Текст книги "Mirage"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Brul
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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“How’d she fly?”

“What’s the old line about having the most fun you can have with your clothes on?” Juan asked. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

They bantered all the way back to the Oregon, both men content in the afterglow of a mission gone right. It was especially poignant for Cabrillo. He counted few men in the world as friends, and Yuri Borodin had been one of them. Now he had avenged that friend. Yuri’s soul could rest a little easier.

The Corporation had nothing lined up at the moment, and if Eric and Mark could crack the laptop, they were due a windfall from the American government along with final payment for The Container affair. Cabrillo thought he should tie up the Oregonfor a while and give his people a well-deserved vacation.

Fate was about to intervene once again. Far from vacation, the Oregonand her crew were about to enter the fight of their lives.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Max Hanley was a born pragmatist. He liked Cabrillo’s idea of laying up the ship for a bit and letting the entire crew take a vacation. He also knew where they could get a replacement for the Nomad 1000 submersible and he figured its current location was as good a place as any to let the crew off.

He had been negotiating with a Taiwanese university that happened to have a Nomad they no longer needed. The school had once been a technical training facility for commercial fishing, and the submersible had been an unsolicited gift. Max could have always bought a new one from the manufacturer, but he was not one to waste a penny, let alone several million dollars.

Max choppered in ahead of the ship as it sailed for Taipei, to meet with university staff. His cover was that he was brokering the deal on behalf of a start-up oil exploration company, the industry that snapped up the lion’s share of U.S. Submarines’ yearly production of Nomads and Discos. The Oregonwas the freighter he had hired to transport the submersible to the offshore petroleum fields of the Gulf of Mexico.

The inspection went well. The school had mothballed the Nomad properly and had checked on her frequently. The batteries took a charge, although Max already knew they’d need to be replaced. Certain things one didn’t buy used. He had fresh ones aboard the ship. All the electronics and mechanical systems worked, and he found no corrosion or damage to any of the hydraulic lines. The only problem they found was the manipulator hand on the end of the robotic arm didn’t work properly. To Max, it was a simple fix, but he got them to shave a few thousand off the price.

When the Oregonarrived, it captured the attention of hundreds of students. They gawked at the massive vessel that blocked their view of the bay and open ocean beyond. Max had arranged a customs inspector to be here from Taipei and he signed off on the loading.

Juan himself, dressed like a scruffy sea dog for the benefit of the onlookers, was at the controls of the ship’s main crane. Crewmen rigged the lift, using slings under the submersible’s thirty-foot hull, and an hour after arriving it was lying crossways on the forward hold and the ship was ready to sail. Max had to stick to his role as broker, so he would drive to Taipei.

The Taiwanese capital was on the northern tip of the island, and they could have steamed there in about fourteen hours, but Cabrillo took the Oregonout of traditional sea routes, both for coastal vessels and those crossing the Pacific for ports in the Americas. And he needed the cover of darkness. A ship deploying a mini-sub, while uncommon, wasn’t unheard of. The ship leaving the area without seeming to recover the mini-sub would raise questions.

Because the Nomad was untested, Juan would let no one else make the initial dive. In the hours it had taken to reach a secluded spot of ocean, the crew had replaced the old batteries with new ones and had attached a system of inflatable bladders to the hull should the mini not respond to Cabrillo’s control. There were safety divers in the water as well, and the area around the Oregonwas lit with powerful spots above and below the surface.

After being lowered into the water and having its shackles removed, the mini-sub’s tanks were slowly flooded by Juan. He blew them as a test when the seas overtopped his viewing bubble. He rose as pluckily as a toy submarine in a bathtub.

So then he went for it, diving down along the Oregon’s steel flank and then rising gently into the moon pool. More crew were in place to secure the lifting cables. In moments, the sub was safely stowed in its new home, and Cabrillo was heading to the dining room for a late supper.

He noted the asparagus he was served had come from a can. It was a good thing they were berthing soon. All their fresh provisions had run out, and he was told, when he asked the mess attendant, that they were down to three rather unpopular ice-cream flavors.

Juan couldn’t sleep that evening, and it had nothing to do with fresh vegetables or butter rum taffy ice cream. Something nagged at his subconscious, some little kernel jabbing into his mind that exhaustion couldn’t nacre over like an oyster encasing a bit of sand with pearl. At midnight, he resigned himself to wakefulness and got out of bed. He slipped on his leg and dressed in the clothes he’d discarded an hour and a half earlier.

