ROGUESTATE, page 2
Parvez Hyder carried an AK-74 he had taken off a seventeen-year-old Russian conscript. He left a knife in the boy’s neck and managed to keep most of the blood away from his trousers. Grozny’s dark night was pierced lights from burning barrels that kept Russian sentries warm, and by fire pits of families who no longer had cellars to call home. His eyes never ceased scanning the path they had trekked up—searching for the telltale glint of a sniper rifle.
Parvez was different from the other men and boys stumbling into the night. He spoke flawless English. He grew up in a blue collar Chicago suburb and spent his teenage years watching the immortal Walter Payton lead the Bears to a Super Bowl victory and dominate the hated Packers and Vikings. He held an American passport, having become a naturalized citizen during Reagan’s first term. He followed the privileged American route and noted with great interest when the Soviet Union collapsed, the empire shattered, and Chechnya declared independence. Parvez decided to take a semester off and explore his heritage. He made an amazing discovery during his travels—he enjoyed killing Russians.
The rebels fanned out from Grozny in groups of twenty. They were wrapped in soiled fatigues, homemade blankets, and filthy bandages. Many of them coughed, and a few could barely hold their rifles up. Malnutrition and sickness dogged their steps. Campfires were shielded from the air, as everyone warily watched the sky for Russian helicopter gun ships, sporting forward-looking infrared sensors.
Russian pilots were circumspect about flying through the nighttime sky. The Chechen rebels had acquired the American-madeStinger anti-aircraft missile. TheStinger downed two hundred seventy Russian aircraft in Afghanistan, achieving an incredible seventy-nine–percent kill ratio. The Russian pilots were well aware of its lethality, as the Chechens had already downed twelve aircraft in the current conflict.
The other problem plaguing Russian pilots was training for night operations. The world was entirely different absent daylight, and more than one pilot ended up strafing friendly troops or misjudging altitude. While Russia still produced weaponry for export, everyone witnessed the prowess of the American military machine and no one wanted to be using second-class equipment. Most Russian pilots remained safe in their bivouac during the evening.
Sometime before the sun began painting the eastern sky pink, Shamil ushered his charges into caverns stocked with fresh water, Red Crescent foodstuffs, and ammunition.
Nigel Turner careened sideways, collapsing into a heap. He slid the pack off his back, wondering if the burning sensation along his shoulders would ever end. His features were bathed in cold perspiration. He groaned ever so softly as exhaustion and sleep demanded his attention. He was amazed to still be alive. Shamil Basayev was a hunted man, and rumors abounded regarding a bounty on his head. Nigel might have dozed off, had it not been for Parvez Hyder pulling a thermal blanket across the opening of the cave.
Parvez intrigued Nigel for several reasons. He was larger than the rest of the men his age, and Nigel suspected it came not from genetics but nutrition. Parvez had straight teeth, good dental work and hygiene—he was the only one besides Nigel who regularly brushed and flossed. The knife he carried strapped to his belt had an eagle perched atop the globe with an anchor running behind embossed on the hilt. The emblem was synonymous with one military service—the United States Marine Corps.
Nigel suspected Parvez understood and spoke English. While he had never heard him utter anything but the gibberish Shamil and his men babbled, Parvez seemed to understand Nigel’s mutterings as he puzzled through a sentence or cussed at his laptop. A lantern illuminated the squalid cave. Parvez was the only man field stripping his weapon and studiously running the copper cleaning brush through the bore. The rest abandoned their weapons carelessly to a pile, but Parvez brushed, blew and polished his weapon. He sparingly applied oil to the moving parts and finished up using a carbon-stained diaper to wipe down his weapon.
Shamil staggered above the flickering shadows dancing off the walls. His dark features a stark contrast to Nigel’s blistered skin and Parvez’s fairer complexion. The two merged like a misshapen animal running along the interior cave walls. They murmured in whispers too faint for anyone to understand.
“It is time to strike back,” whispered Shamil.
Parvez gave a furtive glance over his shoulder toward the others in the cave. “How?”
