The Fox

Chapter Five

IT WAS A beautiful spring dawn. The sun rose to shine from a cloudless blue sky. The early risers of the coastal towns and villages of north-east Kent were up and walking the seashore with their dogs, binoculars and cameras. Out of the north the vast grey shape of the battlecruiser slid through the Strait of Dover. Via fully automated visual media, the world was watching.

In the pretty waterside town of Deal, separated from the just-invisible Goodwin Sands by a small lagoon of navigable water where local fishermen take blue mussels and peeler crabs, breakfasting citizens sat at their sea-facing windows, unaware of the hulking monster cruising towards them.

On the bridge, Captain Denisovich and his officers stood behind their consoles and looked down at the smaller vessels scattering before them. Far away in Moscow, the Vozhd also watched on a huge screen a live feed from an aeroplane chartered by RT (formerly Russia Today), the state-funded television network, which was circling the Kentish coast.

As the Nakhimov began to inch to the right, the helmsman corrected her course immediately. She continued to slip towards starboard.

Staring straight forward over the prow, the officers and crew could see the painted cottages of Deal. Below them in the engine room the revs of the nuclear-powered turbines began to increase. The chief engineer presumed the order had come from the bridge.

‘Five degrees port!’ snapped Captain Denisovich to the helmsman, but the helmsman was already tapping the screen to make the correction. The prow swung through Deal and the ship’s pace increased. The Nakhimov simply refused to obey the command. The navigation officer shouldered the helmsman aside and took over. He hammered in the necessary corrections. Nothing happened.

To the north, in Murmansk, the admiral commanding the Northern Fleet gazed in disbelief at his wall-sized TV screen.

‘Take back command!’ he shouted. At his side, the fingers of a technician flew across h

is console. If the controls of the Nakhimov were malfunctioning, then Murmansk would retake command and bring her back to her pre-destined course. Russian technology would not fail.

In Northwood, a young Royal Navy officer stared at his screen as his fingertips gave the Russian warship her new orders. Beads of sweat ran down his face. Behind him, four admirals gaped at the TV screen. One of them murmured, ‘Bloody hell.’

In Moscow, the cold-eyed little man who controlled the biggest country in the world did not yet realize something had gone wrong. He was not a mariner. The bright façades of the cottages of Deal should not be straight ahead of the prow. They should be well to the right. There should be miles of clear, sparkling seawater ahead.

At low tide, the soft, clinging sands of Goodwin are just visible as the Channel washes over them. At high tide, those sands are ten feet below the surface. The Admiral Nakhimov drew thirty-two feet. At 0900 hours GMT, the nuclear engines of the Admiral Nakhimov drove her 827 feet and 24,300 tons at warp speed on to the Goodwin Sands in front of the eyes of the world.

Far below the stern the huge twin propellers drove her forward as the prow rose in the air. In the engine room the controls were set at full astern, but that command did not reach the drive shafts. It was at that point that the man in the Kremlin realized something had gone very wrong indeed. He began, alone in his private office, to scream with rage.

As the Nakhimov finally came to a complete halt, command and control were restored to the onboard systems. Everything functioned perfectly. The engines went into full astern mode and the propellers responded, slowing to motionless and then starting to turn in the reverse direction. There are no rocks in the Goodwins, and the sand is soft, but it clings. The front half of the battlecruiser was deeply embedded, and she would not move. After half an hour of vain effort Captain Denisovich closed her down.

Hundreds of millions of watchers across the world stared in amazement. Those to the west awoke, turned on their TVs and saw the image of the motionless Admiral Nakhimov fill the screen. Those to the east left their desks as the word spread and crowded round their televisions amid an excited buzz of comment. No one could understand it. But it had just happened.

In Russia the start of the inquiry occurred within minutes. Streams of queries flowed out of the private office of the Vozhd to Murmansk, but Northern Fleet HQ could not respond with a logical explanation.

In Washington, the President was woken and studied the TV images as every channel covered the story. Then he began to tweet. He also put in a call to Marjory Graham in London.

She was trying to raise Sir Adrian. He was in his car, being driven back from Northwood to his flat at Admiralty Arch. He had been up all night taking command of a Russian battlecruiser. At Chandler’s Court, Dr Jeremy Hendricks gazed at the screens in the computer room and swore softly.

In another wing the teenager who had delivered the codes that enabled the penetration was fast asleep. He was not all that interested.

It did not take the cyber-experts at Murmansk more than twenty-four hours to report back to the Kremlin. This was not a malfunction. Against unimaginable odds, their system had simply been penetrated and, for seven vital minutes, had been under the command of a malign stranger.

The voice from the private office in the Kremlin was not forgiving. They had assured him that their technology was unassailable, based on a trillion-to-one likelihood of infiltration. There would be multiple dismissals, even criminal charges, on the grounds of culpable negligence.

Technical officers at Murmansk began to plan the huge operation that would be necessary to get the mass of inert steel off that sandbank. The Moscow-based and government-controlled TV and radio media, which by noon had not even carried the story, tried to work out how to explain what had happened even to a docile Russian public. Word was spreading; even in a controlled dictatorship the power of the internet cannot be repressed for very long.

In his seventh-floor office at Yasenevo the man controlling the foreign intelligence arm of the Russian Federation gazed out of the plate-glass picture window that gave on to the birch forest beneath him. Far away he could see the glitter where the spring sun touched the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. He knew the call was imminent. It came at noon on the day after the grounding. Yevgeni Krilov knew who would be on the line. It was the red phone. He crossed the room to pick it up at the second ring. The SVR man listened briefly then ordered his car.

Like the self-effacing Englishman currently installing himself in a small flat in London, Krilov was a career-long intelligence officer, beginning under Communism. He too had been talent-spotted at university and intensively interviewed before being accepted for the KGB.

Another in his intake was the man whose call he was now answering, the former secret policeman who had become master of all Russia. But while the Vozhd had been assigned the Second Chief Directorate (internal) and posted to Dresden in Russian-run East Germany, Yevgeni Krilov had shown a flair for languages and secured a posting to the First Chief Directorate (foreign espionage), which was regarded as the cream of the cream.

He had served in three overseas embassies, two of them hostile: Rome and London. He spoke workable Italian and excellent English. Like the Vozhd, he later parted from Communism without hesitation when the moment came, for he had long seen its numerous flaws. But he never lost his passion for Mother Russia.

Though at that point he had no idea how the disaster at Goodwin Sands had occurred or who was behind it, over two extensive careers in espionage, he and the Englishman had, ironically, clashed swords before.

Krilov’s ZiL limousine entered the grounds of the Kremlin as always by the Borovitsky Gate, banned to all but senior officials. Although no underling could possibly be riding in a ZiL, the fanatically loyal FSO guards stopped Krilov’s car and examined him through the windows. Then they lifted the barrier and waved his driver forward.

The Vozhd has three offices. There is the big outer one, large enough to receive delegations; the smaller inner one, functional, workaday, with the crossed flags behind the desk, one the Russian national flag, the other the black, double-headed eagle. Almost no one ever gets to the smallest and innermost room, where there are intimate family portraits. But it was here that Krilov was received.