Understrike

By James Barrington

A spy thriller in a series featuring a British secret service agent whose latest assignment puts him up against a Russian nuclear threat.

Russia has developed a new offensive capability. It’s devastating and, above all, secret. The world would be remade.

But when a corpse turns up on the remote Arctic island of Svalbard, it soon becomes clear this was no accidental death. The body has been flagged by secret services and before long Paul Richter is sent to investigate.

Meeting old friends, he plunges into a breakneck chase taking him from the frozen North to the rocky islands and blazing sun of the Azores. The stakes have never been higher. This time Richter is truly on edge, working at the limits of global survival . . .

Frightening in scale and plausibility, based on the most up-to-date science and intelligence, this is the most gripping Paul Richter thriller yet, perfect for fans of James Phelan, Chris Ryan and Andy McNab.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781911420507

James Barrington

James Barrington is a trained military pilot who has worked in covert operations and espionage. He has subsequently built a reputation as a writer of high-class, authentic and action-packed thrillers. He lives in Andorra, but travels widely. He also writes conspiracy thrillers under the pseudonym James Becker.

Book preview

Prologue

Fifteen months ago

Znamenka 19, Moscow, Confederation of Independent States

‘The colonel will see you now, Professor Semenov. Please follow me.’

A bald-headed man who appeared to be in his late fifties stood up from the extraordinarily uncomfortable upright wooden chair he had been occupying for almost all of the previous hour and followed the smartly dressed young stárshiy leytenánt – senior lieutenant – along the wide echoing corridor on the first floor of the building. The Здание Минобороны России, the main building of the Russian Ministry of Defence at Frunzenskaya Embankment was a hulking structure, eight storeys high, the interior coldly opulent, the walls decorated with stones of contrasting colours, mainly marble, granite and serpentine, and other stones quarried from the Ural Mountains.

Semenov walked with a slight stoop, and as he approached the closed door at the end of the corridor he wondered, and not for the first time, if he was doing the right thing. Or if he was seeing something that wasn’t really there.

The stárshiy leytenánt – Semenov had not asked his name, and the junior officer had not volunteered it – paused outside the door for a couple of seconds to allow Semenov to reach his side. Then he knocked briskly on the door, twice, opened it when he heard the shouted command from inside the room, announced the name of the visitor, ushered the professor inside, then pulled the door closed behind him and walked away.

The office Semenov had just stepped into was dominated by a broad mahogany desk positioned in front of the window, which meant he had to squint against the bright afternoon sun in order to clearly see the figure sitting behind it. He immediately assumed that the positioning was deliberate, to provide the officer behind the desk with a small but significant psychological advantage over anyone he summoned to his presence.

‘Professor Semenov, thank you for contacting us,’ the officer said, standing up behind the desk and leaning forward over it to offer the academic his hand. ‘My name is Viktor Alexeev, Colonel Viktor Alexeev. Please sit down. Now, how may we help you?’

Semenov sat down in the chair the officer indicated, a brown leather armchair that was – thankfully – infinitely more comfortable than where he had been sitting before. But he still felt at a disadvantage, because now he was looking up towards the officer, the level of the armchair being significantly lower than the chair Alexeev was sitting in, again no doubt deliberate. Semenov was actually staring directly at a brass plaque, mounted on a wooden block at eye level on the desk, which bore the legend ‘Colonel – Polkóvnik – Viktor Mikhailovich Alexeev’, behind which the senior army officer regarded him with frank curiosity.

Without waiting for Semenov to reply, Alexeev continued: ‘You are an academic, and I am not betraying any secrets when I tell you that we see very few of those in this building. So I am intrigued as to the reason for your visit. Do you work here in Moscow?’

‘Yes, Colonel, I have an office in a building on Bol’shaya Gruzinskaya. Nothing as grand as this, obviously.’

‘Perhaps it’s full of computers or laboratory equipment, Professor? Something like that?’

Semenov shook his head.

