Secretary of Defense Mary O’Neil-Broerman leafed through her own briefing folder. “Can you give us a breakdown of casualties?”
“The Sawfish is a Marine Protector class patrol boat,” the general said. “Eighty-seven feet long, with a standard crew of ten. During boarding operations, they split into two groups of five. One group forms the boarding team, while the other group remains aboard the patrol boat, standing by with fifty caliber machine guns to provide cover. At this time, it seems likely that all five members of the boarding team were killed within seconds of the onset of hostilities. Two of the personnel aboard the Sawfish were killed during the subsequent rocket attack. Of the three survivors, one is in critical condition and another has relatively minor injuries.”
“So we’re talking nine out of ten,” SECDEF said. “Seven dead and two wounded. Basically, we got our butts handed to us.”
The general nodded. “I’m afraid so, Madam Secretary. Round one definitely goes to the hostiles.”
SECDEF raised an eyebrow. “Meaning that round two will go differently?”
The expression that crossed General Boosalis’s face was a bit too feral to qualify as a smile. “Yes, ma’am. That’s the idea, anyway.”
“We can talk about round two later,” Chaz said. “Right now, I want to know more about this mystery ship. Specifically, why is a rust-bucket freighter carrying a contingent of heavily-armed commandos? What sort of cargo requires that much protection?”
“We don’t know yet, Mr. President,” the general said. “But we’re coming up with some interesting leads.”
He thumbed the remote again, and the display screens were filled with a wireframe map of the world, with North and South America occupying the central axis. Another touch of the remote and a red dotted line appeared, beginning at the eastern edge of the Korean peninsula, jogging northeast past the Japanese islands, and then swooping southeast across the Pacific to a point below the southern tip of South America. From there, the dotted line swung north through the Atlantic, and then curved northwest into the Caribbean Sea.
General Boosalis lowered the remote. “This is an early reconstruction of the Aranella’s voyage track, pieced together by the National Maritime Intelligence Center. The ship departed Wonsan, North Korea on the fourteenth of January, with an undetermined cargo. As you can see, it followed a highly circuitous route, avoiding all established shipping lanes, all known operating areas for active naval forces, and the coastal patrol areas for every country along the way.”
National Security Advisor Frank Cerney tugged at his striped Princeton necktie. “They also went a hell of a long way to sidestep the Panama Canal.”
“That’s correct, sir,” the general said. “Detouring around the horn of South America added about eleven thousand miles to their voyage. At an average speed of eighteen knots, that works out to twenty-five additional sailing days, give or take a few.”
Chaz allowed his eyes to trace the red dotted line on the display. These people — whoever they were — had travelled more than three weeks out of their way to evade inspection by the Panama Canal Authority. Then they had massacred the first Coast Guard team to stumble into their path.
To Chaz, this was the most difficult part of any crisis. The earliest stages, where you knew that something of monumental importance was unfolding, but you didn’t have enough information to plan intelligent action — or even to understand what the hell you were up against.
He looked back to the general. “We have no idea what that ship is carrying?”
General Boosalis shook his head. “Not at this time, Mr. President. Plenty of speculation, but no actual indications.”
Chaz suppressed a sigh. “We’ve got dead service members and a U.S. vessel on the verge of sinking. For the moment, I’ll settle for wild-ass guesses.”
The general hesitated for several seconds, as if choosing his words carefully. “The, ah… leading theory would be weapons of mass destruction, sir.”
SECDEF flipped her folder shut. “Are we really going to jump straight to WMDs? At what point did that become our default assumption for everything?”
“It’s not exactly a default assumption,” the national security advisor said. “I’d call it an educated guess, based on analysis and extrapolation of what little information we have at this moment.”
The secretary of defense opened her mouth to speak, but Chaz gestured for the national security advisor to continue.
“If we assume that the cargo is illegal — which seems probable, given the extreme measures taken to protect it — then we only have so many possibilities. We can probably rule out drugs, because we’ve intercepted shipments of narcotics from North Korea in the past. When they get caught, they write off the cargo, deny everything, and let their couriers or smuggler crews rot in prison. What they don’t do is attack U.S. vessels, or murder our boarding teams, because they know we’ll be forced to take major action in response. By that same logic, we can rule out human trafficking, illegal currency or counterfeit smuggling, and conventional weapons smuggling. Again, we’ve got precedent on how the North Koreans react. They lawyer-up, count the cargo as a loss, and throw their people to the wolves.”
His fingers returned to fidget with his necktie, a seemingly unconscious habit. “The Panamanians actually caught a North Korean ship smuggling conventional missile hardware through the canal in 2014. The North Korean government paid about three-quarters of a million in fines and got the ship out of hock, while loudly denying everything in the press. No firefights. No secret commando squads. No rocket strikes against the inspection team. They just sat back and waited for the story to die down.”
“In other words,” Chaz said, “this has to be something in a completely different league. Something they would consider worth the risk of a U.S. military response.”
“That’s how we see it, sir,” said the national security advisor. “But I’d like to let General Boosalis get back to his briefing. He has a bit more bad news to deliver.”
Chaz turned back toward the far end of the table. “Okay. Let’s have it.”
The general lifted his remote and four more dotted course lines appeared on the screens, each one closely paralleling the projected movements of the Aranella until the overlapping tracks entered the Caribbean Sea south of Grenada. At that point, the tracks of the five ships diverged, each taking a different route through the Caribbean.
Except for the track of the Aranella, which ended at the ship’s current position southwest of Puerto Rico, the tracks continued on their individual courses until they reconverged at the southern end of Cuba.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” Chaz asked.
“I’m afraid so, sir,” the general said. “The National Maritime Intelligence Center believes that at least four other freighters have followed this same general route over the past several months. Departing Wonsan, North Korea with unknown cargoes and delivering them to the port of Santiago de Cuba. NMIC believes that the variations in routing through the Caribbean were intended to avoid repetitive patterns that might trigger our traffic analysis software.”
“Why are we just finding this out now?” SECDEF asked. “We should have been on top of this thing six months ago, when it first started.”
National Security Advisor Cerney released his necktie. “With all due respect, Madam Secretary, we don’t have the resources or the personnel to monitor the movements of every cargo vessel on the planet. We keep a close eye on the ones that approach our waters, but we can’t watch them all. And these particular ships have gone to a lot of trouble to avoid our usual areas of interest. If the last leg of their track didn’t pass through the Sector San Juan Security Zone, we would have never noticed the Aranella. As it is, we were lucky to catch one ship out of five.”