AK 239: The Enemy Is Already Here

PROLOGUE

Barents Sea, Russia

^{Captain Vasili’s Diary}

^{Ten Days ’til Christmas}

The next world war will likely be over in seconds!

Not years.

Not minutes.

Seconds!

At least, that’s what our president believes.

Who am I?

Valentin Vasili, Captain, Russian Navy, Northern Fleet.

I had the conn (control) of the Severstal, TK-20, a massive Typhoon (NATO designation) class submarine that was supposed to have been scrapped.

It wasn’t.

Instead, I had her underway in the Barents Sea, Russia.

I’m a thirty-year veteran of the Russian Navy, and was as loyal as they come.

I’d consider myself a serious man given an impossible task.

My biggest worry:

Will I ever see my wife again?

I’m happily married with three grown children. All of my children have migrated to the West.

My wife and I live near St. Petersburg on the water, near the Finnish border. A lovely little place, that’s nice and quiet.

I have no living family in Russia but my wife, who I deeply love.

I love to travel, especially to the West but am always content to return to Mother Russia. I’ve been much happier. Especially when tensions with the West and my beloved Russia were far lower.

However, it seems, those days are long gone. Another Cold War is brewing between Russia and the United States and it looks as if our president is, primarily, to blame.

The U.S. and Russia are expelling each other’s citizens at a rapid pace and, now, both countries have leaders or former leaders that have become very wealthy off their own citizens. This has nothing to do with hard work but rather only due to their positions of immense power and control.

In fact, many of the heads of Russia and former U.S. Senators have common business interests with our siloviki clan (More on the siloviki later).

So with all of this “supposed” perestroika and glasnost since the 1980’s I’m confused:

What I’ve been ordered to do could start World War III.

My mission is clearly the strangest I’ve ever been given:

“Alaska? But why?” I asked.

Admiral Victor Perchinkov, is my boss and the new Minister of Defence. He is a cautious, slender, grey haired man in his sixties that makes no moves without the blessings of his president.

My friend, the admiral, is also a close business and government loyalist. All submarine orders would now be given directly from the admiral who will now work from the president’s office! This is highly unusual, as all prior orders had always come from naval command.

In addition, my old friend, the admiral, had been given as his first task: Sack fifty of my friends, all naval commanders in the Northern and Baltic Fleets. These men are all very well respected commanders.

Why?

For refusing to follow the president’s direct orders:

Harass NATO and the Americans whenever and wherever you can!

Today, each and every one of those loyal Russians cannot find work anywhere in Russia as they’ve been blacklisted.

I’m old enough to remember, not revisionist history, but our true history.

Stalin created a state security service called:

The Ministry of State Security.

Ironically, our beloved president has resurrected that very name and looks to be putting the old KGB back together.

Stalin also famously purged hundreds of military leaders who weren’t willing to murder anyone standing in his way to fulfill the greater glory of Rodina (The mythical Motherland)!

As a loyal Russian soldier, you were required to do anything for Rodina.

Turned out to be: Do anything the tyrant at the top demanded of you!

Death!

Murder!

Whatever!

You did it all in furtherance of the godhead.

Sorry, I’m on a tangent, back to the admiral.

If you wanted to keep your job, the admiral was not someone with whom you questioned.

So I had my orders and, as far as the admiral was concerned, that was that.

However, as my admiral friend should’ve known by now and contrary to what many would think of a Russian commander, I am also a rebel deep down, so I persisted in my questioning:

“Loads of strange unmarked suitcases, twenty-five scientists, twenty-two civilian women with covered heads, a GRU Spetsnaz Team (Russian Special Forces), and parts of my own sub are off limits to me?” I was bordering on insubordination and, truth be told, wanted to be sacked at that point.

However, “my friend” the admiral, had other plans for me.

The admiral reassuringly said, “This is for your own safety, Valentin.”

“My own safety?” I interrupted.

“If those scientists are doing something dangerous on my ship, I must know.”

Admiral Perchinkov, didn’t agree. “We will be in touch.”

The Admiral started to leave, then stopped.

“Remember, Valentin, this ship is now our Red October.”

With that, my old friend, the admiral left my submarine. I didn’t appreciate such vagaries but the admiral knew I loved reading Tom Clancy novels and, except for the ending of the novel, The Hunt for Red October, so did the admiral.

So my sub, with 125 souls on board, departed from a covered port at Severodvinsk, Russia shipyard under the cover of darkness.

We are pulling the old matryoshka doll switch on the West.

Nothing in Russia is exactly as it appears on the surface. Even when you dig deeper and things appear identical, they generally are not.