‘In my particular field, we cannot do experiments in any kind of laboratory. Most of the equipment we use are sensitive measuring devices, nothing more exotic than that. But we do have a computer system, because my job involves running analyses using complex and specialized software.’

‘And what exactly is your field, Professor?’

Semenov told him, and the look of curiosity on the officer’s face became even more pronounced.

‘Then I really do not see why you are sitting in front of me,’ Alexeev said. ‘What has that, what has anything related to your profession, got to do with the military defence of Mother Russia? That, after all, is the primary purpose and tasking of every officer working in this building.’

‘I know,’ Semenov said, almost helplessly. ‘I simply didn’t know where else to go, or who else to talk to.’

He took a deep breath, then launched into the explanation he’d been mentally rehearsing all day.

‘Have you ever heard,’ he began, ‘of Kambalny? Or Shiveluch, or Karymsky? Or even KVERT?’

---

Just over 20 minutes later, Alexeev stood up again from his comfortable leather swivel chair, leaned across his desk and shook his visitor’s hand. The stárshiy leytenánt was waiting at the open door of the office to escort the visitor out of the building, non-military personnel not being permitted to wander the corridors alone.

As the door closed behind the two men, Alexeev leaned back in his seat and exhaled sharply, unaware that he had been holding his breath for a few moments. The theory – if that was not too grand a word for the story that the professor had told him – made absolutely no sense on at least two levels, as he had immediately realized when the man had begun his somewhat rambling explanation.

Alexeev was a career military officer, dedicated to the defence of Russia, her interests and her areas of influence, and he had been trained to assess any potential threat to the country on a number of levels. Two of those, obviously, were strategic – how dangerous would a particular attack be to the security of the homeland if it were mounted – and practical – from a technical point of view, how easily could such an attack be carried out?

The professor’s concern had been for what he saw as a potential but general threat to Kamchatka, virtually the most easterly point of Russia and over 4,000 miles from Moscow. To put that into perspective, the centre of the Kamchatka Peninsula was closer to the American state of Wyoming than it was to Moscow, which alone made the professor’s fears untenable, particularly because the potential aggressor – if there was one – clearly had to be the United States, and if the kind of attack Semenov feared was to be mounted, the American mainland would be as vulnerable as Russia herself, possibly even more vulnerable. So that made no sense.

The only real strategic concern Alexeev had as a result of the professor’s visit was the fact that the Kamchatka Peninsula was home to one of Russia’s nuclear submarine bases, which perhaps made an attack by the West on that region more likely.

But even that potential risk could be largely dismissed because of sheer practicality. When Semenov had been explaining what he believed he had detected, Alexeev had questioned him closely, and had started by asking the professor one very simple question: how? And that had been when the man’s story started to fall apart, because although he had come up with a couple of theoretical mechanisms that could explain his idea, they made little practical sense. And, even in an area as sparsely populated as Kamchatka, there was simply no way that the kind of actions he was suggesting could have been taken without detection, either by the residents of the peninsula or through the unblinking eyes of one of the multitude of Russian surveillance satellites that scanned the landmasses of the world, including that of Russia herself, on a regular basis.

Alexeev had pointed out these fairly obvious counter-arguments, which had seemed to quell the professor’s fears, and the academic had left Alexeev’s office in a far more positive frame of mind than when he’d arrived.

After he’d gone, Alexeev had ordered tea and then sat in thought for some time, because although he was quite certain that the ‘attack’ Semenov believed he had detected was nothing more than a product of the man’s over-active imagination, a couple of remarks he’d made had stuck in the colonel’s mind. And his thoughts had then turned not to defence, but to attack, and that had started his ruminations running along an entirely different path.

Because although Kamchatka was not an obvious major strategic target – apart from the nuclear submarine base – there were a couple of much more likely places where what the professor had described could work, and probably work very well.

He suddenly remembered an article he’d read in one of the various trade papers that crossed his desk on a daily basis. VPK News, if his memory served him correctly. He recalled very clearly what the writer of the piece, Konstantin Sivkov, the head of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems in Moscow, had boldly claimed.

