It was, they all knew, the quiet before the storm. Undeniably a cliché, it was also undeniably true. Before going to any kind of hostile situation, the soldiers of DEVGRU, the finest special forces troops America had ever produced, all spent a little quiet time mentally rehearsing the actions that they would soon be taking, all of them supremely aware that they were going into a situation where there would be no second chances. Everything had to work first time, every time.
As a matter of routine, the men in the Zodiacs checked their weapons, not once, or even twice, but three or four times to make absolutely sure that they were ready for whatever would come when they approached the Russian ship.
But that, for the moment, was all that they could do. Reilly knew, because of the timing he had discussed and reviewed with Richter, that it would take a considerable time for the two fairly slow-moving ships to pass, and there was absolutely nothing that they could do until that happened. In the meantime, the two Zodiacs just had to match speed with the Greek freighter and ensure that they kept the steel sides of the ship between themselves and the still invisible and steadily approaching target vessel.
The leading Zodiac had taken up a position slightly ahead of the second boat, in a position from which the men on board could see the ocean to the north beyond the bow of the Greek ship. Two of men were sitting in the bow watching the horizon carefully, alert for the first sign of the approach of Tango One.
At least the SEALs in the Zodiacs were able to keep moving, which meant that the helmsmen could steer the boats and pick the smoothest possible passage through the waves. Richter and the other five men of Team 1 did not have that luxury. In the small dinghy they were crammed in together, essentially stationary on the ocean and at the mercy of the sea, waiting for Tango One to appear. No ships were visible in any direction and the only sign of life, apart from the usual handful of gulls demonstrating their impressive flying ability, was the Merlin helicopter, then a distant dot in the sky a dozen or so miles away out to the east.
‘You sure this is going to work?’ the soldier sitting in the stern of the dinghy asked Richter.
‘Would you believe me if I said yes?’ Richter asked.
‘Probably not.’
‘There you go then.’
Just under ten minutes later, the SEAL sitting beside him in the dinghy tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the south, where a distant shape was slowly becoming visible on the horizon.
‘That could be the Greek ship,’ he said.
‘I bloody well hope it is,’ Richter replied, ‘because I’m getting fed up with bouncing around like this.’ He raised his voice slightly. ‘Keep your eyes peeled to the north. As soon as we see the Russian ship, we have to make sure we’re in the right place for the intercept.’
For several minutes the northern horizon remained completely empty, but then the unmistakable shape of a ship slowly materialized.
‘This looks like showtime,’ Richter said. He still had the satellite phone with him, with an open line to the pilot controlling the Reaper, and he knew that there were no other vessels in their immediate vicinity, and certainly not within visual range, apart from the Russian and Greek ships. ‘Now we just need to make sure that he’s heading straight for us.’
Richter had a small compass in his hand, the kind used by people doing orienteering or outdoor pursuits of that kind, a simple and foolproof instrument. He opened it up, located north and then took as accurate a bearing as he could on the approaching Russian ship. Then he waited about five minutes and took another bearing on the ship, which was now more clearly visible in the distance, though probably still at least ten miles away.
His logic was simple enough: if the bearing of the approaching vessel remained constant, then it was heading directly towards them. If it changed, even by a degree or two, then it was going to miss them, and that wasn’t what they wanted at all. Richter checked the second bearing, which was a little under one degree to the east of the first one, a barely detectable change, particularly in view of the circumstances, using a handheld compass in a boat that was entirely at the mercy of the waves.
‘We need to move?’ the helmsmen asked.
‘Not yet. I’ll take another bearing in a few minutes.’
The third bearing was about a degree to the west of the original, so the only choice they had was to do nothing until the readings showed a clear direction of movement. The other factor they needed to be aware of was that although the rubber dinghy could not possibly reflect a radar wave, and the electric motor was specifically designed to be invisible to radar, there would undoubtedly be men with binoculars on the bridge of the approaching ship. The dinghy presented a small visual target, but it was still big enough to be seen even in the fairly choppy waves that they were then experiencing. The safe range, as far as Richter was concerned, was probably about five miles. Any closer than that, and they ran a real risk of the dinghy being spotted.
The next two bearings showed a slight but distinct drift towards the east, and the helmsmen steered the dinghy about a hundred yards in that direction, the motor virtually silent as it drove them along. They refined the position over about the next ten minutes, and the next three bearings showed no sign of drift in either direction.
This meant two things. First, that the ship was now heading directly towards them, and second, that they all needed to get wet.
‘Do it,’ Richter ordered.
One of the soldiers took out his combat knife, drove the point into the inflated side of the dinghy next to him, and then repeated the treatment all the way around the perimeter. Air rushed out and quickly, without any fuss, the dinghy vanished stern first beneath the waves, the weight of the electric motor taking it down to the bottom of the sea.
‘You did tell us you could swim,’ one of the soldiers, just his head showing above the waves, said to Richter.
‘More or less, yes.’
In fact, Richter was a reasonably powerful, if only occasional, swimmer, but the weight of equipment he was carrying made him glad of the variable buoyancy life vest he was wearing. As well as the Smith & Wesson revolver he’d borrowed from John Mason back in Longyearbyen what seemed like weeks ago, which he was now carrying in a nylon belt holster because he knew the saltwater would have little effect on its simple and reliable mechanism, he also had a Heckler & Koch 416 fitted with the ten-inch barrel and a suppressor, supplied by the DEVGRU team, in a waterproof case, plus four spare loaded magazines in another sealed bag. All of the Americans were carrying a pistol, a SiG P226, and a suppressed HK 416 and extra magazines in waterproof pouches. As a precaution, each 416 had the over-the-beach or OTB modification, meaning drainage holes cut into the bolt carrier and buffer system so that the weapons would still fire safely even if they were immersed in water before being used.
Now they were in the water, they knew that there was almost no chance of anyone on the Russian ship detecting their presence, their heads being too small to be easily seen against the waves and swell. And they weren’t all in the same place, because getting on board the ship was going to need a coordinated effort involving all of them.
