He looked up and saw Sara’s startled gaze, and laughed out loud. “It’s a long story. Don’t worry, I survived, virtue intact.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Sara, has anything odd happened out here lately?”
“Odd? You mean, other than my ship coming under fire, my captain being killed, and me sending a boarding team to commandeer said ship in a helo with an aircrew of three I may have sent to their death? No. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing we don’t run into every day out here, and twice on Sundays.”
“Before this,” he said patiently. “Have you heard anything over the air, seen anything that didn’t quite fit?” He lifted his shoulders and spread his hands. “Maybe ship traffic where it shouldn’t be?”
Before the words were all the way out of his mouth she was on her feet and headed up the ladder outside her stateroom, Hugh dogging her heels.
“XO,” Ops said. He and all five of his techs were jammed inside the comm room, looking like they wished they had hammers in their hands instead of tiny little screwdrivers and alligator clips. All the equipment had its faces off, revealing a colorful mass of wire and dials and digital readouts and computer boards. Mostly it looked like a mess. A nonfunctioning mess.
“Anything yet?” Sara said without hope.
Ops shook his head. “We caught a stray bullet back here and it must have ricocheted around somehow.” He displayed a misshapen piece of metal that looked entirely too small to have caused this much damage. “We don’t even know what it hit yet, that’s why we’re looking at everything. They took out our satellite dish. They must have nicked the antenna array, too. And I can’t send anyone up there in this weather to fix it. Even if we had the parts.”
“Understood,” she said. “How long before someone comes looking for us?”
“In this weather?” He shook his head. “The Hercs will be patrolling, but we aren’t exactly keeping to the last route we filed with District before the e-mail went out, and right after that the comm got shot out. And we’re the only cutter in the Bering Sea at present. The Alex Hale/M be back in Kodiak by now. They’ll be looking for us, though.”
She nodded. “District hasn’t heard from us in a while, and they’ve probably got red flags up all over the place. Ops, you remember that freighter we saw up on the line? The one we all figured was lost?”
He blinked behind his glasses. “Yes,” he said, although it was obvious that he was remembering the incident as if it had happened years ago instead of days ago.
Sara didn’t blame him. If she’d had the luxury she would have felt like that herself. “What was its name, do you remember?”
He thought. “Star of Wonder? Star of Night?”
“That’s star of wonder, star of light, Ops,” Sparks said.
Ops snapped his fingers. “The Star of Bali. Sorry, XO, I must be a little out of it.”
“What was it’s last port of call?”
“Petropavlovsk.”
Sara looked at Hugh.
“Petropavlovsk,” he said, “was where Noortman’s partner, Fang, and his employers planned to board the ship Noortman found for them. It was also where the Agafia was sent for repairs and maintenance in November.”
The silence was heavy and long. At the end of it Sara said, “You think there were two ships.”
He nodded. “And one was a decoy.”
“The Agafia.”
“Yes, whose activities were designed to draw your attention away from the Star of Bali. Where was the Star of Bali headed?” he said to Ops.
“Seward.”
Hugh looked at Sara. “Seward’s only a hundred miles from Anchorage and that’s road miles, not as the crow flies. The range on the mobile missile launcher Peter sold them is-”
“Two hundred miles, I remember,” Sara said. “Which means they don’t have to get to the dock to launch.”
He hadn’t thought of that, but she was right. The terrorists could launch as soon as they were within range, which meant while they were still well out at sea.
“We’ve got to find them, Sara. Now.”
JANUARY
WHEN DID WE PASS her?“‘
“On the eighth, XO.”
“Six days. Damn, damn, damn.”
“What?” Hugh said.
“She’s slow but she’s not that slow,” Sara said.
Hugh and Sara and Ops and Tommy and the chief were hunched over the chart table, staring at the Transas screen as Sara right-clicked and dragged and dropped them all the way up the Aleutian Chain and back down again.
“You said they wouldn’t want to draw attention, right, Hugh?” Sara said. “My vote is for Unimak Pass. It’s like the intersection of Main Street and First Avenue for the North Pacific maritime freight fleet. All the freighters on the great circle route between Asia and North America run for the lee of the Aleutian Islands. Most of them transit Unimak Pass. If the Star of Bali is trying to maintain a low profile, that’s the way she’d go.”
Hugh looked for flaws in her argument and found none. “Then that’s the way we should go.”
“Yes, well, XO, there’s another problem.”
“Of course there is,” Sara said. “Serve it up, Ops.”
“We got weather coming straight at us.”
Sara sighed. “Ops, I though you said we had a problem.” The ship lurched but everyone was already hanging on to something. “It’s just another storm.”
Ops shook his head. “This one’s worse, XO. The last Bering Sea offshore forecast we got before our comm got shot to hell was for sixteen hundred yesterday. Today we’re looking at a thirty-knot wind, eighteen-foot seas, rain and snow and freezing spray.”
“And?”
“Tonight the wind will be south to southeast, forty to forty-five knots, seas eighteen to twenty-one feet. And did I mention the rain and snow and freezing spray?”
Sara looked at him.
He spread his hands. “Sorry, captain.”
There was a strained silence on the bridge, broken only by the faint whistling of wind as it forced its way between Plexiglas and bulkhead.
“The captain’s dead, Ops,” Sara said.
“Cap-XO-ma’am, I-”
“And I don’t accept your apology for the weather. There is absolutely no excuse for it, and I’ll expect you to do better in the future.”