He wasn’t in the mood for a drink, and sitting alone in his cabin held no interest. Julia Huxley was one of those remarkable people that needed just a few hours of sleep per night. He sought her out and found her not in her cabin but down in medical. She was on the Internet as part of a service for people who had immediate medical questions but no access to doctors.

“Hey, Juan. Can’t sleep?” she greeted when he paused at the door to her office off the main examination room.

Her office was a small cubical barely big enough for her desk and a spare chair. One wall was covered with framed diplomas and awards. She’d confessed once that her version of the “ego wall” wasn’t for her but her patients. Seeing her so lauded tended to put them at ease.

“Master of the obvious,” Juan smiled back and took the spare chair.

“Let me just finish up here. I’ve got a guy in Fiji who I think is having an attack of shingles.” She and her patient typed back and forth for another couple of minutes. “There. Done. Poor fellow is in for a miserable time. So, what’s on your mind?”

“I don’t know,” Juan admitted. “Something.”

“That narrows it down,” Julia teased with a grin. “Okay, try this. How long has something been bothering you?”

“Just tonight. I’ve been on top of the world since escaping Shanghai and then when I went to bed tonight, I couldn’t fall asleep. I’m getting this feeling that I’ve missed something.”

Hux suddenly looked grave. “You and I have been through a lot together.” Julia had overseen Juan’s recovery from having his leg blown off. “I know you, and I know when you think you’ve overlooked something that you are probably right. You have.”

“I know,” Cabrillo said. “That’s what’s making this so tough.”

“We can assume this has to do with our past mission, so why don’t we go through it together.”

And they did, from the very top when Yuri Borodin’s aide-de-camp, Misha Kasporov, rang them to tell them about Borodin’s illegal incarceration up to the moment the Discovery 1000’s hatch closed in the Huangpu River for the ride back to the Oregon. She hadn’t realized how close some of the calls had really been and rebuked him for being reckless. He took her remarks the way a lifetime smoker takes the advice of their doctor to quit. Great tip, but it ain’t gonna happen.

“It has to be L’Enfant’s betrayal,” Julia concluded for him. “Everything else about this is pretty straightforward, at least by your standards.”

“Obviously we can never use him as a contact anymore. He might have come through with Kenin’s location, but the trust is broken. We both recognize that. And, yes, he’s the best in the world at what he does, but there are others we can turn to.”

“So you’re saying that isn’t it?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Juan raked his fingers through his hair, which was now the length of a Marine recruit’s. “Kenin deduced who we are after we rescued, well, almost rescued Yuri. He must have known our reputation because he immediately started eliminating any connection to his optically stealthed ship. He also leaned on L’Enfant to find out where we were going to be. He sent his ship out to capsize the Sakirand I assume sink us as well.”

Juan paused as something began to gel in the back of his mind. “What do you think it cost to develop that stealth ship?”

“Who knows? Even if he had Tesla’s formula for making a ship invisible and samples of his equipment, we’re still talking a hundred million at least.”

“Exactly, and yet he risked it to go after a Sheik’s boat and us. If he had access to a submarine, surely he had people in the surface fleet loyal to him. Why didn’t he just launch a few ship-killing missiles at us and Dullah’s yacht?”

“We could have shot them down,” Julia pointed out.

“He didn’t know that. He threw a hundred-million-dollar asset at a hundred-dollar problem. That bothers me. This was also his big score, his final act of thievery before leaving Mother Russia for good. It’s inconceivable that someone was willing to pay that kind of money to kill an Emirate’s sheik who happens to be our client at the time. That is too big of a coincidence.”

He grabbed the phone off Julia’s desk and dialed Mark Murphy’s room. Murph answered on the second ring. Juan could tell he was on speakerphone.

“How are you two coming with that laptop?”

“We just got it back from Linc,” Eric shouted over some god-awful techno playing in the background.

“Turn that noise down,” Juan admonished.

“Noise?” Mark shot back with indignity. “That’s the Howler Monkeys.”

“I’m sure it is.” The volume thankfully dropped. “Why did Linc have the computer?”

“You didn’t get my e-mail?”

