CHAPTER 2
TUNDRA TCON



The GNV SL A.I. core onboard the Ozempic Tsar managed to get several longwave, satellite telephone and high frequency burst transmissions away before it was silenced by the cold dark waters of the Strait. It also managed to fire a tethered distress buoy from its bow section that bobbed up to the surface of the sea even as the carcass of its host ship settled on the seabed 15 fathoms below. Fixed to the ship by a gossamer thin carbonite string with the strength of tensile steel it sent the position of the now doomed Tsar to its owners, its insurers and to the nearest naval air and sea rescue service - which happened to be the Arkhangelsk headquarters for the Coast Guard of the Russian Federal Security Service.

The comms operator who received the mayday immediately and instinctively hit the alert button which sounded a klaxon across the base at the hangar where the Sikorsky Skywarrior naval rescue quadcopter and its crew were stationed. The next thing he did was call up the international ship register to identify the ship that was in distress so that he could send imagery to both the Sikorsky crew and any other nearby shipping that might be directed to help.

The next thing he did after that, was to sigh, reach over and cancel the alert and shut off the klaxon. He checked the signal traffic just to be sure there was only one ship in distress, and sat back in his chair.
Bloody robot ship.

He was from three generations of fishermen and sailors, had a grandfather who had served on the cold war flagship the Kuznetsov, striking terror into the hearts of the weak NATO fleets every time it sallied out of the Black Sea past Gibraltar and into the Atlantic. A ship crewed by heroes of the Soviet Union, back when Russia had heroes. Men braving radiation leaks and the constant threat of annihilation in nuclear fire to keep Mother Russia safe from a Western alliance bent on its destruction.

Now half the fleet was Unmanned Combat Warships or UCWs, and the rest were slated for either conversion or retirement. ‘Sailors’ didn’t stand watch on the decks of ships, in the freezing air of Baltic seas watching for torpedo wakes or missile contrails, they didn’t even sit deep in the C3I centers of their warships watching glowing green screens for radar returns or listening for the acoustic signatures of submarines. They sat in reverse cycle airconditioned trailers on a shoreside base and watched the world through the sensors on their UCWs, only taking control when they needed to tap in new navigation orders or use their linked sensor arrays to explore and identify unkown contacts. And even the humans were redundant, because the UCWs were programmed with failsafe routines that would kick in if contact to Archangel was lost, or an enemy attack rendered comms unavailable. In a peacetime configuration, the standard UCW lost-comms protocol was to enter a random safe navigation scheme, and set all weapons systems to defensive operations.

In a conflict configuration, the UCW would attempt to carry out the last orders issued before comms blackout, including identification and engagement with any identified enemy air, sea or land targets.

The comms operator looked again at the image of the Ozempic Tsar on his screen and paged away from it in disgust.

40,000 tonnes of cargo, steel and silicon sitting and breaking apart on the floor of the Bering Strait. Apart from environmentalists, the owners and their insurance company, who gave a damn?
*
*
In the Situation Room of the Russian 3rd Air and Air Defence Forces Command, Captain Andrei Udicz gave a damn. He was watching the same cry for help from the Ozempic Tsar scroll across his screen and he turned his face from the screen to look at the five other officers in the room.

“The Ozempic Tsar has been confirmed destroyed, Comrade General,” he reported. “It has deployed a distress buoy, which indicates that at least part of the hull is lying on the sea floor.”

Colonel General Yuli Lukin, Commander of the 3rd Air and Air Defence Forces Command, sat with his fingers on his expansive belly and looked up at the ceiling. “How long until we have visual confirmation?” He was flanked by several intelligence officers and aides.
Udicz looked down at the tablet in front of him. “I can have a pair of Okhotnik UCAVs over the site of the incident within …. eight minutes,” he said. “And I have VRT300 rotary wing drones on standby if we need more eyes.”

“Incident? You mean attack, do you not Comrade Captain?” The General asked, arching his eyebrows. “Our satellites picked up the bloom of a violent explosion. The Ozempic Tsar was carrying no explosive cargo. Inert cargo ships do not just explode in the middle of the Bering Strait.”
“Yes comrade General,” Udicz replied carefully. “Perhaps it hit another ship, or an iceberg?”

