The Silent Man

America, the Atlantic covered more than forty million square miles. Even if the satellites photographed it in one- square-mile chunks, they would need forty million images to cover it.

To work around the problem, two dozen software engineers spent a long night at Fort Meade writing code. By morning, they’d created an application that turned the agency’s face-recognition software into a crude boat- recognition program. The software couldn’t find the Juno. But it could rule out in real time ninety-five percent of the boats spotted by the satellites as too big, too small, or the wrong shape.

The other five percent were classified as possibles and photographed again at one-meter resolution. Those images were then reviewed by the NSA’s analysts, who eliminated any ship that appeared significantly different from the original photographs of the Juno, on the theory that the Juno could not have had time to undergo major structural work since leaving Hamburg.

The analysts were able to rule out another ninety percent of the boats that had gotten through the first pass. Even so, not every satellite shot was definitive. Many of the ships had gray hulls and decks that didn’t stand out against the dark water of the Atlantic. They could only be ruled in or out after being seen and photographed at sea level, by helicopters, drones, or naval aircraft. Their names and locations were passed to the navy for a final inspection.

AT LANGLEY, Exley and Shafer tracked the search in the annex of the operations center in the basement of New Headquarters Building. The annex and the entire center were classified as Blue Zones, restricted to employees with Top Secret/SCI/NO FORN clearances. Originally, contractors had been excluded, too, but after the operations center went dark twice in six months, the agency gave in and hired a team from Lockheed to fix the electronics that supported it.

The annex was a high-ceilinged room, about thirty feet square, with concrete floors and a distractingly loud ventilation system. On two walls, oversized monitors projected digital maps of the Atlantic, cut up into 400,000 patches of ten square miles each. The maps divided the ocean into three colors. Green represented areas that had been searched and cleared. Red stood for areas where suspect ships had been found and needed to be checked. And yellow symbolized areas that hadn’t yet been searched. An unfortunate choice. When the hunt for the Juno started, the Atlantic appeared to be filled with urine.

As hours and then days passed, patches of green appeared on the maps, spreading out from the East Coast along the major shipping routes like a shipborne virus. Tiny blips of red appeared, then vanished. A third monitor contained the names and photographs of suspect ships. As suspect boats were cleared, they disappeared from the screen, replaced with new targets.

On the second morning, the satellites picked up a boat off the coast of Nicaragua that looked to be almost a perfect match. But when a helicopter buzzed it, it turned out to be a freighter that had been built by the same Korean shipyard as the Juno.

By then, Exley was thoroughly sick of staring at the monitors.

“Ellis. We’re useless here. Let’s find something else to do.”

“Last week you were ready to quit,” Shafer said. “Now you’re looking for work.”

“This is it. One last job and then I’m done.”

“If you say so.”

“I told my kids and I’m keeping my word. I’m serious.” But was she? If an interrogator had shot her full of sodium thiopental at that moment, she didn’t know what she would have said.

“Uh-huh,” Shafer said. “Meanwhile, let’s go figure out where Bernard Kygeli gets his money. If anything happens here, they can call us.”

NO ONE HAD OFFICIALLY told Henry Williams that his career was over. But he knew, as surely as if the secretary of the navy had sent him a card congratulating him for thirty years of able service and welcoming him to retirement. He imagined the card would have a golfer on the cover and say something like “You’ve Knocked the Ball out of the Park — Now It’s Time to Hit That Hole in One” in big block letters that his middle-aged eyes would have no problem reading. Like he was a lawyer who’d spent his career behind a desk instead of a man who’d given up his marriage and everything else on land for a life at sea. Instead of a destroyer captain, for Pete’s sake.

But the navy didn’t tolerate failure. And Williams had failed the summer before. Just outside Shanghai, his ship, the USS Decatur, had rammed a fishing trawler filled with Chinese college students. The ramming had killed twenty-two Chinese and pushed the United States and China to the brink of war. In retaliation, a Chinese submarine had torpedoed the Decatur, killing seventeen of Williams’s sailors.

An internal inquiry by the navy found that Williams had committed no wrongdoing in either incident. But Williams knew he would never escape the stigma of what had happened. During the months the Decatur was in dry dock, Williams had been persona non grata at the meetings in Honolulu and Annapolis, where senior officers discussed the future of the service. After the Decatur was recommissioned, it had lost its place in the Ronald Reagan carrier battle group and been shipped back to the East Coast to do laps in the Atlantic. And his superior officers no longer asked him what vessel he hoped to command next. No, his hopes to move further up the ranks, to earn an admiral’s gold braids, had ended in the East China Sea. In two months, when the Decatur was done with this tour, he’d retire. Honorably, with a full pension.

He had no idea what he’d do next. The Decatur’s namesake, Stephen Decatur, had gone out with his spurs on, dying in a duel in 1820—a story Williams loved telling. But duels were no longer politically correct. Williams supposed he’d wind up going home to Dallas, burning his afternoons playing golf. Or maybe he’d start consulting with some defense contractor. Either way he’d secretly be hoping for a quick heart attack.

Was Williams bitter about what had happened? His commanding officers had put him in a damn-near- impossible position, then punished him for failing to find a way out of it. In return for a career of loyal service, he’d been ditched like a rusted-out propeller. Though he could see the other side, too. The navy had plenty of commanders with spotless records. It didn’t have to take a chance by promoting one with a blemish as big as his. And pissing off the Chinese wasn’t in anyone’s interest. Especially since America and China were both pretending that the festivities the previous summer had never happened.

In the meantime, Williams still ran the Decatur, and he wasn’t coasting into retirement. He’d always run a clean ship. Now he was pushing his officers and crew harder than ever. He knew his sailors weren’t happy, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t asking for anything beyond the navy’s own regulations. He simply wanted them followed, to the letter. And if regulations said that officers weren’t to eat until the captain arrived at meals, or that sailors were forbidden to keep pornography even in their own personal footlockers, well, rules were rules. What are they gonna do, fire me?

So, yeah, he was bitter. He didn’t think anyone could blame him.

THE ORDERS CAME near midnight local time, as they were about to cross the equator on a hot dry night in the central Atlantic, slightly closer to West Africa than Brazil. The Decatur was to move east and north, off the coast of Sierra Leone and Liberia, just outside the sea lanes that ran between Europe and West Africa.

There, Williams and his crew would watch for a freighter that had gone missing on a run from Hamburg to Lagos. Somebody thought this ship, the Juno, was carrying more than a couple tablespoons of capital-S, capital-N, capital-M Special Nuclear Material. The whole Atlantic Fleet was looking for it, as well as every satellite the NSA had.

As soon as the orders arrived, Williams lightened up some, took his foot off the crew’s collective neck. Didn’t take a head-shrinker to figure out why. For the first time since Shanghai, the Decatur had a mission. The navy still trusted him a little. And so Williams ordered the Decatur ’s four massive gas turbines to full throttle and turned his ship east at twenty-five knots. By noon the next day, they reached their new position, the sun fierce overhead, the sea quiet, not even the hint of a breeze. Except during hurricane season, weather hardly existed in this part of the Atlantic. Fall and winter and spring were the same, an