“Obviously not or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“The laptop was booby-trapped with a packet of C-4. Eric and I figured it might be rigged, so we X-rayed it first. Good thing we did. We guessed the charge goes off after the computer is opened and the password’s not entered within a certain amount of time. Linc needed until tonight to remove the detonator and explosives.”

“How long before you guys get anything?”

“We’re just starting on the password now. After that, there’s no way to know how many levels of encryption Kenin used. My guess is, a ton.”

“How long?” Juan demanded again, his tone harsh and accusatory.

“Days. Weeks. There’s no way to say. Sorry, Chairman.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Juan snapped. “That’s an order.”

He slammed down the phone. Julia looked concerned.

“They work better when they think I’m mad and make unreasonable demands.”

“So that was theater?”

“Partially,” Juan said. “But we need answers quickly.”

“I don’t understand,” she admitted. “What’s the rush?”

“You know that conflict between China and Japan over some islands?”

“Yeah, something about sovereign rights and newly discovered oil or gas or something.”

“I don’t think it was a recent discovery. I think China has known about it for some time. I remember when I was rescuing Yuri he asked me about current events. I made some lame joke, but I mentioned that the civil war in Sudan was winding down.”

“And?”

“China was a major backer in that conflict because they were getting a lot of their oil from the region. They stopped funding the war because they realized they won’t need to import fossil fuels from Africa if there are decades’ worth right off their coast.”

“But the Japanese,” Julia said by way of roadblock.

“Could do nothing without our help. And what do we do in situations like this where two naval powers are butting heads?”

“Ask Max or Eddie. They’re your military guys.”

“Come on, Hux. Everyone knows what we do.”

“We send in an aircraft carrier.”

“Exactly. Force projection at its finest. And it’s not just a carrier. It’s a whole battle group with several destroyers, a frigate, some cruisers and two submarines. They all act as a screen to keep the carrier safe. The system is so well designed that it’s also considered impervious to attack. Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, the Soviets figured they would need at least a hundred cruise missiles to have a hope of taking out just one carrier.”

“O-kay,” Julia drew the word out. “In comes our carrier, both sides back down, and crisis averted.”

“Think it through, Doc.”

And the horrifying thought that had nagged at Juan’s mind until he’d talked it out with her too. She blanched. “There’s another of those stealth ships out there.”

“That’s got to be it. The ship was conceived before the Soviet Union dissolved as a way to counter our carriers. The Russians don’t need something like that anymore, but a burgeoning and increasingly hostile China would love to be able to take out a big nuclear carrier and do it in such a way that they can’t be blamed.”

“Would they be so bold?”

“This has been coming for years,” Juan said. “All the hacking into our computer systems and industrial espionage. We’ve been in a closet war with China for at least a decade. Now that energy independence is within their reach, they will do anything to fulfill its promise.” A fresh thought struck Cabrillo. “Sinking the Sakirwas a demonstration to the Chinese of the weapon’s power. They must have been monitoring the sinking from the rendezvous ship that escaped us when we were dead in the water. Kenin chose Dullah’s yacht to get back at me, and I bet he even got some Middle East faction to pony up some dinars for the hit on Dullah too.”

“What do we do?”

“I’ll alert Langston but without anything concrete, like Kenin’s computer having a file labeled ‘bill of sale,’ there isn’t much he can do. The Navy won’t act on anything so insubstantial.”

“Our vacation is going to end before it even starts, isn’t it?”

Juan just gave her a look. He called the op center and asked the duty officer to track down the location of the nearest carrier battle group. If it was called in to the region, he needed to know its route since the Chinese would place their deadly stealth ship directly in its path. He was relieved to learn ten minutes later that the Johnny Reb, as the USS John C. Stenniswas nicknamed, had just left Honolulu en route to the Navy base at Yokosuka, Japan. They had a few days’ breathing space even if the President ordered her into the disputed area immediately.

There were other practical considerations to take care of. Cabrillo thanked Julia and headed to the office just off his stateroom. He roused Max from his Taipei hotel suite to tell him the change in plans and to meet the Oregonat the Bali District piers the following day. They had already reserved a berthing space for the two weeks they’d planned for the Corporation-wide vacation. Cabrillo called the port authority to tell them they would only need it for a few hours.

