58 Minutes by Walter Wager

Author:Walter Wager [Wager, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, ebook
Publisher: Graymalkin Media
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

23

THIS WASN'T the worst job in the Soviet Navy, Grilov thought. But it was probably one of the dreariest.

His ears hurt from the headset, his stomach was queasy and he missed his wife back in Leningrad. For two and a half months, the eleven-hundred-ton fishing trawler had been slowly circling a point eighty miles northeast of New London, Connecticut.

Around and around at six knots.

Through choppy seas and steadily deteriorating weather.

Going nowhere.

This trawler wasn't here to fish, and a lot of people in the U.S. Navy knew it. With all the antennas and other electronic gear that adorned the deck and masts, it was obvious that the vessel was one of the scores of "spy trawlers" that the U.S.S.R. operated around the world. Smaller than the other intelligence gathering ships of the Okean, Lentra, Mayak, Primorye and Nicolai Zubor classes, the trawlers did their jobs.

Some of the fake fishing craft tracked NATO naval exercises. Others monitored radio traffic out of major U.S. and British bases or stalked the Western powers' submarines to record their sonar "prints" while studying their speed and tactics. New London was one of the home ports for the most heavily armed American undersea raiders, submersible battleships that could each throw enough nuclear-tipped rockets to kill a dozen cities.

Petty Officer Third Class Sergei Grilov was no missile expert. He wasn't one of the trawler's eighteen electronics warfare specialists either. He was a competent radio technician with a working knowledge of English. His job was to monitor—from four P.M. to midnight, six days a week—the frequencies used in this region by the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

Operating an efficient computer-controlled scanner like those that served the electronic eavesdropping unit at the embassy in Washington, Grilov systematically patrolled the airwaves and taped the American transmissions. The work was strictly routine, often boring.

The significance of the messages was not his responsibility. The trawler carried a team of cryptographers and analysts, all officers of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. Those GRU specialists decoded and evaluated the transmissions for daily reports radioed home. They were probably being recorded and deciphered by the Americans, Grilov told himself. He was right.

Most of the messages that Grilov's scanner detected did not deal with anything important. Aware that the trawlers were listening, the Americans were cautious. All the U.S. missile submarines and some aircraft operated under radio silence, receiving coded communications but barely replying. Messages were often squirted by ultrafast transmitters in five- or six-second bursts of garbled sounds.

Tonight there wasn't much radio traffic at all.

Another dull evening, Sergei Grilov thought wearily.

There were at least ninety more ahead before a replacement trawler arrived and he could start home. It was wiser to take it step by step. It was now 8:57, so his shift would end in three hours and thirteen minutes. That was easier to face than ninety days.

Then he heard the voice.

"Tomahawk to Hot Rod Four."

Staring at the dial, Grilov saw that he was tuned to this month's U.S. Air Force command frequency.

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