Blindfold Game

JANUARY

ON BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

CAPTAIN LOWE RETURNED TO the bridge, Sara on his heels. “Flight quarters,” he said. Everyone stared.

“Flight quarters,” he repeated.

“We’re bringing our helo back on board,” Sara said when nobody moved.

Everyone stopped staring at the captain and started staring at her.

“Flight quarters,” she said patiently.

“But, XO, the Agafia,” Ops said. He even pointed at the outline of the ship nearing a threateningly black horizon that also seemed to be moving, only toward them instead of away. “We’re half a mile off and they’re still way inside the exclusion zone.”

“Flight quarters, Ops,” the captain said in a deceptively gentle voice. He even smiled.

“Aye aye, sir,” Ops said.

Hats were whipped off smartly and the news was piped to the crew. Shortly thereafter phones began to ring as various members of the deck crew called the bridge to see if they were serious. Assured that the bridge was, they began to assemble aft, not without a lot of nonverbal communication that indicated a certain lack of faith in the sanity of the entire command structure of the U.S. Coast Guard. Shortly thereafter the hangar was retracted, and as if that was the signal, the radio sparked into life, signaling the approach of the helo.

“Tallyho!” Mark Edelen said, pointing, and they all looked east to see a bright orange speck against the now black clouds boiling up out of the south.

“Put our nose on the seagull’s ass, Chief,” Sara said.

“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said. “Helm, zero-seven-zero, all ahead full.”

“Zero-seven-zero, all ahead, aye, Chief.”

“XO,” the captain said.

“Sir?”

“Get aft. I want that VIP standing in my cabin talking fast thirty seconds after they hit the deck.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said.

She hit the portside hatch at not quite a run, registering by the wind on her cheek that the temperature had risen a couple of degrees since she’d last taken the air on deck, and slid down the ladder with her elbows on the railings.

“Hey, XO, you’re out on deck without your float coat,” said Seaman Rosenberg as she trotted past. She wanted to flip him off but it didn’t suit either her rank or his.

She hit the main deck and fetched up behind a cowling. The helo was running up on the stern about a hundred feet up. They throttled it way back and approached the hangar deck on tiptoe, nose down, tail up. The closer they got, the smaller the deck looked to Sara. The swell was increasing in height, pushed up by the approaching storm, and the stern bobbed and weaved like Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

The helo made it over the taffrail and hovered over the hangar deck.

It was ten feet from touchdown when the ship slammed down into the sea and the deck slid out from beneath it. The superstructure of the ship stopped shielding the helo from the wind and a good forty-knotter caught her upside the head. Whoever was driving wisely decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hit the throttle, roaring off to port, circling around, and coming up again on the stern.

Sara crouched down behind the cowling, the force of the wind threatening to pull her hair out by the roots, and worked at reswallowing her heart. The LSO was crouched against the exterior of the hangar. “You okay?” he yelled, or she supposed he did. She saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind, the all ahead full the Sojourner Truth had going on. She gave him a thumbs-up, and then they both heard the second approach of the helo and he duck-walked forward to stand in front of the hangar and guide them in.

She could hardly bear to watch, but this time they plunked her down right in the gold, in the exact center of the circle painted on the hangar deck. Sara scuttled around the hangar, dragging her knuckles like an ape, and yelled in Ostlund’s ear, “They’ve got a passenger the captain wants to see pronto.”

He nodded and followed the rest of his deck crew forward, hunched over so the rotor wouldn’t take their heads off. He reached the helo and slapped the side. She could see Sams, in the left seat, crack his door. Ostlund yelled at him. Sams nodded. The LSO walked around the front of the helo and disappeared. Through the windscreen Sara could see the helo’s aft door slide open and someone step to the deck.

Ostlund came scrambling back around the helo on a heading for Sara, followed by someone tall bundled into a Mustang suit and a watch cap pulled low over his brow.

“This here’s our XO, she’ll take you to the captain.”

“Thanks.” The man unbuckled his helmet and turned to Sara.

Her jaw dropped.

“Hi, Sara,” Hugh said. “I need to talk to your commanding officer. Now.”

The ship heeled suddenly and hard to port, and everyone staggered to regain their balance. There were shouts and curses from the hangar deck as the deck crew hung on to the helo’s tie-downs. With a great sense of foreboding Sara looked around to see that the next storm had indeed come upon them. Blowing snow needled into her exposed skin. The seas were rising, and the wind howled around the ship like a hungry wolf.

“Follow me,” she said to Hugh, and then had to yell it again so he could hear her over the sound and fury of the storm.