The penalty for the change had been stiff, and Cabrillo wasn’t sure if he was on the right track. Thanks to them being over the international date line, it was one o’clock yesterday afternoon in Washington, D.C. He called Langston Overholt.

After explaining the situation, Cabrillo asked his old mentor and the CIA’s Spook Emeritus what he would recommend.

“This isn’t actionable intelligence, Juan,” the octogenarian said. “It’s guesses and supposition. Which from you are usually enough to go to the Secretary of Defense, but on this, I’ll need something more.”

“Like proof from Kenin’s laptop?”

“That would only show that he had sold such a weapon to the People’s Republic. Unless he also had their battle plans, I don’t think we can do much of anything. Of course I will pass along a memo of interest and that might get a nonspecific threat warning to the carrier group’s commanding admiral. But you must understand that if they do get sent in to intervene on this whole Senkaku/Diaoyu islands mess, they will already be at maximum alert status. Your crying ‘Bogeyman’ won’t change a thing.”

Cabrillo had expected as much. That was the problem with Washington. Bureaucratic inertia was measured at a glacial pace. The system wasn’t designed for quick lateral thinking. The news was not all bad. Langston continued, “I will talk with Grant down at the China desk to see what they’ve heard. We are aware that China is taking this much further than they have with other disputed islands, like their row over the Spratlys. Japan doesn’t want to back down either, which is why we’ve dispatched the John Stennis.”

“I thought there is a carrier already based in Japan,” Juan said.

“The George Washington, yes. There was a fire aboard her a week ago. A sailor was killed. They claim she’s not fit for sea duty.”

There was an odd tone in Overholt’s voice when he said this, and Cabrillo suspected he knew what caused it. Lang was a World War II veteran. They sent ships back into the fight just days after they took hits from kamikazes. Today, it would take months for safety inspectors and inquest panels and JAG attorneys to make the decision that the carrier was seaworthy.

“We are monitoring the situation,” Overholt said. “Where are you going to be?”

“Trying to guard the entrance to the East China Sea.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Cabrillo was sitting watch in the op center when he got the call from Mark Murphy to meet in the Oregon’s boardroom. Juan checked the time on the main screen. His pet nerds had missed his deadline by only three hours.

They had already docked at Taipei’s new port, nestling like an ugly duckling between two beautiful swans in the form of a couple of cruise ships disgorging passengers for a day of sightseeing in Taiwan’s capital. The truck from the chandlers was already at the dock, and within an hour of their arrival, the crates of perishables and other food had been hoisted aboard.

Juan nodded to the navigator that she had the conn and made his way to the boardroom. Murph and Stoney looked like they hadn’t slept since getting the computer back from Linc. Both men had red-rimmed eyes with bags sagging below them. But they also had knowing grins spreading from ear to ear.

“I take it there’s good news?” Juan asked and took his seat at the head of the table.

“Oh yeah,” Mark said. “We just finished cleaning out Kenin’s last account. All told, he had fifty million in various banking centers all over the world – Caymans, Dubai, Luxembourg. You name it.”

“Well and good,” Juan said. “What about there being another stealth ship? Did they build another one?”

“Sure did,” Eric Stone confirmed. “China paid twenty million for it, plus picked up the tab for Kenin’s luxury retreat in Shanghai.”

In most cases, Cabrillo delighted at being right about something. Not so today. The news sent a chill through to his heart because this meant China was likely emboldened enough to use this new weapon against an American target.

“They were built in 1989,” Stone added. “Originally, the Russians wanted to build one for each of our carrier battle groups. But they abandoned the project after only two were constructed. They were in mothballs at a shipyard and appeared to be all but forgotten. Kenin discovered them two years ago and had them both refurbished, adding some improved technology discovered on Tesla’s mine tender. He knew that the Chinese would be his only potential clients and courted them for months. They finally agreed to the deal at about the same time the disputed gas fields were first mentioned in the media.”

That timing seemed right to Cabrillo. The Chinese knew that if they stuck to their plan the U.S. Navy would intervene. They needed something to counter an American flattop that wouldn’t ignite World War III. In his opinion, he thought Kenin should have held out for more money. Then again, the Russian already had more money than he could spend in a lifetime, so why bother asking for something you’ll never need?

“Are the technical specs on the computer?”

