Power Play (13 page)

“It obviously did work against us in 2016. Just not well enough, I guess. How many other countries bought it?”

“Many. Eastern-bloc nations, plus North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Algeria, and God knows who else.”

“And all your president wants to do is cause a war with the USA? You’re right. He’s nuts.”

“I just wish I could say precisely what he’s planning. But I cannot. The whole subject is in code. But the forthcoming strike operation does have a code, and I’ve written it down . . . here . . . ”

Nikolai handed over a small piece of paper. It contained just one word, three letters, and one number—
Project FOM-2
. “That was mentioned at the meeting several times,” he said. “But no one betrayed even the slightest sign of understanding. I watched them all so carefully, and when the president uttered the code, I studied every face at that table. But no one confirmed, denied, or even expressed bewilderment. They just continued the conversation as if they all knew but had no reason to repeat it—Project FOM-2. That was all.”

“Did anyone else say ‘FOM-2’?”

“Yes, Admiral Rankov did, once. And so did Prime Minister Kuts. No one else.”

“Did you have the feeling this was precisely the same subject we discussed before?”

“Very definitely. But more intense. And there was a lot of talk about that submarine, the
Gepard,
that just ran aground on the loch in Scotland.”

“They briefed me on that in the embassy earlier this evening. Seems the entire Western world’s pretty shaken by the whole incident. The media have gone mad.”

“That I did not understand, Rani. But I’ll tell you one thing: this crowd in the rotunda was not in the least bit surprised. It was as if they all understood the submarine would be caught, either by the Brits or by the Americans. It was only the accident that took them by surprise. From what I could tell, there is no question of a court-martial for the captain. And in the Northern Fleet, that’s almost unprecedented.”

“You mean they somehow deliberately sent that nuclear boat to British inshore submarine training waters around Scotland, just waiting for it to be apprehended?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. And it was right after that they began to talk about Project FOM-2. I was not supposed to understand. That much was clear. But I’m sure everyone else did.”

“You think it’s anything to do with that monastery bullshit you came up with last time?”

“Well, I’ve heard no more. But the nuclear scientists from North Korea and Tehran are in place somewhere. I know that. And just last week I intercepted
a Northern Fleet message—it mentioned Solovetsky, which every Russian knows has a very famous monastery.”

“Where’s Solovetsky?”

“A group of islands somewhere in the White Sea. South. I’ve never been there.”

“Is it a big monastery?”

“Probably about the size of the Kremlin. I think it was once a prison camp.”

“That applies to half of Russia,” said Rani.

“And if we’re not careful, we might end up in one,” added Nikolai.

He sipped his coffee in silence, while Rani ordered cheap red caviar and buttered black bread. He’d had no dinner and told the waiter to bring him a large order, since he felt that by midnight Nikolai would want some. He also ordered vodka: “One for me, and a glass for this gentleman who’s been talking to me.”

The waitress looked spectacularly uninterested and never even glanced at Nikolai, which was precisely as Rani had intended.

Novy Yar was, if anything, becoming even busier and noisier, as late-night Moscow places tend to do. It was just about perfect for the Russian Naval officer and the man from the Mossad . . . anonymous, metropolitan, and indifferent.

“Rani, we have to find out what this FOM-2 is all about.” Nikolai was savoring the caviar but pondering the problem. “It’s the code for some kind of revenge attack on the USA. I cannot believe they are stupid enough to do it directly and then just stand there and take the blame.”

“Neither can I,” replied Rani. “The Americans would slam back at them within minutes. Plus, they’d probably stop any incoming attack before it happened . . . but Markova knows that. I mean, Jesus Christ! The US president never moves one yard without his nuclear codes to call in a missile strike at any time.”

“And they’re more advanced than us,” added Nikolai. “They could take out half our nuclear defense shield before we knew what had hit us.”

Both men were silent for a few moments, until Lieutenant Commander Chirkov said quietly, “Let’s apply normal logic, Rani. How could Russia hit an American installation, military or civilian, without being called to task for it?”

