standing in the Admiral’s bedroom at Fort Meade shaking him and imploring him to awaken. He had turned on every light and was about two steps from pouring a small glass of cold water strategically upon the forehead of the Director of National Security, a mutually agreed-upon tactic if all else should fail, when George Morris finally awoke.
“What in the name of Christ is going on,” he said, blinking at the lights. “Someone declared war?”
“Nossir. But there is something we think may be important.”
“Jeez. It had better be. What the hell’s the time?”
“Er, 0300, sir.”
“Well what’s going on, Lieutenant, speak up for Christ’s sake.”
“Something about those Kilo submarines going to China.”
Admiral Morris was on his feet before the sentence was completed. The image of the ferocious Arnold Morgan rose up in his mind’s eye. “Christ, man! Why didn’t you say so?”
“I was waiting for you to wake up, sir.”
“Wake up! Wake up! I am awake, aren’t I? Gimme three minutes and we’re outta here, got a car outside?”
“Yessir.”
“Get in it. I’m right with you.”
Inside the Director’s office, a set of satellite pictures was already spread out on his desk. Two night duty officers were comparing details, staring through a magnifier into a light box.
“There’s not much doubt about it, sir,” one of them said as Admiral Morris approached. “The three Kilos in the shipyard at Nizhny Novgorod are almost ready to leave. And judging by these pictures, it’s not going to be long.”
The officer stood up. “Take a look, sir. See that scaffold all over the sail on boats one and two a week ago? Look at it on the pictures we got last night. It’s reduced by at least two-thirds. You can see that the third boat now has less stuff all over it than it did two weeks ago. These things, as you know, sir, tend to finish quickly. They don’t have to do much in the way of trials until they get to the coast…they’re going to be gone very soon.”
Admiral Morris considered the evidence before him. The satellite images dramatically highlighted the speed with which the Russian submarines were being readied. It was clear that if the work progressed at this rate, the ships could be moved onto a transport barge within two weeks. It looked as if the three hulls would travel together, possibly on barges and probably with an escort.
The CIA had intercepted several signals between Beijing and Moscow, and two of them suggested that there would be heightened security in the light of the unfortunate accident that had befallen the last two Kilos on their way home to China. It was not, however, clear whether that security would stretch to the inland part of the journey.
The director did not need to study the pictures for long. Lieutenant Harrison handed him three additional satellite photographs showing several hundred miles south — the stretch of the Volga River, which passes the sprawling industrial city of Volgograd. Risen from the ruins of the 1942 to 1943 siege by the German army, Volgograd occupies almost sixty miles of the bank of the Volga. It is here that the river changes course, on the great southeastern bend down to the Caspian Sea.
On the long gentle curve of the river, the overheads had picked up a shot of a giant two-part articulated transporter barge making its way slowly upstream. A Tolkach such as this has a load capacity of ten thousand tons, and while there are many big freight barges plying their way along Russia’s greatest river, these monster nine- hundred-footers are comparatively rare. Powered from the stern (the name means pushers), they utilize a large rising wheelhouse on the bow deck to operate a massive for’ard rudder, without which they’d never get around a sharp bend.
In line astern, this particular barge was followed by another Tolkach, not so long, but all of six hundred feet. Both were of the Class of the XXIII S’ezd (KPSS, the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party), and both were making approximately five knots through the water on this busy industrial reach. They were the type of barge used by the Russians to transport submarines.
In the West it is traditional to build submarines in yards close to the sea, or at least to a major estuary. The Russians, however, have a mammoth shipbuilding industry in the old city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, which is situated bang in the middle of the old Soviet Union almost a thousand miles south of the Barents Sea port of Murmansk, and almost a thousand miles north of the former Black Sea Naval base of Sevastopol. Thus generations of Soviet warships would have been, to the Western eye, stranded at birth, like so many Atlantic salmon born upriver. Or more graphically, it is as if the new Trident submarines were being built in central Kansas or Bedfordshire.
But the frozen heartland of Russia possesses one major natural asset — missing from both central Kansas, and indeed from England…the 2,290-mile Volga, the fifteenth longest river in the world, the very soul of the Communist Dream to construct a great waterway interconnecting the entire Soviet Empire.
A series of canals have made it possible for the Russians to transport big submarines and other warships between the Black Sea in the south and the White Sea in the north. The route begins at the Kercenskij Strait, east of the Crimean Peninsula, and crosses the Sea of Azov, heading northeast. Entering the Volga-Don Canal, the route continues northeast through the lakes, and along a further canal joining the Volga just south of Volgograd.
From that point heading north, the great river widens into breathtaking river-lakes, up to two hundred miles long, before swinging west past the city of Kazan to Nizhny. Here the River Oka, flowing in from the southwest, converges with the Volga and forms a great wedge of land called the Strelka (the arrow), home to the 150-year-old shipyards of Red Sormovo. The Russian word
In recent years this yard has built a succession of merchant and low-draft passenger ships, but it has a long tradition of building submarines — which can be transported by barge, south to the Black Sea and also to the Northern Fleet. The Red Sormovo shipyard constructed the Charlie II nuclear boats, and the old Julietts. The 7,200- ton Barracudas of the Sierra II Class were built here as well, and so were the nuclear-powered Victors, and the Tango Class diesel-electrics. The yard also has an acknowledged capacity for construction of the most modern Kilos.
Because of the landlocked geographics of the Black Sea, and with the Mediterranean another virtual dead-end ocean, most of the submarines built at Nizhny are transported north through a colossal waterway masterminded by Joseph Stalin. It begins on the Volga as the great river winds its way north along silted-up shallows, and along the timber-growing west bank with its barge loads of sweet-smelling birch logs.
Right off the town of Yurevetsk, seventy-five miles upstream from Nizhny, the river swings left, zigzagging its way on a lazy westerly course to the huge Rybinsk Reservoir. Here the Volga swerves hard south, eventually joining Stalin’s astonishing creation, the Moscow Canal.
At that point, the Russian Mother, as the Volga is known, turns its back on the frozen north, and the submarines must continue their journey toward the Arctic Circle in colder waters. The great Tolkach barges continue north up the seventy-mile-long reservoir, traveling through the wide waterways and canals that skirt Lake Beloje. They journey a total of 150 miles before entering the tranquil northern waters of Lake Onega, which is 120 miles long and the second largest lake in Europe.
This is the most beautiful part of the journey, for the lake is wild, and Russian, and spotted with picturesque islands, and quite exquisite wooden churches, many of them standing beneath carved onion-shaped domes. On the island of Kizhi, the Church of the Transfiguration is decorated with twenty-two domes, all perfectly shaped and carved by local eighteenth-century craftsmen. Not one nail was used in the construction of this building.
Along these near-silent waters the Tolkach freighters shoulder their huge underwater warships, malevolently moving across the surface against a backdrop of some of the most lovely waterscapes in all of Russia.
At the end of the idyllic and peaceful Lake, the submarines enter the black shadows of the Belomorski Canal, the embodiment of Stalin’s cruelest ambitions. Thousands of slave laborers perished in a frozen hell while making the canal, as the commissars forced them beyond the limits of human endurance.
The result is a masterpiece of engineering, a straight 140-mile-long waterway joining the lake to the White Sea and the Baltic — a military thruway designed to serve the remorseless ambitions of the Communist dictator. But the endless deaths among the political prisoners and thinkers who formed that terrible army of forced labor scarred the name Belomorski. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who was judged to have approved the canal