“ALL RIGHT,” LOWE SAID.

They were in the wardroom. Lowe sat at the head of the table facing Hugh, who stood opposite him at the table’s foot in front of a dry board which was covered with an outline of names, dates, and places. On the captain’s left were Sara, Ops, and the Engineer Officer, a tall, pencil-thin young man who could barely find his way to the bridge but who could disassemble a Caterpillar generator and put it back together again blindfolded. On the captain’s right were Ensign Ostlund, Ensign Ryan, and Chief Mark Edelen.

“You want us to believe that a North Korean terrorist-no, two-have built themselves a backpack bomb filled with radioactive material, loaded it into a mobile missile launcher, which they have then smuggled on board an oceangoing vessel, and are currently attempting to sail it into these waters, for the purposes of aiming the weapon at a target in Alaska, which you have been told by a less than reliable source to be one of the military bases, Elmendorf or Eielson. Why not Valdez, by the way? The oil terminal ought to go up with a bang big enough to keep any terrorist happy.”

Hugh met the captain’s sarcasm with the same stoicism he had displayed for the last hour. He held a black marker, the cap of which he repeatedly clicked on and clicked off. Click, click. “First of all, sir-” Hugh was respectful but firm. “A backpack bomb is generally held to be nuclear, and, uh, well, in a backpack. I don’t think that is the case here.”

“Really? What is it, then?”

The ship rolled over a swell and Hugh took a quick step to keep his balance. “It’s a dirty bomb. Instead of a weapon of mass destruction, it’s called a weapon of mass disruption.”

Sara, watching the captain out of the corner of her eye, saw him take a deep breath, and wondered what room on board she could convert to a brig when the captain finally lost his temper and ordered her to throw Hugh into it. “What’s the difference between the two?”

“What’s most important to a terrorist is that the weapon of mass disruption is a lot cheaper to make.”

“More bang for your buck, eh?” the captain said.

Hugh didn’t make the mistake of smiling at this almost genial query. “Partly, sir. There is also the fact that fissile, that is, weapons-grade uranium and plutonium are much more closely controlled and monitored than radioactive materiel.”

“Like cesium.”

“Like cesium-137, yes, sir. Cesium-137 is an isotope used in medical procedures like radiotherapy. It’s relatively easy to get, and much cheaper to buy in bulk than weapons-grade uranium.”

“Or plutonium.” Yes, sir.

The ship rolled. Hugh hung on to the edge of the dryboard, waiting for the ship to regain the vertical.

“What’s it look like?”

“Talcum powder.”

“Handy,” the captain said. “You could hide it in an Old Spice bottle.” Yes, sir.

“But you don’t think they’re hiding it. You think they’re about to use it.”

“Yes, sir.” Click, click.

“Based on nothing but a lot of circumstantial evidence.”

“A lot of what I do is connect the dots, sir.”

The captain didn’t rush to contradict him, but Sara knew he would be marginally impressed by this frank admission.

“But if you connect these dots”-Hugh pointed at the dry board- “you’ll see that in this case there is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant concern. The intelligence accumulated about North Koreans trained by al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Recovery of blueprints for such a bomb from the al-Qaida caves. The report of the sale of enough cesium-137 to build such a bomb. Much more than necessary, actually, my informant said that-”

“How much is enough?”

“Less than two ounces, sir.”

Sara, watching the captain because she didn’t want to look at Hugh, saw him trying to hide his shock. “How is it detonated?”

“A couple of pounds of dynamite will get the job done.”

The officers exchanged glances. “You are talking about a piece of ordnance that could fit into a shoebox.”

Hugh thought about it. “Not much bigger than that, sir, no. Easily loaded into the warhead of a missile.”

“A missile that can be launched by a mobile missile launcher.” Yes, sir.

“Like from a ship.”

“Like from a ship, sir, yes,” Hugh said.

Ryan cleared his throat. “If I may, Captain?” The captain nodded. “Mr. Rincon, you’re going to need a pretty heavy ship to carry a missile launcher, and an even heavier one to launch it without sinking the ship that is carrying it. The force of the thrust generated by the fuel upon liftoff would crack the spine of your average freighter.”

“I don’t think they care if they sink their ship, Mr. Ryan. I think they only care about delivering the weapon and wreaking as much death and destruction as they possibly can. These aren’t soldiers we’re talking about here; these are terrorists.”

“Do they have a missile launcher, Mr. Rincon?”

“They bought one, Captain. At the same time and through the same dealer as the cesium-137.”

