ANNA SAT AT THE FAR END of a cave at the foot of the cliff on the north shore of the city. Below her feet, the seawater lapped sluggishly at the rock. Where the sea ended, where she sat in the darkness of the cave, was also the final resting place of the harbour’s detritus of oil and chemical waste, metal and plastic cans, polystyrene and fragments of wood and rope that created a six-inch scum on the lapping surface. The insignificant tides of the Black Sea never scoured the cave clean and the smell was one of vegetable and toxic rot and chemical and oil waste that over decades had stained the cave’s walls in a black, glistening film. Drop a match in here, she thought, and the whole place would go up in flames.
She and Larry had descended from the part of town on the north shore after dark and then he’d left her. She’d watched the light grow at the tunnel’s entrance as dawn rose across the heaving channel of the Sevastopolskaya Bukhta, listened to the horn of a ship that entered from the sea through the breakwaters of Sevastopol’s perfect natural harbour, saw its surface lines as it cut through the channel into port—though the cave’s low entrance obscured the superstructure—and listened to the tight chug of a fishing boat and the nerve-jangling cries of seagulls.
Now she fitted the Aqua-Lung with its debreathing apparatus that would eliminate bubbles rising to the surface as it recycled her own oxygen. She fixed the full mask over her face and ensured that the tight dry suit, which concealed a Russian GRU uniform, the Contender handgun, and two sticks of Semtex, was fastened into an airtight position. She checked her watch again. Then at midday exactly, she descended into the filthy slime of the cave’s waste, sank beneath it, and swam towards the entrance of the cave.
It was a swim of just over two kilometres—at an angle across the channel—until she could come ashore on the long naval quay inside the Russian fleet’s protected zone. Somewhere beneath the same waters where she swam she knew other divers were at work, Russian frogmen who had come to set off an explosion that would rend some unwanted fleet vessel apart and at the same time rend the uneasy peace between Russia and Ukraine that clung on in the Crimea.
The waters where she swam were dirty with industrial waste and visibility was low. That would be a help, if by some fluke she and they should cross paths.
All along the shores on the north and south of the Bukhta the fixed and passive sonars were now, she prayed, disabled.
She swam fast, looking at the compass on her arm from time to time. Accuracy at her landing point was crucial. There was a set of steps that descended from the nearest of the two quays she was heading for. They came down at a protected angle, which meant that anyone surfacing at the foot of them was visible from only one viewpoint and that was a kilometre away as the crow flies, on the north shore. Unless someone was actually standing on the quay above where the steps emerged, it was her best hope of remaining undetected.
She knew she’d entered the dockyards after fifteen minutes. It was a short distance from here to the end of the first of the quays that jutted out from the land into the deep water where big ships could dock. Then she reached the green slime of the quay wall and waited twenty feet beneath the surface while deciding whether to go left or right along the wall. She chose the left and was rewarded after twenty yards with the sight of stone steps that descended beneath the surface. She checked her watch. There was still forty minutes to go while the sonar remained inactive. She imagined that the frogmen would plant whatever device they were using and then get clear of the harbour and away. The explosion might not happen within the hour’s planned lapse in security. But it wouldn’t be long afterwards if it didn’t.
She came as close to the surface as she dared and, through the water, now lighter from the sun’s glare, tried to spot any movement on the quay that betrayed a human presence nearby. After five minutes during which she’d seen nothing move, no shape or outline apart from the quay’s wall, she came out on the bottom step above the surface. She took another quick look around, then stripped off the mask and Aqua-Lung, the dry suit and fins, and, weighted with the gas bottle, watched them sink slowly into the grey water. Then she stood and walked up the steps towards the top of the quay.
When she was halfway up she heard a deafening explosion and stopped in momentary shock. Then she saw a ball of flame that reached thirty feet into the air. She crouched down, feeling the Contender digging into her ribs. She saw now that the explosion had come from the main channel, to the north of the dockyards through which she’d swum only minutes earlier. The victim of the blast was an old Russian naval vessel, anchored outside the dockyards. It was just as they’d thought when she and Balthasar had sat on the high bluff above the city.
