Cauldron

CHAPTER 10 Combustion

The televised images were gripping and strangely beautiful.

A giant, red-hulled oil tanker slid quietly through the narrow waters between Denmark and Sweden, gliding past Copenhagen’s stone jetties, houses, and somber church spires at a steady ten knots. The tanker dwarfed its nearest companions — the two tugs and pilot boat shepherding it through the channel to the Baltic Sea. A ragtag swarm of tiny sailboats draped with protest banners lined the tanker’s route, kept at bay by police patrol craft steaming back and forth along the sound. Chants and blaring air horns carried faintly across the water.

“Our top story this hour: rescue on the way for Poland’s oil-starved economy.

“With Polish refineries running almost on empty, the first tanker carrying North Sea oil crossed into the Baltic — dogged by radical environmentalists most of the way. No arrests were reported by the Danish police, despite earlier rumors that a Greenpeace-led coalition would try to block the ship’s passage before it reached Gdansk.”

The cool, collected features of the network’s Atlanta-based anchor appeared, replacing the footage shot earlier that morning several thousand miles away. “In other news from the region, French Minister for the Environment, Jean-Claude Martineau, expressed his grave concerns about the massive oil shipments destined for the Polish port. He pointed out that meeting Poland’s needs would require nearly two hundred tanker trips a year — even without counting the oil being shipped for the Czech and Slovak republics. With the area’s sea lanes already, overcrowded, he predicted a catastrophe that could ‘utterly destroy the fragile Baltic ecosystem.’

“In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Millicent Fanon delivered a blistering response to the French official’s remarks, labeling them ‘a calculated attempt to mislead and panic’ people in the nations bordering on the Baltic Sea…”

The U.S. House of Representatives was in session, and common sense was out of fashion.

“Mr. Speaker, this President is out of control and out of touch!” The tall, silver-haired congressman from Missouri pounded the lectern in front of him, ignoring scattered boos from the seats to his left. “This Baltic boondoggle is just another example of an administration that cares more about foreigners and foreign politics than it does about the American people!”

Majority Leader James Richard “Dick” Pendleton was in fine form, playing perfectly to the cameras focused on his rugged, All-American profile. He was a master of the one-minute speech, the congressional contribution to the age of television politics. Dozens of House members routinely took the floor at the beginning of each legislative day, speaking for sixty seconds or so on any and every subject that might win them national or local airtime. Used intelligently, it was a potent political weapon.

“Ten billion dollars, Mr. Speaker! That’s billion with a capital B! That’s how much we’ll pay to fill Polish gas tanks and heat Czech homes! Ten billion taxpayer dollars down an overseas drain instead of feeding American families, clothing American children, and creating American jobs!

“Well, 1 say that’s wrong. Downright wrong. In hard times like these, we should be looking after our own people first — not squandering billions like some kind of global Santa Claus! America deserves more, not less, Mr. Speaker. And America deserves a president who understands that.”

The majority leader was confident that very few American voters would realize that the “huge” energy aid program he’d attacked so vigorously represented just one-half of one percent of the total federal budget. When government spending soared into the trillions, it soared beyond comprehension for most people.

Pendleton left the House floor wearing a satisfied smile. He’d done a good day’s work. Millions of Americans would see sound bites from his speech on the evening news, and their support for the President and his party would slip a little bit more. Not much. Just a percentage point or two in the polls. But that would be enough for the congressman’s tastes. Undermining an incumbent president was always a long-term process. Although the next presidential contest was still more than two years off, Pendleton was already planning to win that election.

Like most of his colleagues, he never considered the impressions his intemperate, ill-chosen words might create outside the United States.

For the better part of five days Nicolas Desaix, Schraeder, and other would-be architects of a new European order had been meeting inside the lavishly appointed conference rooms of the old Parliament building. After weeks of preliminary discussions by lower-level officials, the French and German leaders were in Strasbourg to finish hammering out the basic military, economic, and political mechanisms needed to make a new continent-wide alliance work. Once they were satisfied, the array of related treaties would be presented to Europe’s smaller countries as accomplished facts open to acceptance but not to amendment.

