Cauldron

by Larry Bond

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The President paced to the window and stood staring out into the fading afternoon. “Then, when Pendleton or any other congressional son-of-a-bitch starts moaning about our support for Poland, I’ll be ready to fire back.”

  “That could be very risky, Mr. President,” Thurman warned. “Telling the American people that French or German agents murdered the North Star’s crew could rouse a fire storm of public fury — one we couldn’t control.”

  “You think we should just look the other way?”

  Thurman paused to relight his pipe, then nodded slowly. “There are precedents.”

  Huntington knew that was true. During the cold war, the Soviets had shot down several U.S. reconnaissance aircraft — some over the Sea of Japan, others closer to the Russian coast. And Israeli jets had turned a U.S. intelligence ship, the Liberty, into a flaming, bombed-out wreck during the 1967 Six-Day War. In each case, the United States had ruled out direct retaliation or even immediate public disclosure. At the time no one in power had wanted to provoke a crisis or escalate existing tensions.

  “After all, a quiet, unofficial approach to Paris with the information could…”

  The President turned his head. The cold, grim expression on his face choked Thurman off in midsentence. “First we find the evidence, Mr. Secretary. Then I will decide what we do with it.”

  He turned back to the window. More lights were coming on around Camp David as the day gave way to another long winter night.

  FEBRUARY 25 — COUNCIL OF NATIONS, PALAIS DE L’EUROPE, STRASBOURG, FRANCE

  Nicolas Desaix stood near the entrance to the old European Parliament’s debating chamber, watching government officials from half the continent mingle with one another, each surrounded by a gaggle of junior aides and translators. The vast hall was one great sea of gray — gray hair, gray suits, and dull, gray faces.

  What a gathering of apes in fancy dress, he thought sourly.

  The prospect of spending the next several days in close contact with these bumpkins from a dozen different countries was anything but pleasing. Nevertheless, it was the price he would have to pay to see his dreams for a Europe united under Franco-German influence take final shape. This conference was a necessary formality. The little nations must have their chance to babble and fume and fuss before they signed agreements already reached by their powerful patrons. International diplomacy was a game more of form than of substance.

  Well, so be it.

  Desaix donned a pleasant smile suited to the occasion and sauntered through the crowd, exchanging friendly words with those he knew and polite nods with those he didn’t. It was an exhausting charade. Delegates from Austria, Belgium, Croatia, and Hungary approached him one after the other, each seeking some special concession or sign of French favor. Each went away dazzled by his charm and completely empty-handed. Their Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian neighbors followed close behind, and received the same polite attention.

  He moved on, paying careful heed to several of the neutral observers attending the conference. Russia, Ukraine, and Denmark were all nations he had set his sights on. Bringing them into the emerging European Confederation would greatly increase its size and power. The new alliance would then run unchecked from the Atlantic to the Urals and beyond.

  Or almost unchecked, he reminded himself.

  There were still no representatives in Strasbourg from Warsaw, Prague, or Bratislava. Desaix pondered that irritably while swapping meaningless courtesies with one of the Russians. The Eastern Europeans were proving far more recalcitrant than he’d imagined possible. What else would it take to bring them to heel?

  “Minister!”

  Desaix glanced toward the voice, frowning as he recognized one of his own aides. He drew away to a quieter corner. “What is it, Girault?”

  The younger man handed him a wire service printout. “It’s the Americans, Minister. And the British. They’re going to keep shipping oil and gas to Gdansk. And they’re sending warships to escort each tanker from now on!”

  Desaix was stunned. “What? Impossible!”

  “The American Secretary of Defense made the announcement an hour ago.” Girault pointed to the crumpled piece of paper still clutched in his superior’s hands. “He called it Operation Safe Passage.”

  The Foreign Minister skimmed through the report, his jaw tightening as he realized that his aide was right. Against every expectation, the Americans and their British lapdogs were not abandoning their attempt to break the Russian oil embargo. If anything, they were upping the ante. Committing military forces to the Baltic was a clear signal that the two English-speaking countries planned to reinvolve themselves in Europe’s internal affairs.

  That spelled trouble. Trouble because the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks would be even more likely to spurn his latest diplomatic overtures. And trouble because a strengthened Anglo-American presence could only encourage the irresponsible elements already resisting Franco-German influence throughout Europe.

  He shoved the printout into his pocket and grabbed Girault by the arm. “Find Chancellor Schraeder and bring him to me. Immediately. Tell him we have important matters to discuss. In private.”

