‘And the national defence position?’ asked Mrs Graham.
‘I have to agree with the Foreign Secretary,’ said the Defence Secretary. ‘Attempts by Russian submarines and surface warships to penetrate our inshore waters and by their nuclear bombers to penetrate our airspace are constant – at least weekly. Our interceptor fighters and submarine defences are rarely not on alert. The UK is not the only target in Western Europe, just the main one. As the Foreign Secretary said, the Cold War is back, and not by our choice, but by Moscow’s. The West is under covert attack, masquerading as provocations, at every level.’
‘And inside Russia?’ asked the Prime Minister.
‘Just as bad, if not worse,’ said the Foreign Office specialist in Eastern Europe. ‘The grip of the Kremlin on Russian life becomes ever harsher. The Russian media are now mostly slavish towards the Kremlin. Critical journalists are routinely assassinated by underworld hitmen. The lesson has been learned: do not even attempt to criticize the Kremlin. The price will not be your career but your life. Other targeted murders of critics outside Russia have taken place – as we know. We seem to have no recourse but to keep on accepting the aggressions – short of open war, and that is unthinkable.’
The gloomy conference broke up thirty minutes later. The ministers and principal civil servants filed out for lunch. Those at the back awaited their turn. At the door, Mrs Graham caught Sir Adrian’s eye and nodded towards the library. She joined him there a few minutes later.
‘I cannot stop for long,’ she said. ‘You have heard the assessment. Your first thoughts?’
‘They are quite right, of course. The prospects are very gloomy.’
‘And the last speaker? Is she right? There is nothing we can do?’
‘Nothing above the surface, Prime Minister. Though, if Russia sustained a truly catastrophic accident and the Kremlin was then quietly warned that, if the provocations stopped, so would the accidents, it might listen. But nothing can be out in the open. All governments have to save face.’
‘Please let me have your thoughts, Sir Adrian. On paper. Special delivery. Eyes only. Within a week. Do forgive me. I must go.’
And she was gone. Sir Adrian slipped away and drove home. He had an idea.
Sir Adrian was a man who preferred to research thoroughly before he opened his mouth or put pen to paper. He came from a calling in which, if the seniors got it wrong, the juniors could die. He had prowled the sources of information about gas pipelines, how they were created and how they operated. He concentrated on the International Institute for Strategic Studies, or IISS, and the Royal United Services Institute. He settled, out of the former, on Dr Bob Langley.
‘Russia is spending a savage amount of money and effort on TurkStream, and is going for broke. No one seems to be paying a blind bit of attention,’ said Dr Langley. ‘Which is odd, because it will affect the whole of Western Europe for decades.’
‘And TurkStream is …’
‘The biggest natural-gas pipeline the world has ever seen. They are at work now and the plan is to be finished in late 2020. Then our world will change, and not for the better.’
‘Tell me all you know about TurkStream, Doctor.’
‘Natural gas, also known as petroleum gas, is increasingly powering our industries, and this will increase yet more. Some comes from the Middle East by tanker as liquid petroleum gas, or LPG, but much now comes from Russia, flowing west through a series of pipelines. Germany has already become virtually dependent on Russian LPG, which explains why Berlin is now servile to Moscow. The pipelines run across Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Romania and Bulgaria. All are paid transit fees, and these fees play a significant part in their economies. TurkStream will replace them all. When the Russian LPG is really on stream, Europe will become gas-dependent on Russia and, effectively, her servant.’
‘And if we don’t buy it?’
‘Europe’s industrial product becomes uncompetitive in world markets. Which do you think will win? High principle or profits? TurkStream basically consists of two pipelines. Both come out of the heart of Russia and dive into the earth at Krasnodar, near the Black Sea coast, in western Russia. Blue Stream goes under the Black Sea to emerge in Turkey and heads for Ankara. That, plus reduced prices, is the buy-off for Turkey, which is why she and Russia are now firmly in bed together.
‘The second, much longer pipeline, South Stream, also runs under the Black Sea but emerges in western Turkey, near the Greek border. That is where the sea island will be built to accommodate the fleets of gas tankers serving Western Europe. Then the dependency will be complete.’
‘So the man in the Kremlin knows what he is doing?’
‘He knows exactly what he is doing,’ said Dr Langley. ‘First, military threat, married to relentless cyber-attacks, and then energy domination. A predecessor used the Red Army. For “red star”, read LPG.’
Bob Langley was in part a trained strategist; he was also a technician. He explained to the non-technical Sir Adrian that, although the under-sea excavators were as yet only halfway, liquid gas was flowing through them already. But to do that, it had to remain liquid, and not be re-vaporized.
To stay liquid, to stay under pressure as it flowed, it needed regular compressor stations approximately every fifty miles along the route. There were three types of these compressors, but they all did the same job.
‘How are they controlled?’
‘Well, by computer, of course. The master computers are in a facility outside Krasnodar on the Russian mainland. Way underground and miles under the Black Sea, the chain of compressor stations receive the flowing LPG, re-pressurize it and send it on its way to the next station, until it eventually emerges on the Turkish shore. To power themselves, they take a “bleed” of natural gas and use that as the energy source for their own needs. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say? Pays for itself, and far away in Siberia, the gas just keeps on flowing.’