“By doing it in secret and blaming someone else.”

“They could do that. But the whole goddamned world has changed. A nuclear strike does not mean what it used to.”

“You mean like Armageddon?”

“You can forget all about that, Rani. Military scientists spend their lives trying to perfect much smaller missiles, with nuclear warheads that will obliterate a target with hardly any peripheral damage. The thing about nuclear warheads is they can be made much smaller than a great bomb packing the same power.”

“And smaller means less fuel for its journey, right?”

“Less fuel means a slimmer, faster incoming attack, perhaps one that even the Americans might miss. I’m sure that’s the game. Trouble is, I cannot find out if this planned strike is imminent. They are too secretive.”

“The whole world’s pretty secretive these days,” said Rani. “I guess it’s worth remembering no one found out we were going to hit Iran.”

“I know. If we had, it might not have been so easy.”

“And now this vindictive Russian president plans to hit back, at the wrong culprit, for all the wrong reasons.”

“He does. I am afraid it will end up in blood, sorrow, and tears for the Russian people. I will do anything in my power to stop the stupid old fucker.”

“Well, you can start by finding out about FOM-2.”

“Give me a break. I only discovered it existed twelve hours ago.”

“You also found out a lot more. Sounds to me like that submarine might have been on a trial run. Just to see if it could be used in the real attack.”

“Right. And it obviously cannot. Not now. From what I heard, the Americans located it three times, but had no interest in doing anything until the Russian helmsman put it on the sandbank.”

“That could mean they’ve ruled out a submarine. Maybe they’ll switch the whole program to a surface ship.”

“Who the hell knows?”

“No one’s going to bomb, or even attack, big cities, especially with nuclear weapons. It’s all changed. It’s no longer acceptable. War these days, conducted by states, that is, not fucking terrorists, means surgical strikes on selected targets, almost exclusively military. And if you can do it secretly, and blame someone else, so much the better.”

“Is that the orthodox gospel according to Saint Rani? Because if it is, I’ll tell you a flaw: Israel never blamed anyone else for Iran . . . ”

“Israel said absolutely nothing,” growled the man from the Mossad. “And that’s
better
than blaming someone else. It’s more mysterious, more baffling. And, in my view, if Russia launches something against the USA, they will say nothing. They will merely deny all knowledge and participation.”

“Rani, I have come here tonight to suggest we are now in a position to inform the USA to go immediately to high alert because Markova is planning something.”

“How can I? We know so little.”

“It’s definite. Trust me.”

“But, Nikki, we know nothing. Not one single detail. I am reluctant to start sounding an international alarm on that scale, until I can come up with a few details.”

“I’m just afraid it might be happening very soon.”

“Nikki, in this trade, you cannot scare people half to death unless you have hard facts. We have none—except they have a plan in progress. But I take your point . . . You sat there, and you heard it all. More important, you heard the anger of the old man.

“And you have the code, FOM-2. We should make this a priority from now on. I’m going back to tackle the new lead about the monastery. You stick with FOM-2 and stay in touch.”

“Okay. We’ll share a cab. I’m going back to the railway station and find a way to Severodvinsk. You can take it on to the embassy.”

Rani shoved over a handful of Russian rubles for the bill and the taxi. As the senior man—Nikolai’s boss, in a way—he always paid. There were cabs in a line outside, and it was still raining. They climbed aboard and set off east toward the Yaroslavskiy terminal.

“Do I get paid for tonight?”

“We’ll wire it to Geneva tomorrow. I think 50,000 US dollars, to celebrate your new promotion.”

“Thank you very much,” replied Lieutenant Commander Chirkov. “Thank you very much indeed.”

Rani Ben Adan could scarcely believe his luck. He was running an intelligent, highly placed informer sitting at the right hand of the commander
of Northern Fleet and, sometimes, in the company of the president of all the Russians.

