The younger man handed him a wire service printout. “It’s the Americans, Minister. And the British. They’re going to keep shipping oil and gas to Gdansk. And they’re sending warships to escort each tanker from now on!”
Desaix was stunned. “What? Impossible!”
“The American Secretary of Defense made the announcement an hour ago.” Girault pointed to the crumpled piece of paper still clutched in his superior’s hands. “He called it Operation Safe Passage.”
The Foreign Minister skimmed through the report, his jaw tightening as he realized that his aide was right. Against every expectation, the Americans and their British lapdogs were not abandoning their attempt to break the Russian oil embargo. If anything, they were upping the ante. Committing military forces to the Baltic was a clear signal that the two English-speaking countries planned to reinvolve themselves in Europe’s internal affairs.
That spelled trouble. Trouble because the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks would be even more likely to spurn his latest diplomatic overtures. And trouble because a strengthened Anglo-American presence could only encourage the irresponsible elements already resisting Franco-German influence throughout Europe.
He shoved the printout into his pocket and grabbed Girault by the arm. “Find Chancellor Schraeder and bring him to me. Immediately. Tell him we have important matters to discuss. In private.”
The younger man nodded and hurried away into the milling crowd.
Desaix watched him disappear and then swung away on his heel. His mind was already busy exploring ways to hurry this insufferable conference along. With luck, the Americans and British would soon see their paltry naval venture overshadowed by the power of a newly united Europe.
The National Photo Interpretation Center occupied a large, nondescript office building deep inside Washington’s Navy Yard. Managed by the CIA for the country’s other intelligence services, the NPIC’s several thousand specialists were responsible for analyzing the pictures obtained by America’s orbiting spy satellites. Every president since John F. Kennedy had relied on their skills and expert knowledge during times of crisis.
This President was no different.
Bill Reilly was the senior photo interpreter assigned to the center’s northern Europe section. He’d spent years analyzing satellite pictures covering the old Warsaw Pact’s major naval bases, airfields, and army installations all the way from the Baltic to the Kola Peninsula. So many years, in fact, that he often joked he could find his way around Murmansk better than he could around his own hometown — at least from two hundred miles straight up.
His coworkers called him the KH Gnome. He stood just an inch or so over five feet tall, and even on a good day his short-sleeved shirts, wide ties, and brown or blue slacks looked like he’d slept in them. A surprisingly deep, gravelly voice and tufts of white hair that stuck up despite his best efforts to comb them down only reinforced the nickname.
Now he sat hunched over the wide-screen computer monitor on his desk, studying pictures taken days earlier over Gdansk. The pictures, stored on high-capacity CD-ROM disks, were from a KH-11 satellite pass requested in the hours immediately following the North Star explosion. Storing them on computer saved time and space. It also made them easier to enhance and call back.
The pictures Reilly was scanning were thermal infrared images — images produced by the heat given off by different objects and surfaces. Thermal imaging was a capability only recently added to the KH-11 series satellites to allow night surveillance missions. In the Gnome’s expert view it was a redesign that had been long overdue. The bad guys never seemed to work in broad daylight.
“Hello.” His right hand suddenly stopped moving the mouse he was using to scroll through the series of computer-enhanced images. He’d gone over them once before, right after they’d been shot, downloaded off the MILSTAR network to the Mission Ground Site at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and then uploaded into his computer. But the first lesson in photo interpretation was that you usually only saw what you were looking for. And he’d been studying those first satellite photos to get a handle on the disaster’s size and scope — not its cause.
Even then he’d barely been able to make out anything interesting. The enormous heat “bloom” caused by fires aboard the sinking oil tankers had blotted out an equally enormous amount of detail.
These pictures were different. They’d been broken down, digitized, and “washed” pixel by pixel to produce cleaner, sharper images. More important still, he knew what he was supposed to be looking for this time. Anything odd. Anything that looked out of place near the Gdansk oil port holding area.
And that was exactly what he’d just found.
Reilly used the mouse to draw a quick, ragged circle around the object centered on his computer screen. Several seconds later, NPIC staffers were treated to a rare and startling sight — the KH Gnome sprinting down the corridor to his supervisor’s office in his stocking feet.
“You want me to do what?” Stuart Vance stared down at the artist’s sketch he’d just been handed. It showed what looked like a small, dilapidated fishing trawler from several different angles.
His boss, the CIA’s chief of station in Berlin, said it again, slower this time. “I want you to go looking for that trawler.”
“But why?” Vance saw the older man starting to glower and hastily rephrased his question. “I mean, why this particular trawler?”
“Because the director thinks there’s a good chance the people on board that boat were the ones who blew that LNG tanker to hell and gone.” The station chief held up his own copy of the sketch. “Apparently it showed up on a satellite photo taken right after the explosion.”
Vance chewed on his lower lip and then shrugged, still puzzled. “I guess I still don’t see what the big deal is. What’s so surprising about a fishing trawler steaming around the Baltic? There must be a thousand or so running around up there or out in the North Sea.”
“Maybe. But there are several very strange things about this one.” Berlin’s chief of station started holding up fingers. “First, Gdansk Bay is too polluted for fishing. Seems the old communist government never invested much in sewage treatment plants and the new guys don’t have the money to build them. Second, that boat was spotted way out of the normal channel. Right up against the coast in real shallow water. Pretty stupid if you’re just a law-abiding sailor on your way past Gdansk. But pretty smart if you’re trying to avoid radar detection by mixing in with the coastal clutter.”
He stopped and held up a third finger. “Third? Well, the third one’s the charm in this case. The Poles say nobody, and I mean nobody, saw that trawler. It sailed in that night without lights and it left that night without lights.
“Now, I don’t know what they taught you down at Yale Law School, Vance, but when I was learning how to add two and two to make four, that’s what we’d have called suspicious behavior.”
Vance reddened. The chief of station was a Harvard man and it showed. “Yeah, okay.” Then the tall, fair-haired CIA officer spread his hands helplessly. “But those photos were taken more than ten days ago. That trawler could be almost anywhere by now!”
“Right.” The older man grinned unsympathetically. “That’s why every junior intelligence officer from here to Oslo is going to be very busy for the next couple of weeks or so.”
He walked over to the map pinned on his office wall. “You, Mr. Vance, start at Heringsdorf.” He tapped a tiny dot near the Polish border. “And work your way west toward Kiel.