departure time for cargo moving at five knots. The journey to the White Sea was one of approximately twenty-four hours, the 0830 departure would see them comfortably into the canal by 1030, and to Belomorsk for refueling just as the port came to life the following morning.
The big Tolkach freighters always pulled out at this time after their overnight stop, and there were no surprises in Fort Meade shortly after 0200 when the satellite photographs showed them doing exactly that.
Admiral Morgan was pleased. No communication had been received from the SEALs by midnight, which meant everything had gone according to plan. Arnold Morgan was even courteous to Charlie as they made their way back to Washington from Fort Meade in the small hours of the morning. A thin smile played around the edges of his mouth as he contemplated the mayhem due to erupt in both Moscow and Beijing around seven o’clock (EDT) that evening.
“You’re driving beautifully, Charlie,” he observed. Which almost caused his nerve-racked chauffeur to run straight up the back of a Greyhound bus.
It was 1300 local time when Lieutenant Commander Hunter and his men, having changed clothes during the journey, arrived at the St. Petersburg airport. They disembarked the van, leaving Vladimir to get rid of the clothes, combat knives, and pistols, which he would do at the US Consulate, on Petra-Lavrova Street.
By 1500 the SEALs were on board the American Learjet, ready to take off for London. Five hours later they would be traveling business class on the American Airlines 747 making its daily flight to New York. Rick calculated they ought to be somewhere over the coast of Maine when the barges blew up in the narrow northern reaches of the Belomorski Canal.
Pieter, the steward, and Torbin, the head waiter, were not due to report for duty on board the
The ship was heading south down Lake Onega now, and the Captain couldn’t decide whether just to inform the nearest police, or whether to return to the Green Stop. It was hard to imagine that anything had befallen the men in that lonely rural area. But the search had revealed that one of the ship’s rubber inflatables from the upper deck was also missing — several people knew it to be the very one Pieter had been using to take passengers on late-night sightseeing excursions.
Colonel Borsov decided something was a foot. He ordered the
The four old gentlemen from Minnesota and their nurse, Edith Dubranin, were also missed at lunchtime. Their table was empty; they had not been in for breakfast, and no one had seen them. Colonel Borsov himself had noticed they were not at lunch and ordered a steward to go to the upper deck and check the two suites.
The steward used his master key and found the rooms intact, but found no sign of the old gentlemen. Colonel Borsov suddenly understood that the
All day long, Captain Volkov pushed north at his normal slow speed. There would be no more stops before the White Sea, and he always found the 120-mile journey laborious. He had made the trip many times before, in various ships, but the presence of submarines completely blocked his forward view, and the trip seemed endless as a result. He just had to sit and keep the engines steady, driving forward and relying on his son to steer from the wheelhouse on the bow of the lead barge. Young Ivan was good at that.
By sundown, or what passes for a sundown in the season of the White Nights, he was running through the long wide lakes toward the town of Segeza. They reached the town around midnight, and then turned into the narrow inland canal that begins south of Nadvojcy. It was a four-hour run on this very slow stretch up to the next lake, and the master of the Tolkach was glad both he and Ivan had slept for most of the evening while the first mate and the navigator had taken over the helms.
At 0258 on June 12, lit by the bright glow in the northern sky, the Kilos were just four and a half miles south of the lake, and six miles south of the town of Kockoma. The water was flat, there was no breeze and little traffic when Captain Volkov sensed a long and distant rumble beneath the keel. He had heard such a noise before, and he knew what had happened. “FUCK!” he shouted. “WE’RE AGROUND…”
Reaching for his phone he yelled for Ivan, uncertain whether there had been a steering failure. He heard a truly sensational thundering sound again right beneath the keel. “CHRIST! WE’VE HIT SOMETHING…JESUS…IVAN!! WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”
But there was no reply, and Captain Volkov put his engines to stop as he left the bridge and rushed down the companionway, running along the deck beneath the port side of the Kilo. When he reached the bow, where the two Tolkach freighters were joined, he could not believe what he was seeing. The lead barge was listing to starboard before his eyes, the deck now at a forty-five-degree angle.
He could see the guard hanging on to one of the great wooden blocks that held the submarine in place. Suddenly there was another thunderous roar from under the keel, and the front barge twisted farther to starboard. As it did, two-and-a-half thousand tons of Kilo Class submarine swayed, and then toppled sideways, smashing into the barge’s deck edge before hitting the water with a gigantic splash, and disappearing almost immediately beneath the surface.
But the Kilo vanished for only a split second before it surged upward again with terrifying force, like a giant breaching whale, before settling on the soft bottom of the canal, with the lead barge capsized on top of it. Deep beneath the surface the waters of the canal rushed through the huge split in the submarine’s hull caused by the impact with the deck edge and began to fill the Kilo with water.
But Captain Volkov had more immediate worries. The lead Tolkach had now broached, and the clockwise pressure on the coupling that attached his own rear barge was immense. They were swinging right across the canal, and he could feel his ship twisting to starboard. She lurched right just as the force on the coupling became too great. The entire barge rolled right over, in massive slow motion, sending the Captain hurtling to his death, across the deck and into the tortured, fractured coupling area under the bow. More spectacularly, the second Kilo hurtled off the deck onto the right-hand eastern wall of the canal.
The Kilo hit the bank with crushing force, smashing the concrete and destroying the hull. The submarine rolled back into the side of the barge, then down into the water with an impact almost equal to that of the first one. Split wide open below the sail, she lay half submerged, with water gushing in, pinned to the bottom to the great Tolkach that had carried her halfway across Russia. Ivan Volkov had somehow survived and fought his way to the shore, not yet knowing that his father had died.
He clambered out just in time to hear the muffled underwater roar of Lieutenant Ray Schaeffer’s slightly later Semtex charges blast eight gaping holes along the underside hull of the rear Tolkach. He heard the dull thunder, as his father had done four minutes earlier, and then he stood and stared as the six-hundred-foot following barge began to list and then to lurch dramatically as the water rushed in below. She seemed to rise, and then groan her way onto her port side, just as John Bergstrom had planned.
From Ivan’s perspective, the barge seemed to roll with agonizing slowness, and he watched in horror as the rear Kilo wobbled, then crashed majestically, plunging down from her keel blocks, twenty feet above the water. The Kilo hit the surface of the Belomorski Canal with breathtaking reverberations before rebounding back into the water with a gaping hole behind her tower, and a giant split all the way aft, through which water gushed, short-circuiting and wrecking the battery, flooding the diesels, ruining the computerized firing systems, wiping out the sonar, the radar, the operations center, and flooding every compartment.
No crane would ever be able to lift even one of the Kilos out of the water. In under six minutes the explosives set by Admiral Bergstrom’s SEALs had destroyed three Kilo Class submarines worth $900 million, sunk three of the biggest freighters in Russia, and completely blocked the Belomorski Canal for months, or even a year. At least until the Russians could begin to bring in frogmen, lifting “camels,” and start raising the hulls off the bottom.
Ivan Volkov was the sole survivor. As he stood on the chilly, battered banks of the canal, shivering with cold and shock, miles from anywhere, the waters settled slowly and quietly over the wreckage. To the northeast he could see the sun, glowing pink at 3 AM, on the distant horizon. But there was no movement anywhere, and he knew instinctively that no human being could have survived such a crash.
He also knew now why he had survived. As his Tolkach had listed to starboard, he had sensed the danger and dived straight over the bow of the lead barge, from the area directly in front of his wheelhouse. He had plunged