Russian nesting dolls are those children’s toys that have a large hollow outside with several more, increasingly smaller, identical hollow dolls hidden inside. And hiding inside one of those, when everyone else had given up looking, was our Trojan horse.

My Typhoon class sub looks like two submarines sitting side by side. The original Proyekt (Project) Number was 941. However, with the complete remodel, this sub is practically brand new. There is one huge, Top Secret, sound suppressing, skin on the outside hull that covers five separate, watertight, interior hulls. All five hulls have been hollowed out and totally redesigned.

Trouble is: One of the hulls has rooms that are entirely off limits to me!

Unacceptable!

Anyway, while the NSA with COMINT/SIGINT (U.S. Communications intelligence/Signals intelligence) satellites were watching what they thought was TK-20 slowly being dismantled from a satellite 25,000 miles in space, it was only a fake shell of my TK-20, much like the matryoshka, children’s toy.

My TK-20 had spent the last five years, nearby, covered in secrecy, being retrofitted. There are several Top Secrets aboard this ship, but only one of which I knew about at this time:

The caterpillar drive!

The new, ultra-quiet propulsion system made famous in Tom Clancy’s novel: The Hunt for Red October. Anyone with “real knowledge” knew this was just the work of science fiction, right?

Wrong!

Friends of mine have quietly been working on this system for over thirty years. And with the help of several Western scientists and Russians in Skolkovo (Russia’s Silicon Valley) we had made Phase I of Proyekt (English: Project) 239 a reality. How was this done?

Boatloads and boatloads of cash!

With billions of rubles from President Ivan Mironovich our scientists had done the impossible: We made the world’s first propulsion drive without any moving parts!

Not an easy task. Now this is something about which I can get excited!

Kapitan-Leytenant Casmerov, third rank, repeats his question to me. This shook me back to reality.

“What should be our depth, sir?”

I curtly answer, “Hold steady at thirty meters.”

Kapitan-Leytenant Casmerov answers, “Yes, sir.”

“What’s the depth under the keel?” I ask.

“One hundred ten meters,” said Casmerov.

Today the air temperature is a warm -1 degrees C, above the icy waters around the Kola Peninsula.

But that didn’t matter as we are already underwater, shadowing a new Borei class submarine, Knyaz Vladimir.

This old Russian maneuver was a bait and switch tactic to hide the true intentions of my Severstal.

My Russian Typhoon class Severstal (TK-20), the largest submarine ever built, was supposed to be pulled apart on a dry dock at Severodvinsk, Russia and then shipped to Sayda Bay piece by piece.

Instead, in direct violation of the New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, TK-20 was secretly enhanced and ordered to head west, just in case Western satellites or surveillance had picked up our movement.

They hadn’t.

No one had.

I’m upset, as I helped come up with the greatest invention since electricity. I had been promised: This will be used for protection and peaceful purposes. Instead it looks like to me like I’m driving my young crew and myself right into World War III!

As I stared at the navigation console, I am no longer thinking about the mission but rather I was rather thinking about my wife.

I hadn’t told the love of my life that my mission was open-ended. Meaning there was no date given where I would be home. This would always worry my dear wife so, instead, I left her a note that simply read,

On another mission,

Love, Valentin.

This nuclear ballistic missile submarine could stay submerged for four months if needed and we are loaded with enough supplies to do just that, and far more.

Both the Severstal and Borei class submarines are known as SSBNs (Ship, Submarine, Ballistic, Nuclear). While the Severstal is nearly thirty years old, no one but myself and a very small group of Russians knew it had been upgraded and all of her ballistic missiles removed!

That’s right!

I knew all the ballistic missiles had been removed.

However, she was then reequipped to be much more silent and much, much more deadly.

(More on that later.)

Meanwhile I’m thinking,

Why?

I didn’t wait thirty years to captain the greatest ship in the world just to murder millions, if that was the plan!

I had faced death on several prior occasions but those instances were for something in which I believed. This, I felt, was starting to feel like provocation, pure and simple.

And, little did I know, I was not given the half of it.

However, Nikolai Alexi, Kapitan, 2nd Rank, was given a full briefing but, I, the captain of my own boat, Valentin Vasili, wasn’t even invited!

I thought: This kid is part of the siloviki clan and more trusted than I, a loyal officer of thirty years! I snarled to myself as I look at the kid who just turned thirty years of age!

I’m still a bit confused: I am pretending to travel towards the old NATO underwater listening stations that have long been abandoned. The Cold War G.I.U.K. Gap between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom was the only way Russian subs could travel if we wanted to reach the oceans of the earth.

I then proudly forgot about my confusion, thinking:

Was… was the only way we could travel to reach other oceans!