“Sorry, Chairman,” Eric said with an air of hangdog about him. “We cracked every file on his laptop. He had a file describing the capabilities that he used to entice the Chinese, but nothing about how the weapon worked or what equipment he’d recovered off of Tesla’s ship.”

“We’ll keep going over it, Chairman,” Mark replied, “but it’s not looking good. Kenin wasn’t a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy. He didn’t care how the ship functioned, only that it did function.”

“Okay,” Juan said. “Thanks, you two. That was great work. Go hit the sack.”

Cabrillo pulled up a map of the China Sea on the big screen at the far end of the boardroom table and tried to place himself inside the mind of the man in command of the stealth ship. He needed to pre-position himself in front of the carrier battle group and let them come to him since his wake would be visible when the ship was in motion and would surely catch the eye of a pilot flying combat air patrol. It would all depend on the ability to track the unbound carrier group and project its course, a straightforward task because of the constellation of Chinese spy satellites.

Juan could get the battle group’s course from Overholt, so he had the same information as his opponent. The real question was, then, how far out from the disputed islands would I want to take down my quarry? The farther away, the better. However, that decreases the odds of the ships remaining on the projected course. They zigged and zagged at random intervals even as they steamed in a steadily western direction.

He gamed a dozen scenarios and came up with a dozen places he’d lie in wait. It was fruitless yet telling at the same time. Fruitless because, after more than two hours of staring at the map, he was no closer to finding a solution, and telling because it showed how desperately important this was for the Chinese. If the carrier reached the region, any hope of taking the islands by force vanished.

The Chinese had been using the tactic of wearing down the Japanese fleet in hopes that they would abandon the area and thus their claim to the islands. As the world has witnessed with carriers rotating through the Persian Gulf for the best part of two decades, you just can’t wear down the U.S. Navy.

* * *

Captain Kenji Watanabe lined up the H-6 in his sights and ever so gently pressed the trigger on his joystick. Nothing happened. As he knew nothing would. He hadn’t armed his F-16’s weapons systems. He banked below the lumbering, twin-engine aerial-refueling plane as it fed avgas to a J-10 fighter jet.

While the J-10 was a modern aircraft that looked like a cross between his own Fighting Falcon and the Swedish Gripen, the flying tanker was an old Soviet design from the 1950s. Like much of China’s air fleet, it was a knockoff built under license and wouldn’t last five minutes in a real fight. Even the J-10 was really no match for the F-16. It had limited range, hence the need for constant refueling as the aircraft crisscrossed the skies around the Senkaku Islands, and the F-16 was far more maneuverable.

Watanabe’s real advantage was the fact he had probably ten times the cockpit time as the Chinese pilot.

He was seasoned enough to know to give the linked aircraft ample room to perform the tricky operation. The Chinese had only recently perfected air-to-air refueling, so the pilots wouldn’t have much experience. No sense causing an accident with his jet wash. Watanabe came around so he was behind the tandem planes. That way when the J-10 Vigorous Dragon detached from the flying gas station, he’d be on his six. The last Chinese fighter Kenji had done this to hadn’t been able to shake him until he’d finally given up and broke for home base. The veteran pilot felt confident that this new Chinese wannabe ace wouldn’t fare much better.

The swept wing H-6 suddenly dove as it hit clear air turbulence. The J-10 pilot should have backed off and broken connection with the tanker, but instead he tried to stay with the bigger plane and overcompensated. To Watanabe’s horror, the two planes came together and then came apart in a mushrooming fireball that blossomed like a second sun. He threw his own aircraft down and to the left to avoid the devastation and still felt bits of shrapnel pepper the F-16’s airframe. He couldn’t tear his gaze from the awful sight. The wreckage of two destroyed planes finally emerged from the bottom of the explosion like discarded husks. No piece was much bigger than a sheet of plywood, and all of it was charred black.

There would be no parachutes.

Watanabe radioed in his report, hoping, praying that he hadn’t been witness to the trigger event that would send his beloved Nippon to war.

Despite protestations of innocence from the highest level, including an invitation to inspect Kenji Watanabe’s fighter jet to prove it hadn’t shot down the two Chinese aircraft, Beijing couldn’t be mollified. They insisted that this had been a deliberate act and demanded the Japanese withdraw all aircraft and ships from the Diaoyu Islands and cede their sovereignty at once.