The other factor in Richter’s plan then came into play.
The Merlin had been flying around some distance away from the Russian ship, but now, when the aircrew calculated that the vessel was approaching a mile from the position where the DEVGRU team had been offloaded with their small dinghy, the helicopter began tracking over towards the Semyon Timoshenko.
When the target vessel reached an estimated range of two miles, Richter and the five other men made their preparations, swimming steadily away from the exact course the ship was following so that three of them were on one side of its approach path and three on the other. And between them was the first tool they were going to use to latch on to the ship: a length of buoyant high-tensile strength rope, the centre section of which was fitted with half a dozen powerful magnets, and the trailing lengths with numerous loops. That wasn’t how they were going to get on board, but it would get them into a position from which they could begin to climb up the side of the hull.
They hoped.
‘What is he doing?’ the captain of the MV Semyon Timoshenko asked, watching the Merlin helicopter through a pair of binoculars. He had been called to the bridge as soon as the chopper had been detected by the ship’s radar.
The officer of the watch, observing the same aircraft through a similar pair of binoculars, assumed this was a rhetorical question, until he lowered the instrument to find Captain Vadim Pankin staring straight at him, a scowl on his face.
‘I think,’ he said, recovering quickly, ‘that it’s on some sort of training exercise. I think it’s military, but it’s clearly not armed, only a search and rescue aircraft. It’s harmless to us.’
As they watched, the Merlin began a rapid transition down to a low hover, perhaps about a mile or so off the ship’s port beam, remained there for about 30 seconds, then climbed away and repeated the manoeuvre a couple of hundred yards further south.
‘You may be right,’ the captain said, ‘but I feel uncomfortable about this. We are so close to weapon deployment that we can take no chances. Whatever that helicopter is doing, it’s a long way from the nearest land, and I can see no sign of a ship that it could have come from. It is more or less paralleling our course and it also seems to be matching our speed. Get the Spetsnaz men up on deck, weapons out of sight but available, just in case.’
That, the officer of the watch thought, was a ridiculous over-reaction, but Pankin was the captain, and his word was law, so he simply nodded, picked up the internal telephone and passed the message down to the quarters occupied by the guards.
Minutes later, the watertight door at the base of the aft superstructure was opened from the inside and the first of the Spetsnaz troopers stepped out onto the deck of the ship to stare at the Merlin.
At a mile, the approaching ship still looked quite small to Richter, but the closer it got the bigger it seemed, the steel hull seeming to tower above him. At roughly a quarter of a mile and about 90 seconds before it reached them, it looked huge.
‘Brace, brace,’ somebody called out, but in truth they were all already hanging on with all their strength, waiting and anticipating the sudden wrench they would experience once the ship passed between the two groups.
Just over a minute later, the bow of the ship passed Richter and he saw and even thought he heard the magnetized central length of the rope snap into place, the magnets slamming against the sides of the bow as it ploughed into the floating rope.
And then he didn’t think about anything else as it felt as if both of his arms were being pulled from their sockets as the floating rope was accelerated from completely stationary to a speed of about 12 knots in less than a quarter of a second.
‘Hang on, spook,’ somebody yelled helpfully.
Richter didn’t respond. He was too busy just clinging on for dear life. Luckily, he had placed his right foot in another of the loops tied in the rope before the ship reached them, and that meant the strain on his arms was almost bearable as his leg – much stronger than his arms – was taking most of the force.
And about a second later, he was smashed into the steel side of the hull as the rope swung him inevitably towards the ship, and what little breath he had left was knocked from his body. But he didn’t let go, just hung on. Twelve knots, the speed the team controlling the Reaper had calculated the ship was maintaining, didn’t sound very fast, but being pulled through the incompressible medium that was the saltwater of the Atlantic Ocean at that speed was far from a pleasant experience.
He was the second man on the starboard side of the ship, and as he looked forward, trying to dodge the waves smashing into his face, he saw the soldier closest to the bow take what looked like a large pistol from one of his bags and aim it vertically upwards. He fired it and a grappling hook, a rope attached to it, shot up the side of the bow. The rope went taut as the soldier tugged on it, and in moments he released his grip on the rope wrapped around the bow and started climbing up the near vertical rope with swift and economical movements.
In less than two minutes, the rope the soldier had climbed began snaking towards Richter as the soldier above repositioned it.
‘Climb it, now,’ the other DEVGRU SEAL hanging on next to him shouted.
That meant releasing his death grip on the bow rope, but Richter knew he had no choice. He unclamped his right hand as the rope swung within reach and grabbed it. There were, he instinctively noted, knots every couple of feet, which would make the climb slightly less arduous, but he knew it was still going to take pretty much all his strength to do it. From where he hung, half in and now half out of the water, the outward curve of the hull looked like an impossible obstacle.
‘Come on, spook, move it. Climb it, or let go and get the hell out of my way.’
Not exactly the most encouraging words he’d ever heard, but he fully appreciated the sentiment. He kicked the loop off his foot and then grabbed the rope with both hands and started to climb.
It was a hellish journey. The strain on his arms and the strength needed to simply pull his body weight up the rope, not to mention the extra bulk of the waterproof packs he had draped around his body, was extraordinary. Without the knots in the rope that he could clamp between his boots and push against, he doubted if he could have made it.
But he did reach the top of the steel deck, where strong hands and arms reached out for him and more or less lifted him, panting and gasping for breath, the last couple of feet and over the top of the hull.
‘Take a break, get your breath back,’ a friendly voice said.
Richter staggered across the steel deck to the side of a white metal container and slumped down beside it. He had always kept himself fit, but that climb had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. In complete contrast, the two DEVGRU soldiers standing next to him didn’t even seem to be out of breath.
Perhaps three minutes later all six men were standing in a group right at the bow of the Russian ship, their immersion suits dumped in a pile behind them. Richter was almost breathing normally again. The containers that covered the deck of the ship formed a solid barrier behind which they were completely invisible from the bridge.
