The base commander knew where his priorities were best placed.
Oberstev did not mind his relegation to the second car. The eight-hour flight from Moscow had covered 6,000 kilometers and six time zones, and he was fatigued. He had slept, but fitfully and erratically and more as a matter of combatting exhaustion than as a normal part of a biological cycle.
Soon, they turned onto a coastal highway and the gray Sea of Japan was visible. The whaling and fishing fleets were out, and the harbor looked almost barren. A few dozen freighters and tankers lay at anchor or were drawn up to the docks. There were perhaps twenty good-size warships near the naval base’s facilities.
Oberstev watched the activity on the docks as they drove past. The workers moved desultorily, filling nets with cargo, off-loading small cars, wrestling with reluctant equipment. They seemed not to care about anything.
Once on the grounds of the base, the commander’s car led them directly to a gray brick building with a white sign that identified it as the operations center.
The drivers of both cars braked to a stop, then hopped out to open the rear doors.
The passengers emerged, then merged as a group of six as they entered the building.
The base commander explained, “I have set aside the officers’ mess as a command center, Admiral Orlov, if that will be sufficient?”
“That will be fine, Admiral,” Orlov told him. “With any luck at all, we will not be here long.”
They went down a long, wide hallway and were briefed on accommodations for bed and board. Quarters in the guest officers’ barracks were being prepared, and their luggage would be delivered there. Food would be sent in, anytime it was requested.
In the officers’ mess, they shed their greatcoats. Navy seamen jumped forward to collect them.
The mess had been fitted with a table surrounded by padded chairs and topped with a dozen telephones in addition to notepads, pens, pitchers of water, and glasses. Tea was brewing in an urn at one side of the room. Navy technicians stood at attention before six electronic consoles until Orlov told them to return to their duties. A large map had been tacked to the far wall.
Oberstev settled into a chair. His eyes felt bleary. Removing his glasses, he methodically polished the lenses. He wondered if his slender shoulders could take the burden that he felt was coming.
Yevgeni sat at the head of the table, his sycophant Sodur close by. Orlov spoke to a captain named Kokoshin who, in turn, barked a few orders, and technicians began to fly. In minutes, variously colored symbols appeared on the map, identifying the positions of ships and submarines. The area of the sunken A2e was designated by a circular set of dashes drawn in red grease pencil.
Captain Kokoshin came forward to brief them on the symbols. He rattled off coordinates and ship types and estimated times of arrival in the area of operations, now called the AO.
“Questions, comrades?” Orlov asked.
“Deep submersibles?” Yevgeni asked.
“The submersible based here is fully disassembled, retrofitting, as is its support ship. According to CIS Navy Headquarters, the Sea Lion, currently in the Barents Sea, has been identified as the alternate choice and is en route to Murmansk.”
“Tell me about the timelines and the preparations, Captain,” Orlov said.
“Admiral Orlov, the information given me is that the Sea Lion will be in Vladivostok within twenty-four hours. It will need, of course, a support vessel, and the patrol ship Timofey Ol’yantsev is now being fitted with lifting booms and other necessary equipment. It should be ready as soon as the submersible arrives.”
“And then?”
“And then, Admiral,” Kokoshin said, “it will require seventy-five hours to put the Olʼyantsev into the area of operations.”
Oberstev appreciated a briefer who had his facts right at hand. Admiral Orlov may have also appreciated Kokoshin, but he scowled. “It will be four days before we have the submersible in place.”
“I am afraid so, Admiral. However, it may take that long for the submarines to locate the wreckage.”
Oberstev thought that response highly optimistic. He assumed that the nuclear experts had not reported in, for there was no mention of the state of the reactor, or when that state might irrevocably change.
His scowl deepening, the commander in chief of the navy asked, “Other questions?”
Oberstev would really have preferred taking a short nap, but he pointed at the map and asked, “Captain, you have identified only CIS shipping?”
“That is true, General”
“What of American ships in the area?”
“They are there, of course, General. We have not concerned ourselves with them for this operation. An overflight by a Tupolev Tu-20 reconnaissance aircraft revealed that U.S. naval units from Midway Island are en route. Additionally, there have been surveillance flights out of Midway Island. In the area itself are several civilian boats.”
“They are there on purpose? The civilian ships?”
“We assume so, General. American television and radio broadcasts identified the coordinates, though not exactly. Again, we do not think that the civilian ships will be of concern.”
“I recommend that you do concern yourself, Captain,” Oberstev said. “I don’t think the Americans will rest until this passes over. They tend to think of themselves as superior beings when it comes to salvage.”
Kokoshin looked to Orlov.
The commander nodded. “Locate them.”
Oberstev looked at the red-dotted circle on the map, thinking about what was within it somewhere.
And he feared that one day he might be remembered, not for constructing the world’s best and most effective space station, but for putting something very lethal inside a red-dotted circle.
On the atlases in children’s schoolbooks.
Two hours earlier, in response to a coded ELF signal, the Winter Storm had surfaced briefly to receive two burst messages. They were coded for Gurevenich’s eyes only, and he had taken them to his cabin, retrieved the code book from his safe, and spent twenty minutes decoding the first.
He uncovered several terse statements. 1) A CIS Rocket Forces A2e had gone down in the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of 26°20′ North, 176°10′ East, 2) the payload was exceptionally important, 3) the Winter Storm was to rendezvous with an Atomnaya Protivolodochnaya Podlodka boat — a hunter/ killer submarine of the class called Alfa by NATO — named Tashkent, and 4) the two of them were to locate the sunken rocket and its payload. Additionally, the Kirov and the Kynda, with their two task forces, were en route to the site.
The frantic tone of urgency, urgency, urgency permeated the message.
Mikhail Gurevenich did not understand the urgency. Rockets failed occasionally, though most often over a land mass and were destroyed in the air. If they did go down at sea, the navy’s deep-diving submersibles frequently recovered parts of them. He wondered if the Kirov was escorting a salvage vessel with a submersible. It was possible.
The underlying impetuosity might be a reaction to a pay-load that defied space treaties, or that contained supersecret components.
That, he could understand.
The Winter Storm, normally an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) vessel, was designed to hunt down and sink hostile submarines, and Gurevenich assumed from his orders to search for this downed rocket that the payload was, indeed, highly classified.