When she graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with an arts degree, majoring in cryptography and foreign affairs, it was only natural for her to follow her father’s footsteps into foreign intelligence. There she excelled in every aspect from code-breaking to foreign affairs, languages, through to covert operations, athleticism, and fieldwork.
Her father had been somewhat of a legend around The Institute. One would have thought it might have changed the way her trainers treated her. As it was, it had — but not in the way she might have hoped. Instead, she had a target on her back as someone who didn’t belong, and could never measure up to her father’s ability.
Her father would have been proud of her effort today — if he was still alive.
Svetlana was positioned in the dark bowels of the hull where the cold fish storage would have been had the ship been a fishing trawler. Instead, it was the elite ship’s command center. Dozens of complex instruments covered the walls, an array of technology included long and short-range listening devices, radar, sonar, and satellite hacking equipment.
Lost in thought, Svetlana remained quiet for awhile. Her eyes darted from monitor to monitor. Like a member of the audience at a magic show, she felt something was being mysteriously concealed from her. It was a simple ruse, nothing more. But until she spotted it, she might as well admit her opponent had won.
And in this case, her opponent was the U.S. Navy.
It was hard to believe she’d let that happen.
The Vostok’s commander, Kirill, climbed down the steep set of stairs, moving fast, breathing hard. She knew exactly why he’d raced down to the command center. Svetlana looked up, careful not to react when she saw his face. It was not a brutal countenance, but when angry he could be frightening.
Kirill was ill-equipped for and unused to failure. She had no intention of becoming his casualty in this battle, a punching bag for his fury.
Her commander’s eyes were piercing, “Well, what have you found?”
“Nothing, sir.” She turned her palms skyward. “I don’t have anything that can scientifically explain it.”
He swallowed. “Nothing?”
“Not a thing. It’s like the damned submarine just vanished.”
“That’s impossible. At least we know it definitely didn’t disappear.” He closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. She could see his mind ticking over all the possibilities like a computer. His lips settled into a sly, somewhat cunning smile. “Are we certain it was there to begin with?”
Her brows drew down. For an alarming moment, the possibility occurred to her that he was suggesting it was best to report that there was no sub. “You saw it as well as I did, sir.”
“Yes. But now I’m trying to look at this from a different angle.”
“A different angle, sir?”
“If a magician wanted to use sleight of hand to remove a 7900-ton submarine, or in this case, make him think it was moved, wouldn’t he have more easily placed something else in front of us to begin with?”
She cocked an incredulous eyebrow. “You think the submarine was a fake?”
“Don’t you?” he countered.
“Absolutely not,” she said emphatically but held her breath as she waited to see how her CO would take the news.
“How certain are you that what just happened was real?”
“I’d swear on my life that it wasn’t counterfeit.”
“You saw it.” His eyes lit up suddenly, his imagination caught by fantasy instead of science. “The entire submarine disappeared!”
“And yet it didn’t. I’ll show you.” She turned to a digital recording of the footage taken from the event, moved her mouse, clicked through each image, frame by frame. “Look at this, here’s the entire submarine in this frame, and now it just disappears. If it were a magic trick — even a very good one involving a holographic projection or a cardboard cutout of a submarine — it would be impossible to change it in a single frame.”
Standing with deference, she studied her commander’s face. It was hard and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye. She was relieved that she saw no sign of rage.
“All right,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I believe you. If you can’t work out how they’ve done it, or what has even happened, then the most logical explanation is that they’ve developed a concealing technology we’re decades from reproducing.”
She said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
He stood up and shook his head. “Not your fault.”
“Would you like to watch it again?” she asked.
He nodded, without taking his eyes off the screen.
She pressed play. Her lips curled into an incredulous grin.
There it was. The stars and stripes of the American flag. Nothing tremendously spectacular about such a thing proudly displayed off the sail tower of an enemy submarine. Only, in this case, it wasn’t attached to anything at all. Its edges luffed in the passive wind, just shy of twelve feet above the water, as though it was being mysteriously pulled by some invisible force at six knots.
But no submarine was visible.
If this was where the video ended, she might have assumed that the entire thing was nothing more than a clever ruse or a magic trick done by strings — albeit a very good one.
She clicked pause.
Commander Kirill stared at the image. “How are they doing it?”
She cocked a well-trimmed eyebrow. “You know how they’re doing it.”
“Yes, but we were told the technology was decades away.”
She clicked play.
A submarine’s hatch, roughly ten feet above the sea, appeared to materialize out of thin air. A sailor climbed through, and then another — apparently standing on nothing at all. They moved along above the water — before going through the careful process of lowering and then folding the flag away, as though being suspended in space concerned them not at all. With the flag creased into a triangle, the sailors glanced at the calm seawater below their feet.
Svetlana’s eyes widened as one of the men’s legs and torso disappear, frame by frame, as he descended into oblivion. The process was repeated for the other sailor, and at the very end, he took one last look around, and closed the hatch, leaving nothing but air and seawater in his place.
“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”
Kirill said, “I think we should have let them have space and concentrate on this technical knowledge instead.”
She agreed with him.
Invisibility was the Holy Grail of the military industry, for both its defensive and offensive advantages. But like the grail of the crusades, it seemed far out of reach to mere mortals. Cloaking technology itself was nothing new. It had been around for years. Basically, you take an image with a series of digital cameras on one side of whatever it is you want to hide and display it on the opposite side. Even their own engineers had developed such techniques within the Ministry of Defense. In terms of camouflage, the process was pretty good, but no one had been able to achieve anything like the perfect level of invisibility she’d just witnessed.
The red satellite phone started to ring.
The commander swallowed hard, picked up the phone and answered the call.
Without preamble, he said, “You have my attention.”
He listened for a few minutes and then whistled.
“No,” the commander said. “The price is fine. Russia will pay. Just deliver us that submarine.”
The PEOC was a blast-resistant bunker, situated deep beneath the East Wing of the White House. During emergency operations, it could be utilized by the president as an operations center capable of withstanding a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. In peacetime, the room was often utilized for training or in this case, its secure video-conferencing capabilities.