He looked taken aback. “I beg your pardon, XO?”
She met his eyes. “It’s the Agafia, sir.”
JANUARY
ON BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH
CAPTAIN LOWE RETURNED TO the bridge, Sara on his heels. “Flight quarters,” he said. Everyone stared.
“Flight quarters,” he repeated.
“We’re bringing our helo back on board,” Sara said when nobody moved.
Everyone stopped staring at the captain and started staring at her.
“Flight quarters,” she said patiently.
“But, XO, the Agafia,” Ops said. He even pointed at the outline of the ship nearing a threateningly black horizon that also seemed to be moving, only toward them instead of away. “We’re half a mile off and they’re still way inside the exclusion zone.”
“Flight quarters, Ops,” the captain said in a deceptively gentle voice. He even smiled.
“Aye aye, sir,” Ops said.
Hats were whipped off smartly and the news was piped to the crew. Shortly thereafter phones began to ring as various members of the deck crew called the bridge to see if they were serious. Assured that the bridge was, they began to assemble aft, not without a lot of nonverbal communication that indicated a certain lack of faith in the sanity of the entire command structure of the U.S. Coast Guard. Shortly thereafter the hangar was retracted, and as if that was the signal, the radio sparked into life, signaling the approach of the helo.
“Tallyho!” Mark Edelen said, pointing, and they all looked east to see a bright orange speck against the now black clouds boiling up out of the south.
“Put our nose on the seagull’s ass, Chief,” Sara said.
“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said. “Helm, zero-seven-zero, all ahead full.”
“Zero-seven-zero, all ahead, aye, Chief.”
“XO,” the captain said.
“Sir?”
“Get aft. I want that VIP standing in my cabin talking fast thirty seconds after they hit the deck.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said.
She hit the portside hatch at not quite a run, registering by the wind on her cheek that the temperature had risen a couple of degrees since she’d last taken the air on deck, and slid down the ladder with her elbows on the railings.
“Hey, XO, you’re out on deck without your float coat,” said Seaman Rosenberg as she trotted past. She wanted to flip him off but it didn’t suit either her rank or his.
She hit the main deck and fetched up behind a cowling. The helo was running up on the stern about a hundred feet up. They throttled it way back and approached the hangar deck on tiptoe, nose down, tail up. The closer they got, the smaller the deck looked to Sara. The swell was increasing in height, pushed up by the approaching storm, and the stern bobbed and weaved like Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
The helo made it over the taffrail and hovered over the hangar deck.
It was ten feet from touchdown when the ship slammed down into the sea and the deck slid out from beneath it. The superstructure of the ship stopped shielding the helo from the wind and a good forty-knotter caught her upside the head. Whoever was driving wisely decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hit the throttle, roaring off to port, circling around, and coming up again on the stern.
Sara crouched down behind the cowling, the force of the wind threatening to pull her hair out by the roots, and worked at reswallowing her heart. The LSO was crouched against the exterior of the hangar. “You okay?” he yelled, or she supposed he did. She saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind, the all ahead full the Sojourner Truth had going on. She gave him a thumbs-up, and then they both heard the second approach of the helo and he duck-walked forward to stand in front of the hangar and guide them in.
She could hardly bear to watch, but this time they plunked her down right in the gold, in the exact center of the circle painted on the hangar deck. Sara scuttled around the hangar, dragging her knuckles like an ape, and yelled in Ostlund’s ear, “They’ve got a passenger the captain wants to see pronto.”
He nodded and followed the rest of his deck crew forward, hunched over so the rotor wouldn’t take their heads off. He reached the helo and slapped the side. She could see Sams, in the left seat, crack his door. Ostlund yelled at him. Sams nodded. The LSO walked around the front of the helo and disappeared. Through the windscreen Sara could see the helo’s aft door slide open and someone step to the deck.
Ostlund came scrambling back around the helo on a heading for Sara, followed by someone tall bundled into a Mustang suit and a watch cap pulled low over his brow.
“This here’s our XO, she’ll take you to the captain.”
“Thanks.” The man unbuckled his helmet and turned to Sara.
Her jaw dropped.
“Hi, Sara,” Hugh said. “I need to talk to your commanding officer. Now.”
The ship heeled suddenly and hard to port, and everyone staggered to regain their balance. There were shouts and curses from the hangar deck as the deck crew hung on to the helo’s tie-downs. With a great sense of foreboding Sara looked around to see that the next storm had indeed come upon them. Blowing snow needled into her exposed skin. The seas were rising, and the wind howled around the ship like a hungry wolf.
“Follow me,” she said to Hugh, and then had to yell it again so he could hear her over the sound and fury of the storm.
“ALL RIGHT,” LOWE SAID.
They were in the wardroom. Lowe sat at the head of the table facing Hugh, who stood opposite him at the table’s foot in front of a dry board which was covered with an outline of names, dates, and places. On the captain’s left were Sara, Ops, and the Engineer Officer, a tall, pencil-thin young man who could barely find his way to the bridge but who could disassemble a Caterpillar generator and put it back together again blindfolded. On the captain’s right were Ensign Ostlund, Ensign Ryan, and Chief Mark Edelen.
“You want us to believe that a North Korean terrorist-no, two-have built themselves a backpack bomb filled with radioactive material, loaded it into a mobile missile launcher, which they have then smuggled on board an oceangoing vessel, and are currently attempting to sail it into these waters, for the purposes of aiming the weapon at a target in Alaska, which you have been told by a less than reliable source to be one of the military bases, Elmendorf or Eielson. Why not Valdez, by the way? The oil terminal ought to go up with a bang big enough to keep any terrorist happy.”
Hugh met the captain’s sarcasm with the same stoicism he had displayed for the last hour. He held a black marker, the cap of which he repeatedly clicked on and clicked off. Click, click. “First of all, sir-” Hugh was respectful but firm. “A backpack bomb is generally held to be nuclear, and, uh, well, in a backpack. I don’t think that is the case here.”
“Really? What is it, then?”
The ship rolled over a swell and Hugh took a quick step to keep his balance. “It’s a dirty bomb. Instead of a weapon of mass destruction, it’s called a weapon of mass disruption.”
Sara, watching the captain out of the corner of her eye, saw him take a deep breath, and wondered what room on board she could convert to a brig when the captain finally lost his temper and ordered her to throw Hugh into it. “What’s the difference between the two?”
“What’s most important to a terrorist is that the weapon of mass disruption is a lot cheaper to make.”
“More bang for your buck, eh?” the captain said.
Hugh didn’t make the mistake of smiling at this almost genial query. “Partly, sir. There is also the fact that fissile, that is, weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are much more closely controlled and monitored than radioactive materiel.”