Now she ran up the remaining steps onto the top of the quay. It was a piece of luck that they’d exploded the vessel now. There would be pandemonium and, in the confusion, it would make her task easier. Immediately, sirens tore through the low hum of the city and klaxons began to scream their message here, inside the Russian fleet’s highly protected zone.
She looked up along the quay towards the high steel gates that shut her in on the inside of the protected zone and unwanted visitors out. There she saw the train on its tracks that led along the quay and, at the end of the quay where the tracks ended, she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva, broadside on, its towering superstructure dead in line with the train tracks.
There were uniformed men running along the quay pointing at the stricken ship, shouting orders. She heard a man shout at her but she ran past and shouted an order in return. She kept running and was concealed in her speed by the desperate reactions of the few people left inside the protected zone. She reached the engine of the goods train and saw the twenty goods vans trailing behind it and carrying three hundred submarine batteries, most of which weighed half a ton each. With the weight of the train itself, there would be well over two hundred tons of force.
She climbed into the cab. She heard shouting, but it wasn’t directed at her. Not yet. She started the engine of the train and released the brake. Slowly it ground into action and began to rumble along the quay the quarter of a mile before the quay ended at the Moskva. Once it had reached nearly thirty miles an hour, she jammed the accelerator into place, crossed to the other side of the cab, and flung herself out on that side where there was no one. All the people on the quay were on the other side of the train, watching the aftermath of the explosion.
Anna rolled hard on the unyielding concrete and got to her feet. Beside her the twenty goods vans were gathering speed and she heard the engine roaring with the strain of reacting to the jammed accelerator. She ducked down and ran to the far side of the quay, away from the train and the burning ship. She wanted to be far from the train when the last of the vans passed her so that she and the train’s catastrophic run towards the Moskva were dissociated as far as possible. When the final van passed she saw that all the military personnel were now turned from the burning ship and watching in horror as the train reached forty, then fifty miles an hour and still kept adding speed.
She didn’t watch but now kept moving at a fast walk towards the steel gates that protected the quay from intruders. She heard the smash as the train broke through the concrete buffers at the end of the track and then the squeal of tortured metal as it swung itself clear of the tracks and onto the bare concrete of the quay. It must be going at seventy or eighty miles an hour now, she thought, and increasing all the time. When she did stop so that, like all the others now on the quay, she was looking at the impending disaster, what she saw was two hundred tons or more of roaring steel crash into the superstructure of the aircraft carrier Moskva and keep on going. The train was like a massive bullet, the thickened steel of the ship’s superstructure no match for its onslaught. It sheared the side of the superstructure away completely on the quayside and kept on boring into the ship until by the time it stopped half of the train was hanging into the harbour on the far side of the carrier and the engine finally exploded with the unrewarded effort of forward propulsion. The entire superstructure toppled and swayed and crashed over itself and on top of the train. Then a sheet of flame erupted from the bowels of the ship.
Anna turned away. She ran towards the steel gates, her right hand arming one of the Semtex tubes, her left waving the Contender. She hurled the explosive at the centre of the gates and rolled away to feel the flash of the explosion on her back and the searing pain of the heat that tore off the back of her uniform. She kept rolling behind a watch hut and gathered her breath. Then she leapt to her feet and ran through smoke and falling debris out of the protected zone. Behind her a ton of steel from one of the gates crashed to the ground and she was through.
The approaches to the gates were now a mass of troops and security personnel, military vehicles and fire trucks that raced towards the gates from the land side. She dodged in and out of them, losing herself in smoke and terrified humanity until she reached the embankment. There was the Ukrainian military ambulance, exactly where Taras had told her it would be. She ran towards it and stepped into the cab, discarding the jacket of her Russian GRU uniform and slipping on the jacket of a Ukrainian military medic. As she turned the ambulance she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva heave a huge sigh that released another wall of flame, then it keeled over to one side and rolled into ten metres of water.