He had suggested a way of permanently eliminating the United States as a world power, and after talking with Professor Semenov, Alexeev had little doubt that what Sivkov had proposed was feasible. But what his interesting scheme failed to take into account was that if Russia acted upon it, America would immediately be aware of the identity of the perpetrator nation and would without any doubt respond with immediate and overwhelming force, launching its entire nuclear arsenal, because they would quite literally have nothing left to lose. And that, he knew just as well as anyone else in the Russian military, would turn his entire country into a desolate and smoking radioactive wasteland, uninhabitable for centuries to come. The name Chernobyl was deeply ingrained in every Russian’s memory.

Both superpowers would be destroyed at a stroke, because neither would be able to survive. It was the clearest possible example of the old concept of MAD – mutual assured destruction – but unlike a conventional nuclear war, if such a word could ever be applied to an exchange of thermonuclear weapons, with the option Sivkov proposed there could be no gradual escalation. As the United States would start to reel from the catastrophic events unfolding within its borders, at almost the same moment the first of a swarm of thousands of individually targeted and MIRVed warheads, released from the nose cones of American silo, bomber and submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles would begin detonating in or over Moscow and every other population centre and military base within the entire Russian landmass. No one but a suicidal idiot would even contemplate triggering such an apocalyptic event, because both sides would certainly and permanently lose.

But one thing Professor Semenov had said, almost as an aside, had stuck in Alexeev’s mind, because if one particular event could take place, although it wouldn’t destroy America completely as a world power, it would certainly cause catastrophic and widespread destruction in one part of the mainland. And the transcendental beauty of his idea was that Russia could not and would not be implicated in what happened, which meant that the American retaliatory strike would never take place. The idea he had come up with was almost childishly simple, but the big problem, Alexeev knew, would be the actual mechanics of the scheme.

He spent a few more minutes deep in thought, jotting down notes on a pad in front of him with a pencil, then looked again at the notes he had made on the same pad while Professor Semenov had been talking. He had underlined one word that the professor had used – he thought it was spelled freetichsky – and before he did anything else he accessed the Internet to look for a definition. That took longer than he expected, because his guess at the spelling of the word had been less than accurate, but eventually he did find what he was looking for. He read a couple of definitions of it very carefully indeed, jotting down notes as he did so.

When he’d done that, he leaned back again in his chair, considering his next move. He would, he decided, write up the notes of the meeting and then think about it for a few days. He was a career officer, and what he definitely didn’t want to do was to approach his superior with a suggestion that the man would actually laugh at. That would do his long-term promotion prospects no good at all. He’d give it a week, look at the idea from all angles, and then make his decision.

---

It actually took him rather less time than that. Four working days later, he read through the notes he had made during his seemingly unproductive interview with the scientist Semenov again. Then he nodded to himself, walked over to the door to make sure no one was in the corridor outside, and locked it. He returned to his desk, sat down, looked up a number in the internal directory, and dialled it.

He held a short conversation with the much more senior officer he had called, then picked up the notes he had made, left his office and took the lift up to the eighth floor, where he had a rather longer conversation with the same man, this time face-to-face.

Half an hour later, Alexeev walked back into his own office, switched on the shredder and fed the pages of notes through it, together with the three blank pages from the top of the pad, just in case any of them retained indentations from the words he had written on the sheets above.

He had set the ball rolling, and the matter was now out of his hands. An entirely different department of the Russian military machine would now become involved, as long as the inevitable feasibility studies suggested that Alexeev’s plan had enough merit to make it worth proceeding.

Both he and the senior officer he had consulted had no doubts that it would succeed, as long as the technical difficulties could be overcome and the reports by the geologists confirmed what both men hoped and suspected to be the case. With that potential hurdle eliminated, the project would require engaging the services of a number of experts in several different scientific disciplines.