With the talks recessed for the afternoon, two men, Nicolas Desaix and Michel Guichy, the French Minister of Defense, trudged through the snow-shrouded Orangerie — a park adjacent to the towering red, bronze, and silver Palace of Europe. Aides and assistants trailed them at a discreet distance — out of earshot but close enough to run errands.

“I’m still not sure about this scheme of yours, Nicolas.” Michel Guichy shook his head slowly. “So much change so fast. It seems unwise.”

“When you’re on a tiger’s back, my friend…” Nicolas Desaix left the rest unsaid. The other man knew the risks they were running. The French people seemed willing to endure martial law for the moment, but that could change quickly enough once the weather warmed up. Political unrest and spring sunshine were a familiar and unwelcome pairing in France. Even worse, Bonnard, the republic’s half-senile President, was in failing health. If he died, he’d take the Emergency Committee’s paper-thin veneer of legality with him.

No, Desaix thought, they didn’t have time for second-guessing. That was why he’d buttonholed the barrel-chested Defense Minister before the evening negotiating sessions began. He was determined to win Guichy’s support for the treaties he and Schraeder were crafting. Jacques Morin, his handpicked successor at the DGSE, was already on board. Together the three of them controlled the most important functions of the French government — the military, foreign policy, and espionage. Under the emergency decrees now governing France, they held most of the war-making and diplomatic powers ordinarily reserved for the head of state and commander in chief. Once they joined hands, the rest of the rump cabinet would trip all over itself falling into line.

On the surface, executive power in the European Confederation they were proposing would rest with a Council of Nations made up of officials from all member states. But the council would meet only two or three times a year. That and its very size ensured that it could never be anything more than a glorified debating society. In practice, real day-today decision-making would lie in the hands of permanent secretariats. And the leaders for those secretariats would be appointed by France and Germany.

Military matters would be handled through a NATO-like command structure. The Germans were prepared to accept French candidates for the top military and foreign policy slots. They were even willing to integrate their armed forces all the way down to the divisional level.

Those arrangements at least had Guichy’s unhesitating approval. Combining French and German troops in a unified army would act as a powerful check on any future German territorial ambitions. An existing Franco-German corps showed that creating such an army was possible, if not easy. Better yet, he would be the logical choice to head the new confederation’s forces.

“But what do the Boche get out of this?” The Defense Minister’s pleased look faded to a frown. “Germans don’t even piss without asking for a receipt.”

“You’re right about that.” Desaix allowed himself a smile. Bored by anything not directly connected with defense policy, Guichy had absented himself from the talks concerned with other matters. “They want us to guarantee their control over the finance and industry posts.”

“And you’ve agreed?”

“Of course.” Desaix shrugged. “We each have our spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and our own vital industries. The Germans know better than to interfere with those. If they want to play at printing pretty new bank notes and setting interest rates for our junior ‘allies,’ I for one see no reason to stop them.”

“True.” Guichy stroked his chin. Awarding Germany the nominal responsibility for making economic policy meant very little. France had long ago learned how to ignore policies and agreements it disliked. In any event, these days the Germans were better businessmen and bankers than they were soldiers and statesmen. “I begin to see why you want this new alliance so badly.” He shook his head in undisguised admiration. “You are a sly one, Nicolas.”

“Merely careful, my friend. I gamble, but only when I know what cards the other players are holding.”

The Defense Minister nodded. “So I’ve seen.” He hesitated. “But what about the wild card? The United States, I mean. I doubt the Americans will want to see Europe unified under our banner.”

“The Americans?” Desaix grimaced. “They’re nothing. All wind and no backbone.”

