Cauldron

first light, so I’d like you to make sure everybody’s awake and ready to go by 0500.”

“You can count on me.” MacLeod grinned. “Sooner in, sooner out. And it’s certain that none of the boys will be sad to see the back of this place.”

The tanker’s mixed American, British, and Norwegian crew had been on this run once before. With the city under a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew to save energy, Gdansk’s nightlife could best be described as nonexistent. Not that it really mattered. No one aboard would have a spare moment to go skirt-chasing once North Star docked.

“Need anything else, Skipper?”

The captain shook his head. “Nope. Not right now.” He waved the other man back inside. “Get out of the cold, Charlie. And get some rest. You’ll need it.”

He raised the mug to his lips for another sip of hot coffee.

Four hundred feet forward, the limpet mine magnetically clipped below North Star’s waterline detonated, rupturing her hull. Salt water, superheated air, and burning shards of steel blew inward, ripping through one of the huge refrigerated LNG storage tanks.

Whump.

The tanker shuddered once, rocked from side to side as though she’d struck something below the surface.

Frank Calabrese’s eyes widened in surprise. “What the hell?” He grabbed the bridge railing. “Charlie, find out what’s happen…”

His last words were drowned out by blaring collision alarms.

Deep inside North Star’s wounded hull, liquid natural gas jetted out of the torn storage tank, pouring out under high pressure. As soon as it hit the warm, oxygen-rich air it began changing back to its natural state — boiling into a diffuse, highly flammable gas. Seconds later, the gas cloud touched a live electrical wire left dangling by the limpet mine blast.

The tanker exploded.

Calabrese, MacLeod, and the forty-seven other men aboard North Star died instantly — incinerated by an expanding ball of flame that lit the night sky for hundreds of miles around. They didn’t die alone.

Driven by enormous pressures and temperatures, a blast wave raced outward from the blinding pillar of fire shooting up through the lower atmosphere. It smashed into two oil tankers anchored close by and left them both sinking and ablaze — torn by 190-knot winds and flying debris. Sailors who had been on deck were either blown overboard or pulped against steel bulkheads and heavy machinery. Those trapped below drowned or burned to death.

Eight miles from North Star, the shock wave slammed into Gdansk with hurricane force, toppling trees all over the city. Windows facing the blast suddenly blew inward, sending shards of glass sleeting through homes and offices with deadly force. Those hit by the hail of flying glass, men, women, and children — anyone caught facing the wrong way at the wrong time — went down screaming, disfigured or dying. Still others burned to death in fires sparked by fallen electric power lines. Exposed to the full force of the shock wave, several old or poorly constructed buildings near the waterfront collapsed, crushing their inhabitants beneath tons of brick and broken concrete.

When the first deafening echoes faded, thousands of stunned Poles stumbled out of their damaged homes to stare in horror at the eerie, flickering orange glow on the northern horizon.

FEBRUARY 20 — NEAR GDANSK

Ross Huntington trudged grimly along the shore. His escort, a short, stocky man, wore the blue uniform jacket of the Polish Navy. Four stripes on his shoulder boards identified him as a komandor, a captain. They were accompanied by four soldiers in full battle gear and armed with AKM assault rifles. Blue shield and white anchor shoulder patches marked them as members of the elite 7th Coastal Defense Brigade. More soldiers from the same unit manned artillery pieces and antiaircraft guns scattered up and down the waterfront.

Thick black crude oil coated the sea and coastline for miles in all directions. Its sickly sweet smell hung over everything. Several miles offshore, flames and heavy smoke still billowed above one of the tankers set afire when North Star exploded. The other lay on its side closer in, sunk in shallow water and leaking oil from ruptured cargo holds. Smaller craft swarmed around the two wrecks — fighting fires or deploying floating booms in a desperate effort to contain the oil spill.

Oil and gas tankers that had survived the blast were anchored further out, barely visible through a thin gray haze of smoke and early morning fog. Warships surrounded them, steaming slowly back and forth on patrol around the anchorage. Helicopters prowled out to sea and along the coast.

Four-man teams moved slowly down the oil-smeared beach, kneeling from time to time to study pieces of unidentified debris scattered among the dead fish and dying seabirds. Surgical masks, gloves, and nylon protective suits gave them an unearthly, almost inhuman appearance.

Huntington stopped walking for a moment to watch them work. He glanced toward the Polish Navy captain waiting silently by his side. “What are they looking for? Evidence?”

The shorter man shook his head. “Remains, Mr. Huntington. Some parts of those who were killed are still being washed ashore.”

Huntington’s stomach knotted. He’d seen the preliminary numbers before flying out of Washington on this emergency fact-finding mission. The explosion had reached far beyond the harbor, flinging debris into the city itself. Forty-two men, women, and children were confirmed dead. Another sixty-one sailors were still missing and also presumed dead. Eyewitness accounts made it clear that no one aboard North Star or near it could possibly have survived the explosion. Somehow, though, those casualty figures had been unreal, comfortingly abstract. Seeing the soldiers and medical personnel combing this blackened beach for corpses made the disaster sickeningly real.

He looked away, staring out to sea. He’d fought hard to win approval for the oil and gas shipments to Gdansk. At the time, it had seemed the next logical move in the bloodless tit-for-tat trade war they were waging against the French and Germans. Now more than one hundred people were dead. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop feeling somehow responsible for their deaths.

He’d miscalculated. The men in Paris and Berlin were far more ruthless than he’d ever imagined.

Huntington turned back to face the Polish naval officer. “We still don’t have any hard evidence of sabotage?”

“No, sir.” The Pole shook his head in frustration. “And we’re not likely to find any, either. Not after a blast like that.”

Huntington nodded. Preliminary estimates were that the natural gas carried aboard North Star had exploded with a force equal to roughly sixteen thousand tons of TNT — nearly the punch packed by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All that was left of the LNG tanker were several million tiny metal fragments scattered far and wide across the Baltic seabed.

Still, it didn’t take a genius to imagine what must have happened. Or who was responsible.

Huntington shivered as the wind gusted, swirling loose sand into the air. Just to the east lay the Westerplatte, a headland guarding the harbor entrance. The promontory had already earned a grim place in the world’s history books. A German battleship, Schleswig-Holstein, had fired the first shots of World War II there — trying to bombard Gdansk’s small Polish garrison into submission. The war that followed had submerged the entire globe in blood and fire for six long years.

He looked out across the wreck-strewn sea, suddenly afraid that history was repeating itself.

FEBRUARY 21 — PARIS

Nicolas Desaix almost never watched television. This evening he was making an exception. He sat alone in his private office, transfixed by the images being broadcast from just off the Polish coast.

“No one knows what went wrong aboard this floating bomb, the SeaTrans North Star.