The real beauty of the scheme was that at least in the early stages almost none of the participants would have any idea what they were involved in, and by the time they did find out it would be too late for them to do anything about it. This would be an entirely covert strike against America, involving perhaps 50 people in Moscow to provide complete deniability for the leadership, and it would use the forces of nature as its principal weapon. More importantly, it would be a strike that could be neither countered nor defended against.

If it all worked as Alexeev hoped and believed it could, within about a year, maybe two at the most, America would be emasculated, and the balance of world power would shift irrevocably and permanently in Russia’s favour.

Chapter 1

Four weeks ago

Stratford, east London

There are some people who are effectively invisible. People whose physical presence is obvious to anyone who cares to look, but who are simply ignored and disregarded by almost everybody who sees them. People like barmen or waiters, who are just there to provide a service, or the beggars and the dossers on the streets, who people register as vague shapes before averting their eyes and hurrying onwards on important business of their own.

The probability is that anybody later asking about the appearance of one of these vagrants would have trouble remembering what the person looked like in anything but the broadest terms – they might perhaps give an estimate of age and sex, but little more. They were the non-people, the huddled shapes lying on beds of cardboard and newspapers, their unwashed and malnourished bodies clad in multiple layers of clothing against the cold of the nights. They were the welfare society’s most visible disgrace, the derelicts that people stepped around and did their very best to ignore.

But there were some people who didn’t ignore the dossers, who saw them instead as a kind of sick opportunity: a defenceless target, usually old and weak, that would provide a bunch of mindless yobs with the kind of ‘entertainment’ that they craved. Somebody who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fight back and who could be kicked or punched or clubbed or even knifed, and then left unconscious or bleeding or both in some gutter where they would either die or eventually recover sufficiently to crawl to a place of safety. Or at least to what they hoped would be a safer place.

Three weeks earlier, the death toll so far that year from these random attacks had escalated into double figures. The police, as usual, did nothing, citing the usual manpower shortages and commitments elsewhere, but the reality was that prosecuting motorists for speeding or charging homeowners with assault if they had the temerity to fight back when a gang of burglars broke into their home were far easier options. And, of course, there was all the paperwork they had to complete.

But a handful of people had decided that enough was enough, which was why another sad specimen of failed humanity was lying propped in a doorway in a back street in the East End of London, his body odour discernible from several feet away, his face black with dirt and stubble, covered in a torn and tattered blanket that might at one time have been cream in colour. He had made his way there slowly a little after six that evening, just as he had done for the previous eight nights, and had settled down to try to get what rest he could in the space that he had claimed as his own.

An impartial observer would have questioned his decision to choose that spot, because in the previous three months two other dossers had been beaten to death in that same length of street. The road was lined with commercial premises, silent and abandoned after the end of the working day, and if something happened there was no one around to help or even to witness what took place. Maybe the dosser didn’t know this, or maybe he did and was simply past caring. Or maybe there was another reason.

The street didn’t really lead anywhere, apart from the premises of the companies that were established there, and although the occasional car or taxi drove past, there were almost never any pedestrians.

So when the anonymous dosser heard the sound of heavy footsteps, accompanied by loud and aggressive-sounding voices approaching along the pavement from his left, he immediately looked up and stared towards the approaching half-dozen youths.

There was nowhere he could go, no shelter he could seek, so he just eased himself slightly backwards, bracing himself against the wooden door behind him, and waited. It was possible that the approaching group would simply walk straight past him. Probably unlikely, but at least possible.

They didn’t.

Still talking loudly, they stopped and formed a rough semicircle around the old man in the doorway, staring at him. A couple of them were grinning the same way that a shark smiles, showing lots of teeth and ill intent.

‘This is our fucking patch, grandad,’ one of the youths said, his remark prompting titters of amusement among his fellows, ‘and if you want to hang around here, that means you get to pay the fucking price.’

‘Sod off,’ the dosser said, apparently unafraid of the group confronting him. As he spoke, he slid his right hand into the outside pocket of his heavy coat, and left it there.

