Atlantis

Jack had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had looked death in the face once too often. He shifted his gaze to Costas and managed a half-smile.

“No problem.”

CHAPTER 15

At the entrance to the Weapons Bay Costas extracted another gadget from his belt, a yellow box the size of a cellphone. He flipped open the lid to reveal a small LCD screen which glowed dull green.

“Global positioning system,” he announced. “This should do the trick.”

“How can it work here?” Katya asked.

A series of figures flashed on the screen.

“That box is our speciality, a combined underwater acoustic GPS receiver and navigation computer,” Jack said. “Inside the sub we can’t send out acoustic waves so we have no access to GPS. Instead we downloaded the specs for this class of sub from the IMU database and mated it with a series of GPS fixes we took via surface buoys outside the submarine on our Aquapod recce this morning. The computer should allow us to navigate inside as if we were using GPS.”

“Got it,” Costas announced. “In the Aquapod I took a fix where the stairway disappeared under the submarine. It’s on the port side of the torpedo room. Bearing two hundred and forty-one degrees from our present position, seven point six metres ahead and two metres down. That puts us beyond the weapons racks just ahead of the port-side ballast tank.”

As Costas began to look for a way through the crowded racks, Katya reached out and held his arm.

“Before we go there’s something you should see.”

She pointed towards the central aisle in the weapons bay just beyond the spot where they had lain in mortal fear only minutes before.

“That aisle should be unobstructed to allow the gantry to sling the weapons off the racks and ferry them to the tubes. But it’s blocked.”

It should have been glaringly obvious, but they had been so focused on the booby trap they had failed to take in the rest of the room.

“It’s a pair of stacked crates.” Costas eased himself into the narrow space on the left-hand side between the crates and the weapons racks, his head just protruding over the uppermost box.

“There are two more behind. And another two beyond that.” Costas’ voice was muffled as he slid further along. “Six altogether, each about four metres long by one and a half metres across. They must have been hoisted down the chute and jigged into place using the torpedo harness.”

“Are they weapons crates?” Jack asked.

Costas re-emerged and shook off the white precipitate clinging to him. “They’re too short for a torpedo or missile and too wide to be tube-launched. We’d need to open one up, but we don’t have the equipment or the time.”

“There are some markings.” Katya was squatting down in front of the lower crate and rubbing vigorously at the encrustation. It fell away to reveal a metallic surface with impressed figures in two separate clusters. “Soviet Defence Ministry encodings.” She pointed at the uppermost group of symbols. “These are weapons all right.”

Her hand moved to the other group which she inspected more closely.

“Electro…” She faltered. “Electrochimpribor.”

They were beginning to think the unthinkable.

“Combine Electrochimpribor,” Katya said quietly. “Otherwise known as Plant 418, the main Soviet thermonuclear weapons assembly site.”

Costas slumped heavily against the torpedo rack. “Holy Mother of God. These are nukes. Each of these crates is just about the right size for an SLBM warhead.”

“Type SS-N-20 Sturgeon, to be precise.” Katya stood up and faced the two men. “Each one is five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There are six crates, ten warheads in each.” She paused and stared at the crates. “The authorities went to elaborate lengths to keep the loss of this submarine a secret. Afterwards there were a number of perplexing disappearances, especially from Kazbek’s home port of Sevastopol. I now believe they were victims of an old-fashioned Stalinist purge. The executions went unnoticed in the momentous events of that year.”

“Are you suggesting these nukes were stolen?” Costas asked incredulously.

“The Soviet military was deeply disillusioned after the Afghan war in the 1980s. The navy had begun to disintegrate with ships laid up and crews idle. Pay was dismal or non-existent. More intelligence was sold to the West during the final few years of the Soviet Union than during the height of the Cold War.”

“How does Antonov fit in?” Costas asked.

“He was a man who could be harnessed to good effect but was dangerous when the reins were loosened. He hated glasnost and perestroika and came to despise the regime for its collusion with the West. This looks like his ultimate act of defiance.”

“If the regime could no longer hit at the West, then he could,” Costas murmured.

“And his crew would follow him anywhere, especially with the lure of prize money.”

“Where would he be taking these?”

“Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Hezbollah in Syria. The North Koreans. This was 1991, remember.”

“There must have been a middleman,” Jack said.

“The vultures were already circling, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Katya replied bleakly.

“I underestimated our friend the political officer,” Costas said quietly. “He may have been a fanatic, but he may also have saved humanity from its worst catastrophe.”

“It’s not over yet.” Jack straightened. “Somewhere out there is a dissatisfied customer, someone who has been watching and waiting over the years. And his potential clients now are far worse than ever before; they’re terrorists driven only by hate.”

The blue glow from the submarine’s emergency lighting barely penetrated the gloom at the forward end of the torpedo room. Costas switched his headlamp to full beam before leading the way through the maze of weapons racks towards the co-ordinates indicated by his transceiver. Jack and Katya followed close behind, their survival suits taking on an increasingly spectral hue as they brushed against the white encrustation which clung to every surface of the submarine’s interior. After squeezing through a final passage they crouched in single file on a narrow walkway flush with the hull casing.

Costas braced himself with his back against the casing. He hooked his fingers through one of the metre-long floor grates.

“Here goes.”

He rocked forward and heaved with all his strength. Seconds later the grate relented with a metallic shriek and a shower of precipitate. Jack crawled forward to help shift it aside, leaving Costas space to swing his legs over and peer into the darkness below. He lowered himself until only his helmet was visible below the walkway.

“I’m on the floor above the bilges,” he announced. “This is as far down as you can go without wading in toxic soup.” He took the GPS unit from his pocket.

Jack stepped over the hole to let Katya move up to the edge. All three headlamps now shone at the flickering green display.

“Bingo.” Costas looked up from the screen and stared at the casing less than an arm’s length away. “I’m five metres above the point where the steps disappeared under the submarine. We’re bang on target.”

“How does the casing look?” Jack asked.

“We’re in luck. For most of its length Kazbek has a double skin, an inner pressure casing and an outer hydrodynamic hull separated by twenty centimetres of rubber. It provides better acoustic insulation and space for a ballast tank. But just before the nose cone it reverts to single thickness to allow more internal space as the casing tapers.”

Katya leaned forward. “There’s something I don’t fully understand.”