Sir Adrian recalled the old saying: ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ Or, in this case, he who keeps the wheels of industry turning. In his bunker in the Kremlin, the Vozhd might preside over a rubbish economy in consumer-goods terms but, with one single weapon, he aimed one day to bend the European continent to his will.
The elderly knight now had enough information to compose and send his missive to the Prime Minister. He then spent two more days in technical research then, having heard back from her, motored north to Chandler’s Court. There, he would confer with Dr Hendricks.
Dear Prime Minister, my thoughts, as you requested.
The future of our part of this planet, Western Europe, and of our country depends not on security. That comes later because, first, we need to be able to afford it. Prosperity is the initial concern. People will fight if they are destined to perpetual poverty.
It was Germany’s pending bankruptcy in the thirties that drove Hitler to invade her neighbours. He needed their assets to head off the national bankruptcy caused by his spending spree. The people would have stopped worshipping him if they had gone back to the conditions of the starving twenties. Nothing much has changed.
Today, the key to prosperity is energy – cheap, constant energy and masses of it. We have tried to harness wind, water, sunshine – ingenious and fashionable, but a mere scratch on the surface of our needs.
Coal, black and brown, is over. Wooden pellets pollute. Ditto crude oil. The future is natural gas. There is enough under our planet’s crust for a century of heat, light and motive power. These create wealth, comfort and food. The people will be content. They will not fight.
We know where vast unmined deposits are to be found, and fresh ones are being discovered all the time. But Nature, being a perverse lady, has not placed them right below the great concentrations of people who need them.
There has recently been a huge natural gas discovery off the shore of Israel. (It extends into three other national sub-sea territories, but its principal ‘find’ belongs to Israel.) There is a problem.
Ov
er short distances, natural gas can be piped under its own pressure from source to consumer. Israel’s new field is fifty miles offshore. With a few booster stations, close enough. For longer transits, the gas must be liquefied and frozen into LPG – liquid petroleum gas. Then it can be shipped in this form, like any other tanker cargo. On arrival, it is re-vaporized to many thousand times the volume of the tanker. Then it can be piped and used as cheap, clean power throughout the country.
It would make a lot of sense for the UK to conclude with Israel a long-term, exclusive deal. They have the gas but no liquification plant. We have the funds and the technology to build one on a sea-platform offshore. It would be a win-win partnership, liberating us from decades-long dependence on possibly hostile states. But this paper is not about Israel. There are even bigger deposits deep inside Russia, but these are many miles away from the potential treasure-house of Western Europe.
To bring this gas ocean to market, Russia – in the form of its oil/gas monopoly Gazprom – must build one or two gigantic pipelines from her gas fields across Eastern Europe to convenient seaports whence the tankers can supply the western half of the continent.
Smaller pipelines have been mooted to cross Belarus and Poland, and also Ukraine, with tanker ports on the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria. But Russia has virtually invaded Ukraine, and relations are strained with Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, all of whom are in the European Union and worry about the Kremlin’s new aggressiveness. The new and final choice is Turkey – hence the ferocious wooing of that barely NATO country and her highly authoritarian President.
Russia has now pinned all her hopes of swamping Western Europe with her natural gas and thus becoming, through our energy dependency, our effective masters. They plan to do this via pipelines to Turkey. There are two under construction. They are called South Stream and Blue Stream.
The main problem is technical. Both, in order to reach Turkish territory from Russia, have to pass under hundreds of miles of the Black Sea. They are being excavated even as you read these lines.
The excavators are machines of bewildering complexity and, like all such machines nowadays, they are computer-controlled. Computers, as we know, can solve many problems, but they can also malfunction.
I remain, Prime Minister, your obedient servant, Adrian Weston.
At Chandler’s Court, Sir Adrian briefed Dr Hendricks. ‘It will be massively protected from interference,’ said the guru from GCHQ. ‘Even if we could get inside, what malware could we insert? What instructions could we give?’
‘I have been advised on that,’ said Sir Adrian. ‘A single trigger malfunction that would entail unfortunate consequences.’
An hour later, the two men were talking with a diffident boy at his computer bank in the operations room.
‘Luke, there is a master computer near a town called Krasnodar …’
A week later, far beneath the blue waters of the Black Sea, something happened in a reciprocating compressor in Blue Stream called K15. The ‘K’ was for the Russian word Kompressor. The desired and instructed pressure began to vary. It did not decrease. Just the reverse. It began to rise.
Three hundred miles away, at a computer centre in a low steel complex of buildings outside Krasnodar, deft fingers made a correction. It had no effect. The pressure inside a machine far under the Black Sea went on rising. In the computer centre, further and more urgent instructions were inserted. K15 refused to obey. A pressure indicator was rising towards a red line.
Inside K15, permissible tolerances were being approached. Seams strained, then rivets popped. Margins of tolerance had been built into the construction, but these were being exceeded. K15 was built like a gigantic car engine with pistons that rotated on a crankshaft. A crankshaft needs lubrication in the form of heavy oil. It began to fume. It ceased to lubricate.
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.