They all knew it wasn’t enough; they also knew that the American Los Angeles class submarines and the British Trafalgars were so damned quiet, it would be difficult to detect them, however many PLAs they had on patrol.
‘Permission to continue, Comrade Vice-Admiral?’
Feliks raised a hand.
‘The surface fleet. In defensive positions facing the west, the Kiev and the Moskva are co-ordinating antisubmarine tactics, with five escorts.’
‘What about the two Sovremenys in the harbour?’
‘Due to sail tomorrow morning. Taking on final stores.’
The Captain Lieutenant rattled off a list of ships deployed further afield, then handed over to the intelligence briefer. Astashenkov concentrated his attention.
‘The tactics in NATO’s Exercise Ocean Guardian are as predicted — what we’d expect them to be in the prelude to war.’
The boy had learned the jargon well, Astashenkov mused.
‘The US carrier battle-groups have yet to threaten the Rodina. One is in mid-Atlantic, the other closer to the motherland, but still near Iceland. It’s the British who are nearest our shores. Our radar satellite is tracking the Illustrious group in the Norwegian sea. And we have reports locating one or two of their submarines in the past twenty-four hours.’
Astashenkov’s eyebrows arched in anticipation.
‘The first came from a Vishnya intelligence vessel, north of Scotland. It heard a British helicopter trying to radio a submarine. There was no response and in desperation the pilot broke the code. He called “in clear” to HMS Truculent.
‘The second may have been the same boat or another Trafalgar, west of Trondheim, travelling northeast at speed. A PLA tracked it for over an hour.’
‘A PLA near Trondheim?’ Astashenkov growled. ‘I don’t remember anything from last week’s.…’
‘Admiral Belikov, sir. The boat is under the personal orders of the Commander-in-Chief.’
‘Ah, yes…’ he nodded, pretending to know. ‘And what do you conclude from these two — unusual — reports?’
‘The communications security breach was carelessness,’ the Captain Lieutenant answered a little too quickly.
‘Or deliberate.…’
A silence hung in the air as they pondered the significance of the Admiral’s remark.
‘Indeed, sir.’
His eyes searched the chart. It was rare for NATO submarines to be detected so easily; he’d have liked to capitalize on the situation, and maintain the tracking, but the PLA near Trondheim had lost the target. He wasn’t surprised.
Admiral Andrei Belikov, Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Fleet, had a square, lined face, with dark hair, thick at the sides but absent on top. He pushed his heavy-framed spectacles onto the bridge of his nose as Astashenkov entered his large, windowless office in the command centre.
Belikov gestured to a chair.
‘Sit down, Feliks. Interesting briefing?’
‘Nothing you don’t know already, I imagine,’ Astashenkov replied pointedly.
Belikov looked momentarily discomfited.
‘Meaning?’
‘I’m sure you know what’s going on without having to attend a briefing, Andrei.’
‘You’re annoyed that you didn’t know about that PLA in the Norwegian Sea. I’m not surprised; I would be too, in your place. But Grekov insisted on secrecy.’
He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He’d planned to involve his deputy in the KGB operation, but later rather than sooner. The chances of failure had always been high and if the plan came to nothing, the fewer who knew about it the better.
‘Feliks, there’s a little scheme underway, involving us and the intelligence departments which, if it’s successful, could be the most significant since James Walker gave us US Navy submarine secrets.
‘The British and Americans have developed a new mine which they believe is undetectable and unbeatable. If it came to war, they’d use them to close our harbours. They call them “Moray” mines, after that eel with the sharp teeth…’
‘Yes. I know about them, of course.’
Belikov paused for effect.
‘We think we’re about to get our hands on one!’
‘What? How?’
‘The boat detected near Trondheim was HMS Truculent. We were expecting her. That PLA you hadn’t been told about — it was there to pick up her trail, so we’d be ready to receive her and her little gift!’
‘A British submarine? Coming here?’ Astashenkov gasped. ‘To give us a secret weapon?’
Belikov folded his spectacles.
‘We need that mine, Feliks! They say it’s undetectable by sonar. If the Americans and the British were to seed our coastline with those weapons, they could destroy the Northern Fleet before it fired a shot!
‘Grekov himself ordered the KGB to give it top priority.’
‘But how has this been done?’
Andrei Belikov savoured his reply.
‘The key’s in the hands of a very old man who lives near here — exists might be a better word. A prisoner of the State. He’s close to death now, but he has a son. A son who’ll do almost anything to see his father free before he dies.’
The Moscow correspondent of the American Broadcasting Corporation couldn’t stop the grin spreading across his fresh, Nordic face. Glasnost had opened countless doors for foreign journalists in the Soviet Union, but he’d never imagined the day would come when he’d be sitting inside the long, silver fuselage of a TU-95 maritime reconnaissance bomber, wearing the flying suit of a Soviet naval aviator.
Known as the Bear-D to NATO, the plane carried four giant turboprop engines, with double rows of contra-rotating propellers. The nose of the aircraft was glazed for observers to watch the sea below, and large bulges below the fuselage contained radar for locating shipping.
The pilot introduced himself simply as Valentin. He led the correspondent and his cameraman up a narrow, aluminium ladder into the cramped interior, followed by a technician from Gostelradio.
‘When there’s something to see, I’ll tell you,’ Valentin explained. ‘Your camera can film through the glass.’
The compartment was crammed with radar scopes. There was nowhere to sit.
‘Until then, you will be more comfortable in the back. There are seats there.’
He pointed to a narrow hatch.
‘Jeez! Are we sure ’bout all this, Nick?’ the American cameraman whispered from the side of his mouth.
‘I guess we do as the man says,’ the correspondent replied.
Passing the video camcorder ahead of them, they squeezed through the tunnel across the top of the bomb bay to the compartment behind the wing, which was equipped with seats as the pilot had promised.
It was going to be a long day. They’d left Moscow at 5 a.m., flying to Murmansk on a scheduled Aeroflot run. It was now 8.30 a.m. and they had to be back in time to catch the 3pm flight to Moscow, for a press conference with Admiral Grekov. Their material had to be on the satellite to New York soon after midnight if they were to make the evening news programmes on all four US networks.
It had never happened before — American journalists taking pictures of the US Navy from a Soviet spy plane. When offered it as a pool facility the networks had jumped at it.
They strapped themselves in as the first turboprop fired. The crewman thrust headsets into their hands, indicating that it was going to get noisy in there.
They were facing rearwards, and the seatbelts bit into their stomachs as the Bear accelerated down the long runway. Heavy with fuel for the long flight, it seemed to race ahead eternally before lifting sluggishly into the air.