Page 90 of Gryphon

Most of being an effective sniper came down to patience.

She glanced aside at Mike. He’d walked off to wander among the monument’s pillars with Elene on his arm.

Yeah, patience wouldn’t be coming easy today.

72

“How could I possibly predict where that helicopter and its torpedoes will target?” Miranda felt weary to the very bones of the fingers that she was rubbing across her forehead. She, Jeremy, and Général Vachon had looked at everything known about the missing armaments.

The Unmanned Little Bird had been packed in a forty-foot-long high-cube container; high-cube meant that it was one foot taller than a standard shipping container, intended for over-height items—like the ULB. All that would be required to make it operational was mounting the six rotor blades onto the hub and pouring in sixty-two gallons of fuel—an operation requiring under fifteen minutes and no specialized personnel. The Mark 46 torpedoes were designed to mount quickly onto the helo’s hard points.

“They could be fired into any harbor,” she pictured the Swedish shoreline. “And they have hundreds of harbors. The Mark 46 torpedo has a range of eleven kilometers. They don’t even have to fly it into the harbor; they could start the attack from out at sea.”

“Patterns,” Jeremy spoke up. “When we do a crash investigation, we’re looking for patterns.”

“And what doesn’t fit into those patterns,” Miranda stopped rubbing her forehead. “What’s broken or missing? Or perhaps—”

“Shouldn’t be there in the first place.”

They thought so alike, Miranda had never minded Jeremy’s interruptions.

“The attacks have all been against Swedish assets,” Jeremy tapped the table rapidly with a pointed index finger as if the tablecloth held some secret location. But she understood his idea.

“General, can you look up all the locations of Swedish deployment? Especially ships and submarines.”

They all turned to watch the big screens at the front of the conference room used for lecture slides during the sessions. His team at NATO were listening in on an open phone connection, and feeding their results back to his computer to show on the screen.

First they visited MarineTraffic.com.

From the Gulf of Bothnia to the north, Denmark to the south, and all the way up the Baltic to St. Petersburg, his map was soon covered with hundreds of tiny boat icons. Traffic flow, thick with cargo and fishing vessels. Because it was midwinter, there were very few pleasure or passenger vessels.

He selected vessels flagged as Swedish.

The three of them leaned in to study the map as it shifted. Nothing struck her as being unusual. All the patterns appeared normal, heavy traffic along the shore, fishing and small cargo vessels out in deeper waters.

“Anyone?” Général Vachon asked.

She looked at Jeremy and he shook his head. She matched the gesture.

“NATO secure traffic,” Vachon spoke into his phone.

A far simpler map appeared onscreen.

“Sweden only,” he called out.

Someone selected the Countries submenu and switched off everyone except Sweden.

Most of the icons showed ships in ports. Of their five submarines, only one was deep in the Baltic, halfway between Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

“What’s that one?” Jeremy pointed.

As soon as she saw it, she knew he was right.

Général Vachon hovered his mouse over the small icon.

A Visby-class corvette. Mid-channel in the Gulf of Finland close by Russian territorial waters where the Gripen pilot had been ejected and died on Daughter’s Island.

The HSwMS Karlstad stood alone with four jets overhead.

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