Red traitor, p.16
Red Traitor, page 16
“You wrote to me.”
“I did.”
“So I came. You have something to tell me?”
“Will you have some tea?”
Vasin followed Tokarev into the tiny kitchen, where a chunky old radio with outsized dials burbled Woman’s Hour advice from Radio Mayak. Vasin didn’t dare volunteer to help the proud old cavalryman as he bustled around the kitchen. There was no lid on the kettle, or the teapot, or the tea caddy, Vasin noticed. Tokarev was so adept with his prostheses that it was almost as though he had real hands—except that he spilled tea leaves all over the counter and dropped a teacup into the sink. Once the kettle was set on the stove—an electric model which needed no matches to light it—Tokarev settled down at the kitchen table and gestured Vasin to follow suit.
“Saida’s dying. They wouldn’t let me see her. They kept her at the Serbsky Institute only long enough to have her certified insane. Then they took her to some KGB facility. Friend Orlov didn’t want my bosses—the military brass—getting her out, of course. They wouldn’t tell me where she was for a month. But an old war comrade of mine knows one of the doctors at the Serbsky. Traced her transportation orders. Made some calls. Got word to me that Saida was somewhere near Zagorsk, in some closed kontora psychiatric zone. Told me she was under heavy sedation. Refusing to eat. Last week they began feeding her through a tube.”
Tokarev pronounced the words in a hoarse, clipped tone, as though reading an official report. Vasin swallowed hard, impressed by Tokarev’s dignity. He desperately wanted to help this man.
“So, Vasin. You said I needed to find something for Orlov, to exchange for Saida. So I found you something. Now turn up the radio. And take your notebook. All this is in my head.”
Obediently, Vasin did as he was told. Tokarev at least knew his basic countersurveillance—the radio made it almost impossible for microphones to follow a conversation. Vasin turned up Radio Mayak to full volume.
“And so, Comrades, today we will be talking about baking. We learned everything we need to know about baking at our mother’s side—or so we think. But what are the real, scientific differences between using yeast and bicarbonate of soda? Today we have nutritionist Dr. Yulia Mitskovskaya on the program to explain…”
Vasin fished a pencil and pad from the pocket of his coat and joined Tokarev at the kitchen table. The Major began without preamble.
“On October second a flotilla of four submarines left Polyarniy naval base on the White Sea, bound for the Caribbean. Vessels B-36, B-130, B-4, and B-59. All Project 641–class boats. Diesel-electric, eighty-nine meters long. Long-range hunter-killers, designed for a cruise of up to thirty-seven thousand kilometers. Not ballistic-missile boats. Armed with torpedoes only. Got all of that?”
Vasin looked up sharply at Tokarev. He happened to know that information to be correct—it was in one of the reports that Sofia had already passed to Morozov. A fleet of surface ships and, yes, four submarines had been ordered to sea as part of the support effort for Cuba.
“Now listen very carefully. In addition to twenty-one normal torpedoes, every one of those four subs is equipped with a single special weapon. A nuclear-tipped variant of the T-5 torpedo. Which is our heaviest antiship conventional weapon. Each of these nuclear torpedoes carries a warhead of four-point-eight-kiloton capacity.”
Five kilotons would make each torpedo about a quarter as powerful as the atom bomb the Yankees dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. That meant, Vasin presumed, each torpedo was capable of destroying a mere quarter of a city. Or sinking an American carrier battle group.
“Tokarev—how do you know this?”
“Knew you’d ask. An old university mate who joined up, like me, in ’forty-one became an officer in the Soviet Riverine Fleet. Ran supplies across Lake Ladoga to Leningrad during the siege, right under the noses of German artillery and dive-bombers. Three boats shot to pieces under him. He spent a night floating in the freezing water, clinging to wreckage. Paddled to shore, though his legs were full of shrapnel, then crawled along the lakeshore till he reached our front lines. Lost both feet to frostbite. So you can imagine when he and I meet. Footless, I call him. Handless, he calls me.”
