Power Play (26 page)

This Cold War mind-set was routine in the old Soviet era, when technicians from behind the Iron Curtain routinely infiltrated any and all US corporations that were involved in design, manufacturing, and servicing the Pentagon’s vast communication networks, both in combat and in peacetime.

There were still “sleepers” throughout the electronic industries in the Washington area, and they were people with considerable knowledge
about Pentagon equipment. Many of them had risen to important corporate positions and were regularly involved in live tests throughout the world’s largest office complex.

It was by no means certain that the Pentagon was, even now, free of the myriad of “bugging” devices and other software “intruders” capable of totally disrupting the network. Soviet spymasters, working behind the high walls and armed security guards on Wisconsin Avenue, tended to be uninterested in where information came from, only that it flowed steadily.

The CIA occasionally nailed a US citizen spying for Russia, and there have been some shocking cases, but the United States, of course, has at times been equally as devious. In the 1980s the Russians were reluctant to move into their new headquarters, the biggest embassy in the United States, because of a tip-off from a US traitor that the Americans had constructed a secret eavesdropping tunnel underneath the entire building!

The secret tunnel is still there, and if federal agents ever reluctantly admit this, it’s usually dismissed as a minor reprisal for the KGB’s inserting bugs into every wall in the new US Embassy in Moscow in the 1970s, an escapade that caused the United States to fly in American construction workers and lop off the top two floors, replacing them with new secure premises.

No details of the tunnel have ever been formally released, but it was built, and it has been widely accepted that the man who betrayed its existence was the notorious FBI spy Robert Philip Hanssen, who spent twenty-two years selling US secrets to Russia in return for hard cash.

When Hanssen was arrested by the feds in a park near his Virginia home in February 2001, he had just taped a bagful of lethal, classified secrets to the underside of a wooden bridge in readiness for his handler to collect. In return for this outrageous climax to a stupendously dishonest and treacherous career, he was sentenced to life in prison.

In addition to the unseen army of “sleepers,” there was a new gateway into American communications. A major new Chinese international electronics company, Pearl River Satellite Systems, was making inroads all along the East Coast. They had strong support from their government and were gaining a significant foothold in sensitive US institutions, working, often, deep inside the nation’s infrastructure. It was hard to avoid the obvious truth: Pearl River was placing itself in a perfect position for deadly espionage.

The corporation’s activities had been so invasive that US senators were expressing concerns. They had, after all, seen how Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., had gained a $140 million contract to provide a huge access network and transmission center to British Telecom’s twenty-first-century operations. It had escaped no one’s attention that there were 3.6 million Chinese living in America and that Huawei might very soon make a move to enter the US market staffed principally, and with some ease, by its own nationals.

The Russo-China alliance was seen as a potential threat to the United States—two very large and burgeoning economies, with giant egos at their heads, all driven by a burning desire to reduce America’s prominence as the world’s leader, banker, and policeman.

Meanwhile, Admiral Ustinov was studying yet another significant observation e-mailed to him from Solovetsky by Dr. Yang. It pointed out that the entire team of presidential protection and support staff—drivers, aides, secretaries, politicians, White House staff, Air Force One crew, and so on—were all linked on a cell-phone network to form one instantaneous contact grid.

It was a substantial support staff. At times it seemed half the US government was in attendance. But that’s the way modern presidents travel, with all hands on deck, as if they had never left the Oval Office.

“If he wasn’t a scientist, we could use him in the FSB,” murmured the admiral. “Some kind of a grasp of new subjects—never really met anyone like him.”

 

 

 

Admiral Mark Bradfield, who had been made commander of a guided-missile frigate at the unimaginably young age of twenty-nine, now occupied the highest office in the United States Navy. An urbane and educated graduate of the Naval Academy, Annapolis, he was widely regarded as an excellent CNO, as good as there had been in recent years.

He enjoyed a close working relationship with General Zack Lancaster, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Both men had experience under fire and were smooth and erudite negotiators. Also, they were both capable of sounding like seasoned gangsters if things were going against them in any debate.

Weaker members of US Navy hierarchy were visibly cowed by both men when the chips were down. Thus, things did not look great for the future for those who felt intimidated. Everyone knew Mark Bradfield was next in line for the top job when the craggy ex-Rangers C-in-C retired at the end of next year.

Admiral Bradfield did not possess the built-in mantra of the US Navy SEALs: that almost every one of the world’s most pressing problems could probably be resolved best by high explosives. He was a hard-assed negotiator and a versatile strategist. His natural instinct was to think his way through obstacles rather than kick, punch, and flatten them in the time-honored manner of men like SEAL Team 10 boss Captain Mack Bedford, who sat quietly before him.

In his big office on Corridor 7, off the Pentagon’s great internal highway of E-Ring, Mark Bradfield was seriously flummoxed. For two weeks he had been studying the numbers of brand-new and rebuilt warships scheduled to join various fleets of the twenty-first-century Russian Navy.

It made extremely impressive reading if you happened to be Russian, but the list made the US Navy boss grit his teeth. There were five ten-thousand-ton Delta IV ballistic-missile submarines returning to the Northern Fleet after long refits, two new Borey Class nuclear boats of similar capabilities were returning to the Pacific Fleet, and two more Sierra Class submarines were just out of refit and headed for Severomorsk. Three new Oscar IIs, Russia’s fourteen-thousand-ton biggest attack submarine, were out of refit with brand-new missile systems and headed home to the Northern Fleet.

The main export submarine, the near-silent, diesel-electric Kilo Class, was being built for extensive overseas orders—nine to China. But a whole group of brand-new Kilos, already under production, was scheduled to join all four Russian fleets, Northern, Baltic, Black Sea, and Pacific.