“A high explosive iceberg?” the General asked.

“There is a commercial fishing vessel within ten clicks of the site of the attack Comrade General,” Udicz said, ignoring the jibe. “They will be the first people on the scene. The Navy has directed them to search for wreckage.”

Lukin fixed his gaze on Udicz. “Let us assume the Ozempic Tsar was not destroyed by a collision with a highly explosive iceberg. Let us speculate Captain, about other causes,” Lukin invited. “Military causes.”

Udicz felt like he was being invited to step into a trap of some sort, but couldn’t see what kind, yet. “If I should speculate about a military cause Comrade General, I would speculate that such a catastrophic loss could only be caused by one or more long range anti-ship missiles such as the US fields on any one of their several destroyers currently deployed in the Strait.”

Udicz was probably the only officer in the meeting who had actually seen one of the deadly PIKE missiles up close and in action. Two years ago he’d been part of an official Russian delegation observing a NATO fleet combat exercise. Not as a friendly gesture from the Americans of course, but because for any such exercise involving three or more nations bordering the Russian Federation it was a treaty obligation. He still remembered the chill he felt, standing on the bridge of the American stealth missile cruiser the USS Zumwalt, watching as a US submersible fast attack drone (S-FAD) reared up out of the sea beside them, popped its hatches and loosed a volley of 4 of the deadly anti-ship missiles in less than a minute, before sliding beneath the waves again. Forget the missiles though. It wasn’t the sight of the small grey green stealth catamaran appearing from nowhere and firing missiles over the horizon that had made him shiver, it had been the thought that the machine could be launched below the waterline of the very cruiser he was standing on, and then pilot itself under the surface through the Kattegat Strait, down the Gulf of Finland and park itself invisibly on the mud riverbed alongside the Cruise Ship terminal in St Petersburg, ready at any time to detonate a nuclear warhead in the heart of the city.

Of course they had deployed detection systems in the river now, and for the Americans to even attempt to do so as a test or exercise would be regarded as an act of war, but Udicz had to wonder if they had got their countermeasures in place in time. What was to say there wasn’t already an American S-FAD snuggled under a pier in the old imperial capital, covered in silt and just waiting to unleash armageddon on command.

“Difficult to confirm though, I imagine,” the General mused. “Such an isolated body of water, and not even a crew member as a witness.”

“The American PIKE is a surface to surface stealth missile. Our satellites, even infrared, would not have picked up the launch. But the Navy may be able to recover sensor data from the ship’s black box, assuming it is still reporting via the buoy,” Udicz said. “That might provide visual or even audio evidence of a missile strike. The staggered-pulse engines of the US PIKE missile have a very distinctive acoustic signature.”

“Not very definitive evidence though,” the General grumbled. “Readily deniable. Video and audio files are so easily doctored.”

“I agree,” Udicz said. “But why? Why would the Americans do something so stupid? Unless it was an accident?”

“Accident,” Lukin said. “It strikes me you would have to be very determined to accidentally sink a ship the size of a small island.”
*
*


Carl Williams had only been an environmental science attache at the Moscow Embassy for three weeks. With 700 full time staff in the Russian Federation, 200 of which were based in Moscow, Carl was only one of several new staff who had moved into the Embassy compound on Bolshoy Deviatinsky within the last month, and he still had that newbie halo hanging over him.

He had met neither the Ambassador nor his nominal manager at the Embassy yet, and really hadn’t got much further than his orientation paperwork and some training in Embassy security protocols.

As an NSA analyst he would normally have an office in the Controlled Access Area or ‘Tophat’ of the Secure Chancery Facility or SCF, but Carl was an ‘undeclared’ officer attached to the Embassy’s Economic Affairs section and so instead of working in the SCF, he was still learning how to get from his accomodations to the commissary for breakfast and then down through the labyrinthine New Annexe basement tunnels to his desk monitoring Russian Federation Far East Military Command Traffic.

