At Fort Meade, Admirals Morris and Morgan peered at the satellite pictures.
“How long, George? How long before they leave?”
“Well, if we assume they will go together, the most significant factor is that the third Kilo still has some scaffold. I’m not sure how long it takes to load and secure something that big onto a barge, but it’s gotta be a day for each one, and they are not yet down at the loading dock. Right now I’d say the earliest those transporters could start moving would be ten days from now — say May seventeenth. But if you want my best guess I’d still say first week in June.”
“Any idea how they load ’em?”
“They move the hulls around on the land the same way we move our big boats, on a multiwheel trolley system, running on rails over some very hard standing. We use hydraulic lifts to put the hulls into the water, rather than onto floating barges. I’ve never seen anyone do that, but I guess it’s possible. We might even learn something if we get a photo at exactly the right moment.
“We have seen them put submarines onto those oceangoing freighters they sometimes use…That’s when they flood the ships down into the water and float the submarines onto the decks, same system as a floating dock. These barges look a bit different, but they must do it the same way. I don’t see any other possibility.
“The Kilos will have to be lowered into the water, and then floated over the barges. Then the barges will pump out and lift the submarines clear of the water. I’d say the whole process is going to take a couple of days.”
Arnold Morgan thought quietly to himself.
“Right. Then we got five days running time at five knots to make the journey up to the middle of Lake Onega. The very earliest I’m going to see them in the right area is going to be May twenty-second.”
He calculated that would require a five-day tour boat with the scheduled Green Stop at the north of the lake at around 1900 to 2100 on that same night — a tour boat that had left St. Petersburg three mornings previously on May 19, and which would meet the submarines on the waters of Onega in the afternoon of May 22.
“Just gotta make sure we have a block of rooms on one of those ships every day from May nineteenth,” he concluded. “Once we get that in place, the only thing we need to do is to get the travel agent to change the names on the day we send the team in.”
The CIA would now take over the nuts and bolts of the operation, organizing travel agents to book two suites on the top deck, plus one extra cabin, for one ship every day between May 19 to June 10. The entire plan was carried out from Langley, and the space was booked through the United States offices of the Odessa-American Line. As long as the Kilos stayed in Red Sormovo, a succession of young American executives would be enjoying nice vacations touring Russia’s canals and lakes.
By May 31, almost fifty staff members from various consulates, embassies, and private corporations had made the journey up to the gateway of the Belomorski Canal. And more were scheduled. Except that on June 1 everything changed, fast. The first Kilo was photographed by KH-III moving down to the loading dock on rails. Twenty-four hours later a new picture showed it on board the lead Tolkach. There was suddenly no scaffold whatsoever on the third Kilo.
“Christ,” said George Morris. “They’re on their way. Looks to me like June third or fourth departure.”
Arnold Morgan alerted Admiral Bergstrom in Coronado, who confirmed that the SEALs were ready to go at a moment’s notice — he just needed Morgan to let him know the day his men were to leave St. Petersburg, and the name of the ship. Meanwhile he would move his SEALs across the Atlantic and into a hotel in the busy Russian seaport immediately.
Lieutenant Commander Rick Hunter’s team was ensconced in the Hotel Pulkovskaya near the St. Petersburg Airport. Lieutenant Ray Schaeffer was with him, but Chief Petty Officer Fred Cernic had remained in California. Two other SEALs, a thirty-year-old Petty Officer, Harry Starck, and a much younger noncommissioned seaman, Jason Murray, were already in place. The CIA officer, Angela Rivera, a slim olive-skinned veteran in her midthirties, had arrived on May 29 with a large bag of theatrical makeup and a box full of wigs.
The Tolkach barges were loaded by the afternoon of June 4. At first light on the morning of June 5 four tugs dragged the transporters and their $900 million cargo off the Red Sormovo moorings. The massive engines of Captain Volkov’s mighty barge churned up a seething maelstrom in the middle of the Volga junction and slowly pushed their way forward, followed by the six-hundred-footer, fifty yards astern.
