“Miss Svetlana. I must speak with the Minister now, this minute. I understand that he is with the General Secretary, but this is an emergency. The Minister will never forgive you if you do not get him to come out now and speak to me. This is a matter of life and death.”
“Very well. I will try”, Svetlana replied across the line.
Gregory watched the clock in desperation. The clock showed forty minutes past ten. Within one minute, the firing of the nuclear shell would take place. Why the hell wasn’t the Minister coming out? He hit the table in frustration. Suddenly, he reached to the soldier sitting next to him, shaking his shoulder violently.
“Get the trawler immediately”, he shouted. “Now!”
The Minister of Defense’s familiar voice was heard on the other side of the line. The Minister sounded indignant.
“Gregory, you’d better have a good reason for this dumb thing you’re doing. Have you gone insane? What the hell happened?” The Minister’s voice went up when asking the question.
“Mister Minister, we received a message from our people in Washington that just a few minutes ago, all training activity in the United States Navy was discontinued and all navy servicemen were ordered to man their battle positions.”
“So?” the Minister yelled.
“It means, Sir, that at these very seconds, we are firing a shell into nowhere, without a purpose, because their submarine is not there anymore.”
There was a chilling silence on the other side of the phone line, which lasted several seconds, after which the Minister barked again.
“Then stop them, you idiot”, and the telephone line went dead. The Minister had hung up on his man on the front lines.
“What about the trawler?” Gregory shouted at the soldier near him, while his eyes followed the dials of the large clock on the wall.
“I can’t make contact with the trawler, Sir”, the soldier replied meekly.
“It’s strange. I’m trying and trying and they don’t hear me.”
“Then try again and again and again and again until they hear you.” Gregory’s last sentence was uttered in a much more subdued voice, as if he was beginning to realize, deep inside, that he was too late. He crumpled like a deflated balloon. He fell heavily into the nearest chair and looked as pale as a man staring death in the face.
Yevgeni approached Gregory. He held him by the arm.
“It is already too late. Come, let’s go back to our conference room and think together about what we can do, looking forward, and what we can recommend to the Minister of Defense. Let’s think together how we can explain this nuclear blast in the North Sea. I already have some ideas in the back of my mind. Come; let’s go talk about it in our conference room.”
Gregory, his spirit broken, rose to his feet without replying, and let Yevgeni lead him to the door without resistance. The rest of the team joined them and made their way out in absolute silence.
Svetlana entered the general secretary’s room. The shouting session with the Minister of Defense had reached her ears and she understood very well that her boss was especially agitated today.
“Gospodin Vladimir Petrovich Yermolov, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security has arrived, at your request. Does Gospodin wish to be served tea and biscuits?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The General Secretary watched Svetlana as she left the room. I’m so lucky to have someone so quiet and efficient, he thought. Here is a person whom I can trust completely.
The Committee Chairman, or in his better known title, Chief of the KGB, took his seat opposite the General Secretary. He immediately noticed that the Secretary was restless.
“Mister Secretary, has something happened? How can I help you?”
“Yes, a lot has happened, and a lot is still happening. These are my orders. I want you to follow Marshal Budarenko twenty-four hours a day. I want to receive a report every few hours on what he does, who he meets with, what he says, what he eats, when he urinates, and I also want to know the level of sugar in his urine. Everything, I want to know everything. You hear me? Everything! This unscrupulous man is a loose cannon, and he is dragging us into a hot war with the United States. I gave him my approval for X, and he went and did X and Y and Z. This insane bastard has no limits. He will destroy us all. Do you understand? Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes, Mister Secretary. Everything is clear and it will be done immediately.”
“Thank you. That’s all.”
Captain Frank Butcher sat in the captain’s chair of the USS 726 Ohio, examining a chart with the submarine’s new route. The seaman in charge of briefing him with reports from all the ship’s sections sat beside him.
“Now, check when we are supposed to arrive at our battle position”, the captain ordered the seaman.
A minute later, the seaman returned to Captain Butcher.
“Sir, the navigation station reports that we will arrive at our battle position in nine hours and twenty-two minutes. But there is a preliminary report that I’ve just received, of a strong seismic event that caused ground motion. It may be an earthquake.”
“OK. Go ahead and collect data.”
“Sir”, the seaman said again a moment later, “This is very strange. I have just received an unexplained acoustic event from that exact direction. They say it sounds like a continuous, muffled explosion.”
“Give me the direction.”
“Sir, it’s coming from Northwest, direction 335.”
“Tell them to contact Georgia 729 right now. They should be 500 miles southwest of us. See if they have also received something.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Captain Butcher continued examining the map, which he had placed on a small wooden shelf to his right. The seaman’s voice was heard again.
“Sir, the Georgia also detected motion on the ground but not the acoustic noise. According to the cross-sections that we have with Georgia’s location and data, the epicenter of the blast, or whatever that was, is near us, about thirty-five miles northwest of us. I wrote down the exact location here.”
Captain Butcher took the note from the seaman and looked again at the map, searching for the location of the epicenter of that explosion. On its face, the Captain thought, it appears to be an especially powerful explosion, because the ground motion that it created was detected by our sister ship Georgia, which is much farther from us. He picked up the microphone and called out.
“USS 726 Ohio crewmen, this is the Captain speaking. I am reminding you that we are on a level two alert. A few minutes ago, we detected an explosion, probably an exceptional event of unknown magnitude, right at the place in which we would have been right now, had we continued our regular navigation exercise. Communications Officer, transmit a full report on the event immediately to our headquarters back home. When I have further details, I will notify you. USS 726 crew, keep your eyes and ears open. If someone is messing with us, he probably doesn’t know what this machine is capable of. Everyone maintain a high state of alert.”
Captain Butcher placed the microphone back on its hook and started considering this unusual event. What the hell can this be if it reached all the way to USS 729? There’s no chance in the world that the blast was created by standard explosives. What the hell can this be and who planned this and why did it happen in the exact spot that we were supposed to have reached?
As had become his custom, Colonel Yevgeni again assumed command of the discussion. This time, for the first time, Gregory also participated actively.
“There are already reports of a nuclear blast south of the island of Svalbard”, Yevgeni opened. “I have no doubt that within a short time, the story will circulate throughout the world. We executed it, it is our responsibility, and our Minister of Defense did not get from us the outcome that he requested. Everybody already knows why it happened, but it’s not really going to help if we dwell on the reasons. Our responsibility now is to minimize the damage and help the Minister as much as we can, perhaps even gain some benefit from the event. We must do this within minutes. I don’t think we even have as much as half an hour.”