Others would make sure the Americans’ information was authentic, but for the moment, he would assume they were telling the truth. He couldn’t imagine this was some sort of deception.
“All right,” Vaslev announced, “I will pass all this information on to my superiors with the strongest possible endorsement. What they will do with it, or what actions they will take, I cannot say.”
“We would hope that in the spirit of cooperation, and given our openness in supplying such detailed information to your government, we can continue to work together to quickly resolve this, before there is another catastrophe.” Lloyd’s words were couched in diplomatic terminology, but his request was sincere.
“I can make no guarantees about that, either. Those decisions will be made by others.”
“You should also tell your government, that given the great urgency and the great danger of this situation, if their investigations are not successful, we will quickly broaden our investigation to include other governments, and possibly even the public. Everyone in the world is in danger until these weapons are found and the persons involved are stopped. One could argue that the world needs to be told.”
It was a credible threat. The Americans had already revealed what they knew to their adversary. Telling their friends or the public would cost them little. Vaslev wondered which revelation would cause Russia greater problems: that the Soviet regime apparently violated a nuclear treaty, that the Russian government had covered it up, or that it had now lost control of at least one of the weapons.
And who had them now? He shivered at the thought of the Chechens or some Muslim group, and there were many inside Russia, possessing such a weapon. And there were nationalists in Georgia and some of the “Stans” who would love to strike at their Russian neighbor.
“There is one more piece of information for you, a possible lead for your investigators.”
“Lead?” Vaslev asked, puzzled by the word.
“Clue,” Lloyd explained. “A name: Evgeni Orlav. A Russian national. This individual is working in India as part of the refit of the Indian submarine Chakra.”
“And the nature of his involvement?” Vaslev asked.
Lloyd sighed. “We don’t know. But information from a source in the shipyard says his actions have been suspicious since the Kashmir explosion.”
The ambassador looked over at Zykov, who was taking notes. The official looked up and asked, “May we interview this source?”
“No,” said Lloyd firmly. “Not now. Possibly later.”
So the Americans still wanted to keep some things secret. Still, intelligence shouldn’t have any trouble locating this man and putting him under surveillance.
Captain Mishin spoke up. “I have a question. With the ambassador’s permission, it is a matter related to the barge.”
Vaslev nodded.
“Could you please put the map back up on the screen?”
Davis typed for a moment, and the waters of northern Russia reappeared.
Mishin studied it for a moment before nodding slightly, as if satisfied. His expression became very solemn. “In the spring of 2005, I was a junior officer assigned to staff duty in Murmansk, at the Northern Fleet headquarters. There was an incident in that same area, a pursuit of what was reported as a foreign submarine in our waters. I remember coming on duty to find our fleet actively pursuing a submarine contact as it tried to escape. It was general mobilization,” he recalled. “We were on a war footing.”
He’d been speaking to the entire group, but now he turned to face Hardy directly, confronting him. “Was that submarine USS Memphis?”
Hardy replied, “We arrived at our patrol area on May twenty-third, and discovered the barge on June eleventh.”
Mishin’s face hardened. “The dates agree. One of the units pursuing the foreign submarine—Memphis,” he corrected himself, “was the submarine Gepard. After she reported detecting a distant hydroacoustic contact, on June fourteenth, she was never heard from again.”
The naval officer stood and walked to the screen. He picked up a pointer and tapped the chart. “The next day, we discovered debris here, and her wreckage, containing the seventy-three men who served on her, was located later that month.
“Her loss was a tremendous blow to the fleet, as well as to the wives and mothers whose men never returned. It’s long been suspected that she was sunk in battle. Is that what happened?”
Vaslev was surprised by Mishin’s intensity, but it was understandable. Gepard had been the newest submarine in the fleet in 2005, and her loss, following that of Kursk, had dealt a huge blow to the Russian submarine arm’s morale.
Hardy said, “I can provide a more detailed account later, if you wish and my government allows it.” Hardy walked over and stood near Mishin, facing the naval officer. “Late on the fourteenth, we’d crossed the sixty-eighth parallel heading north. Memphis had been damaged by depth charges dropped on us during the pursuit, so we were not as quiet as we might have been. Gepard was waiting, in front of us, and fired two torpedoes only moments after we detected her presence. I maneuvered and dropped countermeasures, and managed to avoid those weapons. We both continued to maneuver, quite violently, and more countermeasures were dropped, by both submarines. She fired again, another pair of torpedoes, but I was able to evade them with the use of a mobile decoy.
“She went active and launched a third salvo of two torpedoes. Because of our maneuvers and the number of countermeasures in the water, I believe the guidance wires on her torpedoes may have been broken. The third pair of weapons was also decoyed away from me, but Gepard’s radical maneuvering put her in the path of the torpedoes. My sonarmen heard their seekers shift to a range-gating scale, followed by an explosion and breaking-up noises.”
Vaslev asked Mishin in Russian, “What does ‘range-gating scale’ mean?”
The Russian submariner explained, “He means that the torpedoes — our weapons — detected Gepard and began pinging more rapidly. All acoustic homing torpedoes do that when they attack. It gives them more precise bearing and range information.”
“So she was sunk by her own torpedoes? Is such a thing possible?”
Still answering in Russian, Mishin said, “Normally, no. There are circuits in torpedoes specifically designed to prevent that from happening. But in a close-range, maneuvering situation, with the guidance wires cut…” He shrugged.
Vaslev couldn’t believe that a Russian submarine had been lost to its own weapons. Switching to English, he asked Hardy, “Did you fire at Gepard?”
Hardy quickly replied with a shake of his head, “Absolutely not, Mr. Ambassador. One of my decoys was launched in that direction, but I didn’t launch a torpedo.”
“Even after you were fired on.”
“Truth be told, because of the damage my boat had received, I was incapable of firing back, even if I wanted to. Besides, we were in international waters, Mr. Ambassador. I could understand why the Russian units fired on us when we were close to your coast. The American term would be ‘hot pursuit.’ But Gepard’s attack, that far away, shocked us, and it is only our good fortune that we weren’t sunk.”
“And Gepard’s misfortune.” Vaslev replied acidly.
Mishin leaned over and spoke in Russian a little more softly than last time. “When they investigated the wreck of Gepard, they found pieces of Russian USET-80 torpedoes outside the hull, on the seafloor. The inner hull near the first compartment, where the torpedoes were stored, was flooded, but largely intact.”