The West was clueless as to my president’s true intentions. The United States had pressed its famous “Reset button” and had reduced its air, naval and ground strength to unprecedented low levels in light of the “new peace” between the U.S. and my country.

NATO was no better.

For example, the Royal Norwegian Navy sold their military base at Olavsvern. The base was built into the side of a solid rock mountain and housed submarine hangers that could withstand a direct nuclear strike.

It cost NATO five hundred million to build and would track all Russian sea vessels from Russian Naval bases on the Kola Peninsula, but no more.

It sold for five million U.S. dollars, a mere one percent of its cost to build!

It’s now rented to a “research group” owned by the Russian government!

I thought,

We are finally going to see some peace dividends. This caterpillar drive, I’ve helped work on my whole life, could be put to some important peacetime uses.

As they say in America:

Boy, was I stupid!

Just before I left I saw the president of Russia, Ivan Mironovich, on TV.

He made yet another bold pronouncement on, state-controlled, Russian TV-12.

The president said,

“Russia & China will co-operate with all of our friends and allies as we have many mutual economic and military interests around the world. We shall continue to hold regular, joint military exercises with China to show America and the West that we will not be bullied.”

I saw German banking expert, Hans Meiner, interviewed just before that. He said,

“Russia and China have become the world’s leading buyers of gold to weaken the world’s dependence on the almighty U.S. dollar. A new Cold War has already erupted in the financial sector. And like China’s President, Ji Xixping, stated: ‘The world’s economy is at a critical juncture.’”

This alone would not have worried me but there are other worrisome events taking place:

Several government ministries have now blocked over one million Russian web pages and invited Chinese experts to show them how to block even more.

More worrisome: Journalism had become a very dangerous business in my country.

Scores of journalists had been jailed.

A worse fate had befallen six dissidents: Murder.

One was a friend of mine.

It was safer these days to be a common criminal than it was to be a dissident or an opposition journalist.

And the siloviki had the common criminals on their side too. With illegal drugs, alcohol and cigarettes and much more.

In addition, I’ve noticed dozens of hardened, underground bunkers being built in or near important government buildings and homes.

In fact, I recently rode on the underground subway that goes from President Mironovich’s house outside Moscow to a leadership command center, completely underground.

These hardened sites are for one purpose and one purpose only:

Preparation for a first strike nuclear war on the West!

So there I was, on my couch, watching my favorite TV show starring: Olga Kasparov.

She is a friend and a very, very cautious journalist interviewing the President of Russia.

More courageous journalists had openly nicknamed the president: Ivan the Terrible, Ivan the Terminator, or just Crazy Ivan.

The President, in his humility, preferred: Ivan the Great!

So I have a nice tall glass of Russian Standard Platinum vodka watching our president on the TV say:

“The Americans try to blame Russia for everything wrong with the world. We Russians have a word for this: Russophobia.”

“For example, Guccifer 2.0 has hacked U.S. Democratic Party emails and state election boards.”

“Americans claim Guccifer is Russian intelligence services.”

“However, our intelligence services tell me: These are disgruntled people in the CIA and in American intelligence agencies who don’t like or trust their own corrupt bosses. Russia is blamed for all this American hacking but Edward Snowden has proven the American government has been illegally surveilling millions of their own citizens. Russia would never interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”

“However, I will stand up to the arrogant American leadership that’s not trusted by their own CIA. We love the American people but I shall never allow our seas to become a pond for NATO or the American military in which they can freely play. We shall help our friends like the Syrians and the Iranians. And we shall build up our defensive forces in our territory, especially on The Crimean Peninsula.” said Crazy Ivan confidently.

I practically spit my expensive Russian vodka clear across the room!

“Our territory?”

“The Crimean Peninsula?”

I understood exactly what Crazy Ivan was saying:

First, this would rally ordinary Russians to an increasingly dictatorial president, claiming to stop Western aggression while he moves further and further into “our territory.”

Ukraine!

Second, it was to misdirect attention away from Russia and my Severstal.

And it worked!

While a brand new class of Borei sub, the Knyaz Vladimir, would pretend she was on sea trials tooling around the Barents Sea, for photo ops, I dove TK-20 deep, deeper, silent and in the opposite direction.

As I did, I put on a pair of old iPod headphones and hit play: ‘A Mad Russian’s Christmas’ by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.[1]

How appropriate, just seven days ’til Christmas!

Merry Christmas, Mrs. Vasili, I thought as I commanded,

“Caterpillar drives to full speed.”

“Aye, captain. Caterpillar drives to full speed.”

We would soon be under Arctic ice heading directly to Alaska!

And then it hit me:

Oh God no!