Blindfold Game

JANUARY

ON BOARD THE USC6 CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

SARA WAS ICILY CALM. “I believed you, I backed your story with the captain. Now he’s dead and there is no missile launcher on the ship we just boarded at gunpoint.”

Hugh was standing on the bridge, his hands dangling at his sides. “I don’t understand it,” he said.

“That makes you and a ship full of Coasties who don’t understand it,” she said.

There was a rumble of agreement which she stilled with a glare.

“Noortman gave me the port, he gave me the ship, he gave me everything.” Hugh stopped suddenly, brows furrowing.

Sara waited. When he didn’t say anything else, she said, “Yeah, well, your thumbnail-pulling skills must not be quite up to CIA par because it looks like he lied through his teeth.”

Hugh met her eyes and the words dried up in her mouth. She’d never seen that expression on Hugh’s face. “They were running with their lights on,” he said.

“Who was?”

“The Agafia. They were running with their lights on.”

“So?” she said. “It’s kind of, oh, I don’t know, the law?”

“Why? If they wanted to run from you, why run with their lights on? Why make it easier to follow them?”

“I can find a boil on the ass of a wildebeest in Africa with our radar,” Sara said. “I don’t need running lights.”

“Still, it helped you find them,” Hugh said. “And what about Noort-man?”

“What about your unimpeachable source?”

“They didn’t kill him,” Hugh said. “They may have killed Peter, but they didn’t try to kill Noortman.”

“And Peter is?” Sara said.

“The arms dealer in Odessa who brokered their deal with the North Korean for the cesium and the North Korean missile launcher. Why? Why try to kill him and not kill Noortman?”

Sara said, a little impatiently, “Peter was a danger to them, Noortman wasn’t?

“That’s not it,” Hugh said. “Or not all of it.”

The Agafia was riding their stern, under the command of Ensign Ryan and the prize crew. The Sunrise Warrior, after the spectacular maneuver that had so ably distracted the attention of the Agafia’s hijackers long enough for Ryan’s team to board and take control of the ship, was keeping pace off their starboard side. “Greenpeace is signaling us, XO,” the chief said.

“Tommy?”

Tommy’s lips moved as the light blinked.“ ‘I am now in possession of one Get Out of Jail Free card. Agreed?”“ At Sara’s look, Tommy said, ”I’m just reading here, XO.“

Sara gave a grudging nod. “Send ‘Agreed.”“

“

“We’re heading back up to the line to continue our work. Good luck with yours, Sojourner Truth.”“

“Once a crusader, always a crusader,” Chief Edelen said. “That was pretty slick back there. I wonder who their master is?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Let’s forget we ever saw them.”

“Forget who, XO?”

The Sunrise Warrior altered course and was almost immediately swallowed by the storm.

“Maybe they didn’t mean to kill him,” Hugh said. “Peter,” he said when Sara looked momentarily blank. “In Odessa. Maybe we were just supposed to think that they tried. The bomb went off in the middle of the night, long after everyone had gone home.”

Hugh was beginning to shiver. He was soaking wet from standing out on the bridge wing, trying to follow what was going on on the other ship. Sara made a sound of disgust. “Follow me,” she said, and led him to her cabin. She muscled him into a chair. “You,” she said to the first person she saw, “towels, lots of them, and find him some dry clothes.”

The towels came immediately; the clothes took a little longer. Halfway out of his shirt, Hugh said, “They didn’t want us to find out what weapons they had bought. But they didn’t mind if we knew what the target was.”

She was still angry, but she was listening. The Agafia had been commandeered by pirates, those pirates had fired on the Sojourner Truth with a machine gun that appeared to have been freshly mounted specifically for the purpose, and Sara knew there had to be more of a reason for that than that the Sojourner Truth had caught them with their nets in American waters. Especially since she hadn’t.

Besides, where was the Agafia’s crew? A three-hundred-and-forty-foot catcher-processor, between ship’s crew and fish handlers, could have upward of a hundred people on board. There was a cold feeling in her gut. “What did the survivors say about the processor’s crew?”

Hugh, as the only Korean-speaking person on board, had tried to talk to the pirates via Ryan’s handheld. “Nothing. Same thing they said about everything. They’re not talking.”

Sara smiled, and he shivered again. “Maybe when it calms down enough to bring them over here, you will find them a little more forthcoming face-to-face.”

“Maybe.”

Someone had actually found a pair of pants that would cover Hugh’s long legs. He stood up to pull them on. He paused. “They had to know we’d catch on.”

“Who? Who knew? And zip up your pants.”

For the first time since he’d come on board he looked at her as Sara, his wife, instead of the executive officer of the Sojourner Truth. “Making you nervous, babe?”

Her brows snapped together. “Knock it off. This isn’t the time or the place.”

