“Aye, aye, sir,” the captain repeated, glancing again at the printout
with an unreadable expression before turning to leave.
After Brandt was gone Tarrant picked up the printout and began to scan
the pages. It was as he had feared. The situation in Norway was no longer to
be considered a local problem.
As was so often the case, the crisis had caught everyone, including
America’s intelligence community, off guard. At the core of the matter lay a
long-standing grievance between Norway and the Soviet Union, going back to
post-World War II days. The argument over the exact location of territorial
water boundaries in the Barents Sea had become a major issue almost overnight.
Soviet military maneuvers on the Norwegian border had heightened the tensions
without really changing the equation. That was just a routine adjunct to
diplomacy as far as the Russians were concerned. The world community had
looked on, unable and often unwilling to get involved as the war of words
continued. Denunciations of both sides in the United Nations, mediation by
the Secretary General–nothing had worked.
But the Soviet President had made his mark on the world stage as a
diplomat whose charm and personal style could make things happen where the
career negotiators were deadlocked. His well-publicized trip to Oslo on a
mission of personal negotiation had been stage-managed with the modern Russian
flair for grabbing Western audiences and selling them on the new Soviet
Union’s dedication to peace and goodwill.
At the time Tarrant had been convinced that the whole dispute with Norway
had been engineered just so the President of the Soviet Union could produce
another of his famed diplomatic miracles … and incidentally counteract the
bad press Russia had been getting over the crackdowns on food rioters in Kiev
and Smolensk. The Soviets had learned a lot about stage-managing public
relations stunts from Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Then, on the fourth day of June,
the unthinkable happened. In front of tens of millions of television viewers
worldwide, a bomb planted in Norway’s parliament building had exploded just as
the Soviet President had come forward to deliver a speech announcing the
settlement of the dispute.
The act had left the world stunned. Not only had the charismatic,
reform-minded Soviet President perished in that blast, but along with him
numerous high-ranking Norwegian government officials and members of the
Storting had died as well. Within a matter of hours there were riots in Oslo
and Bergen, and an air of desperation and near-anarchy seemed to dominate
Norway.
The Soviet reaction had been both swift and deadly. Declaring the bomb
plot and the subsequent disorders in a neighbor country posed a direct threat
to the stability of their own nation, Russian leaders announced their
intention to restore order before the situation deteriorated further. Russian
troops and planes were on their way into Norwegian territory within a day of
that fateful assassination.
Tarrant considered himself a student of history, and he couldn’t help but
draw the parallels between the events the world had just witnessed and another
assassination plot years ago in a Balkan city called Sarajevo. But where it
had taken over a month for open warfare to break out after the death of
Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand, this time fighting erupted in a matter of hours.
What other differences would there be … and what similarities? Would
Norway be another Afghanistan, or the flashpoint for the Third World War?
Tonight the crisis had just escalated one notch higher, and the world had
moved one step closer to all-out war between the superpowers.
It was ironic, he thought as he finished the long communiqud and put it
aside, the way the crisis had come out of nowhere. Twenty years, even ten
years ago, a Soviet attack into Norway would have been unthinkable. Norway
was a firm NATO ally, and though foreign troops were not permitted on
Norwegian soil in peacetime, the apparatus for getting them there in a hurry
was well tested. But the very air of peace and cooperation that had followed
the fall of the Berlin Wall had also undermined the whole fabric of the West’s
defense plans. NATO was almost a dead letter now, in shambles after fighting