Kelnikov spoke in a tight voice, verging on anger, “You accuse us of collusion in this crime? What proof do you have?”
“You know that there would be no conclusive satellite imaging available for the undersea launch of stealth cruise missiles.”
“Then you have nothing,” he said, suddenly happy, reaching into his folder again. “Whereas we have this.” He took out another photograph and almost threw it at her.
It was a satellite photograph of a ship, with latitude, longitude and date stamp clearly visible. She could guess what ship it was, but Kelnikov spoke before she could say anything. “That is a US Navy vessel, the USS Venice Beach. An unmanned guided missile cruiser, armed with anti-ship missiles.” He took out another photo and flipped it at her so hard, it spun on the table in front of her.
She stopped it spinning and held it down with a single finger as she looked at it. It showed a large metal plate on the deck of what looked like a fishing vessel, with the word TSAR stenciled across it. If she had to guess, she’d guess it would turn out to be a close match for the name a certain Russian freighter had stenciled across its stern. Next to the wreckage lay a crushed tubular shape about two yards long and what looked like a mangled engine of some sort.
“Does your report tell you what that is?” Kelnikov asked gleefully.
“Actually it does,” she said. “I’m guessing that tube next to that clearly faked stern plate is the housing of a US PIKE anti-ship missile.”
“Salvaged, not faked, and yes it is!” Kelnikov said, building up a head of steam now. “You don’t deny it? The missile that destroyed a Russian freighter while it was moving through Russian territorial waters was American!”
“Your tone is accusatory,” Devlin said. “But I have seen no evidence to justify your anger being directed at the USA.”
Kelnikov leaned over and jabbed his finger angrily down on the photo, “Your missile, fired by one of your ships!”
She laughed, realizing as she did so that she was ignoring ten years of training and practice in protocol. Kelnikov’s face clouded. No, it boiled.
“Just what about this act of naked aggression do you regard as funny?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
“How about you tell me something?” she asked, speaking in firm controlled tones. “PIKE missiles have been exported to 13 countries, two of which have unfortunately recently moved out of our sphere of influence and into yours. One of those is Finland. I don’t deny the missile in that photograph may be a PIKE, but I strongly deny that it was fired by one of our ships. Our information indicates it was fired by a Finnish submarine which was in communication with Russian far east military command.”
“You accuse Russia of sinking a Russian merchant vessel? What nonsense.”
“The Venice Beach did not fire those missiles. Finland however, recently signed a defense cooperation treaty with Russia. One of Finland’s refurbished French Scorpene class hydrogen-electric submarines was in the area, and would have been more than capable of this attack.”
“Again, I ask you what proof you have for this baseless accusation?”
“The same as you have for yours,” she said coolly. “None.” She closed her folder, “Was this the only matter you wanted to discuss today?” she asked.
Kelnikov slapped the table, but if he expected Devlin to flinch or jump, he was disappointed. She’d seen him in this state many times and had been waiting for it. She did little more than blink at him. “You have 24 hours,” he said. “To admit responsibility for this heinous act, issue an apology and offer suitable reparations to the owners of the Ozempic Tsar.”
“Or…”
Kelnikov glared at her, “Or, as you Americans are so fond of saying, ‘All options are on the table’.”
Back in her limo, Devlin fished out the intel report again and looked at it carefully. She handed it to her aide. “I see that the origin of this report is NSA Moscow. Find out which analyst wrote it will you? By the look on Kelnikov’s face I knew more about this Ozempic Tsar incident than he did, and that was a damn nice place to be. I want to write a note to say thank you.”
ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE
If there was a shittier rock on the whole planet than Little Diomede Island, Lieutenant Commander Alicia Rodriguez wanted to know where. Because she’d be on the first plane there and she’d wallow in its complete shittiness and then be able to return to Little Diomede happy that she wasn’t actually living on the shittiest damn rock on the whole damn planet.
Or in fact, not even on the shittiest rock, but under it. At least if you were living on top of the rock, you’d get 360-degree sea views. Sure, you’d be looking through fog, out over windblown white caps not seeing much apart from shitty seabirds and ice floes, but you could at least look east and tell yourself that right over there, just over the horizon, that was Alaska in the good old US of A. And if you looked West, you could tell yourself you were looking at the Evil Empire reborn and get a bit of a thrill telling yourself you were manning the closest US military base to Russia and they didn’t even know you were there.
But no, she wasn’t living on top of the rock. She and her personnel were living in the cave that a millennia of beating waves had carved under the pockmarked, moss-covered basalt of Little Diomede. Who had discovered the cave? If she ever met them, she would beat ten kinds of crap out of them as a thank you. But it probably wasn’t even a person. It was probably a drone, which was kind of ironic.
Rodriguez wasn’t sure exactly how many years the facility on Little Diomede had been under construction, but she knew why it had been built. A Pentagon position paper had warned that with the opening of polar shipping routes, an increasing amount of vital commerce was now moving through the Bering Strait, giving it the potential to be as strategically important as the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and the Emirates was in the last century. When Russia expanded its naval base at Lavrentiya in the early 2020s, as part of its ‘Pivot to the Pacific’, diplomatic tensions had risen, and the US had looked for responses. It could have recommissioned the old Marks Army Airfield at Nome but strategists pointed out that since the advent of hypersonic cruise missile technology, large fixed infrastructure such as air bases was near impossible to defend and while it had political and economic value, its true value in a conflict would be very limited.
The idea for a secret base under the rock cap of Little Diomede had been born.
There was nothing there but a tiny fishing village twenty years ago. The Navy had bought out the two dozen or so villagers, turned their houses into barracks and then moved in construction crews. They’d created a plausible cover story by building a naval radar dome on the crown of the island, and the first thing they did was throw up a hulking great storage shed next to the dome and then fill it full of mining gear to sink a shaft straight down through the middle of the island to the cave below. Then they began hollowing it out. The Russians showed a lot of interest while the radar was being built, and sent a flight over to scan and photograph it every time it got an upgrade, but as long as they couldn’t see the US putting anti-missile systems there or building airstrips on Little Diomede they generally ignored it, apart from the occasional electronic countermeasure attack trying to jam it when one of their naval battle groups was moving through the Strait.