“Not very definitive evidence though,” the General grumbled. “Readily deniable. Video and audio files are so easily doctored.”
“I agree,” Udicz said. “But why? Why would the Americans do something so stupid? Unless it was an accident.”
“Accident?” Lukin said. “It strikes me Udicz, that you would have to be very determined to accidentally sink a ship the size of a small island.”
Carl Williams had only been an environmental science attaché at the Moscow Embassy for three weeks. With 700 full-time staff in the Russian Federation, 200 of which were based in Moscow, Carl was only one of several new staff who had moved into the Embassy compound on Bolshoi Deviatinsky within the last month, and he still had that newbie halo hanging over him.
He had met neither the Ambassador nor his nominal manager at the Embassy yet, and really hadn’t got much further than his orientation paperwork and some training in Embassy security protocols.
As an NSA analyst he would normally have an office in the Controlled Access Area or ‘Tophat’ of the Secure Chancery Facility, but Carl was an ‘undeclared’ officer attached to the Embassy’s Economic Affairs section and so instead of working in the Chancery, he was still learning how to get from his accommodations to the commissary for breakfast and then down through the labyrinthine New Annex basement tunnels to his desk monitoring Russian Federation Far East Military Command Traffic.
The traffic was of course encrypted, and couldn’t be broken in real time, even by the adaptive neural network natural language AIs he had at his disposal as an NSA analyst. No, his job instead was to look for patterns in the volume, origin and target of Russian Eastern Military District comms and try to tie them to complementary intel from either signals intel or human intelligence sources and see if they could confirm suspected meetings, military exercises, military equipment tests or even civil emergencies.
He had grown up as a kid on stories and films about the great cryptologists of history, like the men and women who broke the German Enigma codes using the world’s first electronic computers at Bletchley Park in the UK. Or the NSA cryptographers who helped avert World War Three by decrypting the Russian fleet signals during the Cuban Missile Crisis and were able to tell the Kennedy brothers that the Russian destroyers had orders to sail only as far as the line of blockade, and no further.
They had worked in rooms of buzzing, clacking equipment, discs of tape whirling, coding machines spitting cards into a fug of cigarette smoke as they desperately fought to break enemy codes ahead of invasions, revolutions or Scud missile launches. Even the generation of code breakers he had been born into had grown up needing to be able to read computer code, looking for potential exploits in a soup of alphanumeric gibberish.
As Carl walked past the other attaches into his cubicle sized office in the LED lit basement corridor under Nevsky Prospect that had been converted into a listening station he threw his sandwich on his desk, put his paper cup of coffee down next to it and glared almost resentfully at the tools of his trade. Instead of whirling reels of tape, he had a telephone headset. Instead of card readers spitting out index cards, he had a small laptop PC full of apps, including one which he could use to stream the latest TV shows. And instead of having to read and write code, he had HOLMES, the NSA AI system that was his own personal analytical assistant.
HOLMES was the name Carl had given the system — it was an acronym for Heuristic Ordinary Language Machine Exploratory System. Which sounded better than NLLS 1.5 or Natural Language Learning System 1.5. He had toyed with calling the system NESSIE, but that had an association with the Loch Ness monster he didn’t think was appropriate, because unlike the monster, HOLMES was not a mythological creature.
Carl sank onto his seat, pulled on his headset and logged in using his voice recognition code.
“Good morning Carl,” HOLMES said in his ears. “Did you sleep well?” In addition to a cool name he had also given the AI a plumb British male voice to match.
Carl’s hair wasn’t brushed and if anyone had paid attention, they’d see he was wearing the same t-shirt today that he had on yesterday. In fact, they might even question whether he’d taken it off when he went to sleep.
“Cut the chat routine,” Carl said grumpily. “Sitrep, anomalous traffic, Sector 42, all incidents since I logged off last night.”
There had been a bump in traffic in that sector before he went off duty last night but he wasn’t expecting anything. HOLMES was supposed to send a text and email alert to him and the watch officer if it detected a major incident worthy of deeper analysis. It hadn’t, so anything that it had logged could only qualify as routine.
“The most noteworthy event last night was the apparent loss of a Russian flagged commercial freighter in the northern approaches to the Bering Strait at 0215 Pacific Standard Time.”
Carl’s immediate reaction was ‘so what’. Sure, terrible for the crew and everything, but civilian shipping disasters weren’t exactly his priority. “Loss? What do you mean loss?” Carl asked. “Contextualize.”
“The Ozempic Tsar was a 400,000 ton fully autonomous cargo ship, sailing from Archangelsk in Russia to Hokkaido in Japan via the polar route, when it issued a mayday on open maritime emergency frequencies to say it was taking water rapidly following an explosion in its engine room and cargo bays and was sinking. It then deployed an emergency locator beacon.”
Carl looked up at the ceiling, hands behind his neck. “Cargo?”
“The registers at Lloyds show that the primary cargo was 162,000 tons of processed lithium.”
“Value of the cargo?”
“Landed value one point nine six three billion US dollars.”
Carl put his coffee down so quickly it splashed out of the cup and over his empty desk. “Billion? Did you say nearly two billion?”
“Yes Carl. Do you want me to source more intel on this incident?”
“Access all available intel, compile and report,” Carl replied. Two billion dollars? Someone had just lost real money. Either the owners, the buyers or the insurers. He picked up his coffee and sipped. How did it get so cold so fast? He should really get one of those absorb and release gel-lined mugs. Those things could keep soup warm all day, they should be able to solve his cold coffee problem.
“Do you want a full or brief report?” HOLMES asked, coming back to him within about three minutes.
“Brief,” Carl said. “Very brief.”
“Open source and US Coast Guard intel indicates the Ozempic Tsar issued its first mayday call at 0210, issued two more between 0210 and 0214 and ceased mayday transmissions at 0215. A distress beacon was released and started transmitting the ship’s location at 0216 at which time the US Coast Guard logged it as a probable sinking, cause unknown.”
“Boring. Location?”
“The distress beacon transmitted the Ozempic Tsar’s location as latitude 65.74 longitude 169.69, which is five miles inside the Russian Federation Exclusive Economic Zone west of Big Diomede Island.”
“Their problem then,” Carl said. “Not even international waters. Any salvage operation initiated yet?”
“Satellite intel indicates there are a number of civilian and two Russian naval vessels at the scene.”
Carl perked up slightly. The Russian Pacific fleet base at Vladivostok could be expected to direct maybe one vessel to check out an incident involving an autonomous ship with no human life at risk; to investigate the area, recover the distress buoy and download the black box data. But two showed a higher than normal level of interest.
“Associated military communications activity,” he said. “Three degrees of separation.” He was asking in shorthand for HOLMES to look at intelligence reports from around the time of the incident, including first hand, second hand and even third-hand source reporting. It was about as broad a search as he could ask for, a total fishing exercise.