‘Right,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘This is your party, spook, so what do we do now?’
‘That’s simple,’ Richter replied. ‘We prep our weapons, and then we wait.’
On the bridge of the Semyon Timoshenko, the captain was looking even less happy than he had done before, though nothing seemed to have changed. The Merlin was still apparently carrying out a training flight about a mile away over on the ship’s port side, alternating between coming to the hover and just flying around. It was close enough to watch, but not close enough to be a realistic concern. And, in any case, what could danger could be posed by an obviously unarmed search and rescue helicopter?
About two or three miles out to the east, a freighter with what looked like a Greek name painted on the bow was tracking north at slow speed.
‘Everybody stay alert,’ the captain ordered. ‘Something is going on here. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.’
Richter had asked the Portuguese pilot of the Merlin to carry out one final manoeuvre as the Greek freighter passed the Russian ship and began to open further to the north, working on the assumption that once the Greek ship had moved past, nobody on board the Semyon Timoshenko would still be watching the other vessel, if anybody had been taking any notice of it beforehand.
It was in some ways like driving a car. On a two-lane road, a driver will pay careful attention to a vehicle coming towards him, but once it’s moved past he will essentially forget it. Richter hoped the same kind of behaviour would apply at sea.
Right on cue, the pilot flared the Merlin above the surface of the ocean, but this time he lowered the boat-hull shaped fuselage of the helicopter right onto the waves, the rotors creating a virtual cloud of spray that surrounded the aircraft as it settled. It was a sight that was virtually impossible to ignore.
And that was the point, really.
As the stern of the Greek ship passed the stern of the Russian ship, Reilly started a mental countdown, but one based upon relative movements rather than time. When he thought the moment had arrived, he chopped his right hand down in a sharp and decisive movement, and the helmsman responded immediately, turning the wheel and slamming the throttles forward on the twin outboard engines.
The Zodiac leapt ahead, the second craft right behind it, swinging around the rear of the Greek ship and angling across towards the stern of the southbound Russian vessel.
On the bridge of the Semyon Timoshenko, the captain was watching the Merlin helicopter, just like the Spetsnaz soldiers on the deck below and the three other men on the bridge: the helmsman, officer of the watch and a lookout. But the captain was getting more concerned with every second that passed.
‘This is just a distraction,’ he muttered, almost to himself, ‘but a distraction for what?’
Then he clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention and issued his orders.
‘Ignore the helicopter,’ he said. ‘Keep alert and concentrate on what you are supposed to be doing. Lookout: anything in view?’
The man immediately switched his attention to the view ahead and on both sides of the vessel.
‘Nothing, sir,’ he reported.
‘Radar contacts?’
The officer of the watch strode over to the screen, which was fitted with a metal shade to allow the display to be viewed even in bright sunlight, and looked down at the picture.
Radar sets, by default, place the origin of the picture – the ship or aircraft on which the equipment is fitted – at the centre, and the timebase rotates clockwise around that point. Each contact shows up as a bright dot, though the set does not emit a ‘beep’ every time a contact is illuminated. That only happens in movies made by people who know nothing about the technology they are depicting. But very often users will shift the point of origin from the centre to use the radar in offset mode, so that the display shows that part of the area around them in which they have the most interest. On a ship, this will normally and obviously be the sea in front of the vessel, and that was precisely the way the watch-keeping officers on the Semyon Timoshenko had set up their display. The radar was selected to a 20-mile range, but the origin had been shifted down almost to the bottom of the screen, so the picture displayed roughly 35 miles of the sea in front of the ship and only about five miles astern of it.
‘Nothing, sir,’ the officer of the watch said, looking at the completely clear picture of the sea to the south of the ship and echoing what the lookout had said just a few moments earlier.
But as he looked up from the radar screen to stare through the bridge windows, something else attracted his attention, almost subliminally. For a moment, he did nothing, wondering what, if anything, he had seen.
His sudden stillness immediately attracted the captain’s attention, and the senior officer swung round to stare at him.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
The officer of the watch didn’t reply, just took a pace back and again stared down at the radar picture. In the narrowest part of the screen, the area behind the ship, two fast moving contacts were now clearly visible. But that made no sense, and for perhaps another second the officer of the watch simply stood there, his mouth opening and closing. Then he found his voice.
‘Two contacts, sir,’ he almost shouted. ‘Directly astern of the ship, both range three miles and closing.’
‘What?’ the captain demanded, then stepped off his high chair at the back of the bridge and strode out onto the starboard wing to look behind the ship.
And at that moment, everything suddenly fell into place. The antics of the search and rescue helicopter had never made sense. No unsupported aircraft would travel so far from land to perform the kind of manoeuvres that he and his crew had been witnessing. They were the kind of activities that would normally be performed in a dedicated training area that would be, crucially, close enough to a shore establishment to allow for rescue if things went wrong. He had been right all along: the helicopter had just been a distraction, an unusual sight that would ensure that the attention of everyone on board his ship was on the aircraft and not on what they should have been looking out for, which was any kind of danger or threat.
And without any doubt, the two fast moving boats – they looked like RIBs, rigid inflatable boats – that were rapidly overhauling the Semyon Timoshenko, each carrying what looked like a dozen men, were a clear and present threat. But the captain knew very well that he and his men had the advantage of size and height, and the attackers were immediately going to discover that the vessel they were approaching had adequate defences.
The captain stepped back into the bridge, pressed a button that sounded an alarm, then bent forward over the console, selected all groups on the switchboard and began speaking into the microphone, while holding down the transmit key.
‘All positions. The ship is under attack. Two fast moving targets, approaching from directly astern. Guards, take up your stations with loaded weapons and fire when ready.’
The crew of the Merlin had been continuously watching the display of the Selex Galileo Blue Kestrel 5000 surveillance radar while the pilot carried out his successful landing on the sea. They had been waiting for one thing, and the moment they saw the two smaller radar contacts separate from the larger return that was the Greek freighter, the pilot immediately began to lift off from the waves, and at the same time turned away from the Russian ship.