“Worth $10 million,” he muttered after watching Nikolai run through the rain into the station.

 

The rain was still sweeping across the Moscow River and lashing the wide forecourt of the embassy. Rani could not hear it as he worked his way through reference books and on the keyboard of his desktop computer screen, in the windowless private situation room the Mossad’s field agents utilize for research.

Next to his right hand was the small piece of paper on which Nikolai had written
FOM-2.
Next to it he had written the word
Solovetsky.
On the big screen was a color picture of the ramparts of Solovetsky Monastery, which looked a lot like a medieval fortress and nothing at all like a religious building . . . a home away from home for Ivan the Terrible, rather than the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.

The six Solovetsky Islands stand in the southern waters of the White Sea off the shores of the Onega Peninsula. Collectively, they are usually known as
Solovki—
wild, scarcely populated pine and spruce lands, with forbidding granite shores, a zillion lakes, and, on the main island, Solovetsky itself, a network of canals that join many of the lakes together. Generally speaking, the place is better suited to families of polar bears rather than people. The islands are less than one hundred miles from the Arctic Circle and are more or less permanently frozen.

The sixteenth-century monastery, Rani read, was on that main island. It was built within four massive round towers, with walls composed of giant boulders, eighteen feet thick in places. Four more towers completed the aura of Gothic menace that enveloped the place. The only aspect worse than its impregnable, sinister appearance was its history—which makes the Tower of London seem like a backdrop for
Mr. Rogers.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, a couple of British frigates laid siege to the monastery and demanded its surrender. Nine hours later, after firing
sixteen hundred heavy cannonballs at it at point-blank range, they gave up and left, having scarcely cracked the ramparts and killed no one.

The monastery had a shocking record as a prison camp, and while Ivan the Terrible exiled four hundred prisoners to it, permanent notoriety was achieved in more modern times. Both Lenin and Stalin used it as a part of the Soviet system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about it often and described Solovetsky as “the mother of the Gulag.”

Thousands and thousands of political prisoners died there, under the most cruel and brutal conditions—poets, intellects, writers, and philosophers perished, some of them outside, chained up, naked, and frozen to death. The man often known as “Russia’s Da Vinci,” Father Pavel Floren-sky, professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Moscow, was incarcerated there before his execution in December 1937.

Solovetsky was the clear and obvious model for the labor camps of the Gulag. It was the first, under Lenin in 1921, and lasted until 1939, when the very name
Solovetsky
became too much even for Josef Stalin. He closed it in 1939.

Rani Ben Adan stared at the screen, at the monstrous fortress before his eyes.
I wonder,
he pondered.
I wonder about that place, about the monastery they mentioned three times . . . and the islands they’ve just mentioned again . . . and what the heck is the northern branch of the Russian Navy doing talking about it . . . this remote and terrible place, unapproachable, in the middle of absolutely nowhere? As Moses might have asked King Herod, what the fucking hell is going on?

Once more Rani pulled the map to the screen. He zoomed out to the whole of the White Sea, noting, as a nonnavy man, that it was almost entirely landlocked. There was only one seaway in and out, in the northeast corner, across which ran the line of the Arctic Circle.

Rani picked up the in-house phone and asked for coffee. Mossad men who risk their lives almost every hour of every day in Russia are regarded as gods in the embassy of Israel.

He stared at the map, trying to put himself in the shoes of Russian schemers, to follow their reasoning. Somehow that map, and the melancholy pictures of the monastery, had instilled in him a sense of certainty. Aside from Nikolai’s sharp observations, he had only two facts: three mentions of the monastery in communiqués deep inside Northern Fleet command and one mention of the Solovetsky Islands in the same place. This
could not be just a coincidence. Rani Ben Adan was sure they were connected, and he could think of no more perfect spot to conduct something truly clandestine, especially something to do with nuclear weapons, than deep within those eighteen-foot granite walls, where even US satellite technology could not penetrate.