Power Play (27 page)

“It was actually worse in Wales. We tried to get that secret place down on the Pembrokeshire coast reopened—NAVFAC Brawdy. But that came
down to town meetings, and God knows what else. And the Brits would neither help nor invest. Kept saying Brawdy had been deactivated for twenty years, and it would cost the earth to get it back into action. It was just too difficult.”

“What’s there now?” asked Mack.

“Strangely enough, it’s another electronic warfare setup—headquarters of the 14th Signal Regiment, which is a very advanced British outfit. It seemed we might have a perfect fit right there, maybe dovetailing our navy surveillance with very sophisticated British electronic equipment. But, like I said, it was just too darned difficult.”

“How about Scotland? That place always seems to be the hub of Russian submarine intrusion.”

“Scotland was not much different. We tried to get Machrihanish back onstream. You probably know it—a Royal Navy Air Base up on the west coast of the Mull of Kintyre?”

“I’ve always heard there was a US SEAL base up there. But it was all very secret. Even now we don’t hear much, except it has a two-mile runway, the longest in Europe, so I guess someone thought it was significant.”

“Guess so, Mack. I was disappointed when we got the Machrihanish brush-off,” said Mark Bradfield. “It was just the perfect place for a listening station, gazing out from lonely country, straight to the Atlantic. The other place we tried up there was the Royal Air Force Base at Kinloss, out on the Moray Firth. It used to be a specialist hunter base looking for Russian boats coming south through the Norwegian Sea. But it’s pretty quiet up there now, and despite all we said, the RAF was even more uninterested than the Royal Navy. No dice there.

“The only other place we tried was the old HMS Sea Lion Base in Northern Ireland, way north, near Londonderry, on Lough Foyle.”

“You draw a blank there too?”

“You can say that again,” said Admiral Bradfield. “The Ministry of Defense had sold it a few years ago to a developer in Dublin, who turned it into a housing estate.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Somewhere between helpless and destitute,” said the admiral. “The United States needs a base somewhere in the Northeast Atlantic, and we’ve never had to worry about it before, because we always had the Brits. And that’s no longer possible.”

“In an ideal world, Admiral, what would be your solution?” volunteered Mack.

“We need a new ally, as savvy, brave, and clued up as the Brits used to be.”

“Is that possible?”

“No. There’s no real firepower in the Baltic except for Russia. And it would be politically impossible to go into partnership with Germany or France or Spain or Italy.”

“What do you think we need from such a new ally?”

“We need a base where we can park a couple of submarines and maybe a couple of frigates. Also, it would be useful to have a fueling area for an aircraft carrier.”

“Then you’re talking one helluva lot of waterfront property. Plus some pretty serious ocean depth. And we’d need accommodation for a lot of people.”

“Maybe not to start. Not while we sort out this Russian crap.”

“I suppose, when you think about it, the cost of reparations to Fort Meade, and the amount of money we’d need to rebuild our entire surveillance system, would run into billions. The price of a new US base somewhere in Europe would be negligible, if we could head off this Russian attack.”

“That’s all true,” replied Mark Bradfield. “I’ve thought about it a lot. We should get moving on this. How about a meeting with Simon Andre, see what he thinks? How about this evening?”

“Can’t. Got an 8:00 o’clock dinner date in Washington. You can come if you like. But I wouldn’t bring anyone else.”

“Where is it?”

“Can’t tell you. But you’ll enjoy yourself. And you’ll get a darned good dinner. And we’ll both learn things.”

“Okay, Mack. Where you staying?”

“I’m at the Mayflower, one night only, leaving for San Diego tomorrow afternoon.”

“Okay. I’ll pick you up at 7:45, and I’ll fix it for us to see Simon Andre here tomorrow morning at 0900.”

“You have an idea where we might build this base?”

“Sure I have. It’s a bit of a long shot, but it would be great if it worked.”

“Can I know the location?”

“How about Ireland? They got a huge deepwater Atlantic coastline.”

