“My research indicates she’s heavily armed — security forces, antiballistic missile defenses, probably also some kind of ship-to-ship defenses.”
“Great.” Glascoe’s shadow turned to Marshall, who was piloting the boat. “Maintain a distance. We’ll see what goes down and be ready to pick up any survivors.”
“You got it.” Marshall’s freckled hands moved easily around the controls. He clearly knew what he was doing.
“I’ll get drones in the air.” Joe turned and hurried from the tube to a tent pitched in the middle of the deck. He’d set up a backup computer station there where he’d intended to watch the sonar feeds and pilot the drones, although he hadn’t spent much time there since his arrival. He’d been too seasick before, but either he’d gotten used to the motion or the antiemetic in the IV was still working. Either way, he felt comfortable up here.
He stood by the drones. Each had a belly-mounted camera to relay information back to Joe’s screens, and he wanted them in the air. Maybe he’d be able to get a good aerial view of the Roc.
Unfortunately, the drones were under the tent. Ordinarily, he’d ask Vivian to drag them out onto the deck so he could pilot them. But she wasn’t there. It would be too embarrassing to ask Marshall or Glascoe or the other men on the ship. But he didn’t have to.
“Edison.” Joe pointed to a drone, then out to the deck near the railing. “Take the drone out there.”
Edison tugged a drone onto the deck where Joe had pointed. It was a day drone, painted blue on the bottom and white on top. On a sunny day like today, it would be hard to spot. Or at least he hoped so.
“Good boy!” He gave Edison a treat from his pocket.
Edison wagged his tail and crunched it down. He looked expectantly at the drone. Edison knew what was supposed to come next.
Joe worked the controls to make the drone take off. He didn’t have much practice, but the drone rose jerkily and hovered a few feet above the deck. He checked the camera — teak boards. So far, so good.
Joe aimed the drone toward the faraway yacht and flew it high above the waves, but not so high he didn’t feel queasy watching it. Maybe the motion sickness drugs were wearing off. He increased the drone’s altitude.
Slowly, the Roc came into view. The yacht was huge — white with teak decks and giant windows. At six hundred (orange, black, black) feet long and four hundred and fifty (green, brown, black) feet high, it was bigger than a naval destroyer. An H with a circle around it on the gleaming main deck was mostly obscured by the helicopter parked on it. The helicopter was white with blue stripes that matched the ship. Three (red) windows on the sides, several in front. It made him anxious just thinking about flying in it. He guessed it could hold eight (purple) passengers.
People strolled around on the main deck and on the upper decks. He counted about twenty (blue, black), but wondered how many people were below. Many. If his guess was correct, all at risk.
No one looked up at the drone, so he judged it high enough that they hadn’t noticed it.
Studying the yacht, he banked the drone in a large circle. The yacht looked just like its blueprint, which he’d seen online, except for a device mounted on top of the bridge. The device didn’t look like a standard antenna. He drifted the drone down for a closer look.
A copper coil glinted in the sunlight. A large conductor. A white tube that looked recently painted to match the ship. On the end, a cable ran out the back and down the side of the roof, presumably to a power source. The device looked like something his erstwhile ancestor Nikola Tesla might have built. A Tesla coil on top of the most expensive yacht in the world. It had to mean something, but he didn’t know what.
Joe stared at the image, trying to make the pieces fit into the list of things that might be expected to be on top of such a ship — antenna, wireless transmitters — but this device was different. Maybe it belonged to the missile defense system. Maybe the captain was a tinkerer. Maybe it transmitted porn.
Maybe it was none of these.
The device was approximately the size of the wooden crate he’d seen being loaded before the Roc left port.
The thoughts dancing around his head moved into formation.
This device was the weapon. An electronic weapon capable of delivering a large electromagnetic pulse.
An EMP bomb.
Heading straight for New York.
Chapter 47
The Roc was almost to New York. It had taken Laila longer than she’d expected to find the prince’s ship. The ship had stayed in regular shipping lanes, and her people had to sift through many false positives. She had worried the giant yacht had slipped through her fingers.
“I’m sure.” Ambra pointed her pencil at a bright object on the screen. “That’s the prince’s ship.”
“The Roc.” The ship was huge, long and thin. The bow tapered to a knife-point edge, the stern rounded. A distinctive profile. No commercial vessels were that size, no military vessels that shape. The prince’s vanity had made his ship distinctive.
“The Israeli protest boat is here.” Ambra pointed at another ship a few miles away. That ship was aimed straight for New York, several miles ahead of the Roc, but the yacht gained on them with every minute. The people on board probably had no idea that the giant ship behind them was a royal superyacht that sought to destroy their lives.
“Are you sure it’s the protest boat?” If she had to shoot it from the water, she wanted to be sure.
“It’s a former Greenpeace boat. Slow old tub with noisy engines. Easy to see and hear.” Ambra pointed her pencil again. “Nothing else like it in this part of the ocean.”
Laila pictured the scruffy settlers aboard, come to complain to the United States and demand more support in their plans to steal more land from the Palestinians. They weren’t innocents in the conflict. Religious zealots who wanted to take all the lands for themselves. They didn’t care about the refugee problem and how its ramifications spread far beyond the borders of their tiny land.
Just as the refugees fled far beyond the lands of their birth, so too would the consequences spread throughout the world if these ragtag settlers were blamed for the crippling EMP discharge the Roc would send straight into the heart of New York. She’d thought of simply sinking their boat, but had decided that if this ship were to be sunk so close before the EMP discharge, tensions would rise.
“Once the Roc reaches that ship, it can discharge the device at any time,” Ambra said. “We can aim for the Roc’s engines. We can stop them without sinking them.”
Laila thought of the men aboard — the prince, the king, her cousins, her brother, her father, servants, and soldiers. According to Nahal’s evidence, few of them understood the true purpose of their voyage. Even fewer knew the prince intended to sink the Israeli ship and then the Roc as soon as it delivered its EMP charge. His men were trained to kill everyone but the prince and his allies. No one would be left to challenge him.
She had no love for the current king. She and her sisters and cousins had suffered under his tyrannical rule. He, too, thought of women only as beasts of burden and pleasure. Even so, he was not as vicious and ruthless as the prince. No one was.
Except for her.
She had to be.
“Hit her broadside,” Laila said. “We must send the device, and the prince, to the bottom of the sea.”