“The Iranian Ayatollah has a plan. He needs someone smart—special,” explained Shamil.
“But my place is here,” hissed Parvez. He gave Shamil a stricken look.
Shamil reached forth a fatherly hand to calm his shoulder. Shamil leaned closer and spoke directly into Parvez’s ear. “How many of us do you think will be alive in a year? One in five, if we are lucky—closer to one in ten. We need to hit them where it counts. We need to make them fear us again.”
Parvez nodded.
“You are the chosen one. You are the one who can pull this off. You have been to the university. You understand technical details and you believe in killing Russians. I can’t send one of these shepherd boys to do what needs to be done,” whispered Shamil.
After another minute, a grim grin penciled its way along Parvez’s features.
Nigel watched the whole thing from his spot against a rock. He pretended to fuss with his laptop, bringing the flat screen and artificial light into the cave’s dank recesses. He suspected something was up, but he had a story to write. Grozny had fallen to the Russians! His hands flew over the keyboard, bringing up his last story—another variation of David meeting Goliath.
It was the fantasy his editors adored, and a fiction that people safely tucked in bed each night wanted to believe. The ponderous and lethargic Goliath rumbling down from the north with his heavy-handed club of bombs and planes, meeting a diminutive David armed with the simplest of weapons— a mere three thousand rebel fighters against a hundred thousand troops. Nigel was sure Hollywood and photojournalists would make movies decrying the savagery exhibited by the Russians. It was pap ladled up to the masses. It was also patently false.
Nigel never included in his dispatches the sources of Chechen money and arms. There were the car theft rings operating inside of Germany and selling their gleaned Mercedes, Porsches and Audis to the new Russian Czars, the drug runners moving product from Turkish poppy fields to Italy, France, Spain, and England, and the notorious white slave trade shipping women and young boys to sick Asian societies. No one waged a war against the Russians, fed troops, or secured bullets, medicine, and clothing without money.
The Iranians, for the most part, considered the Chechens a decadent, slovenly lot. They failed to adhere to theShi’ites strict code designed to usher in the dark ages replete with all its benefits of disease, illiteracy, and poverty. In contrast, the Gulf States of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar sent hundreds of millions of dollars. Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan plied the war with surplus rifles, RPG-7s (rocket propelled grenades), andStinger missiles. It would not do to raise the nasty specter of Islamic fundamentalism, and it tended to spoil the idyllic tale of a desperate band of freedom fighters standing up to the monolithic Russian Bear. Nigel kept the references to petrodollars out of his prose, and worked the crazy dedication angle of suicide bombers. With Grozny’s fall, he suspected suicide squads would increase.
Nigel finished his notes and flipped the laptop shut. Exhaustion quickly slammed his eyelids shut. When he awoke, Parvez was gone.
* * * *
The rebels retreated south through Katyr Yurt—an insignificant village of four hundred. Yesterday, on February 4, 2000, the Russians punished Katyr Yurt for no better reason than it lay along the rebel’s line of march. At three in the afternoon, the Russians came with their fighter-bombers, helicopters, missiles, and vacuum bombs—fuel air explosives—a weapon expressly prohibited by the Geneva Convention for use against civilian targets.
And Katyr Yurt died too.
Three hundred sixty-three people died in Katyr Yurt—not one of them a rebel fighter. The streets were smashed bloody and trees shredded. The vacuum bomb ignited its mixture of fuel and greedily gobbled all the air away from the people below. It literally sucked their lungs inside out. It seems no one told the Russian commanders that Katyr Yurt was behind the Russian lines and inside thesafe zone.
But then, Russians know no better.
Western experts estimate a billion dollars might be needed to rebuild Grozny. Vladimir Putin, the new leader of the Russian democracy, quietly declared Grozny would never be rebuilt. It is an example to all others who would dare declare their independence and forcibly demand a seat at the table of nations.
Stalin’s spirit lives on.