‘Looks like we’ve got a fucking hard man here,’ the youth said. ‘Or an old tosser who thinks he’s a hard man, and that means we’re going to have to teach him a fucking good lesson. The kind of lesson that he won’t forget in a hurry.’

‘Or that he’ll never fucking forget,’ another one said, pulling a switchblade from his pocket and clicking open the blade.

The dosser stared at the knife for an instant and then shook his head.

‘Look, just bugger off, will you? I don’t want any trouble.’

‘It’s too fucking late for that, old man.’

The apparent leader of the group reached into one of his own pockets and pulled out a collapsible steel baton, similar to the sort carried by British police constables, and snapped it open. It made a hissing sound as he swung it through the air in front of him. Beside him, the other youths began pulling out their weapons of choice: another switchblade, a couple of Stanley knives, and the biggest of the group ostentatiously slid a set of brass knuckles onto his right hand.

‘Just back away now, and nobody has to get hurt,’ the dosser said.

The leader of the group looked at him slightly strangely for an instant. For some reason, the man’s voice didn’t sound quite as old as it had done before, and what it definitely didn’t sound like was the voice of a man who was frightened. And he should have been terrified.

‘Fucking get him, Jake,’ one of the group said, and the youth holding steel baton took a step forward, raising his weapon as he did so.

‘This isn’t really your day, is it?’ Paul Richter said, pulling a five-shot large calibre stainless steel revolver from his coat pocket and firing a round straight at the approaching youth, the noise appallingly loud and echoing in the narrow street. It took him in the centre of the chest and he crashed backwards to the ground, the baton flying out of his hand.

He switched his aim immediately, and fired twice more, each round knocking down one of the six attackers. Then he slid the pistol back into his pocket and produced his own collapsible baton, which he immediately opened. The remaining three youths stared in disbelief at their fallen comrades, lying unmoving on the ground, then switched their gaze back to the ‘old man’ in front of them, a man who had suddenly shed 40 years and seemed to have grown six inches before their eyes.

And that, really, was the point, because sometimes things just aren’t quite what they seem.

‘Come on, lads,’ Richter said. ‘There are three of you and only one of me, so what are you waiting for?’

The biggest of them emitted a kind of feral howl from deep in his throat and stepped forward, drawing back his right arm and driving a massive punch towards Richter with his knuckle duster. If it had connected, it would probably have killed him, but Richter stepped slightly to one side, inside the blow, and at the same time swung his baton down in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s lower arm, instantly breaking both bones.

His two companions, each carrying a Stanley knife, stepped forward. But it was a hopelessly uneven fight, because they weren’t trained and Richter was. Two more blows with the steel baton and each of the youths collapsed to the ground nursing a broken humerus.

But Richter hadn’t finished. He removed all the fallen weapons, then stepped over to the three men he had shot and checked each for a pulse in the neck. All were still alive, which was exactly what he had expected, because the weapon he had used was a French-made non-lethal self-defence weapon, firing a rubber bullet with a powerful charge of propellant behind it, and the kinetic energy had been enough to knock each of them unconscious. He lifted the first youth’s right arm and swung the baton with surgical precision to break his humerus, then did the same to the other two, incapacitating all six of them.

Then he stepped back to the youth who’d been wearing the knuckle duster. He was slumped on the ground, clutching his broken right arm with his left hand and moaning in pain.

‘You’re lucky you picked on me,’ Richter said, ‘because now you can all walk away. But if you have any friends, which I doubt, you need to tell them that we have a little operation running in this area. A bunch of soldiers. In fact, a bunch of off-duty SAS men are covering this part of London looking pretty much the same as I did when you and your boyfriends walked over to me to have a bit of fun this evening. They won’t all be carrying non-lethal weapons, and they won’t all be as harmless as me, so just spread the word.’

Then Richter straightened up and walked away, taking a mobile phone from his pocket as he did so and dialling a number.

