Read Online The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller by Andrew Britton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andrew Britton
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elevate him in their eyes.
The more he thought about it, the more surprised Parvin was to find himself growing excited about the next few hours. By the time they reached the coordinates, he was actually thrilled to be doing this, happy for the challenge and responsibility and whatever he might learn.
DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA
It had been a long day and a frustrating one.
The great strength of intelligence analysts is that they can easily come up with a multitude of explanations for all the data they have to process. The great weakness of intelligence analysts is agreeing on which of those evaluations is correct.
Lt. Jr. Grade Mark Mason had spent the entire day at his console, swapping information and interpretations with other analysts both inside the Naval Space Command and without. They had already collected radar and sonar records of all NATO shipping in the region to try and identify who did what, when, exactly where, and most important, why. There was no clear consensus because no one had a clue about what analysts refer to as the “big bang”: the object that set the events into motion.
What was known, Mason had told Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt, was that after passing along the western coast of the United Kingdom, an Iranian frigate in the Norwegian Sea had encountered an ice floe that had been charted by ENVISAT ASAR. The frigate paused in the vicinity for forty-eight minutes, then aborted what were apparently intended to be cold-water maneuvers. The frigate now appeared to be on a full-speed course home. Before departing the Norwegian Sea, however, it appeared as though a boat or aircraft departed the frigate. Satellite confirmation was vague because of fog; the nearest vessel, the Ohio-class submarine USS Henry M. Jackson , was in the North Sea as part of the Commander Undersea Surveillance fleet monitored at the Naval Ocean Processing Facilities in Virginia Beach. It was ordered to shadow the frigate out of sonar range, using satellite guidance. In the words of the commander, the Iranian military vessel seemed to be “making tracks” toward home.
It was also trailing radiation. The big question was whether the frigate had been sent to retrieve something; whether they had been testing something, such as a new weapon; whether the frigate was a front for a seagoing nuclear laboratory—something India and China had done before they produced their own bombs—or whether global warming had unearthed a vein of nuclear material the likes of which no one had ever seen. Dr. Dave Pearl, a physicist at DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects, suggested it could be a meteoroid that had landed anytime from the day before up to four billion years ago. Dr. Cyril Planke of the U.S. Geological Survey said that a plutonium-laden space rock was unlikely. Both men agreed that a half-life reading would be of inestimable value—which was precisely the information Mason did not possess.
After an initial encrypted communication that was still being decoded, the frigate had gone into complete radio silence. So there was no information to be gleaned there. Added to that was the administration’s deferential stance toward the Iranian theocracy: bent on diplomacy rather than confrontation, there was a strict hands-off policy toward any lawful operations on international waters. Mason could not imagine that Admiral Breen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would define an irradiated Iranian vessel as “lawful,” but that was a matter for the International Energy Agency to handle; by the time the bureaucracy had done even a fast-track study, the frigate would be back in the Persian Gulf.
The NSC had thick files with countless white papers containing “what if” scenarios, everything from a plausible event like a tsunami striking a U.S. naval base or a great white shark attacking a SEAL rescue mission to an unlikely event like Somali pirates commandeering an American nuclear submarine. Mason word-searched “plutonium” and “Arctic” from the
The more he thought about it, the more surprised Parvin was to find himself growing excited about the next few hours. By the time they reached the coordinates, he was actually thrilled to be doing this, happy for the challenge and responsibility and whatever he might learn.
DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA
It had been a long day and a frustrating one.
The great strength of intelligence analysts is that they can easily come up with a multitude of explanations for all the data they have to process. The great weakness of intelligence analysts is agreeing on which of those evaluations is correct.
Lt. Jr. Grade Mark Mason had spent the entire day at his console, swapping information and interpretations with other analysts both inside the Naval Space Command and without. They had already collected radar and sonar records of all NATO shipping in the region to try and identify who did what, when, exactly where, and most important, why. There was no clear consensus because no one had a clue about what analysts refer to as the “big bang”: the object that set the events into motion.
What was known, Mason had told Lt. Cmdr. Bobbitt, was that after passing along the western coast of the United Kingdom, an Iranian frigate in the Norwegian Sea had encountered an ice floe that had been charted by ENVISAT ASAR. The frigate paused in the vicinity for forty-eight minutes, then aborted what were apparently intended to be cold-water maneuvers. The frigate now appeared to be on a full-speed course home. Before departing the Norwegian Sea, however, it appeared as though a boat or aircraft departed the frigate. Satellite confirmation was vague because of fog; the nearest vessel, the Ohio-class submarine USS Henry M. Jackson , was in the North Sea as part of the Commander Undersea Surveillance fleet monitored at the Naval Ocean Processing Facilities in Virginia Beach. It was ordered to shadow the frigate out of sonar range, using satellite guidance. In the words of the commander, the Iranian military vessel seemed to be “making tracks” toward home.
It was also trailing radiation. The big question was whether the frigate had been sent to retrieve something; whether they had been testing something, such as a new weapon; whether the frigate was a front for a seagoing nuclear laboratory—something India and China had done before they produced their own bombs—or whether global warming had unearthed a vein of nuclear material the likes of which no one had ever seen. Dr. Dave Pearl, a physicist at DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects, suggested it could be a meteoroid that had landed anytime from the day before up to four billion years ago. Dr. Cyril Planke of the U.S. Geological Survey said that a plutonium-laden space rock was unlikely. Both men agreed that a half-life reading would be of inestimable value—which was precisely the information Mason did not possess.
After an initial encrypted communication that was still being decoded, the frigate had gone into complete radio silence. So there was no information to be gleaned there. Added to that was the administration’s deferential stance toward the Iranian theocracy: bent on diplomacy rather than confrontation, there was a strict hands-off policy toward any lawful operations on international waters. Mason could not imagine that Admiral Breen and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would define an irradiated Iranian vessel as “lawful,” but that was a matter for the International Energy Agency to handle; by the time the bureaucracy had done even a fast-track study, the frigate would be back in the Persian Gulf.
The NSC had thick files with countless white papers containing “what if” scenarios, everything from a plausible event like a tsunami striking a U.S. naval base or a great white shark attacking a SEAL rescue mission to an unlikely event like Somali pirates commandeering an American nuclear submarine. Mason word-searched “plutonium” and “Arctic” from the
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