Wu Lin Kit’s mind was on the other mission, the one he was already imagining, as he wrote up the incident about the Vietnamese fishing boat. The large target was out there, the bigger street, the one he had always been drawn to. He could feel it and he wanted it.
When he was finished with the report, he climbed to a bluff and went through his late-afternoon workout. He did his forms, a series of slow, ritualistic, dancelike moves that simulated martial arts combat. Done at regular speed, these motion studies were lethal. When he finished, he returned to camp and did his daily language studies; Wu spoke seven languages but wanted to know more and was currently studying Russian. Then he had dinner with several of the seamen, after which he hiked out past a slippery breakwater on an isolated section of white-sand beach. The sun was down, visible only in the faintest hot-pink edges of clouds in the western sky. The stars were not yet out, and the low moon was a faint glow behind a layer of nearer clouds.
The sound of the waves, low but forceful, made him feel as if he were alone on the reef, in the islands, on the planet. He knew, though, that he was not. He kept the secure phone with him, sitting on a rock like a black crustacean that had been washed from the sea.
Wu walked into the warm water. He was standing there, trying to keep his balance on the crawling sand, when the phone beeped. Chin Liang was on the line.
“There is movement at the American naval base!” Chin said excitedly. “I’ve just seen the satellite images. The tanker is emerging and it is riding lower than in the images you discovered.”
Wu’s world was suddenly in perfect balance. He did some quick computations. “It’s very early over there.”
“Just past dawn,” Chin replied. “But we don’t think the timing was an attempt to be secretive. The tide is high in the bay—”
“They needed the depth and buoyancy.”
“Exactly!”
“Is there anything unusual about it, apart from what we can’t see? Crew size, gear?”
“Not that we can tell, though the night-vision capability of the S3 is not very good,” Chin said. “We should have full sunup in about fifteen minutes. We will have another round of photographs then. In the meantime, the first pictures have been sent to your computer. I’ll forward the others as soon as they arrive.”
“Thank you.”
“Is everything still quiet at your site?”
“Extremely,” Wu told him.
The men agreed to talk again after Wu had had a chance to study all the images. The operative hung up and returned to his tent. He opened a canvas chair under the blossoming stars, booted his laptop, and sat facing the sea. The first two pictures loaded quickly. They were dark, as Chin had said. Wu could tell that the hull was much lower, but he could not see much else. The second set of images was already coming in. It was lighter now, still not full daylight. But there was enough light to make out some surface details of the vessel.
Drums and crates were being stored on deck, under canvas tarpaulins. Obviously, the hold was full, which was not a surprise. What caught Wu’s attention, though, was a hint of metal underneath the windblown fabric. That could be significant. He waited impatiently for the next picture. It would have been taken about three minutes later, when the vessel was farther out in the bay. Where the wind was probably a little stronger. When the canvas flap was indeed a little higher. The image began to download. Wu magnified that section of the S3 photograph. He clicked on it and asked his basic but efficient photo-enhancement program to sharpen the image and compensate for distortion caused by ripples in the warming atmosphere.
He got a sharper, purer picture showing magnesium-white drums. Eagerly, Wu logged on to the Guoanbu database. He went to the files of U.S. military chemicals. He had heard—perhaps it was propaganda—that American soldiers were such illiterate creatures their chemical containers had to be color-coded rather than labeled. Because of television, they found it easier to remember colors than words.
Whether it was true didn’t matter. Wu found what he was looking for. The drums appeared to contain propylene glycol.
It was like watching a drama on television. A good one. Each new scene was a revelation, another clue in the mystery. The only difference was that this was real. The outcome mattered.
The canvas chair was cool and damp with sweat from his thighs. The lights of the campsite were turned off as the men retired. The patrol boat was also dark. The only sounds were the soft slosh of the retreating tide, the hum of the fan in his laptop, and what sounded like mooing from somewhere at sea. The foghorn wail could be a humpback whale. From August to October, the leviathans left Antarctica for the South Pacific to spawn. Wu had a great deal of respect for the animals, it was a formidable journey.
Wu heard them all without really listening. His attention was on the computer. It was rare to have disparate pieces come together in this fashion, in a way an opponent never foresaw. If Wu interpreted the data correctly, this could be quite an intelligence coup. The Chinese had an international reputation for “dirty hands” intelligence, consisting primarily of moles on-site or bribing and blackmailing people for information. Nearly 80 percent of their intelligence did come from dirty hands operatives. Wu wanted to change that. He wanted parity with nations like the United States, Russia, and Israel. He wanted to bolster the Chinese capacity to collect what the British called armchair intelligence. Even if that chair was made of canvas and aluminum.
The intelligence officer watched patiently as each new picture appeared. Once begun, the downloads took thirty seconds. Each picture first appeared as a blurry mass of gray tones, one that became sharper with every two-second-long scan. Wu was waiting for a second piece of information, one that would let him interpret with confidence what he was seeing.
The drums on the ship’s deck had been the first key to figuring this out. They appeared to contain propylene glycol. A deicer. Unlike the more commonly used ethylene glycol, propylene glycol was not a danger to marine life. It was the only deicer that was not subject to international hazardous-materials regulations.
But that alone was not enough to determine absolutely where this ship was headed. It helped his suspicions to note that the vessel did not follow the coast of the United States. The ship had made a dramatic turn to the southeast, headed out to sea. That suggested a southward voyage that had been charted to steer along the east coast of South America.
But that was still not enough. Not yet.
Wu watched the downloads as 10:00 P.M. approached. That was approximately the time when the American ship would pass out of range of the S3. For the first time in a long time Wu felt tense. He didn’t want this one to slip away. Not when he was so close. Finally, at ten minutes to the hour, he watched as three successive images showed the vessel turning its satellite dish. With eager taps on the keyboard Wu stored these images separate from the others. He needed three to triangulate the position of the dish relative to the position of the S3. Like the legs of a tripod, they could be traced to a single point.
Wu shifted the saved images to the Guoanbu satellite database. This site had been framed in the mid-1990s using information found on the public Fourmilab Switzerland Web site. Internet users could visit the site and view the earth from a selection of several hundred satellites. Since satellites had to remain at a collision-free distance from one another, Guoanbu astronomers used the Fourmilab data about height, longitude, and latitude to chart the space lanes that were open to military satellites. Working with dirty-hands records of secret shuttle-mission military launches—the size and thrust of the boosters used, their trajectories, the length of the burn—as well as detailed telescope studies of the skies, Chinese scientists had been able to create a detailed map of earth-orbiting military craft. This was added to the web of weather, communications, and scientific satellites.
The satellite database told him that the vessel’s satellite dish was pointed to a spot 997 kilometers above the earth at 61[H11034]8'S, 101[H11034]21'E. With rising excitement, Wu looked up the coordinates. They were the location of a nonmilitary satellite, the Polar Bear, located in a stationary orbit over the south pole, where it reported on weather patterns.
Wu sent the data to Beijing and immediately called Chin on the secure line.
The American ship was going to Antarctica.