The traffic was of course encrypted, and couldn’t be broken in real time, even by the adaptive neural network natural language AIs he had at his disposal as an NSA analyst. No, his job instead was to look for patterns in the volume, origin and target of Russian Eastern Military District comms and try to tie them to complementary intel from either sigint or humint and see if they could confirm suspected meetings, military exercises, military equipment tests or even civil emergencies.

He had grown up as a kid on stories and films about the great cyptologists of history, like the men and women who broke the German Enigma codes using the world’s first electronic computers at Bletchley Park in the UK. Or the NSA cryptographers who helped avert World War Three by decrypting the Russian fleet signals during the Cuban Missile Crisis and were able to tell the Kennedy brothers that the Russian naval commanders had orders to sail only as far as the line of blockade, and no further.

They had worked in rooms of buzzing, clacking equipment, discs of tape whirling, coding machines spitting cards into a fug of cigarette smoke as they desperately worked to break enemy codes ahead of invasions, revolutions or Scud missile launches. Even the generation of code breakers he had been born into had grown up needing to be able to read computer code, looking for potential exploits in a soup of alphanumeric gibberish.

As Carl walked past the other attaches into his cubicle sized office in the LED lit basement corridor under Nevsky Prospect that had been coverted into a listening station he threw his sandwich on his desk, put his paper cup of coffee down next to it and glared almost resentfully at the tools of his trade. Instead of whirling reels of tape, he had a telephone headset. Instead of card readers spitting out index cards, he had a small laptop PC full of apps, including one which he could use to stream the latest shows. And instead of having to read and write code, he had HOLMES, the NSA AI system that was his own personal analytical assistant.

HOLMES was the name Carl had given the system – it was an acronym for Heuristic Ordinary Language Machine Exploratory System. Which sounded better than NLLS 1.5 or Natural Language Learning System 1.5. He had toyed with calling the system NELLIE, but that had an association with the Loch Ness monster he didn’t think was appropriate, because unlike the monster, HOLMES was not a mythological creature.

Carl sank onto his seat, pulled on his headset and logged in using his voice recognition code.

“Good morning Carl,” HOLMES said in his ears. “Did you sleep well?” In addition to a cool name he had also given the AI a plumb British male voice to match.

Carl wasn’t a morning person. He also wasn’t a person who bought into the whole idea of talking to HOLMES as though it was a person, even though it had sophisticated conversational capabilities.
“Cut the chat routine,” Carl said. “Sitrep, anomalous traffic, Section 42, all incidents since I logged off last night.”

He wasn’t expecting anything. HOLMES was supposed to send a text and email alert to him and the watch officer if it detected a major incident worthy of deeper analysis. It hadn’t, so anything that it had logged could only qualify as routine.
“The most noteworthy event last night was the apparent loss of a Russian flagged commercial freighter in the northern approaches to the Bering Strait at 0215 Pacific Standard Time.”

Carl’s immediate reaction was ‘so what’. Sure, terrible for the crew and everything, but civilian shipping disasters weren’t exactly his priority. “Loss? What do you mean loss?” Carl asked. “Contextualise.”

“The Ozempic Tsar was a 400,000 tonne fully autonomous cargo ship sailing from Arkengelsk in Russia to Hokkaido in Japan via the polar route when it issued a mayday on open maritime emergency frequencies to say it was taking water rapidly following an explosion in its engine room and cargo bays and was sinking. It then deployed an emergency locator beacon.”

Carl looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “Cargo?”

“The registers at Lloyds show that the primary cargo was 162,000 tonnes of processed lithium.”

“Value of the cargo?”

“Landed value one point nine six three billion US dollars.”

Carl put his coffee down so quickly it splashed out of the cup and over his empty desk. He didn’t notice. “Billion? Did you say nearly two billion?”

“Yes Carl. Do you want me to source more intel on the this incident?”