There were four new aircraft carriers under construction, and the forty-six-thousand-ton
Admiral Kuznetsov,
with its total refit complete, was expected to begin fleet exercises in the North Atlantic off Norway early next
year. All three of Russia’s big Kirov battle cruisers were scheduled to complete refits within eighteen months, and the cruiser
Marshal Ustinov
had arrived back in the Black Sea after extensive modernization.

The biggest program, however, was for Udaloy Class guided-missile frigates, several of which were scheduled for each Russian fleet, including the Caspian Sea flotilla.

There was nothing about the update from Russia that pleased Admiral Bradfield. Suddenly, at least in his own mind, America’s trusted SOSUS grid was back on the front burner. The electronic guardian of the GIUK Gap needed to be reactivated in the North Atlantic and probably improved.

This program had been activated almost as soon as Captain Bedford had returned from his meetings with Israel’s Moscow spy. The information he had imparted was priceless, and everyone in the Department of Defense was now working on strategies to protect the National Security Agency should Russia go ahead and carry out its threat to strike against the Maryland hub of US surveillance.

One problem was that no one in Russia was ever going to admit one single thing. There was nothing to negotiate or threaten simply because the time-honored Russian tactic, when under verbal assault, has always been to say absolutely nothing. It was not worth considering even a president-to-president conference. The wily, old Nikita Markova would simply claim he had no idea what the American was talking about. The only course of action would be to install a new antiaircraft and missile system at Fort Meade, increase all-around surveillance for any incoming attack, and alert every possible US field agent in Russia.

The information Admiral Bradfield had was strong but not infallible. The biggest gap was no date for the attack. Not even the month. The second biggest was no direction, no clues from where the strike would launch.

Perhaps the most valuable intelligence was the Russian abandonment of a submarine as transport. With SOSUS running at only half efficiency, this had given Mark Bradfield precious months in which to put SOSUS back on the top line. And even then he was by no means certain that his navy could zap the oncoming ship from the Arctic that might be carrying the entire paraphernalia required for a full-blooded attack on the US mainland.

And the problem was there for all to see—and it involved the modern, not-so-great Britain, that once all-powerful island nation that had once conquered half the world, but now sat gloomily in the damp northeastern Atlantic, engulfed by immigrants, still swamped by its old Labour Government debts, and with a navy that would have trouble defending the Staten Island Ferry.

There was a deadness about that great stone fortress in London’s Whitehall that houses the Ministry of Defense. Years and years of financial cuts, decades of cutting back personnel, cutting back the fleet, failing to replace critical parts of the armed forces, had left a terrible mark on the morale of the services, as if they felt no one gave a damn about them and their problems.

In a nation where a sizable percentage of the population had never worked, did not even
know
anyone who had worked, and furthermore had no intention of ever working, the armed services understood two things: there was never any money for what they believed they needed in order to willingly fight and die for their country, and there were millions and millions of pounds to give away to a bunch of bone-idle wasters claiming benefits, most of them foreign. That may not have been accurate. But that’s how it felt to them, inside the granite walls of the ministry and on the far-flung battlefields of the world where they were constantly deployed.

And when America came calling for assistance to resurrect SOSUS, the result was nothing but evasion, pleas of poverty, political considerations, local objections, and lack of interest.

Admiral Bradfield had already faced it. If the United States was once more going to electrify the GIUK Gap, and police it, Washington was going to have to do it alone.

America, while forging ahead, as ever, could see its most modern military science was usually several years ahead in its thinking and development. But it missed those alert Royal Navy eyes on the far side of the North Atlantic.

In the opinion of Captain Bedford, Russia’s proposed nuclear slam of the National Security Agency in Maryland was being so well planned, with such a large budget, that the odds had to favor them to pull it off.

“Our best chance has to be to grab the archer on his way to the battlefield
and kick him straight in the balls.” That was Mack’s assessment. “And for that,” he added, “we need to catch him way out in the Atlantic. And, if necessary, sink him.”

“You sure he’s coming down the Atlantic?”

“Dead certain,” replied Mack. “My man in the Mossad is sure of that. They will launch from Central America, and it’s looking like Panama. For that they need some heavyweight gear—missiles, launcher, and so on. It’s a naval operation, so they’ll use a ship for transport, probably a converted warship rigged out in the livery of the Russian merchant fleet, painted dark blue with red lines and flying the flag of the Russian Federation, diagonal blue cross on white.”

“What about this half-assed attack on the president’s emergency comms?” asked Admiral Bradfield.

“In my opinion there’s not going to be anything half-assed about it,” said Mack. “They’ve recruited the Chinese to help, probably with a satellite connection and a state-of-the-art jammer.”

“Can they pull this off, Mack?”

“Damned straight they can,” replied the SEAL captain from Maine. “And unless we get on the case real quick, they will. Russia is a huge, powerful, and now wealthy country. If they set their mind to something, they will almost certainly succeed. But that applies to us as well. Our job is to stop them before they get a chance to do anything.”

“One in the cobblers for the friggin’ archer, right?”

“That’s the stuff, sir. Straight in the cobblers.”

“Well, Mack, our problems with the Royal Navy have been very serious.”

“They didn’t just tell us to forget about it, did they?”

“No, they just seemed helpless. We asked about reopening St. Mawgan in Cornwall. That was always one of the best stations, with a great SOSUS hookup, but all they talked about was no budget for this kind of stuff. Basically, they could not afford to lift a finger to help us. And you know how hard it is to operate in a foreign country unless you have 100 percent backing and a joint financial involvement.”

“Sure do. You get all this local bullshit whenever they see our trucks. They don’t even seem to care if we use local labor for the project.”