In High Places

Part 1 December 23 ^rd

On the afternoon and early evening of December 23rd, three events occurred, seemingly unconnected and, in distance, three thousand miles apart. One was a telephone call, over closely guarded circuits, from the President of the United States to the Prime Minister of Canada; the conversation lasted almost an hour and was sombre. The second event was an official reception at the Ottawa residence of Her Majesty's Governor General; the third, the berthing of a ship at Vancouver on the Canadian West coast.

The telephone call came first. It originated in the President's study of the White House and was taken by the Prime Minister in his East Block office on Parliament Hill.

Next was the berthing of the ship. It was the Motor Vessel Vastervik, 10,000 tons, Liberian registry, its master Captain Sigurd Jaabeck, a Norwegian. It made fast at La Pointe Pier, on the south and city side of Burrard Inlet Harbour at three o'clock.

Just an hour later in Ottawa where, because of a three-hour time difference it was already evening, the early reception guests began arriving at Government House. The reception was a smallish one: an annual pre-Christmas affair their Excellencies gave cabinet members and their wives.

Only two of the party guests – the Prime Minister and his Secretary of State for External Affairs – had knowledge of the US President's call. Not one of the guests had ever heard of the MV Vastervik, nor in the scheme of things was it likely that they would.

And yet, irrevocably and inextricably, the three occurrences were destined to intertwine, like planets and their nebulae whose orbits, in strange mysterious fashion, impinge and share a moment's scintillation.