Kilo Class

“Now come on, Vitaly. We do not think this. We certainly do not regard you as backward, or Third World, or powerless. We are not your enemy. We didn’t want the Kilos delivered, that’s true. But we would never do something like you describe. Anyway, how could we? How could any outsider pull off an operation like that? You think someone blew ’em up?”

“No, Arnold. Not someone. I think you blew them up.”

“No. No. No. I would regard that as an unacceptable act between friendly nations. I might consider it…but I’d never carry it out.”

“Arnold. I just had to hear your formal denial.”

“Well, you got that, old pal. If I were you, I’d take a careful look at some of your other enemies. How ’bout those Chechen characters, they’re still pretty fed up with you guys. And I’ll tell you, it would be a whole hell of a lot easier for them, than us, to knock a few holes in a big freighter. Sounds to me like a classic inside job.”

“Thank you, Arnold. I appreciate your concern. But don’t take me for a fool.”

“Would I do that, Vitaly? We’re friends, and anything I can do to help, lemme know. By the way, you got any kinda security forces in that canal? I mean, what type of guards and surveillance do you have up there?”

“Very little really. We’ve never had a serious enemy inside Russia.”

“Jesus, Vitaly. You gotta shape up. I’m telling you, this world’s a dangerous place. Stuff happens all the time. My advice is to beef up security when you’re moving expensive export submarines around.”

Admiral Rankov could have strangled Arnold Morgan with his own huge, bare hands. But instead he just said, “Thank you, Arnold, for your time. And, of course, you will understand my position, when I tell you that I do not believe in your innocence.”

“I understand your position, of course. You must believe what you must believe. But I am genuinely sorry, and I would like you to try to count me out…please.”

“You’re a bastard, Arnold Morgan,” muttered the Russian, shaking his great leonine head as he replaced the telephone.

Rankov had known Morgan would deadpan his way through the conversation, denying any knowledge of the attack. It was now time for Admiral Rankov to initiate a major investigation as to what, precisely, had happened up there in the Belomorski Canal. His facts were sketchy. He had spoken to the chief of the River Police, who confirmed that the lead barge had tipped over first, followed by its adjoining articulated “pusher,” which housed the Captain and crew. The third barge had tipped the opposite way, moments later. The police chief did not know whether the rear barge was in any way attached, but he thought not.

“Losing one,” murmured Admiral Rankov, “might be just an accident. Losing two barges coupled together could be blind carelessness. Losing three, the last of them unconnected, is sabotage. Terrorism.”

He paced the length of his office. Could it be the Chechens? Possibly, though there must be so many better ideas for them. Aside from the money, the real losers are China, not Russia.

“For sheer motive, I need look no further than the USA,” Rankov concluded. “Though I must admit I find that incredible. How could they have the nerve? How could they operate inside Russia deep in the heartland a long way from the ocean? How did they get here? How did they get explosive in? How did they get away? Where are the culprits now? Are they still here? Might they do something else?”

Admiral Rankov shuddered. The facts suddenly seemed disconnected. And the clues were sparse. There was only one real thought in his mind. Morgan.

He decided to initiate his investigation before reporting the matter to the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Navy, and he called his staff Lieutenant Commanders, Levitsky and Kazakov, to begin making his lists. He told them to sit down with notebooks while he paced and dictated. Then they could go off and prepare a comprehensible report.

The situation at the canal was now well in hand. The River Police had cordoned off the disaster area for a radius of five miles. There were roadblocks set up every two miles, and all vehicles were being stopped and searched regardless of nationality. Extra police were being drafted from all the local areas. Navy frogmen were on their way down by helicopter from Severodvinsk. A Naval commander was already on his way south down the canal with a small fleet support ship specially equipped for salvage operations.

A command operations center would be set up on board while a Navy investigation of the wreckage took place. Admiral Rankov ordered a passenger and a crew list to be delivered for every tour ship and freighter that had stopped anywhere on Lake Onega in the past three days. He also ordered an immediate survey of all missing persons in the area for the past twelve months. This he insisted would include a survey of every town and village, every tour ship, every local freighter, and every military vessel that had been anywhere near those upper reaches of the Belomorski Canal. If anyone had gone missing, under any circumstances whatsoever, Admiral Rankov wanted to know. He also wanted records pulled for every foreigner who had entered Russia in the previous three months, and he wanted those records compared to every recorded departure. “I want to know who’s still here, where they are, and what the fuck they’re doing. All of them. Make sure they check out departure records. If anyone’s gone who did not enter officially, I want that person traced — I don’t care where he lives.”

One of his Lieutenant Commanders unwisely ventured that such an operation would take a thousand people. “I do not give one solitary shit if it takes up ten thousand people,” the Admiral replied. He was going to find out, and prove, who had killed his Kilos. “As if I don’t already know,” he growled under his breath.

Back in Washington, fighting an overwhelming desire to celebrate the plight of the Russian Admiral, Arnold Morgan steadied his grim pleasure. “This is an interesting contest,” he told himself. “John Bergstrom and I have tried to cover all the angles. But there will be a lot of rabbit holes down which I expect Vitaly Rankov to run. I just hope they all come to a dead end.”

Right now, Admiral Rankov was digging out rabbit holes all over the place. His heels clicked on the marble as he paced back and forth, his face clouded, his tones urgent. “Make sure we get lists of all ships that came through the northern waterways, that could have been carrying explosive, check all radar surveillance for any unknown aircraft that came by. Get me lists of every single aircraft that came through Russian airspace in the vicinity of Lake Onega for the past two months.”

“Including passenger planes?” asked Lieutenant Commander Levitsky.

“Including every fucking thing that flies,” snapped Rankov. “If a foreign power did this, I think we’re going to find a few holes blown in the underside of the Tolkach barges. And I must ask how the hell that much explosive got into this country. No one in their right mind would have risked a train, or a truck, or even a boat. The consequences of discovery would simply have been too serious. My instinct tells me that somehow, somewhere, the kit that was used by the saboteurs was air-dropped, but don’t ask me how.”

“How much explosive, sir? How much d’you think it might have taken?”

“I’m not sure. Those barges are huge, they formed a fifteen-hundred-foot-long convoy. I suppose you’d want a charge every fifty feet to be absolutely sure they capsized immediately. That’s a big consignment of explosive. It must have been air-dropped. There’s really no other way, unless they planned it for months and months, and smuggled it in little by little, storing it somewhere up the canal. But I doubt that. Too messy, too risky, and too difficult to hold under tight control.

“Sir, are you suggesting someone dropped a hundred and fifty pounds of high explosive out of a plane, and that a group of foreign frogmen found it, shared it out, and then got under the barges and blew twenty or thirty holes in them?”

“Well, I thought I was, but when you put it like that it doesn’t sound too likely.”

“Sir, I was just thinking about the accuracy factor. Things that get thrown out of planes can go anywhere in a four-mile radius. You could have fifteen or twenty men running round in circles for days trying to find stuff. Someone must have seen them.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Rankov. “But we have no idea where the stuff might have been dropped. We don’t even know where they attached the explosives to the barges. Remember, you can detonate a small sticky bomb anytime within one minute up to twenty-four hours. They could have done it anywhere.”

“Not while the barges were moving,” said Lieutenant Commander Kazakov.

“No, not while they were moving,” said the Admiral, stopping dead in his tracks. “The report says the Captain’s son, Ivan Volkov, was the for’ard helmsman, and he’s still alive, helping the River Police up in Kockoma. Get him on the line, will you? Find out where they stopped. And anything else he has to say. We might just have to