Chapter 6 #2
The directive had come straight from the DNI, but Clark never doubted who was responsible for the final decision.
Fed up with Russia’s sanction busting, not to mention the continued sabotage of undersea communication lines, Jack Ryan had decided it was time to set an example.
The objective: sink one of the most egregious offenders of the fleet.
It was to be done with minimal human casualties, in neutral waters, and in a way that left no clear trail to the responsible party.
A bit of reverse smoke and mirrors to counter Russia’s own.
And for an errand like that, there was only one man to call: John Clark.
Clark ordered his team to hold their position, then donned his rebreather and submerged. His next task was to verify they had the right ship.
He kicked through the darkness with the precision of a metronome.
It was a common misconception that the ocean was silent.
To the contrary, the sea, especially at night, was a jungle of background noise.
Through the rhythmic sound of his rebreather, Clark heard crustaceans clicking and fish grazing on the hard bottom.
The drone of a distant outboard motor was constant, as was the splash of bilgewater being pumped from the freighter above.
A rust bucket like Draco II, Clark knew, wouldn’t float more than a day without her pumps.
He surfaced quickly, less than a yard from the ship’s hull.
He ignored an impulse to touch it for stabilization; the dented steel was encrusted with razor-sharp barnacles and slick algae.
With a clear view of the sky, his wrist-mounted GPS was again functional.
He checked the preprogrammed target coordinate set.
He was fifty yards from where CIA analysts had carefully plotted Draco II’s midship reference point two hours earlier.
The coordinates were off, but she could easily have swung that far on her anchor.
Still, Clark would triple-check. He had no desire to explain to President Jack Ryan how he’d sunk the wrong freighter.
In the old days, he might simply have backed off to check the name painted on her stern, but given how often it changed that would hardly be definitive.
The CIA had come up with a better way to confirm a ship’s identity.
Clark submerged and began swimming away from the ship.
The agency had long struggled to track the tens of thousands of freighters and fishing boats across the world’s oceans.
Trying to match names and registrations to raw photo surveillance was an analyst’s nightmare.
Equally problematic was data from automatic identification system transceivers.
The International Maritime Organization required large ships to broadcast their positions using AIS, the aim being to avoid collisions and enhance security.
Unfortunately, there were countless methods of cloaking, manipulating, and disabling those signals.
Russia, in particular, had turned it into an art form.
The CIA’s ingenious work-around played to two of its strengths, satellite surveillance and digital analysis.
The basic principle was simple: no two large ships were identical.
Antenna configurations, deck modifications, damage from loading incidents.
Rust stains alone were something near a fingerprint.
With enough data, even sister ships launched from the same shipyard could generally be distinguished from one another.
All that was needed was a high-resolution image for comparison.
A library of tens of thousands of vessels had been assembled, images obtained from as many sources as possible.
There were multispectral satellite overheads, but also simple digital photos taken from wharfs and passing ships.
The CIA, in partnership with the Navy and the National Reconnaissance Office, had developed an algorithm to automate the matching of nonconformities in the database.
Every large ship displayed dozens of unique features, sometimes hundreds.
Of course, rust could be painted over and dents smoothed out.
New damage could appear, and antennae might be added.
The software accounted for all such discrepancies.
With typical bureaucratic dullness, the system was called Noncooperative Maritime Target Recognition, or NMTR. It was the nautical equivalent of identifying a person by their scars, freckles, and wrinkles—that project, Clark had been told, was being pursued by another division.
He surfaced cautiously forty yards from Draco II’s starboard beam.
He would barely be visible in the choppy harbor waters, but all the same he kept his profile to a minimum.
He pulled his mask down to his neck and surveyed the ship’s deck.
He didn’t see a single crewman. There had to be at least one man on watch on the bridge, but Clark gave fifty-fifty odds on whether he was even awake.
If he is asleep, he thought, he’s about to get the rudest awakening of his life.
He lifted a waterproof camera above the surface and took three quick shots of the freighter using various low-light settings.
The camera was satellite capable, and he uploaded the images via an encrypted data link.
Clark submerged again, waited one minute, then resurfaced to reestablish a signal.
The reply was waiting: Target confirmed as Draco II. 99% degree of confidence.
He shook his head derisively and submerged again. Ninety-nine percent? Really? A programmer somewhere was covering his ass.
Clark had no such reservations. As far as he was concerned, all the boxes were ticked. It was time for some UDT bang.
He clipped the camera to his equipment belt and rejoined the team ten feet below Draco II’s rudder; everyone had submerged for optimum concealment in the night waters.
In the dim ambient light, he gave hand signals to initiate the next step and then tapped his watch for a time hack.
They would rally at the DPDs in ten minutes.
The team split into pairs, and Clark set out with Bauer at his side.
Each man carried a single explosive device, an updated and more powerful version of the venerable limpet mine.
Magnetic attachment, shaped explosive charge, programmable time delay.
The team had pre-briefed specific attachment points on the hull.
Wu and Hyori had set off toward the bow and would affix their mines to weak points along the forward waterline—DNI analysts had studied the ship’s original blueprints to identify structural vulnerabilities.
Clark and Bauer would place their weapons near the stern—one near the engine room and a second on the rudder shaft.
These detonations would be destructive, but also disabling.
If the ship didn’t go down immediately from the forward blasts, the aft charges would remove any chance of an astute crew getting Draco II underway to run her aground.
All four timers were precisely synchronized.
Everyone rendezvoused at the DPDs on schedule, and soon they were driving toward open sea.
Clark didn’t want to be anywhere near the ship when the mines went off.
He’d had his brain rattled more than once by undersea explosions, and so he’d built in a thirty-minute delay.
That would put them miles outside the harbor’s breakwater when the timers hit zero.
After twenty-eight minutes they surfaced at the extraction point—the coordinate set where they would rendezvous with the boat.
Clark’s eyes swept a full three-hundred-sixty-degree circle.
The boat was nowhere in sight.
And just like that, a plan that had been going swimmingly began to capsize.