The usual complement of Russian military personnel was on board. Three armed guards worked shifts on each of the three barge sections; one of them was on duty at all times. The lieutenant in charge stayed with Captain Volkov. When they reached the White Sea, the Kilos would proceed under their own power, on the surface, to Pol’arnyj for trials and workup. Then they would set off on their journey to China, escorted the entire way by four heavily gunned Russian antisubmarine frigates carrying guided missiles, torpedoes, antisubmarine mortars with a six-thousand-meter range, and racks of depth charges.
America’s KH-III satellite photographed the barges as they set off from Nizhny. George Morris had pictures of the Kilos in his hand at Fort Meade within two hours. Admiral Morgan called Coronado, and Admiral Bergstrom himself hit the start button for Operation Northern Wedding at 2122 Pacific time. The SEALs would depart St. Petersburg on the Russian tour ship
That meant an additional two-day wait for Rick Hunter and his team. While they settled down to the mind- numbing boredom of life in a commercial hotel in Russia, the Tolkach barges cleared the partly elegant thirteenth- century city of Nizhny, with its population of one and a quarter million, and its belief that it stands as Russia’s third capital.
Captain Volkov settled into a speed of five knots and led the way slowly upriver past the dark-green forests that stretch all along the right bank, forming the heart of the central Volga timber-growing industry. The sight of the three jet black submarines being ferried along the river brought local people out by the dozens, and they watched the Kilos pass by, along the lonely, wide stretch of the river that leads to Jurevec. The Volga begins to narrow here, passing first through the picturesque nineteenth-century artists’ colony near Plyos, where white houses built like Swiss chalets cluster along the riverbank. It then passes the neoclassical town of Kostroma, to which Czar Nicholas II pleaded unsuccessfully to be exiled, and where Tolstoy was a frequent visitor.
The submarines ran nonstop past the city of Jaroslav, with its ghastly chemical factory, placed with typical Russian flair so close to the old-world bourgeois charm of the town itself.
At 2200 on the night of June 7 they swept past the hundred-foot-high statue of a female warrior, which guards the entrance to the waters of the Rybinsk Reservoir. They were more or less halfway between Nizhny and the center of Lake Onega now, a distance of five hundred miles. Captain Volkov pressed on into the night, occasionally speaking by phone to his son, who was up in the bow wheelhouse, three hundred yards for’ard. The Russian Navy guards patrolled through the night, walking back and forth with Slavic doggedness.
The 9,500-ton tour ship
The ship was packed. The suites on the uppermost deck, of which there were two, were greatly sought after. They were newly designed and built, each comprising two bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, and a small salon between them. They were much superior to the ten old single-bedroom suites they had replaced, and much more expensive.
Four Americans occupied these suites. In number 400 was seventy-six-year-old Boris Andrews, and his brother-in-law Sten Nichols, who was one year younger, both from Bloomington, in the southern suburbs of Minneapolis. In 401 resided Andre Maklov, a seventy-eight-year-old diabetic from White Bear Lake, St. Paul, and his roommate, the bearded Tomas Rabovitz, a somewhat youthful seventy-four-year-old from Coon Rapids, north of Minneapolis.
All four knew each other and had saved for many months to make the trip, each of them having once had distant ancestors from European North Russia. They were all in reasonably good health except for Mr. Andrews, who would soon require a hip replacement. He presently walked with the aid of a cane and used painkillers to deaden the endless hurt at the top of his right leg.
The four had shared the cost of a nurse to accompany them back to the land of their forefathers. She was accommodated separately on deck two. Her duties were to attend them throughout the trip, and to ensure that none of them were left alone for too long. Her name was Edith Dubranin. She was fifty-two and also had some Russian ancestry, although she had never before traveled outside the United States. Edith was a stern, no-