“Access all available intel, compile and report,” Carl replied. Two billion dollars? Someone had just lost real money. Either the owners, the buyers or the insurers. He picked up his coffee and sipped. How did it get so cold so fast? He should really get one of those absorb and release gel lined mugs. Those things could keep soup warm all day, they should be able to solve his cold coffee problem.

“Do you want a full or brief report?” HOLMES asked, coming back to him within about three minutes.

“Brief,” Carl said. “Very brief.”

“Open source and US Coast Guard intel indicates the Ozempic Tsar issued its first mayday call at 0210, issued two more between 0210 and 0214 and ceased mayday transmissions at 0215. A distress beacon was released and started transmitting the ship’s location at 0216 at which time the US Coast Guard logged it as a probable sinking, cause unknown.”

“Boring. Location?”

“The distress beacon transmitted the Ozempic Tsar’s location as latitude 65.74 longitude 169.69, which is five miles inside the Russian Federation Exclusive Economic Zone west of Big Diomede Island.”

“Their problem then,” Carl said. “Not even international waters. Any salvage operation initiated yet?”

“SATINT indicates there are a number of civilian and two Russian naval vessels at the scene.”

Carl perked up slightly. The Russian Pacific fleet base at Vladivostok could be expected to direct maybe one vessel to the check out an incident involving an autonomous ship with no human life at risk; to investigate the area, recover the distress buoy and download the black box data. But two showed a higher than normal level of interest.

“Associated military communications activity,” he said. “Three degrees of separation.” He was asking in shorthand for HOLMES to look at intelligence reports from around the time of the incident, including first hand, second hand and even third hand source reporting. It was about as broad a search as he could ask for, a total fishing exercise.

“SIGINT analysis indicates a spike in Russian Pacific Fleet Command traffic 33 minutes before the incident and then for two hours following the incident, after which traffic returned to near normal levels except for comms to and from vessels in the area of the incident,” HOLMES replied. “Do you wish to deep dive or continue?”

Carl had been trained to follow his instincts. With AIs like HOLMES to do the actual analysis, instinct was the only competitive edge humans had over neural systems now. AIs were the masters of cold hard logic, but they sucked at Wild Arsed Guessing.
“Continue. Related air or land based military traffic analysis,” Carl replied.

“SatInt and Sigint indicate two Russian Federation Okhotnik Hunter UCAVs were sent to the scene of the incident, arriving over the wreck at 0225 and returning to their base in Vladivostok at 0245. Their flight plan is indicative of a dedicated reconnaissance mission rather than a standing combat air patrol.”

OK, this was starting to get interesting. Not a lot interesting, but a little. Ten minutes after the Russian freighter sinks, and two Russian drones are already on station right over the top of it, transmitting images? Pretty convenient they just happened to be in the area. Carl didn’t believe in coincidences like that.

“Wait, you said there was an uptick in Far East HQ comms traffic 33 minutes before the incident?”

“Yes.”

“Origin and target?”

“The origin of the transmission was Russian Pacific Fleet Command. The target is unknown.”

Carl sighed, “Deep dive. Other non routine Russian military traffic in the area of Bering Strait between the uptick in comms traffic at incident minus 33 minutes and incident time zero.”

“There was a non routine code burst on a Russian Federation military channel six minutes and twenty eight seconds before the incident. The origin of the code burst was 100 miles north of Saint Lawrence Island. No other non routine traffic reported.”

Damn, damn, damn. Something was really nagging at him. A ship explodes. Six minutes earlier, a burst of Russian military traffic from the middle of the Bering Strait. 33 minutes before that, an uptick in Russian Eastern Military District traffic. Wait.

“HOLMES, assume the transmission six minutes before the sinking was from a Russian Federation Naval vessel. Do we have any data on Russian naval vessels within missile range of the freighter at that time?” It was a long shot, but maybe one of a Russian missile test had gone haywire.

“Checking SatInt, SigInt, Humint. No Russian naval vessel within range within the communications window,” HOLMES said. “Do you wish me to expand the search to vessels of other navies?”

“What? Repeat, contextualize.”

