Alone in the Light

By Brian Kenneth Swain

In Chechnya, a terrible mistake costs a brilliant young engineer his family.

In Istanbul, an oil tanker on its maiden voyage sinks for no apparent reason.

In Moscow, an astonishing new weapon threatens to upset the balance of world power.

And in Sochi, a cutting-edge energy facility opens for business.

Movlady Saidov is a young man struggling to navigate a tightrope between rage and love, embroiled in a complex web of conspiracy only partly of his own making. His story is fiction, but the technology, the politics, and the tension are as real as the headlines of yesterdays newspaper. This is Swains most compelling thriller yet, drawing together the seemingly unrelated worlds of cryogenic fuel technology and directed energy weaponry and placing them at the center of a high-stakes game of global geopolitics.

It will keep you guessing. It will keep you thinking. It will keep you engrossed until the final climactic moments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450295109

Brian Kenneth Swain

BRIAN KENNETH SWAIN is the author of nine previous books, including the novels World Hunger, Alone in the Light, and Sistina; the poetry collections Secret Places, My America, and Chicken Feet; the essay collection The Curious Habits of Man; the short story collection The Book of Names; and the children’s book Hegel and Hobbes Have an Adventure. Brian is a graduate of Columbia University and The Wharton School. He grew up in Brunswick, Maine and now lives in San Antonio with his black chow chows Maya and Loki.

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Copyright © 2011 by Brian Kenneth Swain

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-9508-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-9510-9 (ebook)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-9509-3 (dj)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902324

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 5/17/2011

For my dad, Gerald Kenneth Swain, who

never really got a decent chance.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Glossary of Terms

Bibliography

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all those who read the various drafts (sometimes more than once) and provided edits, ideas, clarifications, or a simple dose of encouragement. Conceiving, researching, and completing a novel is a long journey, and the more friends and colleagues you have along for the ride, the better the outcome and the more rewarding the experience.

My sincere thanks to Laura Brann, Mary Margaret Carlisle, Jeanne Champagne, Millie Mohan, Holly Varner, Steve Vosko, and Michael Wen.

And special appreciation goes to Susan Ciancio for her skillful and tireless editing. I am truly obliged.

Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Vladimir Nabokov

Introduction

The original title of this novel was Directed Energy, a name that turned out to be neither especially poetic nor a sufficiently encompassing descriptor of what the book is about. It did, however, have one advantage of which I am particularly fond, i.e., it could be interpreted in several different ways, depending on which elements of the story the reader was most focused upon.[1] As it happens, the phrase Directed Energy not only failed to make the cut as a final title, but also fails, in a literal textual sense, to appear more than cursorily in the story at all. It’s worth noting, though, that this is the most common term with which the military/aerospace industry refers to the sort of weaponry featured throughout the story.

There are only two known ways of stopping a ballistic missile once it has left the ground; you either shoot it down with another missile or with a beam of some sort of radiation. The challenge associated with the former approach is akin to trying to keep yourself from being hit by an approaching bullet through the expedient of shooting at it with one of your own. It is the second option though that comprises one of the principal subplots of this story, i.e., the use of directed energy (in this case a high-powered laser) to shoot down the missile.

This is real technology, the development of which began with Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars) program back in the eighties. The prototype American system is known as the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB) and it has been in development for many years, the prototype currently installed and flying on a modified Boeing 747[2]. The story supposes that the Russians have developed an identical capability, not an implausible premise, given the way that arms development takes place around the world. The story supposes further that this weapon becomes the tool of a dissident terrorist organization, a bit more of a stretch perhaps, but certainly stranger things have happened.

Of course, as with any good story, Alone in the Light is about more than technology, though this certainly plays a prominent role. It is, as well, about the geopolitics of energy, the state of Russian/Chechen relations, and an imagined scenario in which all of these factors—political and technological—converge to produce an unimaginable outcome affecting the lives of the book’s characters in various disruptive ways. Things have been relatively calm in Chechnya in recent years, though with its history of violence and oppression dating back to the 1400s, the likelihood of things remaining stable is easily called into question, particularly given the recent tensions in Georgia, and the strategic proximity of Chechnya to various oil and gas pipelines and to potential flashpoints like Turkey and Azerbaijan.