Tokarev pulled his face into a bitter parody of a smile.
“My mate, the much-decorated war hero Footless, now happens to be a deputy minister of river transport. Two weeks ago he was at some meeting in Moscow. All-Union Congress of Heavy Shipbuilding. Kind of thing he spends his time doing—talking to heavy shipbuilders. He runs into an old comrade who now works at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Heavy ships require medium machines, I guess. Anyway. A colleague of this comrade is there, too—and it turns out he makes torpedoes. The three of them get drunk at the buffet. Mr. Torpedo starts saying how excited he is that some super-weapon he’s made is getting its first operational trials at sea. Super, how? asks my friend Footless. Super nuclear, the guy answers. Tap on the nose. ‘And it’s on its way to teach the Yankees a lesson in Cuba.’ That’s what he says.”
So far, so plausible—or so it sounded to Vasin. The boasting gossip of bosses, among their own—this kind of loose talk was one of the kontora’s perennial security nightmares, as everyone in Special Cases knew. Senior apparatchiks believed, almost to a man, that secrets were for the little people. Generals, too. Eavesdropping on this kind of banter had been the original basis of Morozov’s espionage career. If he was indeed a spy.
“Two days after his meeting took place, I happened to call Footless. I’ve been in touch a lot lately with him—and all my other old mates—since Saida got taken in. Asking around for gossip, anything I can use. I can tell that Footless is dying to tell me something. We meet at the Officers’ Club on Tsvetnoi Boulevard. And he tells me his gossip about the torpedoes—as I’ve just told you. Therefore: I know that at least one submarine has apparently put to sea, carrying a nuclear torpedo, bound for Cuba. The rest was connecting dots. You know this. All kinds of secrets hide in plain sight—if you know what you’re looking for. You don’t have to see the confidential fleet orders to know which four Northern Fleet boats have been provisioned and fueled for a long-range voyage out of Severomorsk.”
“But how do you know that those boats are heading to Cuba?”
“Don’t interrupt—listen. So I started looking at the correspondence that goes out from the office of Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy Admiral Gorshkov. The bureaucratic protocol is this: Two copies of every operational order go to the relevant department—Northern Fleet, Pacific Fleet, and so on—where they are passed down the chain of command to officers in the field. Another copy goes into the Admiralty archive. And another goes to the General Staff headquarters. And, in the case of all confidential, top-secret and flash-priority signals, another one goes to…to who, Vasin?”
“To the GRU.”
“Correct. To the GRU secret registry.”
“Which you got into, how?”
“You don’t get into the registry. You talk to people who do. Again…know what you are looking for, and suddenly everyone presumes you’re in the magic circle. You don’t ask, ‘Can I access the top-secret fleet orders from Admiral Gorshkov’s office?’ You ask, ‘Anything new come through on the Caribbean flotilla? Boats B-36, B-130, B-4, and B-59. Come across anyone’s desk, girls?’ And then someone pipes up, ‘Oh yes. Filed something about them a few days ago.’ And then you know.”
“Know what?”
Tokarev was enjoying teasing out the story of his own sleuthing.
“On October second Northern Fleet headquarters signaled the flotilla, under the authority of Admiral Gorshkov. He formally ordered those four boats to sail to Cuba and take up station at Mariel Naval Base. Then, a few days later, Gorshkov formally gave the individual commanders fire control over the special weapons they are carrying. You see what I’m saying, Vasin?”
“You lost me completely. What is fire control?”
“It means that every boat’s captain has the personal authority to use his nuclear torpedo in the case of enemy attack. No need to seek authorization from Fleet HQ. So there are four Soviet officers, cruising somewhere under the Atlantic right at this moment, each with personal command of a nuclear weapon. And—last and most important thing. The flotilla sailed on the same day their orders came through. October second. Their estimated sailing time to Cuba is twenty-two days.”