Chechnya earned Stalin’s lasting animosity by supporting Hitler in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet Empire did not trouble itself with the petty squabbles inside its borders, and the KGB ensured a reign of terror to keep the myriad of language and ethnic groups in line. History rumbled on and the dark empire broke apart into conquered peoples demanding their independence. Boris Yeltsin presided over the Soviet Union’s disintegration and chose to ignore Chechnya.
A new wind blew for a while.
The Chechens, hardly a unified group, reverted to what they did best. The thirty or so clans squabbled amongst themselves, robbed banks, hijacked cars, and kidnapped journalists. Not content with targets of opportunity inside Chechnya’s borders, the Chechen mafia extended its reach into southern Russia, kidnapping whomever they could find. By 1996, Chechnya had become a problem requiring a solution—a Russian solution.
Old ways die hard.
Boris and his advisors convinced themselves the army built by Breshnev still existed. Except Chechnya was not Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was closer to Afghanistan in the 1980s. The largely unpaid, malnourished, and poorly trained Russian conscript waded into Muslim Chechnya and came to face-to-face with some of the meanest people on earth. While the Russians bombed and strafed Grozny, it still remained habitable at the beginning of 1997.
The killing had only just started.
The Chechens quit killing each other and concentrated on their godless, socialist overlords. Even though peace broke out in 1997 and an oil pipeline deal was struck, the Chechen clans gleefully continued to kidnap journalists and kill any Russian soldiers they found. The Russians returned, marching from the east, north and west. They battered down Gudermes, Chechnya’s second largest city, and crossed the Sunzha River until they came to a rest on the ridgeline north of Grozny in late October 1999.
Grozny would die.
The rebel clans retreated past Argun and Shali towards the Caucasus Mountains’ sheltering slopes. The Russian Army held in its bloody gauntlet a hard fought, extraordinarily expensive piece of blasted real estate. In 1995, the rebels kept fifty thousand army and Interior Ministry troops tied down. In 2000, the number was approaching one hundred fifty thousand. With the fall of Grozny, the war changed from a campaign for territory to a campaign of terror.
They were Russians.
They were Chechens.
The killing had just started.
CHAPTER TWO
Moscow, Russia,Izvestia,February 25, 2001 –A letter recovered from Lieutenant Rashid Aryapov states the accident was caused by the misfire of a practice torpedo in the forward torpedo room. Lieutenant Aryapov was one of twenty-three sailors recovered from the rear crew compartment late last year.
Aboard K-141 in the Barents Sea
August 12, 2000
11:00 A.M. (GMT +3:00)
One man aboard K-141 knew the future, and the future was short lived. Nicolas did not expect to survive the voyage or see the sun again—not in this life. He had been blessed and prepared before his voyage. He anticipated a paradise enlarged by his own imagination and promised by the Iranian mullah—Ayatollah Kambiz Abbasi.
The Iranian had traveled to meet Nicolas on the Kola Peninsula where Russia’s Northern Fleet maintained its headquarters. The Russian Federation’s Northern Fleet was no longer a proud predator roaming the oceans at will and challenging the American fleet. It was husk remembering the glory days. More often than not, the RussianTyphoon andOscar II class boats sortied beneath the waves without the missiles that gave them teeth.
K-141 had been christenedKursk after the largest tank battle in the Great Patriotic War. She was designed before the end of the Cold War to accomplish one incredibly difficult and basic mission—to kill American carriers. The Soviet Navy spent a great deal of time contemplating strategies to combat and defeat the AmericanNimitz class carriers. Russia no longer possessed the political will or economic stability to construct a carrier and the attendant air and naval systems they required, so Russia relied on simpler and stealthier solutions—theOscar II boats.
The Americans assigned twoLos Angeles class attack boats to every carrier task force. Whether or not Moscow wished to acknowledge the truth, the admiralties on both sides of the oceans knew the Russian fleet was no longer a match for the Americans. They simply lacked the ability to adequately attack and defeat a United States Carrier Task Force. TheOscar II class boats were a tepid answer to the imbalance between the two navies. They were designed to come to launch depth and send a fusillade of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles towards an American carrier.