He increased speed as quickly as he could, winding the Merlin up to its maximum velocity of 165 knots, only two knots below the aircraft’s never-exceed speed, just in case the Russian ship mounted some kind of anti-aircraft weaponry and decided to engage the helicopter. But he also kept the Merlin as low as he could, because that would make engaging it much more difficult.
The Russian captain’s broadcast echoed around the ship through the loudspeaker system. It was slightly distorted, but Richter understood every single word, and gestured to the other men.
‘Now we move,’ he said.
The group split into two sections of three men, Richter the third man in the group – the two SEALs were named Matthews and Simmonds – that would approach down the port side of the ship, because that was where the DEVGRU SEALs wanted him. He was, after all, only a kind of passenger, and unfamiliar with their battle and combat tactics, hand signals, verbal orders and the like.
The first three men stayed as close as they could to the line of containers on the ship’s port side as they made their way aft towards the living accommodation and the bridge, the second group of three matching them on the starboard side of the vessel.
The captain’s broadcast electrified the Spetsnaz soldiers, and they reacted immediately in the way they had been trained. Their weapons were stowed in a small storage space just inside the door on the starboard side of the aft accommodation, magazines loaded and already inserted, safety catches on. One man entered the room, grabbed a couple of Kalashnikovs and passed them to a second Spetsnaz soldier straddling the doorway, who immediately handed them to a couple of soldiers outside. That was faster, by far, than the soldiers all crowding inside the storage space together, and in less than a minute the men detailed to guard the Semyon Timoshenko against all threats were ready to do just that.
They lined the rail at the stern of the ship, weapons in hand, and stared at the two approaching craft. And for perhaps a minute, nothing else happened. There was no point in them opening fire, the Kalashnikov AK-47 being both comparatively short range and notably inaccurate, and the two Zodiacs were probably about a mile or so behind, and now closing slowly.
And that didn’t make sense. The small boats should have been able to overhaul the ship in minutes, but for some reason they had slowed down and were now almost matching its speed.
Maybe the attackers had given up once they’d seen the armed soldiers on board the vessel. Or perhaps something entirely different was going on.
Yuri Sebonov, the non-commissioned officer in charge of the Spetsnaz troops, decided to make them keep their distance while he tried to work out what was actually happening. He walked across to the weapons store, picked up one of the RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade launchers, slotted the OG-7V fragmentation grenade into place, and then strode back to the stern rail. He handed the loaded launcher to one of his men and told him to fire it at the pursuing boats.
‘It probably won’t explode,’ the Spetsnaz soldier objected. ‘No hard target.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Fire it anyway, just to make them keep their distance.’
The soldier shrugged, checked that no one was behind him and then took aim, elevating the weapon so that the grenade would cover most of the distance to the targets. He pulled the trigger, and the launcher roared as the grenade soared into the sky before arcing down towards the boats. As he had expected, the round fell some distance short, but did explode on contact with the surface of the sea, which he hadn’t anticipated.
‘That should do it,’ Sebonov said. ‘If they get within range, ventilate them with the Kalashnikovs. Otherwise, just keep your eyes on them. And get every weapon we have, including the SAMs, out here on deck. Then prep and load them, because this isn’t over yet. You three,’ he added, pointing at a trio of his men, ‘come with me.’
Then he turned away from the stern and the four of them began heading forward, looking for trouble, their Kalashnikovs loaded and cocked.
‘What the hell was that?’ Reilly asked, as the fragmentation grenade detonated some distance in front of them, though in reality he already knew the answer.
‘Probably an RPG,’ one of his men suggested. ‘But we’re still out of range back here, and they must know that.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Reilly responded. ‘I guess they’re just showing us that they’ve got teeth. Don’t get any closer,’ he called out to the helmsman, somewhat unnecessarily.
As far as Richter could tell, they were still invisible from the bridge because of the bulk of the stacked containers, and they were by then at least halfway along the deck towards the aft accommodation. And so far nobody on the ship knew they were there.
But the flat crack of the grenade detonating, preceded by the roar from the launcher, told him that the two Zodiacs must have been spotted, which had, of course, been a part of his plan. Another piece of deception to allow him and the other members of Team 1 to get as close to the bridge as possible before they started having to fight their way there.
With a bit of luck, if most of the crew were standing on the stern wasting their time firing RPGs at the Zodiacs, they might make it all the way.
What happened next made it clear that this hope was wildly optimistic.
‘You two,’ Sebonov ordered, ‘patrol the port side of the ship. Make sure we haven’t picked up any passengers, and check inside the container stacks and over the side as well. If you see anyone, don’t call out. Just shoot them.’
‘Understood.’
The four men separated just in front of the accommodation section and made their separate ways along the opposite sides of the ship, checking between the containers as well as along the narrow length of open deck in front of them.
Even as Richter cautiously made his way aft, the two soldiers he was following suddenly seemed to melt into a couple of the gaps between the stacked containers, and he took a few rapid steps backwards to the nearest opening and did the same. He peered around the end of the metal box that was forming his temporary refuge to try to see what they had spotted.
And as he looked, a man stepped into view at the end of the line of containers, holding a Kalashnikov as if he knew exactly how to use it. He was followed by a second man, carrying an identical weapon. Richter knew that if either of these men opened fire, their tenuous element of surprise would be gone, and then they would be both outnumbered and outgunned. Six men, no matter how motivated and well-trained, could not realistically defeat an entire ship’s company, even a small ship’s company, of equally motivated, well-trained and armed men.
They needed to take these two men down, as quickly and as quietly as they could.
What Richter knew, but the approaching Russians clearly did not, was that there were two American soldiers hidden between the containers just a few yards in front of them. And there was one possible way that he could make sure they didn’t find out until it was too late.
He took a deep breath and stepped out from between the containers and into the clear view of the two men, stood there for perhaps a second or two, and then stepped back into hiding.