Vasin did the arithmetic and gripped the table, suddenly giddy. It was now October twenty-second. That meant the flotilla was due in the northern Caribbean…in two days’ time. His brain filled with a blizzard of thoughts. Who authorized this nuclear flotilla and its kamikaze orders to run the gauntlet of the American fleet? And who in hell had the authority to stop it?
“But wait. There’s another thing you need to know. We have a man inside the NSA.”
“The American National Security Agency?”
“Exactly. It’s part of their Department of Defense. They’re the listeners. The guys who monitor our radio traffic. Try to tap our embassies’ phone lines. We have a spy who works there.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“The usual way. Paperwork. Guesswork. The Aquarium registry, again. I went through the logs of all the incoming agent reports. Not the reports themselves, of course. I’m not cleared for that. But where the intelligence reports go, which departments? That’s all in the daily logs of the general registry. And guess what I found? Last summer, we start getting five times the usual traffic of reports going to the Aquarium department that monitors US signals intelligence. Five times more information coming from someone in the field, to that department. So I do a little digging. The files all have the same agent code. Therefore, all this is coming from a single guy. And it’s originating in the GRU rezidentura in Washington. So I check the exact departments this man’s information is being sent on to. Navy intelligence. Air Force intelligence. Our own signals intelligence people. Hardly anything at all to the political bigwigs. Nothing graded ‘flash’ or ‘eyes-only.’ Therefore, it’s technical stuff, fairly low-level. But copious. And detailed. Operational stuff from across the US military—which means it’s from someone with access to a wide range of American signals, across all the services. So it’s probably from inside the NSA.”
“Why do I need to know this?”
“Because of the Navy’s map room.”
“Tokarev—you’ve lost me again.”
“There’s a distribution list. Standing orders, if you like, about which departments routinely get to see the copies of every agent’s product. The most boring document in the world, you might think. But no. Bureaucratic procedures can tell you a lot. The stuff our spy produces always gets copied to the Navy Staff map room, urgent priority. That’s the place where our sailor boys plot all the locations of every enemy ship we know about, anywhere in the world. Which means, what?”
“That he’s reporting on US naval movements?”
“Exactly! Exactly.”
“So you think he’ll tell us if the US Navy spots our flotilla?”
“Very possibly.”
“And how do we know if he does? You said you can’t read the actual content of this guy’s messages.”
“With the whole world on the brink of war? I reckon our Washington station would mark a signal like that ‘flash-urgent.’ And we’ll see the Americans mobilizing their fleet to intercept our boats. That’s how we will know.”
“And if we want to get hold of this flash message? So we’re not just guessing?”
Tokarev’s face, which had been animated with an almost boyish enthusiasm as he laid out his own sleuthing, tensed back into a mask of anxiety.
“If that happens, I’ll think of something. But all this information—surely it’s enough to trade for Saida?”
“Yes. I mean…I think so.”
“You think?”
“You know Orlov. It’s not going to be easy to extract mercy from him. But…you’re paying him in a currency he understands. And this is brilliant work. Really.”
Vasin stood quickly, scooping his notes into his pocket. Tokarev stood, too, more stiffly. Vasin reached across the table and seized one of the old man’s plastic hands.
“Where can I find you, Major? For updates.”
“Call a pay phone number in the next-door building. I can be there every evening at five.”
Vasin scribbled the number in his notebook. By force of habit, he added one to each digit for security.
“Orlov will hear of this right now. That much I can promise you.”
9
Sargasso Sea
22 October 1962, 18:48 Eastern Daylight Time
Tropical rain clouds scudded low over the western horizon, piling up in angry black ziggurats over the island of Bermuda. For a few minutes just before it set, the sun broke through under the clouds in a fiery blaze and then was gone. For eight days Arkhipov’s flotilla had been riding mountainous Atlantic swells, whipped up by Hurricane Ella as it spiraled up through the Gulf of Mexico, five hundred miles to the southwest. The worst blow of the Caribbean storm season, B-59’s navigator reckoned, and one that had made life on board B-59 a misery.