My primary goal in writing has always been to interleave entertainment with a healthy dose of education, and I sincerely hope that this story achieves this dual purpose (from both technological and historical standpoints). The best measure of success in this regard is the extent to which the reader feels compelled to learn more about the topics touched upon in the narrative. A comprehensive glossary and bibliography are provided for the use of those so inclined.

The real-life version of this story is still being written in the Caucasus, as well as in the domains of strategic missile defense and international energy policy. I fervently hope that Alone in the Light provides a suitably interesting foundation for readers to want to learn more about these important topics.

Brian Kenneth Swain

Helotes, Texas

January 12, 2011

Prologue

Tuesday, October 18, 1994—6:50 a.m.

After six relentless days of overcast skies and depressingly cold drizzle, Wednesday’s sun rose warm and yellow, a welcome harbinger to everyone in the small town of Argun, a Groszny suburb that lay a few miles to the east and slightly south of the Chechen capital. The Saidov’s neighborhood was populated by hard-working, industrial families, few of whom would still be sleeping this close to seven in the morning. Twelve families shared the apartment building—two large units per floor—with the Saidovs having inhabited the east side of the fourth floor for the past fifteen years. Seven of these families, including the Saidovs, were currently in the midst of breakfast while the husbands and wives of the remaining five had already departed for work, typically leaving the children and grandchildren in the hands of grandparents or other relatives with whom they lived. Chechnya was a country of almost reverential devotion to the elderly, a society of extremely tight-knit families. It was a place where the majority of one’s immediate relatives still lived within the sound of a loud shout, where leaving the city to pursue professional objectives or a personal dream of some sort was regarded with a reaction somewhere between suspicion and disdain, depending on the level of understanding of one’s family.

Malika Saidov had managed all things domestic in her family’s five-room apartment for as long as anyone could remember. She and her husband Yashurkaev had skirted Chechen tradition and caused severe angst among all three surviving grandparents by deciding that two children was a sufficient number. Once Katerina had been born, precisely eleven years ago this day, they had set about managing their household and limited resources in a way that would ensure the best opportunities for the girl and her older brother Movlady. The other families had found it unusual, stopping at only two children, and the Saidovs were a frequent topic of conversation whenever other building occupants got together to drink tea and share gossip. The family had really given the neighborhood something to talk about when Movy had departed weeks earlier for his first year of engineering school in Moscow.

The mail came early in the Saidov’s neighborhood and, as Katerina drew her chair up to the breakfast table, she was struggling with the envelope she had just received. The girl, tall and lanky for her age, and, at eleven, already nearly her mother’s height, had beautiful, straight black hair and intense deep-set eyes.

I can do it, she said, mischievously pulling the card away from her mother’s proffered hand of assistance. I bet it’s a birthday card from Movy.

Colonel Yusupov banked his MiG 29M Fulcrum fighter-bomber gracefully to the left. With a full complement of bombs and fuel tanks slung beneath the wings, the small twin-engined jet moved with a bit more reluctance than usual, but was still, even at its most ungainly, easily the most agile fighter in the Russian Air Force.

Today, Yusupov thought, glancing down at the multi-function displays that comprised the aircraft’s instrument panel. Today is the day, Aleksei Andreyevich had intoned earlier that morning during the massive pre-flight briefing—the day we will show these renegade Caucasian bastards what it means to fuck with mother Russia. That the defense minister had seen fit to personally organize this mission and address the pilots was an astonishing thing. He had shaken every pilot’s hand, imbuing in them a sense of enormous gravity and pride. Yusupov’s plane was part of an ensemble of more than one hundred fifty aircraft dispatched to various areas in and around Groszny that would, within a window of less than fifteen minutes, mount an air assault to obliterate more than two hundred known or suspected terrorist enclaves and hideouts. Yusupov and his wingman, aided by a forward air controller on the ground with a laser designator, were tasked with eliminating several suspected terrorist positions in and around the Groszny suburb of Argun.

