Brodie nodded thoughtfully, apparently appreciating Ryan’s and Kristen’s comments. He glanced at his XO as he stood. They said nothing; not so much as a whisper passed between them, but apparently whatever communication was necessary between them was accomplished by this silent exchange. As soon as Brodie exited the wardroom, Graves settled the matter for him. “Lieutenant, you’re back in sonar,” he said simply, accepting no discussion. He glanced at Ski, throwing him a bone. “I’ll see what I can do about getting you some help back there, Ski. The rest of you might have to kick in an extra hour or two in engineering to cover for Kristen while she’s working in the shack.”
Chapter Eleven
Tristan Ellis had been with the IMINT section of the NRO for just under a year, having joined the NRO after leaving the military where he’d been an intelligence officer in the Air Force’s Satellite Imagery analysis department. During his time in the military and now as a civilian “spook,” he’d learned just what satellite surveillance could and couldn’t do, and he was a firm believer that the imagery the American fleet of surveillance satellites collected provided the greatest wealth of intelligence on what his nation’s potential enemies might be up to.
Ever since the crisis in Korea had started, Tristan and the entire staff at the NRO had burned the midnight oil trying to provide the kind of significant information the theater commander needed to properly respond to the growing threat. But, in the last two weeks, the focus had slowly moved from the Korean Peninsula and back toward the rest of the globe. The DPRK was still a threat, but recent negotiations led by the Russian Federation had helped alleviate the crisis somewhat. Now the American government was concerned that they had overlooked something.
Tristan was seated at an analysis bench, complete with microscope and imagery equipment as he studied the latest download from a KH-11 Ikon surveillance pass over the Persian Gulf. It hadn’t escaped the NRO’s notice that the Russians had transferred a significant quantity of military equipment to the Islamic Republic, but this in and of itself wasn’t necessarily significant since the Russians had been selling off vast stockpiles of equipment for years. Most of it was outdated and had ended up in countries like Iraq, Syria, the DPRK and other potential enemies.
Satellite imagery analysis was, from Tristan’s perspective, mostly about bean counting. Images might show a train loaded with armored personnel carriers going from point A to point B, and his job was to simply identify and count the types of vehicles and let others determine the reason for the move. Of course, he could often detect certain patterns for himself and had noticed a growing amount of heavy equipment in and around the Iranian port of Bandar-e-Abbas.
Troops, tanks, APC’s, trucks and other military equipment were steadily pouring into the city, and part of his job was to count it. After days of this, he’d become quite familiar with the — as of yet — unexplained buildup of Iranian forces in and around the city. But, once again, as he’d done for the last two weeks, he carefully examined the latest imagery looking for anything new or unexpected.
He was looking over several images of the harbor where cargo ships of all shapes and sizes were docked or anchored and was about to advance yet another frame when his practiced eye noticed something that looked… uncomfortably interesting. He magnified the image of a train car positioned alongside a small coastal freighter. He noted the armed men in military fatigues around the train and on the ship, but ignored them as he looked at the unusual shape positioned on a train car. The cargo on the other flat cars was concealed under large tarpaulins to prevent aerial observation, but the car’s tarp had been removed prior to the cargo being loaded onto the ship.
He adjusted the magnification and played with the resolution a bit to clear up the image. As he did, and the image became clearer, he felt a sickening feeling low in his abdomen. He raised his head from the eye pieces, and thought for a few seconds, trying to determine what else the unusual shape might possibly be. But nothing came to mind. He turned to his computer and brought up his imagery database where millions of pictures of every conceivable piece of military and civilian hardware was carefully catalogued. In less than three minutes, he found what he believed was a match for the image.
“Holy shit.”
“What is it, Tristan?” Aaron Connelly, a fellow analyst, seated at the adjacent workstation asked curiously.
Tristan motioned toward his station. “You tell me.” Tristan surrendered his seat and Aaron slipped into it before looking through the eyepieces. He took a few seconds to adjust the image to suit him and then, after a good thirty seconds, looked up. From the look on his face, he had come to the same conclusion. “That’s too big to be a torpedo shipping crate.”
“The shipping crate is forty feet if it’s an inch,” Tristan agreed.
“That’s too big for an anti-ship missile,” Aaron added thoughtfully. He glanced back down and then again looked at Tristan. “It’s not a cruise missile.”
Tristan tapped his computer screen. “It’s a Bulova shipping container.”
Tristan saw the look of shock on Aaron’s face as he again studied the image. The Bulova series of ballistic missiles were the most advanced submarine-launched missiles in the Russian arsenal. “Even the Russians wouldn’t sell those.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Tristan agreed. “But if not, what the hell is a trainload of them doing in Bandar-e-Abbas?”
Within an hour, it was the same question everyone in Washington was asking one another.
Chapter Twelve
Kristen hadn’t gotten three straight hours of sleep since the Seawolf left Japan. The high-speed run to the Singapore Straits and then into the Indian Ocean had taken almost a full week. From there they’d continued on, racing through the depths toward the patrol area off the Maldives to the south of India.
The combination of mounting stress and unrelenting battle drills piled on to the normal grueling work routine was pushing the entire crew to the breaking point. But for Kristen, there was something else. She couldn’t shake the sensation of being a pawn on a global chessboard, and she didn’t like the feeling. Nothing in any of the intelligence briefings had given her reason to suspect a motive for why the Koreans and possibly the Russians might be willing to risk war with the United States. There was nothing to indicate just what the Russians were planning, and this puzzle, this riddle with no readily available solution, was causing her to spend hours racking her brain in search of the answer.
She was normally obsessive and at times single minded when in pursuit of a goal. These traits had served her well in the past, but were now plaguing her sleepless hours as she tried to apply sheer reason to the enigma and find the solution. But no revelation was forthcoming. Making it worse was the growing fear that the answer was discernible if she hadn’t overlooked some apparently trivial, yet revealing, snippet of information in the hours of intelligence briefings they’d all received almost daily as they made their run from Sasebo. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she had the most uncomfortable feeling — growing stronger each day — that she was overlooking something.