“You’re right, it isn’t.” He stepped into sneakers that were only half a size too small and sat down again to tie them, returning to his line of thought as he did so. “The terrorists knew we’d catch on.”

“What?” Sara was a little bewildered at the rapid change of topic.

“It is next to impossible to keep a secret in that world,” Hugh said. “There is always somebody standing around with his ears wide open who is going to sell what he hears to the highest bidder. They knew that.”

“So?”

“So,” he said, eyes bright with realization, “they set up a dummy to distract us.”

Sara caught on. “You mean they wanted us to catch the Agafia?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why else choose a ship that has that high a profile with the U.S. Coast Guard? What did you call it, a High Interest Vessel? You’d already chased it back across the line on this patrol, and multiple times before.”

He snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “And that’s why they shot at us! They didn’t mean to sink us, or even hurt us that badly.”

“Of course not,” Sara said acidly. “I myself never mean to kill people I shoot at.”

Unheeding, he said, “What they wanted was to get and keep our attention for a nice long time. It was just their bad luck that their strafing us took out our communications. They wanted us to yell for help, Sara. They wanted everything we’ve got in the Bering, hell, in the North Pacific Ocean to come chasing after them.”

She already knew the answer, but he waited so expectantly for her to ask the question. “Why?”

“So that the ship with the weapon on it could slip through.” He finished tying his shoes and sat back in the chair. “Noortman, you little shit,” he said, sounding almost admiring. “And after all we meant to each other.”

He looked up and saw Sara’s startled gaze, and laughed out loud. “It’s a long story. Don’t worry, I survived, virtue intact.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Sara, has anything odd happened out here lately?”

“Odd? You mean, other than my ship coming under fire, my captain being killed, and me sending a boarding team to commandeer said ship in a helo with an aircrew of three I may have sent to their death? No. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing we don’t run into every day out here, and twice on Sundays.”

“Before this,” he said patiently. “Have you heard anything over the air, seen anything that didn’t quite fit?” He lifted his shoulders and spread his hands. “Maybe ship traffic where it shouldn’t be?”

Before the words were all the way out of his mouth she was on her feet and headed up the ladder outside her stateroom, Hugh dogging her heels.

“XO,” Ops said. He and all five of his techs were jammed inside the comm room, looking like they wished they had hammers in their hands instead of tiny little screwdrivers and alligator clips. All the equipment had its faces off, revealing a colorful mass of wire and dials and digital readouts and computer boards. Mostly it looked like a mess. A nonfunctioning mess.

“Anything yet?” Sara said without hope.

Ops shook his head. “We caught a stray bullet back here and it must have ricocheted around somehow.” He displayed a misshapen piece of metal that looked entirely too small to have caused this much damage. “We don’t even know what it hit yet, that’s why we’re looking at everything. They took out our satellite dish. They must have nicked the antenna array, too. And I can’t send anyone up there in this weather to fix it. Even if we had the parts.”

“Understood,” she said. “How long before someone comes looking for us?”

“In this weather?” He shook his head. “The Hercs will be patrolling, but we aren’t exactly keeping to the last route we filed with District before the e-mail went out, and right after that the comm got shot out. And we’re the only cutter in the Bering Sea at present. The Alex Hale/M be back in Kodiak by now. They’ll be looking for us, though.”

She nodded. “District hasn’t heard from us in a while, and they’ve probably got red flags up all over the place. Ops, you remember that freighter we saw up on the line? The one we all figured was lost?”

He blinked behind his glasses. “Yes,” he said, although it was obvious that he was remembering the incident as if it had happened years ago instead of days ago.

Sara didn’t blame him. If she’d had the luxury she would have felt like that herself. “What was its name, do you remember?”

He thought. “Star of Wonder? Star of Night?”

“That’s star of wonder, star of light, Ops,” Sparks said.

Ops snapped his fingers. “The Star of Bali. Sorry, XO, I must be a little out of it.”

“What was it’s last port of call?”

“Petropavlovsk.”

Sara looked at Hugh.

“Petropavlovsk,” he said, “was where Noortman’s partner, Fang, and his employers planned to board the ship Noortman found for them. It was also where the Agafia was sent for repairs and maintenance in November.”

The silence was heavy and long. At the end of it Sara said, “You think there were two ships.”

He nodded. “And one was a decoy.”

“The Agafia.”

“Yes, whose activities were designed to draw your attention away from the Star of Bali. Where was the Star of Bali headed?” he said to Ops.

“Seward.”

Hugh looked at Sara. “Seward’s only a hundred miles from Anchorage and that’s road miles, not as the crow flies. The range on the mobile missile launcher Peter sold them is-”

“Two hundred miles, I remember,” Sara said. “Which means they don’t have to get to the dock to launch.”

He hadn’t thought of that, but she was right. The terrorists could launch as soon as they were within range, which meant while they were still well out at sea.

“We’ve got to find them, Sara. Now.”