His first target was the front door of a grocery store in whose basement was reputed to be hidden a reinforced bunker storing a cache of small arms. A single laser-guided bomb, or LGB, had been allocated to the task. The device, though unpowered, had moveable flight control surfaces and could adjust its descent path by locking onto and tracking a bright beam of laser light affixed to the target by the forward controller.

Falcon Nine is five miles out from target, Yusupov said, keying his microphone to address the ground controller. Is the target illuminated?

Target is illuminated, came the response in his helmet’s headset. Please advise when LGB is away.

Yusupov pushed his mike button twice to indicate concurrence with the controller’s instructions. Weapon is armed. Rolling in on final, he continued laconically, this time to his wingman, on station a quarter mile behind and to the left of the lead aircraft. He slid his control stick smoothly forward and to the right, staring intently at the left multi-function screen, oblivious to the rapidly passing terrain outside. Only two more events needed to successfully take place before he moved on to his next assigned target. At that instant the first occurred—a green light illuminating in the lower left corner of the display. It flashed briefly twice and then remained brightly lit. I have beam acquisition, Yusupov said into the mike. The sensor in the nose of the thousand-pound bomb had acquired the laser that was reflecting brightly from the off-white front door of the grocery store. He placed his gloved fingertip against one of the virtual buttons on the display, initiating the auto-release sequence. The actual dropping of the weapon was now out of his hands—the targeting computer would evaluate wind speed data, aircraft position, and speed, calculating the optimal point at which to disengage the bomb retention shackles. Five seconds of additional straight and level flight and Yusupov felt the distinct jolt of the heavy weapon departing the aircraft. At that moment the green light on the MiG’s tactical weapon display changed to red, indicating a successful release. He instantly banked the plane hard to the right, assuming a loitering orbit he would maintain until receiving confirmation of the weapon’s successful detonation.

Weapon is away, Yusupov said loudly into his mike. Weapon is away.

Ivanov’s Grocery was two blocks south of the Saidov’s apartment building, and nearly all of the building’s occupants patronized it regularly, partly because Ivanov had the finest fresh vegetables anywhere in the Groszny area, and partly because the residents of Puzanov Street had no other alternative without traveling an additional seven blocks. It was, in fact, one of Ivanov’s apples that Malika Saidov was cutting at the moment—breakfast for Katerina and Yashurkaev.

So what does your brother have to say? Malika asked, glancing over her shoulder as she worked at the kitchen counter. Have his classes begun yet? The girl loved her brother profoundly. He had walked her to school nearly every day of her first six years there, and he had spent far more time with her than had her father, who worked an onerous six-day-a-week schedule. Katerina had cried for nearly two days when Movy left for college. Though the girl wasn’t aware of it, Movy had cried as well that day, but only after taking a discreet seat on the train to Moscow. Since then she had made a point of meeting the mailman each morning in the hopes of finding a card or letter, a hope that was rewarded at least three times each week. But the mail service between Russia and Chechnya was inconsistent, and Katerina’s mother wondered at the luck that had gotten her daughter’s birthday card here on exactly the right day. Her son had been gone only eight weeks. Perhaps, she thought, he sent the card very early and asked the mailman to hold it here until her birthday arrived. Whatever the explanation, Katerina was euphoric as she read her brother’s poorly scrawled handwriting. He says hello to everyone, and that it’s getting cold up there already, but they do not have any snow yet. He has a couple of new friends, but is spending most of his time studying. And he says happy eleventh birthday to his favorite little sister. That … she said, looking up at her mother with large smiling, green eyes … would be me, of course!

I suppose it would, her mother confirmed with a smile, extending her hand for the card. Katerina offered it reluctantly, in exchange for a plate of freshly sliced apples and bread.

I told you he wouldn’t forget, the girl offered, placing apple slices on pieces of bread. The apple sandwiches were a curious self-concocted favorite of hers that had engendered ceaseless ribbing from Movy. Told you …

The LGB’s shallow glide ratio carried it forward nearly ten feet for every three it fell. From its initial release altitude of four thousand feet, the bomb’s nose sensor needed to stay locked onto the laser designator beam for more than ninety-five percent of its fall time in order to ensure an accurate strike. If all went as planned, the LGB was accurate to plus or minus three feet. It should literally fly straight through the grocery store’s front door. All would not, however, go quite as planned.