“But this Polish venture of theirs…”

“Means nothing, Michel.” Desaix contemptuously waved away the U.S. oil and gas supply effort. True, he’d been stunned by the first reports. He’d never expected Washington to break the energy embargo he’d engineered. Since then, however, he’d seen American public and political opinion starting to crack. Americans liked quick, easy victories like the Persian Gulf War. They didn’t have the stomach these days for open-ended, expensive commitments.

That was a weakness — one he planned to exploit.

Desaix laughed sourly. “Even their own Congress is trying to stop these shipments. One small setback and the whole ridiculous thing will come to an end. Like that!” He snapped his fingers. “And when it does, we’ll have the Poles and the Czechs begging at our doorstep.”

He could tell that Guichy liked that image. The Defense Minister was a proud man, and several failed attempts to sell the two countries French military hardware and expertise still burned in his memory. Reports he’d seen suggested that they’d all but laughed at Guichy’s offers before turning to the Americans and British for weapons and advice. Seeing them come crawling for admission to a new European alliance would avenge that insult.

Equally important, Guichy was a patriot. Desaix’s vision of a continent subject to French authority — no matter how indirect or disguised — was bound to stir his spirit. The twentieth century had not been kind to their beloved country. Bled white by World War I and crushed underfoot during World War II, she had been largely ignored by the two superpowers during the cold war years that followed. Now, for the first time in a hundred years, France had a real chance to regain its glory and its rightful place in the sun.

“Well, Michel? Will you stand with me?” Desaix stood waiting while his colleague came to a decision. Though it irked him to plead with any man, he concealed his irritation. For the time being, humility best served his ends.

Slowly, ponderously, the Defense Minister nodded.

Nicolas Desaix had his ally. France would pursue its old imperial ambitions in a new guise.

Heinz Schraeder and Jurgen Lettow, Germany’s Defense Minister, stood at a window overlooking the Orangerie, watching the two Frenchmen take their walk.

Lettow, shorter and leaner than his leader, nodded toward Desaix’s distant figure. “I do not trust that man, Chancellor.” He grimaced. “Was it wise to award the French so much?”

He had reason to be displeased. The treaties they were finalizing would make the ministry he headed only an adjunct to a French-dominated Confederation Defense Secretariat. French generals would command German troops. The Defense Minister’s scowl grew deeper.

Schraeder shrugged, unconcerned. “Let the French strut about in uniform for a time, Lettow. This is a modern age. Who will go to war now?” He smiled thinly. “The rest of these agreements are very much in our favor. We give Desaix and his colleagues a slight measure of authority over the trappings of power — the soldiers and the diplomats — and they give us control of the real levers of power — industry, banking, and trade.”

Germany’s Chancellor shook his head. “No, Lettow. We will allow France to bask in its artificial glory while we reshape the continent to our advantage.”

For their own wildly contradictory reasons, Europe’s two strongest powers were coming to the same conclusions.

Colonel Zoltan Hradetsky folded his newspaper and took his feet off the desk. He glanced at the clock hanging on his wall. Only two-thirty in the afternoon. Another hour and a half before he could leave the office, and even that would be an hour earlier than everyone else who worked in the ministry. Of course, his peers had real work to do. He didn’t. After being yanked out of Sopron for offending the French-owned Eurocopter conglomerate, he’d been shunted from dead-end department to dead-end department.

Now stuck in a windowless office, with flaking green paint so old it was starting to look gray, he pushed papers all day. It was bad enough to go from an active, challenging post to a desk job, but what a job!

Oh, his title sounded impressive enough. He was the Ministry of the Interior’s “academy training supervisor.” Hradetsky smiled wryly. Less impressive was the fact that his only task involved monitoring the number of students enrolled in each of the nation’s police training academies. Each day he filled out the proper form and gave it to his immediate superior’s secretary. And each day, he was sure, Brigadier General Dozsa signed the report without reading it — promptly filing it into oblivion.

Whenever he’d tried to make his post anything more than a waste of time and space, he’d been slapped down. Dozsa, the National Police commander, hadn’t even bothered to hide his disdain. During his first and only meeting with the precise, perfectly uniformed officer, he’d been told, “Be grateful for what you still have, Colonel. Especially after all the trouble you’ve caused me. Rock the boat just once more, and I’ll see that you’re drummed out of the service in disgrace.”

