Commander-In-Chief Read Free Page A

office.
    And this decision, born out of panic, made the German electrician Lithuania’s luckiest man of the year.
    •   •   •
    S everal hundred yards from the frantic electrician, the
Independence
sat quietly on still, black waters on a cold October morning, bathed in the lights on the deck and positioned on the attached jetty and pumping station.
    The ship and the jetty were not attached to the Lithuanian mainland; instead they were connected to Kiaulės Nugara Island inthe Curonian Lagoon, at the mouth of the port of Klaipėda. The waters all around were busy with port traffic during the day, but now, at eight minutes after four in the morning, the water was nearly empty from the LNG facility to the sea gate at the mouth of the lagoon, other than a pair of small rigid-hulled inflatable boats crisscrossing the water slowly and nearly silently. The security men on the boats had no clue the electrician was racing along the jetty, because the enormous supertanker was positioned between the patrol boats and the running man.
    The boats passed within twenty yards of each other on their patrol. The men on the decks of the boats glanced across the water at one another, but they passed close too many times a shift to call out greetings or wave hands every time.
    Security here at the port was relatively tight, and there were all sorts of impediments to a terrorist attack by land or by water. But even though the guards at the pumping station, on the island, on the
Independence
, and in the patrol boats were reasonably vigilant, nobody thought anything serious could ever happen here.
    Yes, a month earlier protesters had shown up in small wooden boats and charged the facility through the sea gate. They brought along colorful signs demanding an end to globalization and they had a bullhorn through which one of the protesters shouted expletives at port workers, and they had milk jugs full of oil they planned to sling at the supertanker to demonstrate something of desperate importance.
    They hadn’t been altogether clear on just what that was.
    It was lost on the protesters that this was a natural gas operation, not oil, and their jugs of oil would inevitably end up in the water.
    Fortunately for the ocean around, the two patrol boats hadconverged on the wooden boats and detained the protesters before they could get close enough to the supertanker to be any sort of a danger.
    This was the main type of threat the security guards had in mind, because the
Independence
was built incredibly tough. It had a double hull of milled steel, and inside that, the hyper-chilled LNG was protected by thermally insulated membrane tanks. An RPG from the coast or Molotov cocktails or IEDs would have little effect on the big structure.
    Fully loaded with six million cubic feet of liquefied natural gas, the
Independence
possessed the energy of fifty-five nuclear bombs, but there was only an eighth of its maximum capacity in its storage tanks, and again, it would take one hell of a massive bomb to breach the side of the ship and ignite the gas.
    The patrol boats passed near the LNG tanker, just two hundred yards to the east or so, but it was exceptionally dark here. The two men on the decks would have required superhuman vision and focus to see the anomaly right in front of them. Instead, both boats motored on. One to the north, one to the south.
    In their wake several small trails of bubbles rose to the black surface, then quickly dissipated. The security vessels had noticed nothing, and they just continued their patrols.
    •   •   •
    T he electrician flagged down a security officer in a pickup at the end of the jetty and in broken English explained that he’d spotted a dead female in the lagoon. The security officer was dubious but deferential. He told the German to climb into his vehicle so he could direct him to the spot on the jetty.
    Just as the electrician closed the door, a flash of light caused both men to look out the windshield,