The phone rang. Sara answered it. “Wardroom.”

“XO, I-”

“Is the ship sinking?”

“Uh, no, but-”

“Then not now, Tommy.” Sara hung up.

“As I said before, sir,” Hugh said respectfully, displaying a heretofore unknown-at least to Sara-talent for soothing the savage breast of command, “terrorists don’t think in terms of big bangs. They think in terms of numbers of people killed, and of television footage broadcast worldwide of those people in body bags laid out in rows. The more rows the better. A weapon of the sort I have just described will destroy Elmendorf, and a city the size of Anchorage along with it.” Click, click.

“Okay, that’s another thing, excuse me, Captain,” Ryan said. “What’s the range of a mobile missile launcher? Because Elmendorf is twelve hundred miles from the Maritime Boundary Line.”

“The range of your standard Scud is three hundred kilometers,” Hugh said.

Ops got that faraway look in his eyes he always got when he was carrying the one. “That’s less than two hundred miles.”

Ryan looked at the captain, and the tension around the table relaxed.

“I think that’s the whole point of loading the weapon onto a commercial vessel,” Hugh said. He was speaking slowly and deliberately, displaying no impatience. “There’s hundreds, thousands of them in and out of port cities every day. We can’t look at them all or we’d bring global commerce to a halt.” Click, click.

“What kind of a commercial vessel?” the captain said.

“Initially I thought a freighter. A Scud would fit very neatly into a forty-foot container. All they’d have to do is make sure it was loaded on top.”

“Could it be controlled by remote?”

Ryan stirred. “Logistically, sir, given the distances involved, they’d have to launch it themselves.”

The captain looked back at Hugh. “You said initially you thought a freighter. Has something changed your mind?”

“A source in Hong Kong tells us I was right about the container but wrong about the ship. It’s a fishing vessel, a catcher-processor, one big enough to load empty containers on board, which they then fill with product. Only two won’t be empty.”

“One for the weapon, one for the terrorists.”

“Yes, sir.” Click, click.

The captain’s head turned toward Ops. “Ops?”

“Still no joy on the sat phone, sir,” Ops said. “And our e-mail is still down.”

There was no point in killing the messenger, but Sara could tell that Lowe was greatly tempted. So could Ops, who was regarding the table with a rapt look, as if by not making eye contact the captain might forget that he was present.

“There’s always the VHF,” Ryan said.

“With the entire Bering Sea listening in,” Sara said. “Including, always supposing they exist, these terrorists.”

Hugh’s gaze was level and flat, his tone impersonal, without inflection. She could have been a total stranger. “They exist.” Click, click.

The silence hung heavy over the room. The captain pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. “XO, with me.”

Sara followed the captain from the wardroom into the pantry. The captain shut the door behind them-the door into the companionway had long since been secured, with BMOD Meridian braced against it and staring stolidly ahead, pretending to be deaf-and turned to face her. “How reliable is this guy?” he said bluntly.

“Very reliable,” Sara said, and added irresistibly, “in everything except marriage.” And then wished very much that she had not.

Lowe’s eyes narrowed.

“He’s not a nut case, Captain,” she said, unconsciously straightening to attention. “We’ve been married for ten years. I’ve known him all my life. He’s intelligent, very well educated, and not prone to flights of fancy. The CIA recruited him before we graduated, and however little I may like the CIA they don’t recruit dummies. Most of the time he’s a by-the-book kind of guy. He wouldn’t have gone to such extraordinary lengths to get here if he didn’t think the threat was real.”

“He sure as hell convinced Sams and Laird in St. Paul. Of course, they’re aviators and they’ll believe anything that’ll get them into the air.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lowe jerked his head toward the door. “You didn’t sound even a little bit convinced by his argument in there, XO.”

“Devil’s advocate, sir,” she said sturdily. “Part of my job.”

Lowe looked at her for a long, long minute. He reached past her to open the door into the wardroom. They filed in and took their seats.

“All right,” the captain said. “What are we looking for?”

There was a collective exhale of breath. “A fish processor slash stern trawler,” Hugh said. “Three hundred forty feet long. She’s leased to a Russian fishing consortium by a series of limited liability corporations. Niue flagged.” He looked up to find everyone looking back at him with an enraptured gaze. “What?” he said.

Mark Edelen had to clear his throat to get the words out. “What’s her name, Mr. Rincon?”

“Oh.” Hugh looked down at the notes he’d spread on the table in front of him. “The Agafia.”

