“Da, Tovarisch Admiral,” a short, dark-haired man with the epaulets and
insignia of a kapitan pervovo ranga, a captain first rank, snapped back
with military precision. Every man at each base he’d visited, Karelin
reflected, had been eager to show his zeal.
And well they might. Karelin’s retinue included two men in civilian
clothing, anonymous, yet obvious in their anonymity as agents of the
Third Directorate, that arm of the KGB responsible for guaranteeing the
loyalty of military units all the way down to the company level. Around
them were eight men in standard, green-camouflaged army uniforms, but
with peaked caps and the collar tabs bearing the Cyrillic “VV”
identifying them as Vnutrennie Voiska, the MVD’s interior army. All had
the flat, expressionless faces of Central Asians, men favored for MVD
assignments because, as one Soviet army officer had once observed, they
were “known for their obedience, stupidity, and cruelty.”
They particularly enjoyed hurting Russians for some reason, which was
why they were so useful for internal security work. The AKM assault
rifles they held were not carried slung or held at port arms. Instead,
the weapons’ muzzles seemed to probe restlessly in all directions about
the tight-knit group, finding and tracking each potential threat.
Clasping his hands behind his back, Karelin let his eyes run the length
of the nearest of two titanic mountains of steel rising like islands
from the sea cave’s oil-black water. “Excellent, excellent,” he said.
Despite being completely enclosed, the cavern air was cold, especially
here by the water.
Karelin’s words launched puffs of white vapor before his face. “And
what is their current status, Comrade Captain?”
“Leninskiy Nesokrushimyy Pravda is ready for sea now,” the officer
replied. He gestured across the dark water toward a more distant island
identical to the first. A hammerhead crane was positioned above it, a
blunt-tipped, white cylinder sixteen meters long dangling from its
tackle. A crew was positioned on the long deck beneath, guiding the
cylinder past an open hatch in the deck. “As you can see, Comrade
Admiral, Slavnyy Oktyabrskaya Revolutsita is still taking missiles
aboard. It is his captain’s intent to work through the night and have
him ready to deploy to sea by this time tomorrow.” As a Russian, he
referred to ships with the masculine pronoun, rather than the feminine.
“They are true monsters,” Karelin said. It never failed. Each time he
saw these black-armored behemoths, especially within the confines of one
of the caverns, he found himself a boy again, gaping up at their rounded
flanks and towering sides like the greenest raw recruit. These were the
centerpiece of the Motherland’s defense, the very embodiment of her
technical and nuclear might: Tyfun.
One hundred seventy-one meters long, an imposing twenty-four meters
wide, with a submerged displacement of almost thirty thousand tons,
Typhoon was by far the largest submarine in the world. There were eight
in all, two home-based at each of four specially designed and
constructed underground shelters along the Kola Inlet.
Quite apart from their size, Typhoons were unlike any other submarine in
the world. They were designated as PLARBs–Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya
Raketnaya Ballisticheskaya–a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile
submarine, what the Americans called a “boomer.” Each carried twenty
SS-N-20 missiles in two rows down the long, long deck forward of the
squat, two-tiered sail. Each missile, in turn, mounted six to nine
independently targeted MIRV warheads and had a range of 8300 kilometers.
If her captain so ordered, Lenin’s Invincible Truth could slip through
the nuclear-proof blast doors at the west side of the cavern and into
the Polyamyy Inlet beyond. From that spot, just a few kilometers north
of Murmansk, he could reach across the pole to strike targets as far
south as San Francisco or the Americans’ big nuclear-missile sub base at
Kings Bay, Georgia.
Or, with different orders, he could reach any target at all anywhere
across the broad sweep of Asia. No renegade army, no traitorous city,
no nationalist-minded republic in all the vast sweep of the neo-Soviet
empire from Odessa to Dushanbe to Vladivostok was safe.
“You are Captain First Rank Anatoli Chelyag,” Karelin said, as if he
were speaking the name for the first time. He gestured toward the