The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (7 page)

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 start of the nuclear age to the present and came up dry. He expanded his search to NATO files and also found nothing.

However, he did find an interesting footnote in the files of
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was a reference to an Office of Strategic Services file that mentioned “plutonium.” The OSS file was among the more than 35,000 documents declassified by its successor, the CIA, in 2008, and sent to the National Archives. Mason went to the NA website and looked up the document in question. It was the personnel file on an operative, Largo Kealey. The flag came up because Kealey was tested for radiation exposure due to “proximity to plutonium in Brest.”

Why would there have been radioactive materials in the French port in 1944?
Mason thought.

There was nothing about that in any of the files he checked. He got in touch with Dr. Pearl who directed him to Sally Massina, DARPA historian.

“Sally’s a living library of R&D,” he said. “She’s seventy-two and retired now . . . but there’s no one who can connect historical dots better than her.”

Mason called but she insisted on Skyping.

“I don’t get to see many faces these days,” she told him.

“Why? Where are you?”

“The Temecula Valley, California,” she said. “I’m on twenty-three acres of mountaintop. I’ve got golden eagles, rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, mountain lions, illegal immigrants—and a shotgun. But no neighbors.”

Mason was happy to make the video call. Sally was not what the young man had expected. She had a long sun-bronzed face and long henna-red hair, both beneath the largest cowboy hat he had ever seen on a human being.

“Here’s the connection,” Sally said without preamble. “In October 1941, Allied intelligence operatives working in Denmark eavesdropped on a meeting between a Danish physicist whose name they did not know and a German scientist whose name, unfortunately, they
did
know: Werner Heisenberg. This chat, in a park, I think, convinced MI6 in London that the Nazis were moving full-ahead to develop an atom bomb. At the same time, a heroic gent, Professor Leif Tronstad—who designed and helped construct cutting-edge power plants—had not fled Scandinavia like most of his colleagues when Hitler’s goons took over. He stayed to spy. At great personal risk, he sent coded telegrams to Sweden that made their way to MI6 about the Nazis using a plant in Norsk to produce heavy water—which, as you probably know, is necessary to produce nuclear weapon isotopes such as Plutonium-239. Brit commandos tried, and failed, to destroy the plant. It was called Operation Freshman and it was a disaster. The Allies tried again in Operation Gunner-side. This was pretty late in the game, mind you—1944. MI6 learned that the Germans were planning to ferry a butt load of heavy water across Lake Tinns for a rail trip to Germany. A second team of commandos used eighteen pounds of plastique to sink the ferry. Lotta passengers drowned along with most of the heavy water.”

“Most.”

“Most,” Sally said. She took a swallow of beer from a stein that sat on a pair of curled ram’s horns. “Brewed this myself,” she said proudly. “Anyway, the Nazis salvaged three canisters. The containers made their way to a materials testing laboratory at an air base in Anklam, a town in the Western Pomerania region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The OSS learned about the transfer after bombing the crap out of Germany’s other R&D sites, notably the V-2 rocket facility at Peen-emünde. They dropped in paratroops and recovered documents that pointed them toward Anklam. This was a classic good-news, bad-news scenario: they got that new facility with bombs, plastered it flat, but aerial recon suggested that the contents had already been relocated.”

“To Brest?” Mason asked.

“No—don’t get ahead of me,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I like ambition in a young man. Just not when I’m telling a story. What happened was, there was a mirror lab. That’s what they called backup facilities, and Berlin was smart enough to have them. The backup to Anklam had been built in Denmark. The Nazis always expected to have to finish the work there. They were close. Real close to getting their bomb. So close that they had already worked out a means of getting the finished product out by U-boat.”

Sally went silent and regarded the monitor.

“MI6 picked that up by following the trail from Anklam with a Geiger counter,” Sally went on. “Then, with Kealey as a spotter to ID the sub and its departure, the RAF blew the U-246 all to hell and back. Nothing was ever found of it—not even trace radiation. Of course, after the war no one went looking because the files were still classified.”

While Mason was absorbing what she’d told him, Sally grinned at the camera.

“Someone find it?” she asked. “I know, you can’t answer. But—jeez. If that’s the case, I only hope it was someone who doesn’t mean us any harm.”

“Is there any reason you would say that, apart from the obvious?” Mason asked.

“Mind you, I don’t know this for a fact—no one alive does. But there were rumors about the device. If I were you I’d skip whatever my next meal is to have a look at the debrief files of Professor Paul Dammann.”

She spelled it for him. Mason brought the file up. “There are a lot of pages here,” he said. “Can you give me a clue where I should start?”

“Sure,” she said. “Look up ‘steamer trunk.’ ”