‘It’s me,’ he said, when the call was answered. ‘And the latest score is six down. I’d appreciate a pickup as soon as you can get here, because the smell of this coat is starting to get to me now.’

He had been waiting at the end of the road for about a quarter of an hour when a white Transit van pulled up beside him, the driver a black man wearing a yellow leather coat.

Richter pulled open the passenger side door and looked inside.

‘The coat goes in the back, my man,’ Carpenter said firmly. ‘You don’t climb in here with me wearing that thing.’

‘I was only going to ask if the rear doors were unlocked,’ Richter said.

Carpenter nodded, and a couple of minutes later, having tossed the foul-smelling heavy overcoat, deliberately prepared for the operation, into the cargo area, Richter climbed into the passenger seat wearing the reasonably clean jeans and shirt that he’d had on underneath it. His grubby and unshaven face provided a stark contrast to his clothing.

‘Thanks, Steve,’ he said. ‘Anything from the others?’

‘Not so far. A couple of the guys saw what looked like trouble approaching, but it didn’t come to anything. So you had six, eh? How many corpses?’

‘None,’ Richter replied. ‘They’ll all get to walk away, but with six broken arms between them it’ll be a while before they try their luck again on the streets.’

‘If they ever do,’ Carpenter said, slowing down as they reached a set of traffic lights. ‘I guess you want to go home now?’

‘Damn right I do. I need a shave and a long bath, and maybe the number of a pizza delivery service. On the other hand, I’ve got another couple of days before my leave ends, so you’d better pick me up again tomorrow afternoon as usual, so tonight I’ll just have to manage with the pizza. And for God’s sake don’t tell Simpson that I’ve been moonlighting.’

Chapter 2

Three weeks ago

Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoye Predpriyatie (Sevmash), Severodvinsk, White Sea, Russia

The timescale initially envisaged by Viktor Mikhailovich Alexeev eventually proved to be somewhat pessimistic, not least because the most crucial single part of the weapons system that the project required had already been under development for some time, and although he had known about the new device he had simply not made the connection.

Rumours about the Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System, later known within Russia as the Poseidon and categorized in America as the Kanyon, had begun to circulate in the Western intelligence community in about 2010, and it was first publicly acknowledged in September 2015, following the apparently accidental disclosure of a document by a Russian general on the Russian television station NTV. Accidents of that kind almost never happened, and certainly not in Russia, where the likely penalty for such crass and manifest stupidity would be extremely serious and in all probability fatal. Almost certainly, the ‘leak’ was a deliberate statement to the West that Russia was well advanced in its development of the Poseidon, a potential doomsday weapon, essentially a nuclear armed and nuclear powered super torpedo, and the Russian President Vladimir Putin was delivering an unmistakable warning to America.

When the new classified project received the go-ahead from the highest echelons of the Russian government, the Poseidon was clearly the weapon of choice, but there was one obvious problem: the delivery system was going to require extensive modification because the tactical scenario required an entirely different launch platform to be used. That meant identifying a suitable vessel to transport the device and then, crucially, to launch it in the appropriate place at the optimum time. For some days, the matter was discussed at the very highest level of the Russian Navy, until one of the officers made some very basic measurements and calculations and came up with what was potentially the ideal solution. Once that had been established, the next step was easy: all they had to do was find the right ship.

Not all container ships are huge, and some do not start off life intending to fulfil that role, but many end up being converted because shipping almost any kind of goods in a container is one of the fastest and most efficient ways so far developed of transporting cargo. The 2,500-ton MV Semyon Timoshenko was a SA-15 class cargo ship built in the mid-1980s in the Valmet Vuosaari shipyard in Helsinki, Finland, for a small Russian cargo line working mainly the White Sea, the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Because of the harsh weather likely to be encountered in the northern oceans, it was designed from the first as an icebreaker and multipurpose freighter. Early in the twenty-first century, when container shipping definitively became the way to go, the vessel was modified to carry the ubiquitous steel boxes in her hold space and stacked on the decks above.

