Outside Krasnodar, profound concern mixed with utter bewilderment morphed into panic. When the faraway compressor exploded, no one heard a thing. But at the deepest point of the Black Sea, where K15 happened to be situated, the water is 7,200 feet deep and the ambient pressure more than any machine can stand.
Through the fissures the seawater flooded in – saline, corrosive, powered by the insane strength of its own pressure. It forced itself down the pipeline, mile after mile, until every seal at either end had been closed.
It overtook and consumed the excavators, which stopped, ceasing to turn at the point they had reached. By nightfall, TurkStream had to be closed down.
‘This,’ said the senior scientist in the computer centre at Krasnodar, ‘should not have happened. It cannot have happened. I built this system. It was foolproof. It was impenetrable.’
But post-mortem examination, as the disaster sub-sea was being assessed, revealed that the Krasnodar master-brain computer had indeed been penetrated and a tiny malware sown.
Chapter Twenty
THERE WERE TWO reports. One reached the most private office in the Kremlin in the morning, one in the afternoon. Between them, they inspired in the master of all Russia the greatest rage his private staff had ever seen.
When angry, he did not publicly scream or shout, nor rage or stamp. He became deathly white in face and knuckles, fixed and motionless. Those foolish enough to address him, having failed to note the signs, would be greeted with a reply in the form of a hiss and would be wise to leave the room.
The first report was from a weapons company called Energomash, a manufacturer of missile fuel and engines, specifically the RD250, which had powered Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles until Defence Ministry policy had replaced the country’s principal rockets with another type, from another supplier. It was the ministry that had passed the Energomash report up to the Kremlin for attention as a precaution.
The company reported that it had received a complaint from a recent customer about its rocket engines. It had sold the RD250 to North Korea, and the customer there had complained. It appeared that a defective missile-engine component in a huge consignment transmitted in a sealed train to Mount Paektu had caused a catastrophic explosion during testing of the Hwasong-20 missile. The detonation had destroyed the missile and with it the silo in which assembly was taking place.
Energomash had conducted its own thorough examination and had concluded that there was only one viable explanation. Its quality-control computer database had somehow been penetrated and near-invisible changes made to the manufacturing sequence.
The firewalls protecting its computerized manufacturing database had been so dense that external hacking had been deemed impossible. Something had gone wrong that simply defied explanation. Someone had accomplished the technically impossible.
The result was a disaster for North Korea and its secret missile programme and its subsequent refusal to place any more orders with Russia. Concealing this humiliation from the tight-knit scientific community concerned with missiles worldwide would be nigh on impossible.
However, the report from Energomash paled into insignificance when compared with the news that came in the afternoon from Krasnodar, the operating centre of the TurkStream project. For the Vozhd, the malfunction deep under the Black Sea was truly disastrous.
He was not technically minded, but the layman’s language in the document was plain enough. Somewhere deep under the ocean, close to the midway point between the Russian and Turkish coasts, a compressor had gone out of control, despite frantic efforts to correct the malfunction. Once again, computers that had always worked perfectly had refused to accept commands.
The technical chiefs of TurkStream had determined that there must have been an interference and that it had been externally sourced. But that was out of the question. The controlling codes were so complex, involving billions of computations and permutations, that no human mind could feasibly break through those firewalls to the controlling algorithms. Yet what could not be done had been done. The outcome was damage that would take years to repair.
Over Moscow, a warm spell had generated a black-clo
ud storm, but the cumulonimbi, dark though they were, engulfing the golden domes of St Basil’s Cathedral could not match the mood inside the office of the master of Russia. In a single day he had not only read a report, passed by the Foreign Ministry, detailing a truly horrendous interview with the dictator of North Korea, but also received this devastating news.
For the man in the Kremlin the restoration of his beloved Russia to her rightful place as the sole superpower on the continent of Europe was no mere whim. It was a life’s mission. This supremacy no longer depended on Stalin’s massed tank divisions but on utterly dominating the supply to Western Europe of Russian gas at a price that no other supplier and no alternate energy-type could match. And that depended on TurkStream.
For years, the Vozhd had personally authorized a steadily mounting cyber-war against the West. Outside his native St Petersburg stands a skyscraper inhabited from ground to roof by cyber-hackers. These had steadily and increasingly sown malware and Trojan horses into the computers of the West, but in those of Britain and the US especially. It was war without shells, without bombs, but most of all without declaration. But it was war … of a sort.
Billions of pounds’ and dollars’ worth of damage had been inflicted; healthcare, air traffic and public service systems had crashed; and the Vozhd had exulted in the hurt caused to the hated West, even though ninety per cent of cyber-attacks had been frustrated by Western cyber-defences. But the report from Krasnodar detailing the years of delay and the Tsar’s ransom in treasure that repairing the damage would cost proved, if further proof were necessary, that someone was fighting back. And he knew who it was.
Someone had lied to him or been, themselves, completely duped. The Iranians had failed. Somewhere, that British cyber-genius was alive. The teenager who, in cyberspace, could do the impossible had not died in a villa outside Eilat. He sent for his spy chief, the head of the SVR.
Yevgeni Krilov was with him within an hour. The Vozhd thrust the two reports at him and, while Krilov read, he stared out over the Alexandrovsky Garden at the roofs of western Moscow.
‘You failed,’ he said. ‘Your Night Wolves failed in England, and the Pasdaran failed at Eilat.’
Krilov sat in silence and reflected that this was not all that had gone wrong. He had not revealed that his rival had not fallen for his plan to incriminate the Assistant Cabinet Secretary as his informant in London – and he still did not know why – and that his real ‘mole’, in the form of the junior civil servant Robert Thompson, must be presumed not to have died in a car crash but had quite simply disappeared, along with the daughter whose kidnapping had purchased his treachery. He did not know the details, but he had long ago been forced to assume that the four Albanian gangsters charged with that operation would not be seeing Tirana again.
None of this he had shared with his boss in the Kremlin. Years spent climbing the career ladder had taught him that superiors like only good news, and that these instances of good news, unless repeated, are soon forgotten. Failures, on the other hand, are etched into the record.
After the news the chief of the SVR had just learned, there could be absolutely no doubt: Weston was the man he was up against. It was he who was foiling his every attempt to locate and eliminate the teenage hacker.
All spy agencies have their legends. Sometimes these legends are their heroes, perhaps long gone, but sometimes they are their opponents, often also departed. The British remember Kim Philby, the Americans Aldrich Ames. The Russians still snarl at the recall of Oleg Penkovsky and Oleg Gordievsky. These were the great spies, of their own side the traitors. But, across the divide, those who recruited and ‘ran’ them were the heroes.
When he was a rising star in the old KGB, Yevgeni Krilov had heard of a British spy who had flitted into and out of East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, who had recruited and run a cipher clerk in the Foreign Ministry and a Russian missile colonel in Hungary.
Krilov also knew, though he could never prove it, that he had also been present at the ÁVO trap in Budapest set in order to capture this spy. After that the man had been withdrawn from active operations to a desk job in London and risen to Number Two in MI6. Then he had retired. Or so it had been thought.