No one expected theOscar II boats to survive their fiery assault, as the attack would terminally mark their positions for the E-2CHawkeyes . Besides, no one mounted nuclear warheads on the cruise missiles anymore. The cost was prohibitive and the maintenance problems enormous. Russia was no longer interested in waving a nuclear saber at the Americans, and crossing the nuclear threshold to kill a carrier was rhetorical folly reserved for angry old men.
Whenever theKursk left port, she never held a full compliment of twenty-four missiles, and the warheads were conventional. Alone and beyond the support of the Northern Fleet, she would cruise across the North Cape following old Archangel/Murmansk route favored by the American lend/lease boats during World War II. She would slide beyond Great Britain’s boundaries and come to the attention of the American Sixth Fleet as she crossed into the Mediterranean. The underwater SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) array of hydrophones and directional antennae still found the Russians.
The age-old cat and mouse game between the hunter and the hunted continued. TheKursk discovered that the improvements in American sonar and acoustic technology made her another target marked by a sound signature in the American Navy’s database. Most of the time, theKursk became the mouse, and there was very little Moscow could do to change the balance of power.
The last morning for theKursk began two hundred feet beneath the waves north of the Arctic Circle. A summer storm raged on the surface as Nicolas removed a small device from his personal pack—it was a little larger than a paperback novel. Tucked in one of his pockets were a simple screwdriver and a diagram describing where he should place the device. It was a gift from the Iranian. He called it theHammer of God .
The Chechen had accompanied Nicolas after the meeting with the Iranian, explaining to him in his oddly accented Russian the need to accomplish this mission. The Chechen was older, battle scarred and smelled of onions, but he promised the seaman his act would attract the attention of the whole world. A victory forAllah was the whisper.
Three weeks later, the Northern Fleet commenced its annual fleet exercises. TheKursk ’s one-hundred-seven man crew was augmented with nine senior officers and two weapons contractors. They were there to observe the exercise from a submariner’s perspective. TheOscar II boat cruised through the icy depths performing mock attacks and gunnery exercises against the Northern Fleet’s guided missile cruisers and theAdmiralKuznetsov —Russia’s newest carrier.
TheAdmiralKuznetsov had its own history of neglect. Commissioned in 1991, it had languished for lack of trained men and maintenance parts until 1999. Armed with an impressive array of ship-to-ship missiles, an air wing of thirty fixed-wing aircraft and twenty helicopters, theAdmiralKuznetsov represented an attempt to equal the American super-carriers. Unfortunately, it was a design that attempted to do many things, but did none of them very well.
Nicolas made his way into theKursk ’sforward torpedo room. There were eight long fish waiting in the racks, but Nicolas only needed one. He looked around, noting the metallic taste of the air, and the gentle hum as the two reactors kept theKursk moving below the storm. Sweat stains dribbled down his shirt, and a severe ache reached around his shoulders. He pulled the device from his pocket and set it atop the torpedo he decided to use. There was no time for doubt—paradise beckoned.
TheKursk was armed with radically new type of torpedo called theShkval (Squall). The problem with an object moving through the ocean is the drag imposed by water against the object’s skin. Twenty years ago, the Russians began a research program designed to leapfrog conventional thinking and move into the realm of supercavitating munitions. Cavitation is simply the phenomenon of air bubbles that naturally form around any object as it moves through water. Supercavitation is an artificial air bubble that envelops the entire projectile, and the drag difference between air and water allows theShkval to reach speeds approaching five hundred kilometers per hour underwater. Essentially, theShkval was designed to move through the artificially created air pocket before it collapsed. TheShkval achieves its enormous acceleration from a jet engine and rocket fuel—not the safest mixture at two hundred feet below the surface inside a sealed metal tube.
His eyes moved back to the open hatch. Purposefully he strode back down the deck and threw the locking bolts securing his work against intruders. Nicolas discovered there was a security lapse during the mid-day watch change. Either the officers did not take the possibility of action seriously, or no one cared. They left the forward torpedo room vacant for almost fifteen minutes as seamen moved between dinner, breakfast, and their new duties.
