Brian flicked the pencil aside. It was atop a photocopy of a postcard. This was what Naval Intelligence was meant to do, to take in information like this, figure out if it was intelligence or nonsense, and advise on where to send the boats.
This was a bit different to calculating the number of outboard motors imported into the territories of various regimes. It was probably the first time there was one of their own in the mix, this Liam guy. Weird to see former Navy folk on the screen.
Here on the HMS St Giles, in Portsmouth, it all seemed very distant. But the leads were checking out. They could see Liam in all the right places at all the right times. They had folk digging through to see where all the Project Cork hardware was, to make sure that none had gone missing. He had an interview with one of its architects in half an hour. Clearances had been straightened out, he could see everything he wanted to. Problem was, it was fuzzy. It might be that there was a real threat to Project Cork and it needed securing, or it might be that this was a smaller problem that would go away, and would in fact be made worse by reacting.
What ought he do? Could be they hadn't enough information to crack it without spending a significant amount of time brute-forcing it, enough time to get a ship to their transmitter to put some holes in it. He needed to figure out how to get signals intelligence on the hydrophone arrays maybe. And start tracking any odd Malaysian parcels in the Baltic.