“Yevgeni, I hope you’re not taking the compliments that I am making up about you too seriously. The last thing I want is for you to start believing my lies.”
“Yes, I’ve already got that”, Yevgeni said sardonically. “By the way, Brigadier General, as my personal attendant, you were derelict in your duty to light me a cigarette every hour on the hour. Is my health not important to you anymore?”
The Naval Intelligence building was surrounded by a tall wire fence. At the entrance gate, a naval lieutenant greeted them with a salute. According to his chest insignia, he was a submariner. He led them inside and gave them a short tour.
“Good evening, gentlemen. My name is Alexey Buchenko, and I will be attached to you 24 hours a day. I will coordinate everything that you require here on the base. Here, in this building, you can work under the best conditions. This building is compartmentalized externally and internally. Your accommodations are here, just across the room. By the way, your luggage has already been distributed in the rooms. Please follow me.”
As they walked in, Brigadier General Dimitri turned to Alexey.
“Lieutenant Alexey, on which submarine are you serving?”
“K-219, Navaga Class, Brigadier General.”
The young submarine officer felt great pride when he named the nuclear assault submarine that he was serving on, which was state of the art and the pride of the submarine fleet.
Colonel Yevgeni was the first to enter the conference room on the second floor of the Intelligence building. The room contained some 15 officers, men and women, and they all rose to attention in unison as Marshal Budarenko’s special team entered the room. They continued to stand as Yevgeni and his other team members took their seats at the conference table. Yevgeni motioned to them to be seated.
“Good evening, everyone”, he said.
“Good evening, Colonel”, the teams replied, almost in unison.
“We have a shared mission of the utmost importance to our Armed Forces and to the Soviet Union, and we shall execute it as well and as quickly as possible. That is why you were brought here without delay. We shall now split up into three teams, and each team will be joined by one of my men. Because there is a need for continuous communication between the teams, the most efficient way is for all three teams to be working in the same room. Therefore, we shall split up into three groups here in this room. The ordnance and explosives team will assemble in the left-hand corner of the room. You will be led and guided by Colonel Nazarbayev”, Yevgeni said, pointing to the Kazakh Colonel.
“Those of you in the communications and electronic warfare team will get together in the right-hand corner. You will be headed by General Okhramenko.”
Yevgeni placed his hand on the General’s shoulder in a gesture that seemed patronizing to most of those present, coming from an officer of an inferior rank.
“The third team is made up of the operations research and mathematics specialists. Please come here; you will be working with me. The two remaining members of our team will alternate between the teams. Let’s go!”
Yevgeni watched the obedient naval officers carry out his instructions without comment — each man and woman walked to his or her position. He now examined, with great interest, the three male and the two female officers around him. Yevgeni turned to the most senior, a female Lieutenant Commander.
“I understand that you received a preliminary briefing this morning. Is this correct? And by the way, what is your name?”
“My name, Sir, is Lieutenant Commander Doctor Irena Pashutin, and my doctorate is in operations research. And yes, Sir, we were indeed briefed this morning.”
“Very well. Is one of you a seismologist, as I requested?”
A young junior Lieutenant raised his hand.
“I am, Sir. My name is Lieutenant Junior Grade Belov.”
Yevgeni scanned the faces of the other team members, but decided that this was not the time to elaborate on their functions, preferring to get to work immediately.
“Your mission is perhaps the easiest and the shortest, but it also requires the most precision. Your starting point for all your calculations is a nuclear blast with a magnitude of twenty megatons. You should calculate for me what the earthquake value should be, or the magnitude of a land shockwave on the Richter scale that is felt at a distance of six thousand nautical miles from the blast’s epicenter. That is essentially your job as a seismologist, Lieutenant Junior Grade Belov. This is where we’ll start, your starting point. This point, which, as I said, is six thousand nautical miles from the explosion, we shall name the Alpha Point. The magnitude of the shockwave that we get at Alpha Point, which will be measured on the Richter scale, we shall call R. Is everything clear so far?”
The five officers concurred, nodding their heads.
“Now we advance to the next stage. I want to create a small explosion, using standard explosives, not far from that Alpha Point. The explosion must be made under two conditions. One, the explosion will take place far enough away from our Alpha Point that acoustically, the explosion will not be heard at Alpha Point. The second condition is that the magnitude of the blast, the same R value, identical to that received from a nuclear explosion far away, will be received at Alpha Point. What we need to find out is how many kilos of standard army explosive, and at what distance from Alpha Point, would create that blast. Will two hundred kilos of TNT at a distance of 10 kilometers from Alpha create the desired effect, or perhaps I need to explode half a ton of TNT thirty kilometers away from Alpha? This is exactly what I need to get from you.”
Yevgeni finished his speech and looked at the five officers sitting across from him. It seems, he thought, that I am not really challenging them. He would now challenge them with another task, and maybe then they would start sweating.
“So far things are simple and relatively easy. Right, Lieutenant Colonel Doctor Pashutin?”
“Yes, Sir”, answered the operations research specialist. “This is really not complicated and you will get exactly the two figures that you requested. However, Colonel, you probably intend to carry out the blast at a specific location. Therefore, I need to get data on the type of soil at that location. I also need to know the temperature and wind speeds and directions at that location. These are important for our calculations. Of course, I mean the data for the two regions, points, Alpha and R.”
Yevgeni decided that now was the time to give the team a shot of motivation, before elaborating on their mission.
“Before we left Moscow to come here, I asked for a team made up of the best of the best in the Soviet Union. I am happy to see that this is exactly the case.”
“Thank you, Colonel, for the compliment”, replied Dr. Pashutin. Yevgeni hurried back to his subject.
“Everything you said is very true, but I can’t provide some of what you requested, for reasons of state security. Moreover, we are now coming to another stage where the picture gets a little more complicated.”
The officers, three men and two women, listened closely to what the colonel had to say, and were even more attentive than before.
“The speed of sound in the air is well known, even to schoolchildren. In water, however, the speed of the sound waves is about three times faster. I am reminding you of this because our Alpha Point is actually located 300 meters underwater.”
“Then it is a submarine!” exclaimed Doctor Pashutin almost involuntarily, as if she were a schoolgirl.
“Exactly”, replied Yevgeni. “We do not need soil data. Please consider the sea and climate data that are prevalent and typical during this season here, in the sea near Murmansk.”