Hradetsky’s hands curled into fists, crumpling the newspaper he still held. Remembering Dozsa’s insults brought all his repressed rage roaring to the surface. In the old days, he could have erased the stain on his honor with a well-timed saber cut. But dueling was out of place in this modern world. In any case, honor meant nothing to the government he still served — however unwillingly.

The simple truth was that he had nowhere else to go. He was a policeman, first and last. With the whole world mired in what seemed a perpetual recession, work of any kind was hard to get. And with work came ration cards for heat and food. Not a lot, but enough. Enough to survive a winter that had been the worst in decades. Subzero temperatures and the food shortages produced by autumn crop failures made life almost unbearable for all Hungarians. Those who were unemployed were even worse off. Priority for scarce foodstuffs went to those who still had jobs.

Of course, Zoltan Hradetsky had another important reason for staying at his post. An old-fashioned reason. Duty. He’d sworn an oath to uphold the law and to protect his fellow countrymen. And even though his superiors seemed determined to chain him down inside the Interior Ministry’s idle bureaucracy, the oath remained.

So, torn between his anger, his duty, and the need to eat, he’d rotted uselessly at his desk, watching his poor country endure the winter’s bitter cold like a man in a threadbare coat. Draconian security measures and international relief efforts had kept mass starvation at bay, but the past few months had been one long, dark nightmare. Curfews, rationing, and peremptory curbside executions for thieves and looters made it feel like wartime, even if the only obvious enemies were hunger and cold.

Those were bad enough. The very old, the very young, and the sick all suffered as rations were cut and cut again. Despair was spreading as parents saw their children’s faces pinched by the cold and malnutrition. Deaths from bronchitis, pneumonia, and influenza stood at all-time highs. So did public unrest.

Hradetsky frowned. You wouldn’t know that from reading the tightly controlled government press. But he’d seen enough unvarnished crime statistics to know that only very careful juggling could make them sound good. Murder, muggings, and child abuse were all up. And, for the first time since the fall of the nation’s post-communist democracy, there were signs of organized political resistance to military rule. “Subversive” newspapers were beginning to appear on Budapest’s streets — taped to lampposts or slipped under doors. Some of the civilians who had led the old government were said to be forming clandestine opposition groups.

Hungarians were angry, and they were looking for a focus for their anger.

Hradetsky knew where his countrymen should look.

French and German emergency aid shipments were keeping Hungary afloat, but only by a narrow margin. And every shipment carried a price tag in lost national sovereignty. With every passing week, Hradetsky saw his country sliding closer to being a wholly owned French and German client state.

He had several old friends in the building, some of whom would still talk to him, despite his pariah status. Certainly his job left him with plenty of time to read and think, and to listen and learn. Even from his lowly post the Interior Ministry was still a good place to pick up information that contradicted the “official” line.

Or to see interesting things. Like the nameless, arrogant visitors who dropped by the minister’s private office. They came, stayed for a few hours, and then flew back to Paris or Berlin. Rumor had it that they were checking up on police activities, reporting to their governments on the “behavior” of Hungary’s law enforcement apparatus.

If that were true, their visits were having an unsettling effect. From Major General Racz on down, high-level ministry officials were taking an increasing interest in routine personnel assignments — even in the outlying police districts. To limit contact with the “free trade” states, border crossings were being either closed or put under army control. Every report had to be forwarded to Budapest for approval. Racz, Dozsa, and their cronies were also aggressively collecting information on anyone even remotely connected with what passed for the political opposition. It didn’t matter if it was a food riot, a labor demonstration, or just a coffeehouse gathering. The generals wanted to know who “the troublemakers” were.

As support for the military Government of National Salvation sagged, old tyrannical habits were gaining new strength.

