Commander-In-Chief Read Free Page B

straight ahead at the giantship. A glow emanated from the far side of the vessel and silhouetted it, then a thin flame skyrocketed up, ripping open the darkness, and the fireball that came next turned the night to day.
    The security officer behind the wheel of the pickup had been well briefed on the fact that the
Independence
was toughly built but nevertheless essentially a huge bomb. He jacked the pickup into reverse, stomped on the gas, and raced backward over an eighth of a mile, literally chased by a series of roaring explosions that rocked the jetty and sent debris and shock waves in all directions.
    The pickup finally bounced back into a ditch along the side of the access road into the facility. Here the guard and the electrician bailed out of the vehicle and dove into the mud.
    They felt the heat over them, they heard shrapnel sprinkle the ground all around, and they heard the sirens from the jetty, but above all they heard the thundering death of Lithuania’s game changer.
    •   •   •
    T he communiqué from the perpetrators arrived the way these things do nowadays: A Twitter account was registered, and a single tweet was posted. This linked to a nine-minute video that began with a nighttime shot of a group of four masked men and one woman standing together, apparently somewhere along a dark highway.
    A low-quality night-vision lens on the camera gave an eerie feel to the footage as they crept through a forest, but to military experts the five subjects of the video moved less like trained special operators and more like children playing a game. A man used bolt cutters on a barbed-wire fence, then he and the others passed through, right next to a sign that read:
    ZONE PROTÉGÉ
    More creeping around paved roads and concrete buildings, a shaky zoom-in on a guard sitting in a tower in the distance. Then a chain on a cargo container was defeated with the same bolt cutters, and soon all five individuals were hauling crates out of the facility, back through the barbed-wire fence.
    Inside a room with plenty of light now, the five crates were shown lined up on the floor, their lids open. Inside were bread loaf–sized boxes, a half-dozen in each crate. The only writing visible on the boxes read
Composition Four
.
    Again, those in the military would easily recognize C-4, a military plastic explosive.
    A lot of it.
    A woman with a French accent spoke English; she held up what she said was a detonator, claimed all the equipment was from the American military and it had been liberated from a NATO storage facility in France.
    The scene moved and the camera was back outside in the dark again, filming in grainy green night vision. Five people knelt at the water’s edge wearing wetsuits, swim masks, and snorkels. Tanks and vests were stacked next to them. Through a telephoto lens the camera recorded jerking images of the
Independence
LNG facility and the port beyond.
    A close-up shot of the shoreline showed a coffee table–sized item completely enshrouded in black plastic next to the divers. Strapped to the plastic-covered box were several scuba vests, and one scuba tank was strapped to the top. A different woman spoke now, her voiceover narrating the scene; her accent was later determined by authorities to be from Barcelona.
    “The bomb was made buoyant by the attached scuba equipment. The revolutionaries took the device into the water and sunkit to where it descended below the surface. Then they delivered it to their target, over a kilometer away.”
    The five disappeared in the darkness off the water’s edge, pushing the large floating plastic item attached to the scuba equipment between them.
    The camera stayed on the shoreline, then the scene cut again. Now the gargantuan
Independence
was in the center of the frame, illuminated by bright lights. After only a few seconds of calm, the explosion bloomed on the near side of the ship, the rolling flame ascended, and secondary and tertiary detonations erupted, some