China made preparations to send most of her fleet to sea, including troopships carrying over a thousand commandos to occupy the islands by force.

Diplomatic channels hummed with attempts to defuse the situation, but neither side was going to back down. Japan ramped up its own military presence on the islands by commandeering a hydrofoil fast ferry and rushing in troops. The American President had no choice but to order the USS John C. Stennisto the disputed territory. He also lit a fire under the Secretary of Defense’s tail to see that the crippled George Washingtonwas back in service ASAP no matter what the lawyers said.

Inside the week, unless America’s calming presence could prevent it, the third Sino-Japanese war was about to erupt.

* * *

The Oregonpatrolled the seaway leading to the islands like a restless bear in a cage. Back and forth she swept, radar set to maximum, her crew keyed up on caffeine and adrenaline. The weather was cooperative, allowing them to send up drone planes to enlarge their search area. Juan even convinced Langston Overholt to allow them access to satellite data, though, in truth, they didn’t have the expertise it took to interpret the high-res pictures with any degree of accuracy. For that, everyone was relying on the experts at the National Reconnaissance Office, a group even more secretive than the NSA.

For his part, Cabrillo sat in the center of the op center, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He rode the gentle swells that rocked the ship with the ease of a cowboy on a long cattle drive, his body tuned to his environment so that the minor adjustments to posture came without conscious thought. The gimbled cup holder built into his chair was rarely empty, though Maurice secretly switched him to decaf after the third cup. The watch would rotate at regular intervals and yet the Chairman remained a fixture in the room, silently brooding while his eyes darted from display screen to display screen. He checked the radar repeater over the shoulder of the watch stander and the feed from the drones over the shoulder of the remote pilot. And far from being distracted, the crew took comfort in Cabrillo’s steadying attention. As long as he was there, things would be all right.

He caught sleep when he could, usually when the ship was at the far end of her patrol box and thus less likely to stumble on the stealth ship. He didn’t bother with his bed but rather fell onto the sofa in his office and pulled up a woolen lap robe that had been rescued off the Normandieafter she burned in New York Harbor in 1942. He would rouse himself after a couple of hours and use the ritual of shaving to convince his exhausted body he had received enough sleep. Then it was back to the op center, where he would prowl tirelessly just as his ship did.

Cabrillo had just returned from a two-hour catnap when something on radar caught his eye. It was a blip. That was little surprise. Though war clouds gathered, these were busy shipping lanes and would remain so up until the shooting started. Hali Kasim was on watch as both communications officer and radar operator.

“Hali, that target to our north, what’s the range?”

“Fifty miles, give or take.”

“How long has it been on our scope?”

Kasim typed into his keyboard for a minute. “Looks like twenty minutes.”

Cabrillo did some calculating in his head, using the radar’s range and the Oregon’s speed and heading. “She’s doing less than three knots. Does that strike you as odd?”

Hali agreed. He was still working on his computer. “I’ve got one even odder. There was a target at this exact same location the last time we swept this grid.”

George Adams happened to be on duty, piloting the model airplane they used as an aerial surveillance platform. He said, “Don’t need to ask me even once. It’ll take me a bit, though. I’ve got a bird already in the air, but she’s fifty miles the other side of us.”

Juan kicked into overdrive. This wasn’t the time to wait around. There was something off here, and Cabrillo needed answers. “Tell you what, Gomez. Let that one ditch and send up another.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take the loss out of my share.”

Adams did as ordered, kamikazeing the one UAV and launching another off the deck. It still took the better part of thirty minutes for the four-foot plane to approach the target. Juan hadn’t altered the Oregon’s search pattern, but he had slowed its speed so as to not break radar contact. Twenty miles out, Gomez dropped the drone from a comfortable altitude of five hundred feet to a wave-skimming twenty feet.

This was where his instincts and experience as a pilot paid off. They needed to remain below the target’s radar coverage, lost in the acoustical backscatter of heaving waves. There was no finer pilot aboard than Adams, so no one on the mystery ship knew they were being stalked. The drone’s camera showed the dark ocean seemingly inches below the little plane’s landing gear, while ahead the setting sun was a pale blaze of yellow against the horizon.

“There!” Juan called when he spotted a boxy silhouette sitting on the line dividing sky from sea.