A shouted command in Russian told him that they’d seen him, but because he was no longer anywhere in sight, they had nothing to fire at. So they reacted exactly as he had expected, and began pounding along the deck towards the spot where he had disappeared. The sound of their footsteps was suddenly interrupted by two distant thuds, followed almost immediately by two more. It was a sound that Richter knew well: the noise of a suppressed HK 416 firing double-taps, two shots really close together and fired into the target’s centre mass.
He looked around the side of the container again, and saw exactly what he had been expecting to see: the two Russians were lying flat on their faces on the deck plating, unmoving, as one of the DEVGRU soldiers picked up their Kalashnikovs and lobbed them over the side rail into the ocean.
Two were down, but they had no idea how many other crew were on board the ship, though Richter guessed it could well be another 20 or 30. Long odds, by any standard.
And then, from somewhere on the starboard side of the ship, Richter heard the sound he’d been hoping not to hear: a short burst, perhaps five or six shots, from an unsilenced weapon, almost certainly a Kalashnikov based upon the sound alone.
Yuri Sebonov was an unimaginative man, but he was thorough. As far as he could see, there was no way that any enemy forces could possibly be on board the ship.
He had personally checked every space on board when he had joined the vessel in Severodvinsk, and had inspected every single container before it was loaded, as a basic and obvious precaution, and since then the vessel had made landfall nowhere. It had not been approached by any other vessel of any type during its voyage, apart from the two RIBs that he assumed were still holding position some distance behind the ship, and those he knew he could discount. An undetected approach from the air was out of the question. It would simply not be possible to parachute onto a vessel of such a small size without being seen.
Logically, therefore, there could not be any stowaways or enemy forces of any kind on board the ship. But nevertheless, he was going to check. Just in case.
But less than a minute after he and his companion had separated from the other two men, they both saw movement ahead of them, about halfway along the deck, as some shape moved between two of the container stacks. It was movement where no movement could be, but Sebonov knew he hadn’t imagined it, and he reacted instinctively, thumbing the safety catch on his AK-47 one position down to automatic fire, and pulled the trigger to loose off a short burst. He didn’t expect to hit anything, but what he did expect was to alert the rest of his men to the fact that – somehow – the ship had been boarded.
Two seconds later, both Sebonov and the second man were dead, cut down by a figure that emerged from between two entirely different stacks of containers just in front of them and fired four precisely aimed and almost silent shots.
The shots from the Kalashnikov were clearly audible to the men on the Zodiacs, just under a mile away.
‘Sounds like the party’s already started,’ Reilly said.
As they looked at the stern of the Semyon Timoshenko, they could see some of the men there move away quickly, presumably summoned to confront whatever danger they faced on the ship.
‘Now we need to give them a hand. Take us in,’ he told the helmsman, ‘but no closer than half a mile to keep us out of range of those Kalashnikovs for as long as possible. Just be ready to go to full speed on my order.’
Back at Funchal, Richter had explained what actions they would take in certain circumstances, one of which was their detection by the ship’s crew before they reached the accommodation at the stern of the ship. In fact, that possibility was one of the reasons why he’d briefed that they’d divide into two groups and head aft from the bow along opposite sides of the ship. If one of the two group was detected, then those men were to engage the ship’s crew, making as much noise as possible, to allow the other group to try to make it to the bridge undetected, or nearly so.
And as Richter and his two companions began moving towards the stern again, they heard the sound of at least two Kalashnikovs opening up, one on the starboard side of the vessel and one slightly further aft, as far as they could tell from the noise.
‘Quick as we can, now,’ he said. ‘The bridge is the key.’
Captain Vadim Pankin had been standing on the starboard bridge wing when Sebonov had ordered his man to fire the RPG, and he hadn’t immediately understood why. Then it became clear that the Spetsnaz NCO knew what he was doing, as the two RIBs maintained about the same distance behind the ship. It had been a warning shot, just to keep the enemy at bay.
Then he’d watched from the same position as Sebonov had taken three of his men to start a search of the ship, which seemed to Pankin a completely pointless exercise. That belief had been shattered seconds later as the firing had started.
‘Secure the bridge,’ Pankin ordered, stepping back inside and slamming closed the door to the bridge wing. His action was mirrored immediately by the lookout on the opposite side of the bridge. The internal door to the bridge from the accommodation section was already locked. That was done automatically as soon as the door closed.
From the secure citadel, Pankin prepared to watch his Spetsnaz guards dispose of whoever the intruders were. The only real question on his mind was how they’d managed to get on board.
As the firefight raged along the narrow strip of deck between the stacks of containers and the starboard side of the ship, Richter and the two DEVGRU SEALs accompanying him darted from one gap between the containers or any other cover they could find to the next refuge, constantly aware that they might at any moment be spotted and engaged. They used a basic leapfrog technique, one man covering the area ahead of them while the other two moved.
They made it to the end of the container stack without being seen, and faced only a narrow section of open deck to reach the port-side door leading into the accommodation section. There were half a dozen armed men on the starboard side of the deck, but their attention was clearly fixed on engaging the intruders, and none of them so much as glanced in their direction.
Then Richter looked up and found himself staring at a grey-haired man looking straight down at him from inside the bridge, a man who almost immediately disappeared.
‘That could be the captain,’ Richter said. ‘If it was, any second now he’s going to let the world know where we are, so we need to move right now.’
Even as he said that, they heard a distinct hum as somebody activated the outside loudspeaker system. But before the captain had said the first word, the three of them were already running across the deck.
As they reached the steel door, a burst of fire cracked across the deck and blasted the paint off the steel a few feet behind them.
And then they were inside the superstructure and safe. At least they were safe until somebody followed them in.
Matthews led the way up the staircase at a virtual run because he was the man who’d breach the door when they got to the top. He was carrying a shotgun over his shoulder as well as his HK 416. Richter followed, with Simmonds bringing up the rear.
