“Hmmmm,” said the Admiral. “I guess he thinks they may be prominent, or at least a couple of them may be. He wouldn’t ask us to identify a group of camel drovers, would he?”
George Morris studied the pictures for a moment and nodded. “Well, they’re good-quality shots, which means that Arnie didn’t take ’em himself. With something like a modern camera, he’d have an attention span of about five and a half seconds…Right. These would be the work of Harry. Remember the ones from the Admiral’s farewell party?”
“Yeah. Couldn’t forget ’em. There was one Jane said made me look like a bloody swag man, hair floppy, shirt out, holding a pint of Fosters, asking Mrs. Morgan for a dance.”
“Yes. I saw that one. And here’s four more guys who look like they didn’t want to be photographed. Again in very sharp focus. More dignified than you, of course, but very finely focused.”
They both chuckled. But Admiral Morris was not taking this lightly. “Okay, Jimmy,” he said. “Get these copied. Let’s have fifty sets. Then draft a note and we’ll send them through the regular mail to places we might get some feedback.”
“Like where?” said Lt. Comdr. Ramshawe.
“Well, we could start with our embassies in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, all the Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel. Then we’ll get the Pentagon to make some more copies and check out the commanding officers in all our Military and Naval Bases around the Middle East. We’ll get the FBI on the case, and the CIA. We’ll ask the Brits, MI5, MI6, Scotland Yard…”
“Christ, that’s a lot of trouble to go to, sir.”
“Happily we are assisted by a very large staff. I suggest we avoid putting anything on the networks. No Internet, no computers or E-mails, other than internal secure. The pictures are, after all, taken by a private citizen. And there is no suggestion of urgency. Arnold’s honeymoon was five months ago. It’s taken him that long to send them. But if the Big Man wants a check, we give him that check. As well as we can.”
“Okay, sir. I’ll take care of it right away.” And Jimmy Ramshawe retreated to his paper-strewn lair, muttering, “Some bloody private citizen. Takes a few holiday snaps, sticks ’em in the mail, and half the world goes into free fall.”
He picked his way through the piles of paper, and studied the photographs again in a thoroughly Ramshavian way…Well, they were taken on top of a volcano, but we can’t see it…We can only see the top of this cliff…a very high one…right on the shoreline of the Canary Islands…So the volcano must be behind the photographer…Wonder what it looks like…Suppose it’s dormant…They wouldn’t be standing around on top of it, not if the bastard was chucking molten lava all over the place…I didn’t even know they had volcanoes in the Canary Islands.
But he had no time for reveries. He called for someone to come and make copies and for someone else to draw up a list of all the U.S. Embassies in the Middle East. He buzzed U.S. Army Capt. Scott Wade down in the Military Intelligence Division and asked him how to circulate the pictures to the U.S. Middle East Bases. Then he summoned Lt. Jim Perry and asked him to put the whole thing into action.
He drafted the letter of request himself, E-mailed it to Jim, and told him to download, print, and distribute it, together with the pictures, as soon as they were ready tomorrow morning. Then he turned his attention to something he thought might really matter.
Fresh from the National Surveillance Office there was a satellite shot of a Russian-built Barracuda nuclear submarine making its way north through the Yellow Sea, presumably to the Chinese naval base at Huludao, because there’s not much else at the dead end of the Yellow Sea to interest anyone.
He also had a three-day-old picture of the Barracuda clearing the breakwater outside the base at Zhanjiang, headquarters of China’s Southern Fleet.
The satellite had taken two shots of the submarine, the second one about 25 miles out of the base, just before she dived. The next snapshots of that stretch of ocean showed absolutely nothing, and Jimmy had wondered where the hell the ship was going.
There was only one operational Barracuda in all the world, and the new photograph of the submarine cruising north on the surface meant this one in the Yellow Sea was the same that had cleared Zhanjiang four days ago.
He still did not know who owned it. The Russians had been evasive, claiming they had sold it to the Chinese, and the Chinese flatly refused to reveal anything about their submarine fleet to a Western power, even to the U.S.A. whose money they so coveted.
Thus, there were unlikely to be any definitive answers. Jimmy Ramshawe would write a brief report and keep a sharp eye on the photographs from northeast Asia, ready for the moment the Barracuda sailed south again heading for God knows where.
Again he pondered the mystery of the Barracuda. Why the hell’s the damn thing going to Huludao anyway…That’s their nuclear missile base, where they built their two oversized, primarily useless Xia-Class ICBM boats. Beats the shit out of me. The ole ’Cuda’s too small for an ICBM. Maybe the Russians are really selling her this time.
But then, they could just as easily have sold her in Zhanjiang. Why take her north for 2,500 miles? What’s in Huludao that the Barracuda might need…Maybe specialist engineering for her nuclear reactor…Maybe, and more likely, missiles. The Chinese make cruises up there…I don’t know…but I’d better watch out for her if she leaves port…
He scanned the photographs again, pulling up a close-up of Huludao and its docks and jetties. It was a busy place, full of merchant ships in a seaport geared to handle well over a million tons of cargo per year. The place was groaning with tankers and merchant freighters.
He tracked the activity at the Huludao base for the next two days, and was pleased with the NSO’s very clear photograph of the Barracuda arriving, and heading straight into a covered dock.
The next set of prints showed the unusual sight of a civilian freighter, with a longish flat cargo deck parked bang on the submarine jetties. Must be bringing in spare parts, he thought, not knowing that the Yongdo’s lethal illegal cargo had been unloaded in another covered dock, two hours before the satellite passed.
He fired in a request, purely routine, for the CIA to identify that ship, but did not have much luck. Langley said it was a pretty old vessel, probably Japanese Navy in origin, but converted like so many old warships in the Far East for civilian freight. They were uncertain of the owners, but guessed it was either still Japanese, if not, North Korean.
Probably bringing in a couple of fucking atom bombs for onward shipment to the Arabs, he thought, sardonically. Nothing serious. Only the end of the bloody world.
Another week went by without event. The Barracuda had not been seen since, and no one had been able to identify the Japanese-built freighter in the submarine yards at Huludao. And then something fascinating happened. The United States ambassador in Dubai, who had previously served in the embassy in Tehran, sent a note to say that he recognized two of the four men in Admiral Morgan’s photograph.
His Excellency Mark Vollmer, a career diplomat from Marble-head, Massachusetts, was absolutely certain. According to his note: During my tenure in Iran I was personally asked to process the visa applications from two extremely eminent professors from the Department of Earth Physics at the University of Tehran. One of them was Fatahi Mohammed Reza, the other was Hatami Jamshid, both natives of Tehran.