October 1st, 1980
Naval Support Activity, Bahrain
In the three weeks since her sudden exodus from Sinop, CTI3 Rhonda Keller had been busy. The building they had moved into wasn’t meant to host a fully staffed collection and analysis facility. There wasn’t any spare room in the crowded compound. The space shortage was just the beginning of the logistic challenges. Bahrain didn’t have the collection equipment that they needed, and moreover it was geographically out of position to maintain Sinop’s mission. Instead, Sinop was being operated by a drastically reduced crew and the collected data was being sent via courier to Bahrain for analysis.
The rumor around the facility was that the Naval Security Group would flatten the area around the current building and build up their presence. Over the past ten days many of Keller’s shipmates were transferred out to Rota Spain. The Iraqi invasion of Iran had meant that the Navy needed more room for Arabic and Farsi linguists, while the Russian linguists could be better used elsewhere. They had left Keller in place as part of a detachment whose primary mission was to pour through the signals traffic to find any sign of Soviet activity in the Iran-Iraq war.
Most of that collection was being processed during the day shift. Lieutenant Stevenson had put Keller on permanent mid-watches while she sorted out a batch of transmissions they’d received from Kaspiysk. The reel-to-reel tapes had followed them down from Sinop, and Stevenson was adamant that they be processed before Keller could return to the normal watch rotation. Keller had no direct evidence of this, but she was confident that she was being punished for digging up the old Sea Monster theory when Agent Poole was around.
She was listening to the tapes in chronological order. The first few had nothing of any actual value. Just routine communications checks and status reports of a port facility operating at night. She had become adept at fast forwarding through the hours of empty static and pinpointing the few minutes of actual transmissions each night. By the time she had processed two weeks of nothing, she finally heard something useful. At least she hoped it would be useful. She spent a couple of hours working up a transcription and rough translation before heading over to the watch commander’s office.
“Hey Boss,” said Keller, as she knocked on the door. “I’ve got something from these Kaspiysk tapes that I’d like to show you.” Stevenson cleared a spot on his desk and invited her to show him what she had. Keller set the translation down, with the transcript off to the left in case she needed to reference it.
“Okay, what have ya got?” asked the Lieutenant.
“Well Sir, most of what I’ve reviewed so far is just dogshit. That is, until about a week ago. On September 25th, this exchange popped up.” She pointed to a spot on the translation, and Stevenson read aloud.
“Shopkeeper, this is Buyer 3. We have encountered a problem with Eaglet 2.”
“Buyer 3, this is Shopkeeper. What is your situation?”
“Shopkeeper, Eaglet 2 has suffered an [garbled] engine failure.” Stevenson looked up at Keller.
“What’s this garble here? Any ideas?” Keller consulted the transcription.
“I can’t say for sure, but it sounds like ‘Pody’em’ which means climb, or rise. But I’ve never heard it in that context. The prefix ‘Pod’ means ‘under’ so this could be any number of words. It’s just not clear enough to pinpoint it.” Stevenson went back to the translation and continued reading to himself.
“Okay. So, from what we have here, sometime around 0200 hours on last Thursday morning, the Ruskies had a ship suffer an engine failure, and they had to send a tug out to bring it back to port. What makes this worth reporting?”
“Sir, the first thing is that the engine damage was caused by taking water into the vozdukhozabornik.” Stevenson looked at her blankly. “The air intake. I thought that might be a reference to a jet engine.”
“It could be, but you know the fire triangle. All types of engines need fuel, flame and air. But I’ll admit I’ve never heard of a ship engine failing for water in the intake. That’s the sort of thing you can engineer around when you put an engine in the water.”
“Also, look here,” she pointed to another section of the transcript. “When the port is taking the report they specifically ask about Eagle 1 and Eaglets 3, and 4. There are clearly more than one of these things out there.”
“Is there any significance in the difference between an Eagle and an Eaglet?” asked Stevenson.
“I honestly don’t know. In fact, I didn’t know ‘Eaglet’ was a word until I looked it up tonight.”
“So, you think the Soviets have deployed a fleet of jet-ships to the Caspian Sea, and they are now suffering catastrophic engine failures?” Before Keller could answer, Stevenson continued; “I don’t think we have anything here we can report on. As far as I can tell, we just have a simple breakdown of a shitty Soviet coastal defense vessel. I’ll grant your point that we don’t have these callsigns mapped to any existing vessels, but they could just be updating the callsigns.” Keller’s face sank with the realization that what she thought was a break in their case wasn’t enough to convince the LT.
“Look, there might not be an answer here. This could all just be chasing ghosts. I appreciate the effort that you’ve put into this, and once you’re finished, we’ll send whatever findings we can back to the States. But don’t think you need to solve this riddle. 90% of the time, there’s no genuine answer. Some bureaucrat probably checked the wrong box on a form and sent a bunch of jet fuel to the wrong port. It happens. Just work through what you have left. I really need you back in the rotation for this Iran mission.” With that, Stevenson handed her back her file, and went back to writing his own report.
Keller went back to her reel-to-reel tape recorder and started plugging away at the rest of the tapes she had. She knew that Stevenson was probably right. And she also knew that if there hadn’t been a war in the Middle East, she’d have more leeway to work on this.