Seconds after they’d started to climb, the steel door at the base of the superstructure slammed open, and a hail of bullets from a Kalashnikov sprayed around and up the interior staircase. It wasn’t an aimed volley, just a burst of fire to clear the way. The three men were already two flights up, and so the bullets just ricocheted harmlessly around the steel staircase below them. But they knew the man or men below would be following, so Simmonds took a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and simply dropped it down the staircase behind him as they reached the top landing. The explosion below them was strangely muffled, and was immediately followed by a scream of pain.
By then Matthews was already unslinging his breaching device, a Remington Model 780 Special Purpose Marine Magnum shotgun loaded with solid shot, effectively a 12-gauge lump of lead rather than individual bits of shot. He racked the slide to chamber the first round, then fired it at the top left-hand side of the bridge door, the noise of the shot an assault on the senses. The second and third shots, just as loud, followed as fast as he could rack the slide and pull the trigger.
Matthews stepped back to shoulder the Remington as Simmonds stepped past him and kicked the heavy door bodily out of its frame and straight onto the bridge, where it crashed into the wheel, the helmsman presumably having taken cover somewhere when Matthews had opened fire.
‘Clear,’ Simmonds said, checking the bridge and the occupants. ‘Four Tangos, none of them armed.’
Richter followed immediately behind him, his own HK 416 swinging round to cover the occupants.
‘Go,’ Reilly ordered, and the Zodiac surged forward again, the second boat matching speed a dozen yards behind and displaced about the same distance out to the starboard side.
The number of men lining the rail at the stern of the Russian ship had dropped to only half a dozen or so, and that was about as good odds as they were likely to get.
‘Covering fire when we get to about three hundred yards,’ he ordered the two men sitting in the bow. They both nodded and checked their weapons, ready for action, but only one was holding his HK 416. The other man was holding what looked like a massive six-shot revolver. This was a Milkor MGL, the three letters standing for Multiple Grenade Launcher, and the variant he had was the M32A1 short-barrelled version, known in the United States Special Operations Command as the Mk 14 Mod 0.
This was an amazingly versatile piece of kit, able to fire as fast as the user could pull the trigger, the huge spring-driven six-shot cylinder rotating automatically each time the weapon was fired, meaning that in skilled hands – and there were no more skilled hands than those of a Navy SEAL – it could manage three rounds every second and up to 21 rounds a minute, including the reloading time. It was an impressive force multiplier, able to handle a huge range of ammunition from pyrotechnics and non-lethal baton rounds up to high explosive and even anti-tank rounds. In view of the assault they were carrying out, Reilly had ordered that only high explosive rounds would be used, and the SEAL was carrying six in the weapon and a further 24 – four full reloads – in his uniform pouches.
The men on the ship opened up before the Zodiacs got that close, but the boats were not an easy target, bouncing over the waves as the helmsmen deliberately weaved them from side to side.
‘Steady us up,’ Reilly ordered the helmsman, ‘then grenades.’
When the Zodiac had more or less stabilized, the SEAL with the MGL immediately opened up, doing his best to keep the stern of the Russian container ship lined up with the reflex sight mounted on his weapon, a difficult task because of the way that the Zodiac was still bouncing around.
He fired the first three rounds in under a second, then changed position slightly to give himself more stability before he continued. As he fired the sixth grenade, Reilly saw one of the first rounds detonate against the aft superstructure of the Russian ship, while another one exploded in the sea just astern of the vessel. The MGL was not an especially accurate weapon even in ideal conditions, but the idea was to make the people on board the ship keep their heads down to allow the Zodiacs to approach closer. If the explosives took out a few of them, that would be a bonus.
The second salvo was better, two of the grenades impacting the ship, both on the superstructure but much lower than the first round.
On the second Zodiac, another SEAL opened up with his identical weapon as soon as the first man had stopped firing, giving him time to reload, and the two boats then began a kind of leapfrog action. Each travelled fast but erratically while the SEAL in the bow inserted new cartridges, then slowed and stabilized while he was firing, allowing the other Zodiac to make ground.
It seemed to be working. They were still taking fire from the ship, but this was getting less and less concentrated because of the almost constant rain of high explosive grenades detonating against and near the stern of the vessel, impacts that were getting more and more accurate as the Zodiacs closed the distance between them.
And as they closed with the ship it wasn’t just the grenade launchers that the SEALs were using. Engaging a target in the open ocean was exactly the kind of task the SEALs trained for, and their HK 416s – they had the longer range model with the 14-inch barrel – were much better and more accurate than the AK-47s. When they began firing, two of the Russians fell almost immediately, and the other men darted left and right, obviously looking for cover. But they continued to return fire, bullets cutting into the water around the Zodiacs, and at least three or four found their marks, and three of the SEALs in the second boat fell backwards as they were hit.
A final salvo of grenades laid down a carpet of high explosive across the stern of the vessel and suddenly the firing from the stern of the ship stopped.
‘Now we’re cooking,’ Reilly said, as the two Zodiacs powered up to the ship and held position there, their outboard motors keeping the bows of the boats pressed firmly against the steel of the Semyon Timoshenko‘s hull while they were secured to its stern. One SEAL at the back of each boat covered them, just in case another Russian appeared with his Kalashnikov, while in the bow other SEALs lobbed rubber-covered grappling irons over the stern rail and shimmied up them.
In less than two minutes, all the SEALs, as well as Jackson, Barber and Mason, were on board, apart from the three wounded men who were being tended by one of their companions in the Zodiac, now tethered to the ship, alongside the second boat, while another SEAL kept a watchful eye on the ship, his HK 416 at the ready.
Apart from the gaping hole in the back wall and the door lying partially across the helmsman’s position, it all seemed strangely calm on the bridge when Richter stepped in. The grey-haired man he’d seen from the deck below was just sitting down in a high chair at the rear of the bridge, while three other men, one wearing a junior officer’s uniform jacket over blue jeans, stood in a line in front of the windows, their hands in the air.
Richter swung his HK 416 to point at the man he assumed was the captain, who simply stared back at him.
‘My name is Richter, and this operation is over right now,’ he said in fluent Russian.
