Mercifully for those on board the Swedish Airlines Airbus, the deaths of all came nearly instantaneously as the full center tank exploded just two seconds after slamming into the fuselage of the gray Russian spy plane.
But many of those on the Russian spy plane were not as lucky. Captain Chipurin was, at first, unaware he’d lost the tail of his aircraft. He frantically put on his emergency air supply and fought the unresponsive plane all the way down with his copilot, a futile three-minute-and-twenty-second attempt to fly the unflyable through the middle of the heavy storm.
The men and women in the main cabin had parachutes, but they were not wearing them, and the dying spiraling plane meant not one of them had a chance to do anything to save themselves. Instead, all they could do was whip around in their harnesses, strapped into their chairs, arms, legs, and heads flailing, screaming helplessly into a roaring wind. Most passed out within a minute, but a few managed to get their masks on, which did nothing for them but ensure that they suffered their terror longer than their more fortunate colleagues did.
Finally, Chipurin’s broken craft slammed into the water at latitude 59.0404 and longitude 19.7576, near the middle of the Baltic Sea, well before the first bits of debris from the Swedish airliner began raining down on the water around.
None of them would ever know that Swedish Airlines flight 44, just twenty-five minutes after takeoff from Stockholm, had been given permission to deviate from its course by twenty degrees to avoid the new storm cell growing in front of it, but its request to climb out of the weather was delayed because of a Latvian cargo plane that had just been vectored into that altitude. When the final approval for flight 44’s altitude change was approved by ATC, the Airbus pilot and his copilot had missed the transmission, delaying their ascent by more than two minutes before ATC noticed the error and repeated the transmission.
The deviation and the delay put the Airbus eleven miles south of its normal route and four thousand feet lower than its normal altitude, which would not have been an issue, if not for the Russian spy plane transiting the area without squawking its transponder.
Twenty-two minutes later, at three a.m. in Washington, D.C., a man residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was awakened and given the news. He did not go back to bed. Instead, he headed for his bathroom to shower, his closet to dress, and then began the familiar walk to his office.
34
The USS James Greer (DDG-102) was an Arleigh Burke — class guided missile destroyer assigned to the Sixth Fleet and based in Naples, but at the moment she sailed west through the Gulf of Finland in moderate seas.
She was two months into a four-month cruise, having already been to Gibraltar, Portugal, England, Germany, and Gdańsk, Poland, before sailing here, the northernmost point of her voyage. She left Helsinki first thing this morning after a three-day port visit, and just prior to that she had been participating in passing exercises with the Finnish Navy’s fast attack craft Tornio and a pair of ships from the Finnish Coast Guard. PASSEX were joint drills between the ships from the two nations involving simulated air attacks, tactical maneuvering, and bridge-to-bridge communications set up around increasing coordination between the U.S. and allied ships that might find themselves working with the U.S. in a real fight.
The drills had gone well, and when they were finished the sailors and officers on the Greer enjoyed a performance of the Finnish Naval Marching Band, which was nice, plus thirty-six hours of liberty in the bars and restaurants of Helsinki, which was better. Not all the sailors and officers were granted shore leave, of course, but enough did to where the executive officer of the ship, Lieutenant Commander Phil Kincaid, had wandered the passageways for several minutes late the previous evening before encountering another living soul.
The Baltic PASSEX with Finland had been exciting, to a degree, but the 383 officers and crew on board the James Greer hadn’t joined the Navy to drill and listen to a Finnish marching band. They had joined to serve the United States, to project its interests and values around the world and to keep the peace, even if keeping the peace meant going to war.
Guided missile destroyers were known as the most versatile warships in the Navy. Larger than frigates but smaller than cruisers, they were capable of antiair, antisurface, and antisubmarine warfare, and they used the latest technology in the furtherance of each task. The Arleigh Burke was the first ship in the newest class of destroyers, designed around the Aegis Combat System. Commissioned in 1991, the class had gone through several flights of modernization over the past twenty-five years, and the James Greer was one of the most modern in the Navy’s sixty-four-ship inventory.
Destroyers are so named because they are descendants of a class of ships known as torpedo-boat destroyers. Torpedo boats are a thing of the past, but torpedoes themselves are still a threat to surface warfare. They are now normally fired from submarines, of course, which is why destroyers are equipped with the most advanced antisubmarine warfare capabilities known to man.
The James Greer was capable of antiair and antisurface missions as well, but there were no real surface threats to speak of in the area. Russia’s Baltic Fleet had several small corvettes and old frigates in port in Kaliningrad, but no surface ship captain would steam out to do battle with an Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyer unless either he was part of a large armada or he was insane.
There were air threats around here; the Russians had been throwing a lot of aircraft in the theater to spy on, intimidate, and essentially piss off all the other nations that sailed on or flew over the Baltic, but the real menace to the James Greer in these waters would come from below the waves. There were a pair of upgraded Kilos in the Baltic Fleet, and while the vessels were not the newest Russian technology, they were quiet diesel subs, they were deadly, and, most important of all, their commanders and crew knew these waters better than anyone.
It was for these reasons that the men and women on board the Greer took their jobs exceptionally seriously. For the last few weeks of their cruise they had been here in the Baltic Sea, so they were in the middle of Russia’s turf, and they had even been buzzed by two Russian Su-27 interceptors two weeks earlier while north of Poland.
The captain of the James Greer was not a captain in rank, he was a commander. Commander Scott Hagen had been in the Navy since the Academy, he was forty-three now, and his wife told her friends he was going to stay in until the Navy sent armed men to drag him off base for sticking around past retirement age.
He was a lifer.
Hagen sat behind his desk in his wardroom at 1100 hours, scanning through some reports from his acoustical intelligence officer. He heard movement outside in the passageway, and then his XO rapped gently on his door before leaning in. “Message for you from the N3.”
Hagen sighed in frustration. He’d been hoping this message wouldn’t come. “Bring it in, although I have a feeling I know what it says.”
Kincaid entered the wardroom and handed the single page over to his captain without comment. Both men had seen the news about the missing plane over the Baltic late this morning. They had discussed the chance that they would be contacted by the Sixth Fleet’s director of operations (N3) and ordered into service. Hagen had bet they wouldn’t get that order. They were half a day away from the location of the crash, so they wouldn’t be involved in any real rescue, and due to the increased tension in the Baltic region, he felt the Navy would want to keep one of its most powerful weapons in the area, ready to employ quickly if shots were fired.