors — a petty officer 2nd class, a petty officer 1st class, and a senior STGC — had used a laptop computer and the ship’s towed array sonar to create a “Black Box Detector” to search the deep water for the flight data recorder of SA44. They did this by taking the acoustic signature created by the black box’s “ping” and sending it out to the towed array of the James Greer, telling it, in effect, to ignore every boat, fish, whale, and other sound in the sea, and to search for the telltale noise.
It had taken two days of running patterns in the area, but the box had been found. A research vessel that had been working at the site of a World War II plane wreck off the coast of Finland had joined the hunt, and they used their submersible to bring up the flight data recorder, allowing the other salvage equipment on station to concentrate on the recovery of larger pieces of wreckage.
And now the sailors involved in the successful search for the crucial equipment had their twenty-minute press conference to bask in their success to the world media, although all three of them looked like they’d rather be anywhere else in the world than here under the lights, carefully fielding questions without revealing one word of classified intelligence, all while their captain looked on from out in the passageway.