TOMMY WAS A LITTLE startled when the whole horde thundered up the ladder and erupted onto the bridge. “XO?” she said.

“Where’s the Agafia, Tommy?”

Tommy, mute, pointed at a steady green blip on the radar screen. “She’s heading southwest.”

Sara looked up to peer through what was now a stygian gloom. She saw no lights on the horizon. She saw no horizon. They had felt the ship begin to roll more heavily in the wardroom, and she was beginning to pitch and yaw as well. The storm was well and truly upon them, but by now it wouldn’t have felt natural if it hadn’t been.

“And-” Tommy said.

“Wait a minute,” Sara said. “Who the hell is this?” She indicated a second blip not far from the first, both of them lying less than a half mile off.

“It’s the Sunrise Warrior, ma’am,” Tommy said reproachfully. “I tried to tell you on the phone. She hove up over the horizon just as you all went below.”

Captain Lowe jumped up into his chair. “Get them on the horn.”

“Belay that,” Sara said. She stepped to the captain’s side and lowered her voice. “Forgive me, Captain, but are you thinking of ordering them from the area?”

“That was my plan, yes,” the captain said. “The last thing we need right now is a bunch of idealistic civilians getting in our way. I want them long gone before whatever goes down out here goes down. You have a problem with that, XO?”

Sara refused to be intimidated by the implied menace. “Firstly, sir, I don’t think they’ll take to being ordered. They don’t, as a rule, if you recall.”

They both remembered last August and the whole whaling debacle. “No,” he said, “they don’t, do they. Secondly?”

“Secondly-” Sara hesitated.

“Spit it out, XO.”

“Well, sir, I was thinking that we might be able to use them.”

“Use them how?”

“It’s a big ocean, captain. If Hugh-if Mr. Rincon is right and there are terrorists on board the Agafia, and if they do have a weapon they are preparing to launch, we might be able to use another ship. The Sojourner Truth and the Sunrise Warrior are both faster than the Agafia.”

Lowe snorted. “That’s a stretch. What’s her top speed, five, six knots? A baby stroller is faster than she is.”

“Yes, sir. For another thing, I’ll bet both of us are more seaworthy than she is, too. You remember what the Pheodora was like when we boarded her.”

“If the Agafia’s in that bad shape we can run her down on our own.”

“Still, sir, it wouldn’t hurt to have another ship standing by. Just in case. And…” Sara paused. She hadn’t wanted to draw this card, but there wasn’t a whole lot of choice left to her. Besides, in this she knew she was right. “I know the international campaigner she’s got on board.”

“The international campaigner?”

“The ship is here on what they call a campaign. It was someone’s idea, and that someone, once they sell the idea to Greenpeace headquarters in Amsterdam, usually heads up the campaign when it goes into action. I know the point person on board.”

“How?”

Sara looked at the overhead. “I arrested her once.”

The captain stared at her, disbelieving what she had just said. “You what?”

“I worked one year at Prudhoe Bay, sir, when the freight barges were coming in. Greenpeace was getting in the way with inflatables. Vivienne Kincaid was ramrodding that campaign with a crew of six. I was with the detachment that arrested them.”

“And because of this history you think she’s going to help us?”

“She’s not an unreasonable person, sir, and she’s an American. I think when it comes down to it she’ll chose country over cause.”

The captain’s voice was cold and hard. “I don’t like the prospect of trusting the fate of the crew-not to mention an entire city-to a fanatic, XO.”

“No, sir. But they’re what we’ve got.” She could have said more, but she knew when to shut up, and did so.

He brooded for a moment, and then raised his voice. “What’s it doing out there in the way of weather?”

“Barometer still dropping, sir,” Tommy said. “Temperature in the low twenties. Rain, snow, freezing spray. Winds out of the southeast at forty-five knots. Seas eighteen to twenty feet. Forecast is for fifty-five knots before midnight.”

The captain looked at Sara. “We’ll never be able to launch a small boat in this.”

“No, sir.”

“Are we still on an intercept course for the Agafia?” he asked Tommy.

“Of course, sir,” Tommy said, a little hurt.

“How long?”

“We’re closing to half a mile now, sir. I don’t think she’s making much headway in the storm.”

“Probably ran into it on purpose, trying to hide,” he said.

The deck rolled and Sara took a quick step to regain her balance. Hugh lost his balance and crashed into the bulkhead. PO Barnette, on the conn, stood rooted to the deck, hands clasped in the small of his back, staring straight ahead.