Hradetsky found this renewed emphasis on political intelligence-gathering especially troubling. During Hungary’s first heady years of freedom, he and other junior officers had worked hard to make the National Police a professional crime-fighting force. One that was free of the corruption, inefficiency, and brutal misconduct so common under communism.

Now, with foreign backing, his country’s rulers were reversing course, undoing reforms that had made Hradetsky proud to wear his police uniform. Toadyism and unquestioning deference to French and German interests were valued more than competence.

He grimaced. There wasn’t much chance that would change any time soon. The generals were in too deep to back out now. Like their counterparts in the rest of Eastern Europe, they were signing any agreement the two European superpowers put before them. Treaties to adopt a single currency. Treaties to blend existing national legal systems and economic regulation into a continent-wide monolith. Arms sales and joint military exercises. And on and on and on. The pace was dizzying — deliberately so, he suspected.

Hradetsky could read the handwriting on the wall. If the generals were allowed free reign, Hungary would be absorbed. She would be swallowed whole by bigger nations that preached the common interest while working for their own selfish ends. He bit his lip. The prospect of working under orders issued in Paris or Berlin made him feel sick.

Running lights outlined several huge ships moored several miles off the windswept Baltic coast — oil and liquid natural gas tankers waiting their turn to off-load at Gdansk’s overcrowded docks. Snatches of music and canned laughter rose above the steady slap of small waves against steel hulls. Sounds carried far across the sea at night.

Five miles outside the offshore anchorage, a rusting’, storm-battered fishing trawler drifted silently with the tide and currents. Crewmen in winter coats and gloves clustered on the tiny vessel’s stern, grunting softly as they wrestled a heavy Zodiac inflatable raft back on board.

Four shivering men stood near the trawler’s darkened wheelhouse, stripping off dry suits and scuba gear. Their features were almost invisible under layers of black camouflage paint, but all of them were young men in perfect physical condition.

The trawler’s short, fair-haired captain, older but just as fit, stepped down out of the wheelhouse. “Any problems?”

One of the divers shook his head. “None. Everything went just as planned.”

The captain clapped him on the shoulder and leaned back inside to speak to the helmsman. “Right. Let’s get out of here. All ahead one-quarter.”

“All ahead one-quarter. Aye, sir.”

The fishing vessel’s diesel engine coughed to life with a stuttering, muffled roar and its single screw started turning, churning the sea to foam. Still sailing without lights, the trawler headed west, hugging the Polish coastline.

The North Star rode easily at anchor.

Captain Frank Calabrese leaned on the bridge railing, his hands cupped around a steaming coffee mug for warmth. His ship, an LNG tanker, stretched forward almost as far as his eyes could see. Nine hundred and fifty feet long and with a 140-foot beam, she was as big as an aircraft carrier and almost as massive. The top halves of four heavily insulated domes rose above North Star’s hull like giant white golf balls — refrigerated tanks holding 786,000 barrels of natural gas kept liquid at 323 degrees below zero.

“You wanted to see me, Skipper?” Charles MacLeod, his first officer, stepped out onto the open bridge wing.

Calabrese sipped his coffee and then nodded. “Sure do, Charlie. I just got the word from the harbormaster. We’re cleared to off-load starting at 0900 hours tomorrow.”

“About bloody time.”

“Amen to that.” The American tanker captain chuckled, amused by his first officer’s impatience.

He could also understand the younger man’s irritation. MacLeod had a pregnant wife waiting for him in Stavanger, North Star’s homeport. Every day they were delayed multiplied the Scot’s already staggering radiotelephone bill.

So far they’d been anchored off the Polish port for more than forty-eight hours, kept waiting while other tankers pumped their precious cargoes ashore. Despite working around the clock, Gdansk’s refinery teams and pipeline crews were falling further and further behind. Trying to funnel all the oil and gas Poland needed through one medium-sized port facility was like trying to irrigate the Sahara through a single garden hose.

Calabrese stood up straight, taking his weight off the railing. “The Poles are sending a harbor pilot aboard at 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.

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.