The forward air controller, Special Forces Sergeant Ivan Meritov, lay beneath a thick layer of leaves and brush on a hilltop nearly half a mile outside the Argun city border. He was equipped with an encrypted radio for conversing with incoming aircraft and a shoulder mounted laser on top of which was attached a long-range monocular telescope. Under ideal weather conditions he could illuminate bombing targets more than two miles away. The half-mile to Ivanov’s Grocery Store had been child’s play. Unlike the entire preceding week, much of which he had spent furtively traveling to this location, the weather today, optically speaking, was as nearly perfect as he could hope for. Once he received the call from the MiG 29 pilot that the LGB had been released, he had only to hold the beam steady on the store’s front door and technology would do the rest. His remaining task was to visually confirm the kill, after which he could move on to his next assigned target.

From years of field experience, Meritov knew the approximate fall time for a wide range of Russian aerial munitions as a function of their release altitudes. Thus he knew, as the delivery van drew to a stop approximately five blocks from Ivanov’s, completely blocking the laser beam, that he was still a good forty seconds away from having effectively guided the bomb to its destination. With the store now totally obscured, he was faced with a choice—leave the laser on, illuminating the van’s side and causing its pointless destruction, or switch the beam off and rely on the bomb to blindly extrapolate its remaining path, hoping that the winds did not throw it off target by too much. Without hesitation Meritov switched off the laser designator, leaving the device on his shoulder so that it could be used again in the unlikely event the truck should pull away. He could do nothing now but wait for the impact.

Hurry or you’ll be late for school, Malika said, hastily stuffing Katerina’s backpack with books and a bag lunch. The girl slid her chair back from the table and jumped up, grabbing the bag. She turned for the front door, but then suddenly stopped.

Movy’s card! she shouted. What did you do with it? I want to take it with me. Her mother reached to the kitchen counter for the envelope and card, then paused as an unfamiliar distant sound came through the open kitchen window. About a mile from their apartment was a small regional airport. They often heard occasional small aircraft flying overhead, but almost never anything with jet engines. The television news had shown nothing but the fighting for the past several months, although most of it was either in Groszny or Gudermes. Dear God, she thought, please don’t let this be the beginning of yet another assault. Yashurkaev had to work in the city, besides which she had a brother in eastern Groszny who, despite living dangerously close to recent fighting, refused to abandon his home and move in with them in their relatively safe neighborhood. Every time they spoke, he talked of new atrocities he had witnessed—buildings destroyed, friends who had disappeared in the middle of the night. Still he could not be convinced to come to Argun, speaking only of undue hardship on the already crowded family.

Katerina momentarily set her bag on the kitchen table so she could unzip the front compartment to insert her birthday card. Malika turned and drew closed the kitchen window so she would not have to listen to the sounds of whatever new calamity was befalling her countrymen. Yashurkaev rose from the table to hug his daughter before leaving for work.

The LGB, nearly silent in flight—so effective was its aerodynamic shaping—traveled in excess of three hundred knots, falling without guidance for the final forty seconds of its journey. Missing its intended target by only one hundred or so yards, it ploughed instead through the east wall of the Saidov’s apartment building, six feet above ground level, punching a nearly perfect outline of the bomb’s frontal profile in the brick wall before lodging between the cracked and splintered beams that separated the first floor from the basement. The bomb lay, seemingly inert, for two full seconds, its detonation time delayed to ensure maximum penetration. When it detonated the building stood no chance—its ancient brick and mortar construction already invisibly weakened by several minor earthquakes over the years and a general lack of structural maintenance. The blast completely and instantly evaporated everything in the bottom two floors, killing the thirty-three occupants of those four apartments. Since the building’s entire base of structural support had been effectively removed, the remaining four upper floors collapsed into the basement, leaving a twenty-foot mound of crushed brick and concrete. The debris was almost completely invisible until the warm morning breeze blew away the cloud of dust and smoke that the explosion had created. Of the eighty-seven building occupants, the only survivor was an old woman living on the top floor who incongruously ended up lying dusty but unharmed, still in her pajamas, atop the entire rubble pile, utterly unaware of how she had gotten there or what had happened to her erstwhile home.

