“I understand,” Pitt said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
A few seconds of silence came next, and then Paul’s voice. “Initiating power-up sequence in five… four…”
“Wait!” a voice shouted from Pitt’s outer office. “Wait!”
Hiram Yaeger rushed in with a set of papers in his hands. “I’ve found something.”
“Stand by,” Pitt said into the phone. “What do you have, Hiram? Tell me it’s Thero.”
“Not exactly.” He handed over a printed page with a blue background and a jagged line crisscrossing it. It looked like a game of connect the dots.
“What is this?” Pitt asked.
“It’s a ship’s course over the last forty-eight hours,” Yaeger said.
“What ship?”
Hiram was panting. He’d run all the way up from the tenth floor when the elevator didn’t respond fast enough. “I don’t know what ship exactly,” he said. “But it’s important — I’m sure of it.”
Pitt didn’t doubt his friend but he needed clarity. “What exactly are you talking about?”
“There’s a storm brewing down there,” he said. “Any ships in the area should be getting out of the way, or at least transiting with all due haste, but this one is changing course at odd hours and intervals and all but driving in circles. It’s taken her two full days to arrive where she is now. Had she traveled straight, she could have done the trip in ten hours. In and of itself, that means nothing. But it is suspicious.”
Pitt didn’t disagree. But there were reasons some ships took odd courses. One in particular came to mind.
“There’s a lot of illegal fishing down there,” he said. “The Aussies are always chasing ships off. Every year, they even capture a few. Those ships trawl for the biggest catch. But they stay out of the shipping lanes, and they don’t stay in one place very long because they don’t want to get caught.”
“My first thought,” Yaeger said, “but this isn’t a fishing trawler, it’s a containership of some kind. And those turns are not as random as they seem. There’s a pattern to them.”
Pitt looked at the jagged line. “I don’t see a pattern.”
Yaeger had a second item in his hand. It was a transparent overlay. He’d printed something on it.
“The angles are slightly off,” he said, “and the legs aren’t exactly the right lengths, but it’s pretty close.”
He placed the overlay down and lined up the edges of the page. The left side of the pattern on the transparent sheet matched closely with the legs and courses the wandering mystery ship had taken.
Pitt recognized the full pattern instantly. “The constellation of Orion.”
Yaeger nodded. “For reasons I can’t begin to guess at, this lost containership has been tracing out half of the constellation. It’s a mighty accurate effort at that.”
“Could it possibly be a coincidence?” Pitt wondered aloud.
Yaeger shook his head. “Ten million to one for a ship to randomly make these turns and steam legs of the proper length. Add in the fact that our Orion just went down hours before this pattern started in the very same area, and the odds might hit a billion to one.”
Pitt nodded. Someone on that ship, someone in control of that ship, was trying to tell the world something. He couldn’t fathom what circumstances might be creating this oddity, but he had a good idea who might be sly enough and intelligent enough to pull it off.
“Kurt,” he said almost unconsciously.
Yaeger nodded. “He’s the biggest astronomy buff in the department. He’s always up on that roof with his telescope.”
“Where’s the ship now?”
“Here,” Yaeger said, pointing to a position on the map. “Three hundred miles east-southeast of Heard Island. It was holding station for a while, but now it’s heading northeast at what must be flank speed.”
Pitt turned toward the speakerphone. “Paul have you been listening to this conversation?”
“Both of us have,” Paul said. “In fact, Gamay’s hearing seems to have made a rapid improvement. Not to mention both of our spirits.”
“Mine as well,” Pitt said. “But let’s not get carried away. Get everybody back to their stations. Keep that device switched off, and tell the captain to head due west at flank speed. Don’t spare the horses.”
“Should we try to contact them by radio?” Paul asked.
Pitt thought for a second. “No,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but if we do have someone aboard that ship and he had access to a radio, he’d have called by now. Remain on radio silence until we know more. I’ll have more orders for you in a while, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start planning a boarding party.”
“Yes, sir,” Paul said. “Gemini out.”
For the first time in days, Pitt felt a surge of positive energy. He looked back at the course line to make sure he hadn’t imagined it.
“Find out what you can about that ship,” he said to Yaeger. “I want to know who owns it, where it’s been, and what it might be doing on the bottom of the world.”
Yaeger nodded. “Should we give this info to the NSA?”
Pitt hesitated and then shook his head. “Let’s make sure we’re not fooling ourselves first.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Janko strode through a dimly lit tunnel several hundred feet below the surface of Heard Island. He traveled alongside a small conveyor belt that ran the length of the tunnel. The belt rumbled along continuously, carrying rock and other material in the opposite direction. At the far end, he came to a large, irregular-shaped room carved out of the rock.
The space was over a hundred feet in diameter and dropped down in sections like terraces. The air was thick with dust and the sound of hammering as two dozen workers toiled in the space under flood lamps. They dug with jackhammers and picks and carried the results of their labor to the conveyor belt in wheelbarrows.
Janko made his way to a burly foreman, who watched over the workers like a prison guard on a chain gang.
“Surprised to see you down here,” the foreman growled over the clamor.
“The yield has dropped,” Janko said angrily. “You’re sending up nothing but rock.”
The foreman shifted his weight, turning his stubble-covered face toward Janko with a sneer.
“I told you this would happen months ago,” he said. “The diamonds in this mountain came up in kimberlite pipes. Brought to the surface by volcanic activity over the eons. The vein doesn’t run horizontal, it runs vertical. We were lucky to find the top portion so rich. But the old man took the lion’s share of that, didn’t he?”
Janko didn’t react.
“Well, anyway,” the foreman continued, “the yield is gonna keep going down until you get me some heavy equipment, preferably the kind that can be used underwater.”
“We tried that,” Janko said. “The ASIO intercepted the shipment.”
“Then you’d better get us more employees,” the foreman said without emotion.
Janko glanced around. Once, they’d had over a hundred workers, men and women captured or lured in by offers of big contracts. But the work was harsh, and accidents were common. Over the last year, half the crew had been killed, most in accidents, a few in escape attempts, a few others tortured and killed as examples to show the rest that working was better than rebelling.
An intercom box buzzed on the wall. Janko picked up the heavy receiver and was surprised to hear Thero’s voice.
“We have a problem,” Thero said.