If the captain was surprised at being addressed by an attacker in his own language, he didn’t show it.
‘By "this operation" I assume you mean this entirely illegal act of piracy on the high seas,’ Pankin replied. ‘This is a Russian merchant ship, carrying a legitimate cargo for delivery to ports in Africa and elsewhere. My government will no doubt be making the strongest possible protests to the British and the American authorities. I presume that’s who you three are working for, from your accents.’
‘And do all Russian merchant ships have guards embarked, armed with Kalashnikovs and RPGs, Captain?’
Pankin shrugged.
‘We will be entering dangerous waters, infested by pirates, when we begin heading north up the east coast of Africa,’ he replied. ‘Having a team of armed guards on board is a sensible precaution to protect our cargo, and those men themselves decided on the type of weapons they would carry.’
This wasn’t making sense to Richter. The Russian captain was too calm and far too controlled, because he must have known he was facing the ruin of the mission he had been tasked with completing.
‘It’s because of your cargo that we’re here,’ Richter said, stepping closer to the grey-haired man in the high chair, and still covering him with the HK 416. Behind him, Matthews was aiming his weapon at the three other men, while Simmonds stood outside the bridge at the top of the internal staircase, just in case any other members of the crew decided it was a good time to pay the captain a visit.
‘I thought most pirates simply ransomed the ship and crew, so why are you interested in my cargo?’
‘We aren’t pirates, Captain, as you well know,’ Richter replied. ‘We are here, on your ship, with the blessing of the governments of the nations that would be most directly involved if your mission had succeeded. So the American, British, Spanish and Portuguese authorities all know why we are here and what we’re doing, and we’re not interested in all of your cargo, just one item. The Status-6 weapon, though you may know it better as Poseidon, that you have been told to launch at the southern end of the island of La Palma, to blow apart the Cumbre Vieja volcanic system.’
The captain gave him a slight smile.
‘I don’t suppose you would believe me if I claimed to know nothing about that,’ he said, ‘so I won’t. But what I will say is that all that you have done here is much too little, and far too late.’
The Spetsnaz guards had fired a lot of rounds towards the location about halfway along the starboard side of the Russian ship where the three SEALs had taken refuge, but the steel containers provided almost perfect cover for them and, less than five minutes after the first shots had been fired, two more Russians lay dead. One of the SEALs had taken a bullet through his left bicep, and that hurt like a bitch, but it didn’t stop him firing his SiG pistol whenever a target presented itself.
When the rest of the SEALs swarmed onto the ship over the stern rail the odds changed, but the fight for control of the ship still wasn’t over. Where the SEALs had boarded was directly behind the aft superstructure, out of sight of the main deck, and the first that the Spetsnaz troopers knew about it was when two SEALs stepped into view around the starboard side of the accommodation section, weapons raised as they looked for targets.
Mason and Barber, accompanied by another two SEALs, headed in the opposite direction, around the other side of the superstructure, and engaged the Spetsnaz troopers as soon as they saw them.
But almost immediately, now faced with armed enemies attacking them from three different directions, the Russians disappeared into the maze of containers, their steel sides and doors acting as extremely efficient bullet-proof shields as they scattered.
John Mason made his way along the port side of the container stack, while Barber and the SEALs headed deeper into the maze, because the only way to get the Spetsnaz troopers out of the stack was to go in after them. On the starboard side of the ship, other SEALs mirrored their actions. The deck echoed with shouts and shots as the mopping up operation began.
Jackson remained tucked into the starboard side of the accommodation section, covering the rear of the deck cargo with her borrowed HK 416, matched by another of the SEALs on the port side. Suddenly, a volley of shots rang out from between two of the rearmost containers, and she heard a grunt of pain from the opposite side of the deck. Two Russian troopers stepped out from the stack and started walking quickly towards where the SEAL had been standing. Jackson made an immediate decision, turned and ran back towards the stern of the ship.
One of the Russians obviously saw her, shouted out and then fired a couple of shots at her, but she already had the steel of the superstructure between herself and them. She ran around the rear of the accommodation section and reached the port side just as one of the Spetsnaz troopers aimed his Kalashnikov at the fallen SEAL.
Jackson was less than 20 yards away, lifted her 416 and fired a double tap directly at the Russian. He fell backwards, the assault rifle tumbling to the deck beside him, and she immediately ducked into cover beside a hefty square steel box holding some kind of machinery, because she had no idea where the second Russian was.
Moments later, he stepped into view from the rear of the accommodation section, his Kalashnikov at the ready. He had obviously followed her all the way round.
Only a sucker gives anyone an even break, especially in a firefight, and as the Russian walked past her Jackson shot him twice in the back.
Then she ran forward to check on the SEAL. He’d taken three rounds and was clearly unconscious. The two on the chest had knocked him down, but the bullets had been stopped by his ballistic vest and it was the one he had taken in the thigh that concerned her, because of the amount of blood he was losing. Jackson looked round. Her eyes settled on the first Russian she’d shot, and more particularly on the belt that he was wearing.
She strode across to him, undid the buckle and pulled the belt out of the loops on his trousers. Then she clicked the magazine release on his Kalashnikov and pulled it out. She walked back to the fallen SEAL, slid the belt under his upper thigh, did up the buckle and then stuck the Kalashnikov magazine into the loop she had created. She turned it until the belt tightened on the man’s leg and she could see the blood flow diminish. Then she slid the magazine under his thigh, hoping that his weight would keep the rudimentary tourniquet in place, because there was nothing else she could do for him.
And then, quite suddenly, all of the firing stopped. The last half-dozen of the Spetsnaz troopers had realized they were effectively surrounded, and simply gave up, because the only other option was to die.
At last the SEALs were in complete command of the ship, with the opposition all either disarmed or dead; it had happened far quicker than Reilly or any of his team had expected. But this was, after all, the kind of operation that the DEVGRU SEALs spent their lives training for.