The forward air controller slowly lowered his telescope sight and lay silent for a moment before keying his microphone call button. A reported miss on the target would engender a second attempt to ensure that the mission was successful. Watching the dust slowly clear away from the shattered apartment building, he spoke as clearly as he could into the mike. Falcon Nine, that is a direct hit … repeat … direct hit on target. Proceed to waypoint beta. In the distance, the forward air controller could hear the twin Klimov engines of the loitering MiG as it lit afterburners to depart the Argun area and move on to its next mission.

Chapter One

Tuesday, April 8, 2003—3:17 a.m.

It was precisely 3:17 a.m., and a brilliant full April moon reflected off the black waters of the Istanbul Strait. As the heavily loaded oil tanker Vladivostok ploughed its way through the narrow shallow waters of the Bosphorus, a rapid series of muffled thuds emanated from the amidships area. The indistinct sound, noticed only in passing by a lone watchman making his night rounds on deck, quickly dissipated in the cool night breeze, leaving behind the drumming of the turbines deep below deck and the occasional distant shouts of crewmen on the attending tugboats. Thirty-seven seconds later, the fourteen-month-old supertanker split neatly into two pieces, as if cleaved by a stage magician’s bow saw. It settled quickly to the bottom, leaving the still buoyant bow and stern sections protruding above the surface, dead in the center of the Bosphorus Strait, three hundred meters off the southern tip of European Istanbul.

At just under four hundred meters, with a fully loaded weight of 280,000 metric tons, the tanker Vladivostok was a quarter-mile-long monument to the ascendancy of the Russian petroleum industry. The mammoth vessel had been constructed in Japan by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, with the ship’s operator—petroleum giant Petrograd—electing, despite enormous political pressure, to eschew Russian shipyards in favor of the least-cost alternative. Three years and nearly ten billion rubles later, the gigantic monopoly had become the proud operator of the world’s largest, fastest, and safest double-hulled petroleum tanker.

It had required three more months of lively negotiation between the Turks and Russians to permit passage of Vladivostok through the labyrinthine waters of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the strategically critical waterways connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. The Montreaux Agreement that governed maritime operations in the area placed strict limitations on vessel size and weight, limitations that the new Russian tanker so vastly exceeded that permission had been granted for its passage only after direct intervention by the Russian ambassador to Turkey. Even then, the Turks had only grudgingly agreed, subject to the stipulation that the Vladivostok, whether loaded or not, travel the entire nineteen twisting miles of the Bosphorus under control of no less than four tugs, and in constant radio communication with an operator of Turkey’s new Vessel Traffic Management System. Under terms of the agreement, the short journey routinely required two full days.

This was the ship’s third voyage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and the cargo this time was destined for Boston Harbor in the United States. With U.S./Middle East relations at an all-time low in recent years, the Americans had begun hedging their bets by significantly ratcheting up imports of Russian petroleum in the past twenty-four months. The new multi-year contract provided a steady and lucrative client for the rich new Tengiz field that lay beneath the north Caspian Sea, off the coast of Kazakhstan.

Three divers, equipped with bubble-less rebreather equipment, had spent an undetected hour and a half the previous night working beneath the Vladivostok. When their exacting efforts were completed, the only thing showing above the waterline was a thin, twelve-inch copper antenna, painted to blend into the neutral gray of the hull. This was all that was required for the newly installed system controller module to communicate with the constellation of Global Positioning System satellites orbiting eleven thousand miles overhead. The geographical coordinates that would initiate the detonation sequence were preprogrammed into the controller, which the divers had attached to the steel hull using strong beryllium magnets. Along with the controller, the divers also attached a string of seven interconnected and carefully sized and shaped packages of Czech-made Semtex plastic explosive. Varying in weight from ten to twenty kilograms, each was attached at a precise position along the hull. The tanker was brand new, double-hulled, and very strong. The Semtex, as it turned out, was stronger.