“Those devils! They’d probably want the whole of the state of New York in return.”

“How about if we paid off their debts and made ’em the fifty-first state?”

It was one of the few occasions in naval history when Captain Mackenzie Bedford had been nothing short of dumfounded.

 

Admiral Ustinov, in conference with six of his officers, had finally come up with a sufficiently large ship to transport the hardware for Operation FOM-2 across the Atlantic. Two hours ago he had ordered the forty-seven-hundred-ton large amphibious landing ship
Korolev
(Ropocha Class Hull 131) to be completely repainted in civilian colors and livery.

Work began this day on removing her 76mm guns from the for’ard and aft decks and blanking out the rocket launchers from either side of her hull. The objective was to make her look like a big, old merchant-marine ship, moving slowly down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at around twelve knots to make the most of her six-thousand-mile range. The hull would be painted out and her waterlines painted red. The principal hull color would now be dark blue, with white upper works.

She would fly a Russian flag and make the journey from the northern Black Sea port of Sevastopol to Murmansk as soon as her new image was completed. At her top cruising speed of sixteen knots, she would take a little under three weeks to complete the seventy-seven-hundred-mile voyage.

Korolev
was a thirty-year-old warship, stationed most of her working life in the Ukraine. But she had always been well maintained in the warm waters of her Black Sea home and would have no problem with the long trip to Panama once she was loaded.

Admiral Ustinov intended to keep her regular crew for the Atlantic crossing, since she would be heading into near-tropical waters and, in the end, steaming essentially through rain forest.

The selection of a cargo ship for the FOM-2 mission was a make-or-break decision. The admiral intended to use the very latest TELAR (transporter
erector launcher and radar) to fire the Iskander-K surface-to-surface missiles on their way from the remotest regions of the Panama jungle to Fort Meade, Maryland.

He intended to fire four of them, fast, one after the other, with only split seconds between them, no time to reload. And this meant two enormous TELAR vehicles rumbling through the rain forest. It also meant two mighty launchers had to be transported across the ocean to Panama.

The Chinese port authorities would land them, but thereafter they needed to be in top condition and ready to move off, westward along the waterway. The ship that carried them thus needed to be more than capable of the task. The
Korolev
could carry ten battle tanks if necessary.

And she was a ro-ro (roll-on, roll-off), with a wide tank deck running the length of the ship. From one of the enormous military loading docks in the Severomorsk yards, the heavily armored TELARs, with their high mobility MZKT-7930 Astrolog 8X8 chassis, would roll aboard the former landing ship under their own steam—brand-new 1,000-hp Yamaha diesels, which would provide a road speed of fifty-five miles per hour.

The TELAR vehicles chosen for this operation would carry every possible extra—including the new TADAGAR system (target acquisition, designation, and guidance radar) and a heavy rotating turntable, to allow maximum aim accuracy, however awkward the jungle vegetation may be.

Once launched, it was difficult to see how the Iskander-Ks could possibly miss their target: a black glass building that jutted up out of the essentially flat campus of America’s National Security Agency. Admiral Ustinov favored a night firing to avoid inflicting heavy casualties on the US technicians who manned the giant surveillance complex 24/7. But the NSA was the Crypto City that never sleeps. There would be casualties. Admiral Ustinov knew that, but he also knew the nuclear warhead, which would destroy all the US communications, was especially designed to detonate under tight control, inflicting as little peripheral damage as possible. The objective was an unstoppable intense explosion, tailored to incinerate only the immediate area that surrounded it. That was the modern way. President Markova liked that.

When eventually the
Korolev
cleared the Murmansk channel bound for Panama, she would carry a sizable cargo. Aside from the two TELARs and their four missiles, she would also carry a third truck to transport the giant generator and heavy fuel tanks plus the jammer itself and high antennas, with boxes of electronic spare parts.

The forty military staff personnel required to conduct the jungle section of the operation would disembark at Cristóbal Harbor, on the outskirts of Colón, at the Atlantic end of the canal.

