gravelly voice and tufts of white hair that stuck up despite his best efforts to comb them down only reinforced the nickname.
Now he sat hunched over the wide-screen computer monitor on his desk, studying pictures taken days earlier over Gdansk. The pictures, stored on high-capacity CD-ROM disks, were from a KH-11 satellite pass requested in the hours immediately following the
The pictures Reilly was scanning were thermal infrared images — images produced by the heat given off by different objects and surfaces. Thermal imaging was a capability only recently added to the KH-11 series satellites to allow night surveillance missions. In the Gnome’s expert view it was a redesign that had been long overdue. The bad guys never seemed to work in broad daylight.
“Hello.” His right hand suddenly stopped moving the mouse he was using to scroll through the series of computer-enhanced images. He’d gone over them once before, right after they’d been shot, downloaded off the MILSTAR network to the Mission Ground Site at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and then uploaded into his computer. But the first lesson in photo interpretation was that you usually only saw what you were looking for. And he’d been studying those first satellite photos to get a handle on the disaster’s size and scope — not its cause.
Even then he’d barely been able to make out anything interesting. The enormous heat “bloom” caused by fires aboard the sinking oil tankers had blotted out an equally enormous amount of detail.
These pictures were different. They’d been broken down, digitized, and “washed” pixel by pixel to produce cleaner, sharper images. More important still, he knew what he was supposed to be looking for this time. Anything odd. Anything that looked out of place near the Gdansk oil port holding area.
And that was exactly what he’d just found.
Reilly used the mouse to draw a quick, ragged circle around the object centered on his computer screen. Several seconds later, NPIC staffers were treated to a rare and startling sight — the KH Gnome sprinting down the corridor to his supervisor’s office in his stocking feet.
“You want me to do what?” Stuart Vance stared down at the artist’s sketch he’d just been handed. It showed what looked like a small, dilapidated fishing trawler from several different angles.
His boss, the CIA’s chief of station in Berlin, said it again, slower this time. “I want you to go looking for that trawler.”
“But why?” Vance saw the older man starting to glower and hastily rephrased his question. “I mean, why this particular trawler?”
“Because the director thinks there’s a good chance the people on board that boat were the ones who blew that LNG tanker to hell and gone.” The station chief held up his own copy of the sketch. “Apparently it showed up on a satellite photo taken right after the explosion.”
Vance chewed on his lower lip and then shrugged, still puzzled. “I guess I still don’t see what the big deal is. What’s so surprising about a fishing trawler steaming around the Baltic? There must be a thousand or so running around up there or out in the North Sea.”
“Maybe. But there are several very strange things about this one.” Berlin’s chief of station started holding up fingers. “First, Gdansk Bay is too polluted for fishing. Seems the old communist government never invested much in sewage treatment plants and the new guys don’t have the money to build them. Second, that boat was spotted way out of the normal channel. Right up against the coast in real shallow water. Pretty stupid if you’re just a law-abiding sailor on your way past Gdansk. But pretty smart if you’re trying to avoid radar detection by mixing in with the coastal clutter.”
He stopped and held up a third finger. “Third? Well, the third one’s the charm in this case. The Poles say nobody, and I mean
“Now, I don’t know what they taught you down at Yale Law School, Vance, but when I was learning how to add two and two to make four, that’s what we’d have called suspicious behavior.”
Vance reddened. The chief of station was a Harvard man and it showed. “Yeah, okay.” Then the tall, fair- haired CIA officer spread his hands helplessly. “But those photos were taken more than ten days ago. That trawler could be almost anywhere by now!”
“Right.” The older man grinned unsympathetically. “That’s why every junior intelligence officer from here to Oslo is going to be very busy for the next couple of weeks or so.”
He walked over to the map pinned on his office wall. “You, Mr. Vance, start at Heringsdorf.” He tapped a tiny dot near the Polish border. “And work your way west toward Kiel.
“I want you to visit every town that’s got so much as a single rotting wharf. Talk to the locals. Find out if any strangers bought or leased a boat like that recently. And if they did, see if you can dig up who they were or claimed to be.” The chief of station showed his teeth again. “Technology can only take us so far, fella. Now we’re down to pure, slogging legwork. In this case, using your legs.”
Great, Vance thought gloomily, join the CIA and get to see a dozen stinking German fishing villages. He folded the sketch in half and left, inwardly fuming at an assignment that seemed certain to be tedious, demeaning, and futile. He passed other young officers waiting outside the station chief’s office for their own orders.
The lambs were going forth to stalk lions.
MARCH 4 —
STRASBOURG, FRANCE
— European foreign ministers meeting here stunned the world today by signing a series of sweeping agreements designed to produce a new, continent-wide alliance — the European Confederation. If ratified by the respective national governments, these treaties would establish a common currency, a single, multinational army, closer links between national police forces and judicial systems, and unified trade and foreign policies.
As a first step, France and Germany announced their own plans to fully integrate their armed forces, intelligence services, and police units. Other nations joining the confederation are expected to follow suit in the coming weeks.…
CHAPTER 12
Threat Warning
The first unmistakable signs of the new European order were already reaching Germany’s armed forces — right on the heels of a fast-moving rainstorm.
A cool, damp breeze ruffled Lieutenant Colonel Willi von Seelow’s uniform coat as he stood waiting near the headquarters helipad. The brigade staff, a little knot of officers and senior noncoms, stood at ease around him, chatting softly as though worried that they might be overheard by their august visitor even before his arrival.
He shifted his weight, frowning slightly as he felt the ground give under his feet.
The brigade’s parade ground stretched for several hundred meters to either side, still a little muddy from yesterday’s rains. More mud-filled ruts had been “plowed” by the 191st Panzergrenadier Battalion’s tracked armored vehicles. Forty-two Marder APCs were lined up by companies and platoons, with two command tracks out front. Self-propelled 120mm mortars, trucks, and other “soft-skinned” vehicles were drawn up in neat rows behind them. Bundled against the cold and fitted with full combat gear, the battalion’s five hundred men and officers milled around their vehicles, waiting like the brigade staff.
Von Seelow was especially proud of the 191st. He’d served with the battalion as a company commander for several months after transferring over from the defunct East German Army. His old comrades had done well during the winter troubles. Despite being underpaid, outnumbered, and loathed by many of their fellow countrymen, they had kept the peace all winter long. Of course, several months spent enforcing the government’s martial law decrees had eroded their “conventional” combat skills, but at least these men were now battle-hardened. They had seen a few of their comrades die and many others injured. They were veterans.