As the Turkish tugboats guided the fully-loaded vessel along its painstaking path through the intricate twists and turns of the lower Bosphorus, the tanker captain kept one knowing eye on the main control room’s matrix of forty-inch plasma computer displays. There were six of the high-resolution color screens, arranged in a two-by-three array on which the crew could pull up any information concerning the ship’s navigation, performance of the engines and other onboard systems, or cargo status. At the moment, the display on the lower right was showing a real-time channel map, overlaid with a small, slowly-moving symbol that represented Vladivostok. Also overlaid on the map was the projected path of the vessel, as well as all marine obstacles, whether fixed or moving, with which the ship might have occasion to interact. At this hour of the night, competing traffic on the water was minimal, but not nonexistent. Also displayed on the screen, in large red numbers at the lower right, was the number 2.75. This represented the distance in kilometers that Vladivostok would require to come to a full stop—more than 1.7 miles, even at her current speed of barely over one mile per hour.

The navigation screen also provided a numerical indication of the vessel’s precise latitude and longitude. These were accurate to the tenth of an arc-second, and were updated by continuous GPS signals from no less than four simultaneous satellites. Suitably accurate on the open seas, the twenty-five-meter position resolution provided by the civilian version of GPS was insufficiently precise within the narrow confines of the strait. Thus the tanker captain relied almost solely on the tugs, with their extensive knowledge of the local waters and changing conditions. But despite its secondary status in the tanker’s current situation, the GPS-provided coordinates were more than sufficiently accurate to provide the key data needed by the bomb controller.

The captain kept his other eye on the ship’s bow, some thousand feet ahead and seven stories below, yet nevertheless clearly visible, bathed by the light of the full moon. At exactly thirty-six seconds after 3:17 a.m., the full moon slid behind one of the few clouds in the Turkish night sky, and the ship passed gracefully beneath the arching span of the Bosphorous Bridge. At that moment the tanker’s navigation computer calculated a position of forty-one degrees eight minutes north latitude and twenty-nine degrees four minutes east longitude, which placed the ship approximately one hundred eighty meters from the Eastern wall of the 550-year-old Rumeli Fortress.

In the instant that the geographic coordinates of the tanker matched those stored in the bomb control computer, that system’s digital control circuitry performed its final and most important function. It generated a series of seven precisely sequenced logic pulses, each lasting just fifty milliseconds, each routed to a different explosive packet. The electronic detonators embedded within each Semtex package amplified the weak pulses, imbuing them with sufficient strength to initiate the firing of a pre-charged capacitor. This discharge, in turn, caused the flash melting of a tiny bridge-wire, creating a micro-explosion sufficient to ignite the primary explosive in the detonator. Exactly seventeen milliseconds after each detonator’s main charge fired, its respective Semtex package did so as well. While somewhat complex, the equipment involved was extremely reliable, safe to handle and, more importantly, the resulting time delays were highly predictable every time.

The explosive charges had been positioned in a cradling pattern, a string orthogonal to the ship’s longitudinal axis, running from just below the waterline on the starboard side, along the bottom and up the other side to a matching position on the port side. The seven charges were roughly equally spaced, and the largest was placed directly at the bottom, in the center of the string.

The concept was simple and elegant, but had required extensive research into details of the ship’s construction. By first detonating a large charge directly against the ship’s keel, centered on the largest interior cargo tank, the outer hull would be breached, allowing the six-foot-thick protective air layer between hulls to quickly fill with seawater. By delaying for several seconds the detonation of the remaining six charges, the now water-filled, and hence incompressible, barrier layer would effectively transmit the maximum power of their shock waves directly against the walls of the oil-filled center tank.