Though B-59’s five hundred tons of accumulator batteries filled most of her hull, they still needed to be charged for at least six hours a day. That meant running the diesels—and diesels needed air. Sailing a submarine on the surface, in the teeth of a tropical storm, was the maritime equivalent of climbing into a barrel and rolling down a mountain. At least a dozen of the crew lay injured, pitched violently against the thousands of levers, taps, gaskets, and pipes that protruded at every angle throughout the submarine. One young midshipman lay with a fractured arm after being hurled down the steps into the machine control room. The cook’s mate had split his head open on the ventilator hood of the ship’s stove, spilling a forty-liter tub of boiling soup on himself in the bargain. Even Arkhipov, with his twenty years of experience at sea, had concussed himself in the rear torpedo compartment as an unexpected roll of the ship sent him staggering against the heavy steel breech of one of the six firing tubes.
On the first day of the storm, the officers and warrant officers had abandoned eating meals in their two messes in favor of bolting bowls of food in their berths—just like the enlisted men had to do for the duration of the voyage. Arkhipov had spent most of his waking hours in his cabin, sitting with his back braced against the bulkhead and his feet against the deal table opposite, too seasick to read or even think. Every compartment of the boat reeked of vomit. Even the macho Savitsky, occupying the cabin directly opposite Arkhipov’s, retched his guts out every half hour into the personal sink in his cabin. The seas had been so high that they regularly broke over the top of B-59’s six-meter-tall conning tower, turning the view from the bridge windows into a gray-green screen of foam.
On the second day, they’d lost contact with B-36. On the surface, the subs could communicate using short-range VHF radio. Submerged, they relied on an underwater telephone system that picked up acoustic signals broadcast from one ship to the other via an array of stainless-steel plates along the front of the conning tower. But the electromagnetic fury of Hurricane Ella had played havoc with the radio, and the crazy currents churned up by the force of the storm scrambled the underwater signals, reducing the range of the phone from ten kilometers to less than one.
Now, on the eighth day, the sea’s fury was finally beginning to abate. There had been one tactical advantage to the storm, and it was that storm weather grounded all American sub-hunting aircraft—and high waves made spotting the sub’s black-painted hull all but impossible. As the swells subsided, so did B-59’s invisibility to the enemy.
* * *
—
In the sonar room—a compartment smaller than his own cabin—Arkhipov stood nervously watching the sonarman’s screen. Flanking B-59 were two green blobs, equidistant from her a couple of kilometers to the northwest and southeast and holding the same course toward Cuba. Probably B-4 and B-130. Where the fourth boat of his flotilla had disappeared to was anyone’s guess.
Other than the two Soviet submarines, the area around Arkhipov’s boat appeared blank, dotted only with a constellation of small, glowing specks that flickered and disappeared as the sonar’s sensor turned through 360 degrees. Shoals of fish, most likely. Clumps of floating seaweed. The sea was always full of ghost noises, echoes floating up from the depths. But no large ships—at least not within the sonar’s twenty-five-kilometer radius.
Reassured, Arkhipov ducked aft and made his way to the radio room.
“Nothing from Moscow?”
The radio officer hooked one of his headphones behind his ear and shook his head. No word from fleet headquarters for more than a week on the long-distance radio set—not since a command to Arkhipov’s flotilla to maintain radio silence. That meant that B-59 had to sail mute, listening passively for incoming long-wave radio signals from Moscow, signaling the other boats with the underwater telephone only, or by the weakest VHF short-range radio signal.
“Anything more on local radio?”
The young officer turned in his swivel seat and plugged his headphones into a different radio set that occupied the opposite wall of the cramped comms room. A powerful AM/FM radio, tuned to a local civilian station. Of course American radio was full of lies and capitalist propaganda. But for the moment—and in the absence of instructions from Moscow—snippets of radio news from the United States were all the information on the outside world that B-59 had.
