With its nineteen-inch-thick armor-plated steel hull and twin steam turbine engines, the nuclear icebreakerVyesna made the four hundred and fifty kilometer trip to Murmansk in just under seventeen hours. The dummy charges Carlson rigged in the reactor room and at other strategic points throughout the vessel, which he threatened to detonate via remote if there was any trouble, were enough to ensure the crew’s complete cooperation. The men were professional sailors, not soldiers and had no desire to die.
Via encrypted messages transmitted back and forth to Washington, Harvath learned that the threat of a pending Russian attack was already beginning to leak out. People in America were hoarding food, water, and medical supplies, while millions were fleeing major metropolitan areas, unsure if they had been targeted.
Now that Harvath had succeeded in disabling Russia’s previously envisioned impregnable air defense system, hawks in Rutledge’s cabinet were calling for a full-on first strike to neutralize the Russians and calm fears at home. The president, though, was still concerned about the Soviet nukes secreted on American soil and urged Harvath to get back to DC as quickly as possible. There was less than two days until the State of the Union address.
By the time theVyesna crashed its way into the Kola Inlet, General Paul Venrick of the American Joint Special Operations Command had established a rendezvous point just across the border with a Norwegian Special Forces Team.
After DeWolfe had disabled the ship’s communication equipment and Carlson, with Alexandra translating, warned that he could still detonate his explosives from up to twenty kilometers away if the crew did anything stupid, the team lowered one of the icebreaker’s rigid inflatable boats over the side and headed for land.
They beached just down from a small town called Platonovka, where Avigliano located an old UAZ-brand cross-country vehicle and, seeing no one around, promptly “commandeered” it. Stopping at two gas stations, Alexandra and Harvath went inside where they allowed the attendants to hear them speaking English. Alexandra then asked for directions in Russian to a village on the Finnish border about two hundred kilometers to the southwest. At no time did they allow the attendants to see the car they were driving.
With enough of a false trail in place to occupy the police and the military until they could make it out of the country, they headed for the Russian border with Norway, using back roads whenever possible.
Two hours later, they ran out of road and had no choice but to abandon the UAZ and hike the rest of the way in on foot. When they made it to the rendezvous point, the Norwegian Special Forces unit allowed them a few minutes to catch their breath before making their presence known. Harvath, having been tasked to SEAL Team Two-the Navy’s cold weather experts, also known as the Polar SEALs, was well versed in winter warfare and noticed the soldiers before anyone else. The rest of the team was taken somewhat by surprise, as the men appeared virtually out of nowhere.
Once identities had been established, the unit commander called in a Royal Norwegian Air Force Bell 412 helicopter for their extraction. They were transported to Kirkenes Airport about forty kilometers away where the CIA Air Branch Cessna Citation X, which Harvath had flown over to Berlin on six days ago, was de-iced and waiting.
The Mach.92 Citation X traveled nearly at the speed of sound. With a range of three thousand nautical miles it was necessary that they put down in Greenland to refuel. They stopped at Sondre Stromfjord airport and were on the ground for less than fifteen minutes before being airborne again. Harvath and Alexandra hardly noticed the minor interruption and declined to exit the craft to stretch their legs and instead remained on board and continued to pour over Stavropol’s journal.
The man might have kept extensive notes, but he was no fool. Sensitive information was encoded somehow and it was only now, after almost three-and-a-half hours and two thousand miles of flight that Alexandra was beginning to get a handle on it. The fact that the man wrote in cursive Cyrillic and had terrible handwriting to boot, relegated Harvath to the back seat while Alexandra twisted her hair in knots, broke pencil point after pencil point and wore down several erasers trying to crack Stavropol’s code. The code itself wouldn’t have been such a problem had they not lost the first journal. Much of the encrypted information seemed to directly relate to earlier entries in the other notebook.
Leaving Greenland’s airspace, Harvath had received an intelligence update. He was told that Gary Lawlor’s condition had stabilized and that he’d been transported to the Landstuhl Medical Center in southwestern Germany, near Ramstein Airbase. That was the good news. Then came the bad. Not only had none of the Russian nuclear devices been discovered, but until they were verifiably locked down, president Rutledge wasn’t taking any chances. With less than twenty-four hours left until the State of the Union address, his aides were preparing two separate speeches. Though giving the speech the Russians wanted would create worldwide financial chaos and do immeasurable harm to America’s economy, he was not willing to risk the greater damage to American lives and infrastructure that would be created by the detonation of nuclear weapons on American soil.
Being cooped up in a plane over two thousand miles from home, Harvath had never felt so impotent in his life. Sitting on his hands was driving him insane.
They were over Newfoundland when Alexandra began excitedly rifling through her stack of notes, pulling out several pages in particular and laying them in front of her. Next, she tore four pages out of Stavropol’s journal and placed those to her side. Without even looking up from what she was doing, she told Harvath to go find her more paper.
When he returned, she grabbed a sheet off the top of the small stack he held in his hands and told him to sit down. He slid into the seat across the table from her and said, “What is it?”
“I finally figured it out,” she said, as she placed one of the pages from the journal side by side with a blank piece of paper and began writing. “It’s a combination of something we callPoluslovitsa, or half-word, where certain letters are purposely left missing, and an old form of Russian fast written characters.”
Harvath watched as she filled in the missing Russian words and then translated the text into English. As its meaning became clear, Harvath scrawled down a message and rushed it to DeWolfe, who encrypted his words and sped them ahead of the plane to Washington.