Another fifteen electronic technicians to operate the generator and the jammer would travel the length of the Panama Canal with the generator truck before disembarking at the Port of Balboa, right opposite the old Rodman US Navy Base at the Pacific end of the canal. They would travel on a commercial flight from Panama to Houston, where they would change to Delta Airlines and continue to Denver.

The truck, bearing civilian livery but containing the equipment that would nullify the president’s emergency comms, would swing through Balboa and cross the Puente Centenario Bridge, a colossal cable-stayed span sweeping 262 feet above the canal. This is the continuation of the Pan-American Highway, known only as CA-1 all the way through Central America, from Panama to Mexico.

Admiral Ustinov did not consider his career was on particularly shaky ground, but that court-martial threat must have been noted in the Politburo’s inner sanctums. Certainly, the president and his senior ministers knew about it. But Rankov had been very persuasive, insisting that it must all be shelved and forgotten. In his view, Ustinov was the man for any major naval project.

And FOM-2 was just about the biggest project around. Another screwup was out of the question. The operation had the highest possible priority. If it went wrong, Alexander Ustinov would not look forward to a long and peaceful retirement or exalted government position.

Nossir. He’d be breaking rocks in outer Siberia. Thus, he did not care what FOM-2 cost, or how many people it took to make it succeed. He only knew he had to win. The main building in Crypto City must be destroyed.

 

 

 

The US Navy staff car pulled to a halt outside the most majestic hotel in Washington. The doorman moved swiftly to the rear passenger door and recognized the head of the United States Navy sitting inside.

“G’d evening, Admiral,” he said crisply and stepped back to allow the
uniformed Captain Mack Bedford to enter. The doorman closed the door of the long black Buick, with due deference. The SEAL commander issued quiet instructions to the driver, who drove swiftly up Connecticut Avenue to a point three miles out of town.

And there they swung into a fortress of an entrance and pulled up before a pair of tall iron gates, Admiral Bradfield staring ahead at the striking stone building, with its great archways, Middle Eastern architecture, and wrought-iron accessories.

“Who the hell lives here?” asked Admiral Bradfield. “Ali Baba and the forty thieves?”

There was no time to reply because two armed guards came to the driver’s window and requested the names of the visitors.

“Admiral Bradfield and Captain Bedford,” he replied.

“They’re expected. Carry on,” replied the guard. “Will you be waiting or coming back for them?”

“I’ll wait.”

“Okay, park over there. We have a chauffeurs’ room. I’ll take you over.”

Almost immediately, a young military officer appeared and said, “Admiral . . . Captain, welcome to the Embassy of Israel.”

He led the way into the wide central atrium for which the embassy is famed, and they crossed the enormous carpet, which had been specially woven for the building and features the deepest-held traditions of the Holy Land. They walked together up a short flight of stairs to the ambassador’s residence and there stepped through two wide mahogany doors into an unpretentious but superbly decorated room, a portrait of David Ben-Gurion on one wall, one of General Moshe Dayan above the fireplace.

The Israeli officer sitting on the far side of the room stood up and walked toward them, smiling to offer a brief, warm bear hug to Mack Bedford, who in turn faced the US Navy’s chief of operations.

“Admiral Bradfield, I would like to introduce you to Colonel Rani Ben Adan, who has, as you know, been very, very helpful to us.”

Mark Bradfield shook his hand warmly. “I really am delighted at this,” he said. “My country owes you its gratitude.”

“Sir,” replied Rani, paying immediate deference to the American’s high rank, “it is my opinion that we have reached the point where I need to tell you everything I know. May I suggest a glass of wine and we can talk before dinner?”

“Perfect,” replied the admiral.

Rani walked to the sideboard and poured three glasses of Israeli wine from the southern town of Richon-le-Zion, the place where Baron Edmund de Rothschild first established some of his greatest vineyards at the end of the nineteenth century.

They sat down in three plush, dark-red velvet armchairs, and Rani began by explaining the contact who had disclosed such remarkable intelligence involving both the United States and Israel.