  The younger man nodded and hurried away into the milling crowd.

  Desaix watched him disappear and then swung away on his heel. His mind was already busy exploring ways to hurry this insufferable conference along. With luck, the Americans and British would soon see their paltry naval venture overshadowed by the power of a newly united Europe.

  FEBRUARY 26 — NATIONAL PHOTO INTERPRETATION CENTER, BUILDING 213, WASHINGTON NAVY YARD

  The National Photo Interpretation Center occupied a large, nondescript office building deep inside Washington’s Navy Yard. Managed by the CIA for the country’s other intelligence services, the NPIC’s several thousand specialists were responsible for analyzing the pictures obtained by America’s orbiting spy satellites. Every president since John F. Kennedy had relied on their skills and expert knowledge during times of crisis.

  This President was no different.

  Bill Reilly was the senior photo interpreter assigned to the center’s northern Europe section. He’d spent years analyzing satellite pictures covering the old Warsaw Pact’s major naval bases, airfields, and army installations all the way from the Baltic to the Kola Peninsula. So many years, in fact, that he often joked he could find his way around Murmansk better than he could around his own hometown — at least from two hundred miles straight up.

  His coworkers called him the KH Gnome. He stood just an inch or so over five feet tall, and even on a good day his short-sleeved shirts, wide ties, and brown or blue slacks looked like he’d slept in them. A surprisingly deep, 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 North Star explosion. Storing them on computer saved time and space. It also made them easier to enhance and call back.

  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 ph
otos 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.

  MARCH 2 — U.S. EMBASSY, BERLIN

  “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 nobody, saw that trawler. It sailed in that night without lights and it left that night without lights.

  “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 — WASHINGTON POST

  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

  MARCH 9 — HEADQUARTERS, 19TH PANZERGRENADIER BRIGADE, AHLEN, GERMANY

  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.

  He glanced at the officer standing beside him.

  “You wait and see, Willi. A Frenchman commanding German troops. It will be a disaster.” Lieutenant Colonel Otto Yorck shook his head. Only a little shorter than von Seelow, his bleached blond hair and faded blue eyes made him look more like a ski instructor than an army officer.

  Von Seelow smiled. As CO of the 191st, Yorck had a reputation for straight talk, even when it might be more politic to keep silent. He had also been a ready friend in the brigade’s hierarchy, one of the few fellow officers who didn’t seem to care about Willi’s eastern birth.

  Privately, of course, he shared Yorck’s feelings. Under the newly signed Articles of the European Confederation, the French and German armed forces were being joined at the hip, blended together to form a new multinational army. This new EurCon II Corps, for instance, would include not only the German 7th Panzer and 2nd Panzergrenadier divisions but also the French 5th Armored.

  Close military cooperation between the two former NATO allies was nothing new. In just one example, German and French airborne divisions had worked together during annual Colibri, or Hummingbird, exercises since 1963. One combined Franco-German army corps already exist
ed. Formed during the early 1990s, it had symbolized a “European” approach to security issues. As a military unit, though, the corps had never been much more than an experimental unit.

  What was happening now, though, was a very different and vastly more complex process. The two nations were trying to merge their military command, communications, intelligence, and logistics functions into a single seamless whole. And all in a matter of months. The language barrier alone was formidable, but there were also significant differences in operating procedures, even basic organizations. For example, at full wartime strength, the 7th Panzer Division could field more than three hundred Leopard 2 tanks, nearly two hundred Marder APCs, and seventeen thousand fighting men. Its closest French counterpart, the 5th Armored, was only a little over half that size.

  But this new drive for unity was going forward, even at breakneck speed. Moreover, it was a curious merging. Most of the corps and higher joint commands were being given to French officers, some newly promoted for their billets. Even the new II Corps, with its two German divisions, now had a French commander.

  There’d been a lot of grumbling against Schraeder and the rest of the German leadership. Many of the more conservative officers were complaining about being sold out by their own leadership. The idea of allying with the French, recent partners but longtime enemies, made Willi uneasy as well. The French certainly seemed to be well in charge.

  Willi winced inside. His father, Colonel Hans von Seelow, and his grandfather, the old general, were certainly spinning in their graves.

  The radio on his belt crackled. “Private Neumann to brigade. Helicopters in sight.” Even as he looked for Colonel Bremer and nodded, shouts rang out across the parade ground, “Stand auf!”