“I have a 98.4% match on both a possible launch vessel and missile type,” HOLMES said. Carl could swear it sounded pleased with itself. “The time to target projected from the location of the comms burst at six minutes to the time of first mayday call from the Ozempic Tsar matches the profile of a US PIKE long range stealth anti-ship missile launched from the Finnish Scorpene class submarine FNS Vesikko.”

Carl snapped forward in his chair, “Say again? Expand!”

“Sigint indicates the FNS Vesikko sent a message to Finnish Fleet Command at Heikkila, Finland, one hour before the incident, reporting its position, bearing and speed. The FNS Vesikko is a refurbished French Scorpene class submarine equipped with the US PIKE long range stealth anti-ship missile. My analysis shows that if the Vesikko had maintained its stated bearing and speed, its estimated position would correlate with the location of the anamalous comms transmission 100 miles north of Saint Lawrence Island. A PIKE missile fired by the FNS Vesikko at this position would have taken six minutes and eighteen seconds to reach the Ozempic Tsar, which correlates with the timing of the anomalous radio transmission. The triangulation of these three data points gives a 98.4 certainty that if the Ozempic Tsar was destroyed by a naval vessel, it was a PIKE missile fired by the FNS Vesikko. Putting an image onscreen for you now.”



Carl could feel he was starting to sweat. He wasn’t a small man - in fact he was carrying about fifty pounds more than he probably should be, but it would usually take a lot more than just sitting in his chair in the cold corridor under the Embassy compound to make him break out in a sweat. This sweat wasn’t exertion, it was fear.

“Would a what you call it missile…”

“AGM-158C PIKE.”

“Yeah. Would one of them be enough to take down a 400,000 tonne freighter?”

“If it successfully struck the ship’s hydrogen storage or fuel cells, one such missile would be sufficient. Standard military doctrine would dictate two are fired to secure target destruction.”

Carl whistled, “A double tap. Just to be sure.”

“Please repeat. Was that a question or comment?”

“Neither. Please tell me there were no US naval vessels, capable of firing a PIKE missile, inside that kill zone at the time of the incident.”

There was a slight pause, then HOLMES responded, “The nearest long range cruise missile capable US vessel was the subsea drone USS Venice Beach, which was on station 290 miles south-southeast at the time.”

“Inside missile range?”

“300 nautical miles,” HOLMES said. “The USS Venice Beach could also have engaged the Ozempic Tsar with its missiles at that range but it would have had to fire thirty minutes earlier. I am unable to locate any US PACFLT traffic to or from the USS Venice Beach at that time.”

“But it is around the time of the Far East Fleet comms burst. They might have been reporting on a suspected US missile launch. Dammit, this is ugly. HOLMES, deep dive Navy C3I logs and check whether the Venice Beach fired a PIKE missile in the last 24 hours. Check whether any US Navy vessel in the Northern Pacific has fired any sort of weapon at all. Check for any intel indicating that Russia has the capability to hack a US naval vessel and order it to fire one of its missiles. I want you to run three scenarios: one, the Finnish submarine sank the Russian Freighter. Two, the USS Venice Beach sank the freighter. Three, an unknown Russian vessel, aircraft or land based missile battery sank it. Summarise potential supporting data and assign probabilities then send the report to my laptop with a copy to the Senior Defense Attache and NSA.”

“Will do Carl. What should I title the report?”

Carl thought about it, “Heading: Battle of Bering Strait. Subhead: Who killed the Ozempic Tsar?”

“Yes Carl. Compiling.”

Carl waited. He drew a dot on a page and wrote OzTsar next to it, then a ring and FNS Vesikko at six minutes eighteen seconds. Further out at thirty minutes, USS Venice Beach. It was the time correlation between the position of the Finnish sub, the flight time of a PIKE missile, and the timing of that comms burst from the middle of the Bering Strait that bugged him the most.

“HOLMES, do you believe in coincidence?”

“I do not indulge in beliefs, Carl.”

“Point taken. HOLMES, book me some serious bandwidth. Something stinks here.”
*
*
(C) 2018 Fred 'Heinkill' Williams - to be continued