He handed the form to the girl with a five-dollar bill, and asked her to send it off as soon as possible.
Two hours later, at 0600 Eastern Daylight Time, Lieutenant John Harrison answered the phone in Admiral Morris’s office, six thousand miles away, and wrote down the message he received from Cable and Wireless. He had no clue as to its meaning but had been instructed to call Admiral Morgan immediately, should he receive a cable from “Rick.”
He picked up the direct line to the Admiral, who was in his office, waiting. “Short cable from Rick, sir,” he reported.
“Beautiful,” said the Admiral, putting back the phone. He stood up and punched the air with delight. “Those guys! They just delivered the bacon!” he exclaimed. “I’ll show those Russian pricks they can’t fuck with me!”
Back in Russia, the Lermontov steamed on, cutting her speed as she entered the waters of the Svir River, which joins Lakes Onega and Ladoga. The tour ship spent most of the afternoon and evening making the hundred-mile journey along the winding waterway. The following morning the ship ran across the wide southern waters of Lake Ladoga and turned into the Neva River for the final thirty-mile stretch up to the port of St. Petersburg.
Lieutenant Commander Hunter and his men said good-bye to Jane and her daughter as they disembarked. They were met by the driver of an unmarked car, which drove them to the airport. Inside an hour, they were on a Finnair flight to Helsinki and touched down before dark. Jane Westenholz would never know who they were.
The two Tolkach barges were observed by America’s KH-III satellite as they moved slowly north up the Volga. Captain Igor Volkov, master of the articulated double barge, led the way through the channel. His twenty-four-year-old son, Ivan, was at the wheel on the for’ard rudder, nine hundred feet in front of him.
On the evening of April 25 they had arrived at the cement town of Volsk. Its factory chimneys belched yellowish smoke and dust across the sky. The chronic pollution could be seen in the orange glow of the streetlights and was even visible in the photographs Admiral Morris studied in faraway Maryland.
The Tolkach and its six-hundred-foot-long consort stretched for over five hundred yards of the Volga as they moved in stately procession through the heavily industrialized reaches of the river on the approach to the imperial university town of Kazan.
On April 27 they had rolled past Syrzan, a town of old rusty chimneys and sprawling brick factories that looked like a throwback to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The picture definition was poor because of occasional rain, but the eye of KH-III was good enough. “They’re gonna make Nizhny by May sixth,” George Morris told Arnold Morgan.
Four days later, on May I, at the approximate time the SEALs had been fighting their way through the rain-swept woods of Lake Onega, the giant barges had reached Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. It was night as they hove into sight, and Captain Volkov could see the red neon nameplate stark above the new river station. They were not stopping, and he gave a short blast on the ship’s horn as he passed. Scatterings of people stood and gazed out across the sandy shallows into the great black flow of the central stream of the river, where the barges left hardly a ripple.
They were a hundred miles short of Kazan, and these miles would be traversed in wide waterways — up to eighteen miles across — as the Volga turns into a virtual inland sea. At the town of Zaton the barges made a ninety-degree turn for the port of Kazan, which they made in the small hours of May 3. Just beyond there they swung hard left, along the now-narrowing river, and began their nonstop run to Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles away.
The US satellites charted their progress most days. Late at night George Morris and Arnold Morgan would examine the photographs of the three Kilo class submarines in Red Sormovo and the progress of the Tolkach barges. There was still some scaffold left on Kilo three, but the two American admirals assessed the first two to be almost complete.
All the way along to Nizhny, the Volga is flanked by green rolling hills and woods. Intermittent villages set in the folds of the hills are bright in the morning light, and almost invisible in the misty rain that sweeps through every few days in spring. The eastern shore of the river is flatter than the more hilly Asian bank, but the two diverse green plateaus along the shallow, slow flowing stream of the Volga are a feast of glorious rural landscape. The presence of the giant barges with their military overtones was hideously intrusive.
In the small hours of May 7 Captain Volkov steered around the Strelka and moored alongside the loading quay at the junction of the Volga and the Oka Rivers at Nizhny Novgorod. Both barges made a huge 360-degree turn in the mile-wide waterway and came up in the shadows of a forest of dock cranes. Behind them stood the great Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. With the dock on their starboard side and the waters of the Oka to port, the barges now faced northeast. They were less then four hundred yards from the three Kilos.
At Fort Meade, Admirals Morris and Morgan peered at the satellite pictures.
“How long, George? How long before they leave?”
“Well, if we assume they will go together, the most significant factor is that the third Kilo still has some scaffold. I’m not sure how long it takes to load and secure something that big onto a barge, but it’s gotta be a day for each one, and they are not yet down at the loading dock. Right now I’d say the earliest those transporters could start moving would be ten days from now — say May seventeenth. But if you want my best guess I’d still say first week in June.”
“Any idea how they load ’em?”
“They move the hulls around on the land the same way we move our big boats, on a multiwheel trolley system, running on rails over some very hard standing. We use hydraulic lifts to put the hulls into the water, rather than onto floating barges. I’ve never seen anyone do that, but I guess it’s possible. We might even learn something if we get a photo at exactly the right moment.
“We have seen them put submarines onto those oceangoing freighters they sometimes use…That’s when they flood the ships down into the water and float the submarines onto the decks, same system as a floating dock. These barges look a bit different, but they must do it the same way. I don’t see any other possibility.
“The Kilos will have to be lowered into the water, and then floated over the barges. Then the barges will pump out and lift the submarines clear of the water. I’d say the whole process is going to take a couple of days.”
Arnold Morgan thought quietly to himself.
“Right. Then we got five days running time at five knots to make the journey up to the middle of Lake Onega. The very earliest I’m going to see them in the right area is going to be May twenty-second.”
He calculated that would require a five-day tour boat with the scheduled Green Stop at the north of the lake at around 1900 to 2100 on that same night — a tour boat that had left St. Petersburg three mornings previously on May 19, and which would meet the submarines on the waters of Onega in the afternoon of May 22.
“Just gotta make sure we have a block of rooms on one of those ships every day from May nineteenth,” he concluded. “Once we get that in place, the only thing we need to do is to get the travel agent to change the names on the day we send the team in.”
The CIA would now take over the nuts and bolts of the operation, organizing travel agents to book two suites on the top deck, plus one extra cabin, for one ship every day between May 19 to June 10. The entire plan was carried out from Langley, and the space was booked through the United States offices of the Odessa-American Line. As long as the Kilos stayed in Red Sormovo, a succession of young American executives would be enjoying nice vacations touring Russia’s canals and lakes.