The captain made up his mind. “Let’s make the storm work for us for a change. Bosun, pipe the aviators to my cabin. XO, Mr. Rincon, with me. Chief, you have the conn.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“WITH ALL DUE RESPECT, sir,” Lieutenant Sams said, and halted, at a loss for words. He didn’t say, “You gotta be kidding me,” but the words were on his face for anyone to read.

Captain Lowe was not unsympathetic. “I know it’s a lot to ask. Can you do it?”

Sams’s eyes were red-rimmed. He ran his fingers up into his thinning hairline and scrubbed vigorously at his scalp. “There’s a question of fatigue here, Captain. We were in the air for-” He stopped, obviously trying to add up the hours.

“A long time,” Laird said.

Sams nodded. “A long time.”

“The question is, can you do it,” Lowe said.

“The question is, can I even get off the ship,” Sams said. “I’m sorry, sir. I beg your pardon for raising my voice. It’s been a long day.” He glared at Hugh, who looked back without apology.

There was a knock at the door. “Come,” Lowe said.

It was Ops. “Still no response from the Agafia, Captain. Either their radio’s down or they’re ignoring us. And e-mail is still down.”

“Just as well,” the captain said with a hard look at Hugh. “District isn’t going to believe this anyway.”

“Look, Captain,” Sams said, “we’re coming up hard on her stern, right? We’re going to be close enough that we don’t have to put the bird in the air. We can just put a boat in the water.”

“I don’t believe this,” Sara said. “An aviator thinking up reasons not to fly. A thing unheard of in memory of man.”

They all smiled, except for Hugh. It lightened the tension, just a little, maybe just enough.

“Ah hell,” Sams said, shaking his head, “this’ll be one for round the bar.”

“Yeah,” said Laird, “and I never said I wanted to live forever anyway. Let’s take a look at the pitch and roll.”

They went back up to the bridge. They were close enough now to be able to see the Agafia‘s lights, diffused through the blowing snow and fog into an enormous halo off their port bow. There was a smaller glow illuminating the fog and snow to starboard, indicating the position of the Sunrise Warrior. The lights were bobbing up and down with the motion of the sea, no more so than the cutter. Sara took two quick steps to grab hold of a pipe to steady her footing.

Ops got on the VHF again. “Fishing vessel Agafia, fishing vessel Agafia, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, please respond, I say again, please respond.”

The result was a weighty silence. Ops repeated the hail. Same response. Ops looked at Lowe and raised one shoulder. Lowe climbed up into his chair. “XO.”

Sara presented herself. “Sir.”

He nodded at Hugh, standing silently to one side. When Lowe spoke, he was at his most formal, which could be extremely intimidating and which immediately straightened the spines of everyone within hearing. “Regardless of the reliability of the intel provided by Mr. Rincon of the CIA”-his voice was even and pleasant but no one on the bridge was left in any doubt as to the captain’s opinion of Hugh’s employer-“the Agafia has already crossed the Maritime Boundary Line, trespassing multiple times on the territorial waters of the United States. We have in hand a letter of no objection from District. We can board and seize her at our discretion.”

“Agreed, sir.”

“However. We are looking down the maw of a nine-sixty-millibar low, heavy seas, and freezing spray. These are not ideal conditions for a boarding.” A wintry smile broke through. “I’m not even going to ask for a GAR assessment on launching the helo.”

This actually raised a chuckle around the bridge, which did nothing to lessen the level of tense expectation. “We’re good to go, Captain,” Sams said, and next to him, Laird echoed his assent.

“No, you’re not,” the captain said, “but if Mr. Rincon’s information is correct, we don’t have a lot of choice here. Therefore, I-”

“Captain?” Tommy said, her puzzled expression reflected in the green back lighting of the radar screen.

“Tommy-”

“Captain, the Agafia. She’s come about.”

“What?” Lowe pulled upright. “Come about? You mean she’s coming at us? Why would she-”

They all looked up to see lights bearing down on them out of the fog. The next thing Sara knew she had been hit by a couple of hundred pounds of hurtling male that knocked her across the deck from next to the captain’s chair to up against the starboard hatch, which fortunately was closed or they would both have tumbled out onto the starboard wing of the bridge.

She lay there, stunned into immobility, staring up at Hugh. She opened her mouth to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing and at that moment four of the forward bridge windows blew in with a sound like a thunderbolt, only ten times as loud. There were loud thumps and crashes as high-velocity metal projectiles stitched a line across the bridge five feet high.

Glass broke, metal housing splintered, flesh was shredded, and the bridge was filled with screams, curses, the angry howl of the wind and the bitter force of the blowing snow.