Ships, like cars, tend to age quickly, especially when sailing routes through the Baltic, Norwegian and Barents seas in the depths of winter, when the bow had to batter small icebergs known as ‘growlers’ out of the way while the ship steered a course around the bigger bergs, and the screaming wind and moisture-laden air coated almost every part of the vessel’s superstructure in a layer of ice inches thick. So when the managing director of the shipping company that owned the Semyon Timoshenko received a cash offer for the old and somewhat tired vessel from the Russian Navy, ostensibly for use in some kind of unspecified trial, he thought about it for less than ten minutes before accepting. The ship had then been unloading eight containers at Kandalaksha, a port town in the Murmansk Oblast, at the head of the Kandalaksha Gulf, and collecting a dozen empty units.

A short exchange of radio messages sorted everything out to the satisfaction of both the managing director and the senior Russian Navy officer deputed to handle the negotiations, though rather less satisfactorily for the master and crew of the ship: the Semyon Timoshenko was to remain in Kandalaksha for an additional day, and was to disembark all the loaded containers it was carrying there. These were destined for several different ports in the region, but other container ships plied the same routes and could deliver the cargo without any problems, apart from incurring something of a delay.

Perhaps strangely, the master of the ship was told to collect the planned 12 empty containers from the port, as instructed by the Russian Navy officer, because these would also be required for the trial the ship was supposed to be involved in. Containers are lost overboard from ships on an almost daily basis in the oceans of the world, and because these were empty nobody would care very much what happened to them, so they would simply be written off.

The master was then ordered to sail the vessel direct to Severodvinsk, but not to the container port there. Instead, he was told to deliver the ship to Sevmash, Severnoye Mashinostroitelnoye Predpriyatie, the shipbuilding company located nearby. This is the only shipyard in Russia that has manufactured, and still manufactures, nuclear submarines. It builds other stuff as well, including massive structures like ice-resistant stationary drilling platforms.

Once there, the master was instructed to pay off the crew, giving each of them a small bonus due to the early termination of their contracts, and then he himself was to report to the shipping company’s head office in Arkhangelsk, just down the road from Severodvinsk, to wait for a new command.

The architects of the plan had chosen the Semyon Timoshenko for three reasons: first, and most important, because it was equipped with a deck crane. Second, it had been modified to act as a container ship and, third, it was old and battered and therefore cheap. That had been almost a year earlier, and in the intervening months, work of both a routine nature and other unusual and more specialized tasks had been taking place on the Semyon Timoshenko in one of the smaller dry docks in the shipyard. A maintenance programme had been initiated, which included cleaning the hull and checking its integrity, overhauling the engines, generators and other equipment, upgrading the navigation system to incorporate the very latest in GPS technology, updating and modifying the bridge controls, and so on. No changes had been made to the external appearance of the ship, because that was all part of the plan, but almost every system on board had been modified, upgraded or completely replaced.

Some of the work carried out hadn’t been on the ship at all, but on the empty containers that were still stacked on the deck of the vessel, and to anyone with even a basic working knowledge of marine transport, these changes would have made no sense at all.

The very first thing that the shipyard had been instructed to do was to X-ray each container, despite the fact that they were all empty. The standard dimensions of shipping containers are based on the imperial rather than the metric measurement system, and have a height of 8.5 feet, a width of 8 feet, and come in two lengths, either 20 feet or 40 feet. Within those standard sizes are different permutations, so, for instance, containers can have doors at each end (these are known as tunnels), doors that open along one or both sides rather than at the ends, open-topped containers which have tarpaulins as roofs, refrigerated containers, half-height containers for heavy bulk cargoes, and others. But by far the commonest, the workhorse container, is the 20-foot or 40-foot standard unit, and those stacked on the deck of the Semyon Timoshenko were all 40-footers with doors at one end only.

Two of the containers that had passed the X-ray examination had been selected, lifted off the ship and placed end to end in the yard beside the vessel. A team of welders had then carved out matching holes in the solid ends of the containers, leaving a ring of steel about one foot wide around the hole. Then the ends of the containers were welded together, and additional strengthening steel plates were welded across the floor where they were joined.

