He turned back to Hugh. “You came from a U.S. Coast Guard ship. I must assume that you have captured the Agafia. Where is my brother?”
One brother per boat. “He is a prisoner, along with those of his men who survived.”
“You lie,” Ja Yong-bae said. “He would rather die than live in captivity. As would I.”
“Why are you doing this?” Hugh said.
The man gave a very European shrug. “I would have thought it was obvious.”
“It isn’t. Please explain it to me.” Hugh was only half paying attention to their conversation. He didn’t know what Sara was going to try next, but he knew Sara and he knew something was coming and that it would be big and bad. Sara didn’t do redundant. And she would be operating on the assumption that he was dead, so she would not be constrained by fear for his safety, and she would be highly motivated for revenge. Hugh wanted off the Star of Bali, and he wanted off now. If Ja offered him the chance to jump overboard he’d take it and thank him.
Ja considered. “Why not? There is time, and you have come so far.”
He had Hugh hoisted up over the side of the container. There wasn’t a lot of room inside because it was mostly filled with the missile and its launcher. Men hunched over the controls.
“Why do this?” Hugh said. It had bought him time before and he liked to go with what worked. “Who do you work for?”
“Myself.”
“You trained with al-Qaida in Afghanistan.”
Ja raised an eyebrow. “You’re remarkably well informed for a member of the United States Coast Guard.”
What the hell. “I work for the CIA.”
Ja’s eyebrows raised. “Do you,” he said after a moment. Then, amazingly, he smiled. “It took you long enough to catch up with me. Didn’t I leave enough clues?”
With a groaning of gears, the head of the missile began to rise.
“WE’RE JUST COMING UP on the northern point of the island, Captain.”
“Are they in sight yet?”
Everyone on the bridge strained to look. “No.”
Sara hoisted herself into the captain’s chair to see if height would give her an advantage. The dark green seas were whipped into whitecaps by the winds howling up out of the southwest, but the swell was way down, and what was left of it was pushing them north.
It would also be pushing the Star of Bali north.
“Let’s kill the lights,” she said.
Ops nodded. The ship’s lights went out, inside and out. Sara got down and walked out onto the starboard wing and looked back. Even their running lights were out. They were as indistinguishable from the dark green water as a two-hundred-and-eighty-four-foot white hull with an orange stripe down both sides and a big white square retractable helo hangar could be. She wondered where Laird and Sams were, if they were alive and safe.
Probably not, because if they had been they would have been able to yell for help, and if they had been able to yell for help there would have been no need for the task in hand. She hoped yet again that she was doing the right thing. She hoped she wouldn’t lose any more of her crew.
Sara had heard all the cliches about command, but she had never understood until now the definition of the word “lonely.” She turned and saw Mark Edelen looking at her, and thought she saw condemnation in his eyes.
She squared her shoulders and went back inside, this time climbing into the captain’s chair without thinking about it.
They were coming up Eldorado Narrows all ahead full, as fast as the EO could push all four generators. Fox Island, a series of three mountain pillars connected by two ridges, was passing by on their left. The ridges were high enough that they couldn’t see the Star of Bali, presumably passing up the outside of the island as the Sojourner Truth was passing up the inside. Which meant that the ridge concealed the Sojourner Truth from the Star of Bali as well.
Cape Resurrection, on their right, had been succeeded by a series of sheer cliffs contorting themselves into a sinuous convolution of coastline that was mostly bare rock dropping into eighteen, twenty-nine, thirty-seven fathoms of water. Ahead, a narrow spit thrust out from Fox Island to the northeast, a rude gesture of land thickly crusted with trees, most of them dead and bare of limb. An old fishing boat was tossed up among them, its wooden sides as gray as the dead tree trunks.
“Getting kind of skinny through here, XO,” the chief said.
Sara looked at him. He was sweating. “Maintain course and speed,” she said.
The Sojourner Truth seemed to have been swallowed alive by the encompassing walls of land. The sky looked very narrow above, and the throb of the engines echoed back at them. Sara saw a group of sea lions hauled out on a rock dive back as the cutter passed by. In the next moment the cutter’s wake rolled over their rock in a cold green wave.
She knew what the chief was feeling. She was feeling it herself. The channel was three hundred yards wide from land to land and only two hundred of that was navigable due to shoals and rocks and reefs protruding from the shore on either side. They were an hour away from low tide, and the Sojourner Truth was making the better part of eighteen and a half knots.
Sara was glad the chief was scared. It would keep him sharp.
Everyone on the bridge seemed to hold their breath as the cutter flashed between spit and headland, and then they were through.
Sara let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Well done, Chief, helm.”
Mark pulled off his cap and wiped his forehead on his forearm. His hair was soaked. He saw Sara watching and resettled the cap on his head. “Helm, steer three-zero-zero.”
“Steering three-zero-zero, aye.”
The bow of the Sojourner Truth swung to port and the northern point of Fox Island.
“HOW HERE’S SOMETHING Y0U don’t see everyday, ladies and gentlemen.” The fifty-foot cruise ship slowed down until it was almost dead in the water as the passengers lined up on the port rail. “We’ve got two pods of orcas, also known as killer whales, in sight. The one closest to us is a resident pod. The one farther off is a transient pod.”
“Mom, look!”
“I see, honey.” Lilah blew her nose and tucked her hands back into her pockets, leaning against the rail to steady herself against the roll of the boat.
The captain’s mellow voice continued over the loudspeaker. “The residents reside right here in Resurrection Bay. The transients, the ones farther off, they travel all over Prince William Sound. The resident orcas eat fish. The transient orcas eat everything, including sea mammals like sea otters and sea lions. The two pods speak different languages, and they don’t interbreed.”
Eli tugged at her hand. “Mom! Boat! Big boat!”
Lilah looked up and saw a freighter pass them en route to the dock in Seward. Men were at work in one of the containers stacked on deck. She squinted at the name on the bow. The Star of Bali. Such a pretty name for such an ugly ship.
“If you’ll look up on the cliff above us, you’ll see a couple of bald eagles-”
“IT’S VERY SIMPLE, REALLY,” Ja said, watching the nose of the missile point toward the sky. “My nation is in serious need of an invasion. Your government used the bombings in New York and your capital to launch a war in the Middle East. If I detonate this weapon”-he patted the undercarriage of the Scud-“in an area with a military presence responsible for protecting most of the North Pacific Ocean, your nation will take this as an act of war. Especially when they learn that North Korea is behind the attack. Which they will, as your people discover the evidence I have left behind.”