Richter stared at the Russian captain for a long moment, unease flooding through his body as he realized they had all somehow missed a trick. He stepped across to the windows of the bridge and looked out across the ranks of stacked containers, but he saw no sign of the weapon that he was certain had been concealed on board the ship. But it didn’t make sense that they had already fired it, because the warhead had to impact the southern end of La Palma, and even his very rough mental picture of their location convinced him that they had to be at least 200 nautical miles north of the island, maybe even further away than that. And if his deductions had been correct, the release point specified by the planners in Moscow required the Semyon Timoshenko to be somewhere south of the island of La Gomera, and well south of La Palma.
He suddenly realized something else, that he had no idea of the maximum range of the Status-6 weapon. But if they hadn’t already fired it, where the hell was it? Had they fitted the ship with a massive torpedo tube under the waterline? Bearing in mind the size of the weapon, or what Western intelligence sources believed were its dimensions, that seemed unlikely. It was far too big for that kind of launch mechanism. Even the huge Russian Oscar-class submarines were believed to be configured to carry it in a pod on deck.
Richter turned back to look at the Russian captain, who still appeared to find the situation amusing.
‘We will find it, you know,’ Richter said, ‘wherever it is. And then I’m sure a team of American technicians will spend a few happy months tearing it to pieces so that we can develop proper countermeasures to it.’
‘No they won’t,’ the Russian said, and there was such utter certainty in his voice that Richter knew something was very wrong. There was something that they had all missed. Either the Russians had already fired the weapon, though that made no sense, or his reading of the entire situation was wrong, and the Status-6 device was on a different ship entirely. Maybe the Semyon Timoshenko was just one part of the operation, an obvious vessel for Western forces to intercept, while the ship actually carrying the device somehow sneaked into position. But that made no sense either.
‘What the hell’s that?’ Matthews asked. He had herded the unresisting three men to the port side of the bridge and was looking down through the windows at the activity on deck below.
‘That,’ Captain Pankin replied, presumably having understood what the SEAL had said, ‘is the reason why the American eastern seaboard will cease to exist in about seven or eight hours, or about three hours after the southern counties of England are inundated.’
Richter took two rapid strides to the bridge windows and looked down.
On the starboard side of the ship, what looked like a double-length container was slowly rotating so that it angled outwards, driven by two hydraulic arms, one at each end. As he watched, it appeared to lock into place, and four supporting legs began to extend steadily downwards towards the deck, while at the same time the double doors at the far end or the extended unit began to swing open, again driven by some kind of machinery.
Richter knew immediately what he was looking at and whirled round to confront the captain.
‘Stop it,’ he yelled in Russian. ‘Stop it right now.’
‘That’s the thing about automated systems,’ Pankin said calmly. ‘Once they start, sometimes you can’t stop them.’
‘Find a way.’
‘As I said a couple minutes ago, you’re much too late.’
Richter pulled the Smith from his belt holster and pulled back the hammer, aiming the muzzle of the pistol at the Russian’s groin.
‘Are you sure about that?’
Pankin nodded.
‘You can’t stop it, or you won’t stop it?’
‘Both. I follow my orders, Mr Richter. I know my duty.’
‘Then you’re no use to me,’ Richter said, shifted his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed into the Russian captain’s stomach, toppling him backwards out of the chair to lie in a tangled heap on the floor of the bridge, clutching himself and alternately screaming and moaning.
Immediately, Richter turned the pistol to point at the junior officer being guarded by Matthews.
‘You,’ he snapped. ‘Abort that launch sequence.’
The Russian officer shook his head despairingly from side to side, and Richter saw that he had just wet himself in terror.
‘I can’t,’ he stammered. ‘The control unit is in the corner over there—’ he pointed at the other side of the bridge ‘—but the captain wanted it to be irreversible, in case we were ever boarded.’
Richter jogged over to the black object the junior officer had indicated. He glanced out through the window. The double doors on the end of the double-length container – they had obviously welded two of them together, end to end, to accommodate the vast size of the super torpedo – were about half open.
He looked at the black control unit, but the only thing on it was a small metal lever incorporating a keyhole, which was pointing to a label marked зажигание – zazhiganiye, or ‘ignition.’ He gripped the lever and tried to turn it back, but it wouldn’t move.
‘You need the key,’ the junior officer said, ‘and the captain threw it into the sea when the first shot hit the bridge door. Just before you came in.’
That at least explained why the captain had only been getting into his seat when Richter had walked in. He’d just triggered the mechanism and thrown away the key.
‘But,’ the officer added, a nervous quiver in his voice, ‘even if you had the key and turned the lever, it wouldn’t stop it. Once the switch has been made, the process is irreversible. The weapon has a separate power supply and is isolated from all the ship’s systems. That’s the way the captain wanted it. A kind of insurance policy.’
Richter looked again at the black box, aimed the Smith and fired two shots straight at it. The massive impact of the .44 Magnum round blasted the box into oblivion, but when he stared through the window he saw that the container doors were still steadily moving open.
He wrenched open the starboard side door and stepped out onto the bridge wing.
As he stepped into view, two of the SEALs on the deck below looked up, raising their weapons as they did so, before immediately lowering them again.
‘What the fuck is this?’ one of them said, pointing at the canted container. The supporting legs were fully extended, and the double doors were now almost completely open.
‘That’s the Status-6 torpedo,’ Richter shouted back. ‘Blow the crap out of it, right now.’
Both SEALs braced themselves and levelled their HK 416 assault rifles at the object inside the container, which they could see but Richter couldn’t because of the angle.
The racket was deafening, but whether the bullets were having any effect was a different matter.
And then there was a muted roar, and a huge black, red and silver object, looking almost exactly like a ridiculously oversized conventional torpedo, shot out of the double-length container, the nose already dipping under the force of gravity, and splashed into the sea about 20 yards off the starboard side of the ship and immediately disappeared beneath the waves.
Richter stared down at the now empty double container with an expression of utter disbelief on his face.
Despite all they’d done, they’d failed at the eleventh hour.