Olivia finished scanning Ghaffari’s emails and flagged Pastor’s self-portraits as targets of future analysis.
She cleared her mind and let thoughts of a handsome naval intelligence officer creep into her head. After trying to thwart visions of Commander Sanders from growing in her mind and heart, she had given up. He had a hold on her.
She reached for her phone to call him but struggled to find a reason. Then she wondered if she could simply call him to say hello. She realized she could not and started down the passageway toward a break room in search of a snack to distract her from feelings she hadn’t felt in months.
On her way to the break room, she decided to intensify the surveillance on Ghaffari. She would return to Norfolk and transform herself into a field asset to watch Ghaffari herself.
And it would remove the distance between herself and Commander Sanders.
Commander Brad Flint stooped over a navigation table in the control room of the Annapolis. He had spent three days spiraling, zigzagging, and repositioning his ship in search of the Leviathan but had found nothing.
With the Israeli submarine gone, he revisited the encounter where he had lost it. All the technology and brightest minds aboard his ship had reconstructed every known fact about the Leviathan when it disappeared. The verdict — the Leviathan had vanished without a trace.
The visual perspective Flint preferred for reviewing the Leviathan’s disappearance was a simple hand-drawn graphing plot. Paper covered the navigation station’s flat surface like a tablecloth. Ticked traces etched in colored pencils represented the Israeli submarine and all vessels occupying nearby water at the time.
He stared at the traces, struggling to make sense of what happened in the water almost four nights earlier.
Alex Baines appeared by his side.
“Still trying to make sense of it, sir?”
“Yup,” Flint said.
“We’ll find the Leviathan before it can threaten the carrier task force,” Baines said. “Either we will or the assets from the task force will.”
Flint grunted.
“Even if we don’t finish this ourselves, we did our job, sir. Our work uncovered what was going on and allowed a task force to defend itself.”
“If that’s where the Leviathan is actually going,” Flint said.
“There aren’t many other interesting places for it. Maybe southern Europe to launch cruise missiles at what — Rome, Marseille, Barcelona? It’s speculation, and given that the Israelis have admitted to losing control of the Leviathan, the carrier makes the best sense as a target.”
Flint ignored Baines and tapped his finger on a thin, elongated oval that represented the uncertainty of the location of the high-speed screws that had appeared in the direction of the Leviathan after its disappearance.
“We heard high-speed screws on the general direction of the Leviathan’s last known location, right?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve analyzed the heck out of them. They’re the worst enigma in this mystery.”
“High-speed screws,” Flint said. “You can make it from Cuba to Miami on a boat with high-speed screws. So this could have been a sporting craft from Egypt.”
“Could have come from Alexandria. Sure, sir. That’s the verdict we agreed on. A small boat with high-speed screws could theoretically make it from Alexandria to Beirut or Cyprus.”
“But we would have heard it more consistently. It came and went, faded in and faded out too randomly. And then it was gone. We would have heard it pass by us with high bearing rate if it was making its way north or northeast.”
“And it would have changed bearings if it was going any place else, sir. I know it. That’s why it’s not settling right for me.”
“Nope. Not settling at all,” Flint said.
Baines straightened his body.
“Well, sir,” he said, “all we can do now is what we’re doing. Head in the direction of the task force and see if we can catch the Leviathan before the task force does.”
“Wait, XO.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We considered that one of the merchant vessels launched the high-speed craft, right?”
“Of course, sir. It’s possible, but unlikely.”
“We’ve been dealing with the world of the unlikely since the Leviathan deployed.”
“Agreed, sir. What’s on your mind?”
“Some sort of interaction between a merchant ship, the high-speed craft, and the Leviathan.”
“We considered that, sir. We would have heard the high-speed craft covering the distance between its mother ship and the Leviathan in that case.”
“Not if the mother ship, as you say, was closer to the Leviathan than we thought.”
“There were a couple ships that passed by the same bearing,” Baines said. “But they were too far away to be factors.”
“Humor me and let’s see what happens if we change what we assumed about merchant speeds. Can we convince ourselves it’s possible that one of these ships passed closer to the Leviathan?”
Flint tapped a green trace and a purple trace representing the paths two ships had taken the night of the Leviathan’s disappearance.
“What about these two?” he asked.
“We had blade rate for that one. So we know that its speed and tracking are accurate,” Baines said. “We might have had blade rate for the other one, but since its screw noise faded, we just assumed it was far away. I can check on it with the sonar team.”
“Yeah, XO. Go check.”
The plot showed forty-two vessels in the water, and they served as extras in the movie in which the Leviathan starred. But Flint promoted the vessel of the purple trace into a supporting role by slowing its speed. He tightened the tick marks and pulled its track closer to the Leviathan’s last known position. The tick marks correlated to ten knots.
Where the new purple trace passed in front of the Leviathan, Flint placed a straight edge on the plot and ran a mechanical pencil along it. The gray lead reached another merchant vessel that had passed to the west.
Baines returned.
“Dang, sir. We assessed the merchant from the system’s stored data. It wasn’t fifteen knots. Blade rate supports ten. I hadn’t considered looking this deep at data for merchants because there was so much traffic, but it looks like I should have, given where you’re going.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Flint said. “I told you to focus on the Leviathan and the high-speed craft — not the merchants. But look here. I’ve redrawn the merchant at ten knots.”
“Closer, but still a couple miles ahead of the Leviathan.”
“Now look at this other merchant here that we picked up about an hour after losing the Leviathan.”
“It’s a ship moving in the same direction,” Baines said, “but at fourteen knots, like most merchants.”
“Right. Can it be the same ship?”
Flint watched Baines lean over the plot and work dividers along the merchant traces.
“At ten knots, this merchant passes in front of the Leviathan. Then we don’t hear it for about an hour, but instead we hear high-speed screws. Then a new merchant appears from nowhere, doing fourteen knots, but in reality, what we thought were two merchant ships is actually one.”