The principal challenge then became one of synchronizing the shock waves generated by the six secondary charges. Knowing the timing and reflection characteristics with which each wave would propagate inside the tank allowed the controller programmers to schedule the detonation initiation pulses in an extremely precise and effective manner. Achieving such precision had required information on not only the structural design of the tanker—they needed to know bulkhead thicknesses, buttress spacings, and steel compounds—but also what grade of oil was going to be shipped in the center tank. Only with that information could they calculate the specific gravity and other physical constants that would determine how a shock wave would travel inside the rectangular steel-walled tank. It wasn’t quite rocket science, but it did require a good deal of math, a bit of clever computer simulation, and excellent intelligence on the ship’s construction, cargo, and loading and movement schedules.

The real genius of the idea was in using the tanker’s own structure and the fluid dynamics of its cargo to break the inner hull, while the explosive charges did the same to the outer hull. The charges had been shaped to conform to the hull’s contours and to focus as much of their concussive force as possible inward into the body of the ship. As a result, there were only very small explosion plumes from the water on each side of the hull, none of which were visible from on board the tanker. Aside from the quick series of dull thuds heard by the night duty man on the Vladivostok, and perhaps by a crewman or two on board the tugs, the only initial indication of a problem was the sudden pressure increase that registered on the center tank status gauge in the main control room, located near the stern of the ship, more than five hundred feet from the actual explosions. The pressure increase lasted only a split second though, and was followed immediately by a dramatic pressure decrease, an indication that could only mean the discharge of massive amounts of cargo from a tank. This sequence of warnings caused an instantaneous cacophony of noise and flashing lights in the control room which, in turn, initiated an instinctive set of actions from the crew—actions designed to isolate and stem the discharge. With the entire center tank open to the sea, the crew’s efforts were, however, utterly futile.

What was visible, within ten seconds of the detonations, was the gradual but distinct subsiding of the center of the deck, and a much too rapid decrease in the ship’s forward speed. Also within ten seconds of the initial pressure spike, the captain and crew of three working the night shift in the control room were able to look down on the waters of the strait and see from both sides of the hull centerline a rapidly spreading layer of Kazakh CPC Blend crude oil reflected in the bright moonlight.

With the hull and center cargo tank now almost completely fractured, the deck was the primary structural component continuing to hold the ship together. As the center deck slowly hinged upward, the maze of fluid and breather pipes that ran along the deck began to bend and buckle as well. The shredding and twisting steel emitted a horrific symphony of metallic sounds that carried across the calm water and must have been easily audible from either shore of the strait. It was certainly audible to the tug crews, all of whom had feverishly begun disconnecting lines and backing off from the stricken tanker as soon as they had witnessed the enormous vessel bowing in the center. None were enthusiastic about the prospect of being dragged down by what was now an obviously sinking ship.

The six peripheral detonations had each blown roughly ten-foot holes in the outer hull, creating essentially a connect-the-dots effect. The explosions had also caused the desired cataclysmic ruptures of the center petroleum tank. As the crude gushed into the strait, it was quickly replaced by seawater—heavier seawater—which increased still further the downward force on the fractured hull’s center section.

The captain looked down from the control room in disbelief as the ocean and growing oil slick began lapping over the gunwale rails on each side of the ship’s sagging center section. Breaking out in an instantaneous sweat, he reached for the crew master-alert button with his left hand and keyed the radio mike button with his right.

"Istanbul Maritime Control, this is Vladivostok declaring an emergency! We have sustained unknown but critical structural damage. We are going down—Repeat…we are going down! We are abandoning ship … requesting assistance. Repeat … Istanbul, we are eighteen crewmen. We require immediate assistance! Though they were easily visible from the Istanbul shore or from the Bosphorus Bridge immediately behind, he nevertheless read off the ship’s coordinates twice before switching to the intercom system. All hands, this is the captain. Prepare to abandon ship immediately. Repeat…abandon ship!"

At the time of the explosion, the fully-loaded Vladivostok was navigating a section of the strait only thirty-two meters deep. In fact, this was the primary reason the Bosphorus Bridge had been located here. The shallow water had made for the easiest and least expensive construction of the enormous tower caissons. Filled with 150,000 tons of petroleum, the tanker’s hull drew just over thirty-eight feet, meaning it was clearing the bottom by just sixty or so feet. First to settle into the mud was the destroyed center of the ship, leaving the remainder of the mammoth vessel bent up at each end in a wide V