Two lengths of specially fabricated steel, looking something like railway lines but very much lighter, were delivered to the shipping yard, placed inside the double container and welded to the steel of the floor, a precisely calculated distance apart and running for its entire length. Then the container was placed in a cradle and turned onto its side to give access to its base. After establishing the precise centre point of the modified unit, engineers welded a circle of steel about half an inch thick onto the container floor.

Four hydraulic cylinders were fitted, one at each corner, which contained legs that would extend below the container, and a system of hydraulic pipes was installed that linked all four legs to ensure that they would extend at the same rate and to the same degree.

Then a custom-built strengthening cage was welded to the inside of the containers, a lattice of steel somewhat like a roll-cage that provided support to the roof, side walls and floor. The two rear doors were fitted with thick steel plates in one specific area, to act as blast shields.

Two other containers also needed attention; these, too, were welded together and had additional steel bracing struts fitted to provide extra strength for the roofs and sides of the units. Another circular steel plate was welded onto the roof in the exact centre of these joined units. Around the edge of this plate was a low steel lip, and within the lip was a very heavy-duty ball race, covered in grease.

Once that work had been completed, the first modified unit was carefully lowered on top of the second, the circular steel plate slotting precisely inside the lip of the steel on the bottom container, allowing the upper double container to rotate on top of the lower unit. The two sets of joined containers were then lifted back onto the deck of the Semyon Timoshenko, one on top of the other, the upper one being locked into place simply by drilling a hole through the steel of the floor in each corner, a hole that penetrated the roof of the lower container, and by then placing a large steel bolt in each hole.

That completed the work that the Sevmash engineers and shipyard staff had been told to do, but the ship could not sail until one final piece of equipment had arrived. This was a large tarpaulin-wrapped object delivered on a low loader and accompanied by a pair of utility vehicles full of armed soldiers. The utility vehicles remained outside while the low loader drove into the shipyard and stopped beside the Semyon Timoshenko, once more afloat in the flooded dry dock.

A small team of hand-picked Russian sailors were waiting there. That part of the shipyard was cleared of all staff, and then the tarpaulin was removed from the cylindrical object it had encased. The crane driver lifted the upper double container off the ship and placed it beside the low loader. Six small wooden platforms fitted with heavy-duty wheels were placed in a line in front of the open door at one end of the container. Lifting straps were positioned around the cylindrical object, and it was lifted off the vehicle and lowered onto the line of platforms.

The sailors then pushed it forward into the container, ensuring that the wheels on its underside lined up with the two rails welded to the container floor. The cylinder slid easily inside, the far end of it virtually touching the closed doors at the opposite end of the double container. A retractable steel locking lug protruded from the rear end of the underside of the cylinder, and as it was moved into position, it mated with a matching bar welded to the container floor with an echoing clang. That would prevent any further movement of the cylinder until the device was deployed, when it would automatically be retracted. The sailors closed the container doors, and collected three further wooden boxes, two large and one small, from the vehicle, which they carried on board the ship and stowed away.

Then the crane driver lifted the unit off the concrete of the quayside and deposited it gently back on top of the other double container. One man went inside to replace the locking pins, and closed and secured the container doors behind him when he had done so.

The following day the final stages of that part of the project began. This comprised installing the fins and other external components of the cylinder that had been removed prior to it being transported. While the installation and testing of the directional guidance system and the launch mechanism began, a succession of lorries appeared beside the ship, each carrying a loaded container which was craned onto the vessel and positioned above and around the modified containers as a form of disguise. When it sailed, it was important that the Semyon Timoshenko looked just like any other small container ship, and that it was carrying a genuine cargo of goods.

The only part of the loading which might have appeared unusual to an experienced container ship crewman was that there were no containers on the same level and on the line immediately inboard of the upper unit, to allow the container to rotate freely when the time came. For the same reason,