The first man they took out was the mercenary who had run aft to man the Browning machine gun newly bolted to the Agafia‘s deck. Ryan disarmed the weapon by pulling the bolt securing it to its stand and letting it follow its gunner over the side.
They were on the bridge fifteen minutes later without a scratch on any of them. One Asian guy was screaming something at them in his native tongue, which no one understood or even tried to very hard. From the way the other four surviving crew looked at him, he was the boss.
Ryan almost shot him down where he stood before he remembered that command might actually want to talk to the boss, so he said, “Secure them all below somewhere and mount a guard. If they so much as sneeze, shoot ‘em. The rest of you, let’s start looking for Mr. Rincon’s missile launcher.”
An hour later, they had inspected the Agafia bow to stern, containers hold, engine room, galley, and staterooms, and they still hadn’t found it.
ICE WAS BUILDING UP on the rescue hoist. No one in the aircraft said anything about it because what was the point, but the silence was getting a little strained.
Laird pointed at the radar screen. Sams nodded without leaning over to look. The radar was degrading because ice was building on the nose of the aircraft, too.
They’d left the Agafia with forty-five minutes of fuel remaining in their tanks. They’d been in the air forty-seven minutes. Sams avoided looking at the fuel gauge, concentrating instead on the horizon, a dark gray, featureless expanse. He’d put some altitude between the helo and the deck so he’d have some choices when the time came.
When it did, it came fast, and it looked like a tall iceberg, so he didn’t see it at first. Laird shouted and pointed, and there it was, a steep cliff footed with a narrow strip of beach. He eyeballed it. It ought to be wide enough for the fifty-one foot rotor.
It had to be.
One engine died, and they made the beach.
The other died, and they started to fall.
After that, they started to spin.
JANUARY
ON BOARD THE USC6 CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH
SARA WAS ICILY CALM. “I believed you, I backed your story with the captain. Now he’s dead and there is no missile launcher on the ship we just boarded at gunpoint.”
Hugh was standing on the bridge, his hands dangling at his sides. “I don’t understand it,” he said.
“That makes you and a ship full of Coasties who don’t understand it,” she said.
There was a rumble of agreement which she stilled with a glare.
“Noortman gave me the port, he gave me the ship, he gave me everything.” Hugh stopped suddenly, brows furrowing.
Sara waited. When he didn’t say anything else, she said, “Yeah, well, your thumbnail-pulling skills must not be quite up to CIA par because it looks like he lied through his teeth.”
Hugh met her eyes and the words dried up in her mouth. She’d never seen that expression on Hugh’s face. “They were running with their lights on,” he said.
“Who was?”
“The Agafia. They were running with their lights on.”
“So?” she said. “It’s kind of, oh, I don’t know, the law?”
“Why? If they wanted to run from you, why run with their lights on? Why make it easier to follow them?”
“I can find a boil on the ass of a wildebeest in Africa with our radar,” Sara said. “I don’t need running lights.”
“Still, it helped you find them,” Hugh said. “And what about Noort-man?”
“What about your unimpeachable source?”
“They didn’t kill him,” Hugh said. “They may have killed Peter, but they didn’t try to kill Noortman.”
“And Peter is?” Sara said.
“The arms dealer in Odessa who brokered their deal with the North Korean for the cesium and the North Korean missile launcher. Why? Why try to kill him and not kill Noortman?”
Sara said, a little impatiently, “Peter was a danger to them, Noortman wasn’t?
“That’s not it,” Hugh said. “Or not all of it.”
The Agafia was riding their stern, under the command of Ensign Ryan and the prize crew. The Sunrise Warrior, after the spectacular maneuver that had so ably distracted the attention of the Agafia’s hijackers long enough for Ryan’s team to board and take control of the ship, was keeping pace off their starboard side. “Greenpeace is signaling us, XO,” the chief said.
“Tommy?”
Tommy’s lips moved as the light blinked.“ ‘I am now in possession of one Get Out of Jail Free card. Agreed?”“ At Sara’s look, Tommy said, ”I’m just reading here, XO.“
Sara gave a grudging nod. “Send ‘Agreed.”“
“
“We’re heading back up to the line to continue our work. Good luck with yours, Sojourner Truth.”“
“Once a crusader, always a crusader,” Chief Edelen said. “That was pretty slick back there. I wonder who their master is?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Let’s forget we ever saw them.”
“Forget who, XO?”
The Sunrise Warrior altered course and was almost immediately swallowed by the storm.
“Maybe they didn’t mean to kill him,” Hugh said. “Peter,” he said when Sara looked momentarily blank. “In Odessa. Maybe we were just supposed to think that they tried. The bomb went off in the middle of the night, long after everyone had gone home.”
Hugh was beginning to shiver. He was soaking wet from standing out on the bridge wing, trying to follow what was going on on the other ship. Sara made a sound of disgust. “Follow me,” she said, and led him to her cabin. She muscled him into a chair. “You,” she said to the first person she saw, “towels, lots of them, and find him some dry clothes.”
The towels came immediately; the clothes took a little longer. Halfway out of his shirt, Hugh said, “They didn’t want us to find out what weapons they had bought. But they didn’t mind if we knew what the target was.”
She was still angry, but she was listening. The Agafia had been commandeered by pirates, those pirates had fired on the Sojourner Truth with a machine gun that appeared to have been freshly mounted specifically for the purpose, and Sara knew there had to be more of a reason for that than that the Sojourner Truth had caught them with their nets in American waters. Especially since she hadn’t.
Besides, where was the Agafia’s crew? A three-hundred-and-forty-foot catcher-processor, between ship’s crew and fish handlers, could have upward of a hundred people on board. There was a cold feeling in her gut. “What did the survivors say about the processor’s crew?”
Hugh, as the only Korean-speaking person on board, had tried to talk to the pirates via Ryan’s handheld. “Nothing. Same thing they said about everything. They’re not talking.”
Sara smiled, and he shivered again. “Maybe when it calms down enough to bring them over here, you will find them a little more forthcoming face-to-face.”
“Maybe.”
Someone had actually found a pair of pants that would cover Hugh’s long legs. He stood up to pull them on. He paused. “They had to know we’d catch on.”
“Who? Who knew? And zip up your pants.”
For the first time since he’d come on board he looked at her as Sara, his wife, instead of the executive officer of the Sojourner Truth. “Making you nervous, babe?”
Her brows snapped together. “Knock it off. This isn’t the time or the place.”
“You’re right, it isn’t.” He stepped into sneakers that were only half a size too small and sat down again to tie them, returning to his line of thought as he did so. “The terrorists knew we’d catch on.”