“That’s my problem: If we can’t find out how the floater got in there, then the default assumption has to be that the system failed.”
“And they’re interviewing everybody? That Russian, for instance, and her people, the operating engineers?”
“Oh, hell, yes, three times a day. We’re going to be sitting down with lie detectors shortly. The company’s sending down a battalion of lawyers, which made the Bureau really happy.”
Pardee showed up with sandwiches and iced tea. I could see that Ari wasn’t really hungry, but he ate anyway. We chewed through lunch in silence, and then he looked at his watch again. I told him we’d get back to him first thing, either late tonight or in the morning, when we had something. He thanked us for lunch and then pushed back his chair.
“If it’s him, you tell that crazy bastard to get back in,” he said. “I don’t care what or who else he’s screwing around with-we need him back at Helios, now.”
At eleven that night, Tony and I arrived at the designated rendezvous point, which was a point just to seaward of where the Cape Fear River poured out into the Atlantic. The night was dark and cold, with a steady fifteen-knot breeze kicking up some small whitecaps around us. Tony had noted that the rendezvous time would coincide with slack water following an ebb tide, which would minimize the current coming across the bar. Otherwise, we’d have had a tough time staying in the lat-long position designated in the note. To the north the lights of Kure Beach twinkled over the dunes; to our west were Southport and the Oak Island pilots’ station. The actual rendezvous position was nearly alongside the so-called sea buoy, the first buoy that a ship entering the Cape Fear estuary encountered. The buoys had all looked small from a distance, but this thing was big, some fifteen feet high. It was festooned with barnacles, radar reflectors, bird manure, the blinking light, and a crowd of sleeping pelicans.
Tony kept checking the radar for any contacts, especially one of those huge container ships. There were some big blobs on the scope up near the container port, but they were most likely tied up to the pier. The layout of the river entrance and the shorelines of the estuary stood out in sharp green lines on the radarscope display. The boat had been bouncing around quite a bit when we stopped, so Tony put us on a two-mile racetrack pattern, which kept the motion to a minimum as we idled around, waiting for Trask. I’d left Pardee back at the house so we’d have a base of communications ashore, and I’d briefed Tony on the way out to the rendezvous. He’d had some questions.
“If Trask is working undercover for Homeland Security, how come the Bureau doesn’t know that? I mean, aren’t they supposed to be talking to each other these days?”
“That’s the theory,” I said, “but, remember, out of all those alphabets, the FBI is the one that is not inside the Homeland Security mantle. My guess is they both hold back from each other.”
He turned the wheel to go back downwind and looked again into the radarscope cone. “But why would they do that? Wasn’t that the point of those so-called intel fusion centers? So everybody knew what everybody else was doing? So they could stop stepping on each other’s toes?”
“It’s a Washington thing,” I said. “I think it’s about budget money. The agency with the biggest budget has the most power. You bare your bureaucratic soul to an outfit that competes for budget money with you, you make yourself vulnerable. We played those games back in the sheriff’s office, remember? Major Crimes versus Patrol, Patrol versus Community Relations? Same deal, bigger honeypot.”
“We’ve got a contact,” he announced, pointing down into the radarscope cone. I looked. There was a tiny green blip down in the direction of Oak Island. Tony turned on the leaders function, which put a green line on the blip. The length of the line represented the contact’s speed, and the direction of the line indicated its course. This one was coming our way.
“It could be a pilot boat,” I said.
“Then we’d expect a contact to seaward-an inbound ship.” He flipped the range scale out to twenty-five miles, but there was nothing coming from seaward. He dropped the scale back down to ten miles, and the contact continued to close us. Whoever it was, he was coming out of the estuary.
Tony made sure the VHF radio was tuned to channel 16, which was the standard channel for ship-to-ship comms in restricted waters. Trask probably wasn’t going to initiate voice communications, in case the Coast Guard had been alerted to watch for his boat. I still wondered if a Bureau team had put an RFID tracer on the boat. If they thought Trask was dead, though, why would they care about his boat? Even if they did know that Trask had been working undercover for the government, the boat’s whereabouts still shouldn’t matter.
“He’s coming right for us,” Tony said. “Or at least for that buoy.”
“Our nav lights are on, right?” I asked.
He nodded and picked up binoculars to search the night ahead of us. The flashing light from the sea buoy wasn’t helping with our night vision. The seas were confused, and I guessed that the tide had turned. When the sea began to flow back into the estuary, it collided with the outbound river current, creating a crazy patchwork of waves and whorls in the water. Tony was having to work to keep the boat on course as the currents opposed each other over the bar.
I checked my cell phone and found coverage. I called Pardee back at the house.
“We’ve got a contact headed our way,” I said. “We’ll call again after we have our meeting, or in one hour, whichever is sooner.”
“And if you don’t?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“We’re loitering about something called the sea buoy,” I said. “Where the seaward end of the channel into the Cape Fear River begins.”
“Roger that,” he said. “One hour, and then I call the Coast Guard.”
I agreed and hung up.
“Five miles and closing,” Tony said. “We’re right in the main shipping channel. Want to go meet him?”
The water around the sea buoy was getting rougher and rougher. “Might be a little flatter inside,” I said. I wasn’t getting seasick so much as having trouble staying upright as our small boat bounced and pitched in the confused chop. I was glad I hadn’t brought the shepherds.
Tony kicked it up a few knots, and we pointed into the estuary. When the sea buoy was a half mile or so behind us, channel 16 suddenly came to life.
“Hold your position,” a voice said. No call signs, no identification numbers or names, just a voice. It sounded like Trask, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.
“Roger,” Tony replied, also leaving out any identifying information. It was totally incorrect procedure, but it worked, and anyone listening would be clueless as to who was talking or why. Tony slowed and tried to find a stable course, but the water was still pretty rough. The current seemed to be pushing us into the estuary, although it was hard to tell in the dark.
“Two miles,” Tony said, staring out into the night. He kept checking the radar to see where the other boat should be. I kept looking for lights but didn’t see any.
“Shouldn’t we be able to see his running lights?” I asked. “That’s a big boat.”
“You’d think so,” he said. “Unless he’s turned them off. That thing had radar, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Tony switched the range scale down to five miles, and the blip became larger, halfway in from the edge of the screen. The electronic leader pointed right at the center of our scope, where the rising chop had created a bloom of green sea return on the display.
Tony kept looking out with the binoculars, while I switched the range scale down to two miles. The contact was still visible, but it was getting perilously close to the edge of the blob from the sea return, which now covered the inner one-third of the display. At some point, the radar would become useless. That point was just about now.
“Cam,” Tony said.
I looked up to see Tony staring ahead, no longer using his binoculars. I tried to get my eyes to work, night-blind from having been staring down into that radar screen. I was about to ask, “What?” when I saw the bows of what looked like the Keeper dead ahead, close, very close, and pushing up a huge wave. Tony reached for the controls, but a moment later, she crashed into us and I was spinning underwater in a coil of noise, roiling seawater, shattering fiberglass, and the thrum of two large propellers pulsing the water right in front of my face.