Zero Hour

TWENTY-THREE

After thwarting the hijacking of the Ghan, Kurt, Joe, and Hayley had switched modes of transport, taking a chartered jet to Perth and then boarding a Sea Lynx helicopter that flew them to the NUMA vessel Orion when she was still three hundred miles from the coast.

From there, the Orion had turned southwest, heading back out to sea. Three other ships in the NUMA fleet were joining them and heading in different directions. They were moving south, attempting to set up a picket line using the sensing devices Hayley had designed. The plan was simple. If Thero tested his device, they should be able to locate him.

As Hayley began the long task of calibrating the sensors, Kurt made his way up to the bridge. He arrived just as the third watch began.

Through the large plate-glass windows, he could see that the sky had darkened and lowered, and the sea had turned a dark iron gray. The western swell continued at four to five feet, surprisingly calm for this section of the world. Still, Kurt didn’t like the look of things.

He grabbed two mugs with the name ORION on them and a small representation of the constellation’s stars embossed on the side. He filled them with coffee and wandered over to Joe, who was standing with the Orion’s captain, studying the charts and the weather report.

“Captain?” Kurt said, offering one of the mugs.

“No thanks,” Captain Winslow replied.

“I’ll take one,” Joe said.

Kurt handed one mug to Joe and kept the other for himself. He took a sip and then nodded toward the weather report. “What’s the word?”

“No storm yet,” Joe said, “but the pressure’s dropping. We’re looking at a disturbance coming in from the west.”

It was March, which meant it was early fall in the southern hemisphere. The worst of the weather would not hit for another month or so, but south of 40 degrees latitude they’d entered an area known as the Roaring Forties. At this latitude, the Great Southern Ocean encircled the Earth uninterrupted by land. It could brew up a monster storm whenever it chose.

“So far, we’ve been lucky,” Winslow said. “But my old bones tell me this weather isn’t going to hold.”

“Quiet before the storm?” Joe asked.

“Something like that,” the captain said.

“We have to keep going,” Kurt said, “even if the weather hits hard.”

Winslow seemed determined as well, but only to a degree.

“We won’t let you down,” he assured Kurt. “But if there’s a point at which the danger to the ship and crew becomes too great, I’ll have to make that call. The Orion’s a strong ship, but she wasn’t built for a full-on gale.”

Kurt nodded. The captain was master of the ship, and though Kurt was in charge of the mission, the captain’s word would hold sway. “What about the others?”

Joe pointed to the chart. “Paul and Gamay are aboard the Gemini.”

On the map, she was a long way out of formation.

“Why is she so far behind us?”

“She had to come all the way from Singapore.”

“Frustrating,” Kurt said. “But it’s worth the wait to get Paul and Gamay on the team. What about the others?”

“Dorado’s here,” Joe said, pointing to a different section of the map well to the east, almost directly under the center of Australia.

“And the Hudson is way over here, south of New Zealand. They just got the equipment delivered. Two days, at least, before they come online.”

Kurt studied the chart. Four tiny ships, just dots on the map in the vast sea. They were the only real hope of finding Thero before he acted.

“You think this is going to work?” Joe asked.

“It all depends on Hayley’s sensors.”

“You don’t seem as certain as before,” Joe noted.

“She’s hiding something,” Kurt said.

“And yet, you like her,” Joe noted.

“All the more reason to be careful,” Kurt said.

At this, Joe nodded. “It’s always the punch you’re not looking for that hits the hardest.”

Kurt took a sip of the coffee and glanced out the bridge windows into the deepening gloom. He couldn’t help but wonder which direction that punch might come from.

Eighty-six miles behind the Orion, a different kind of vessel loomed out in the darkness. From all appearances, the MV Rama was a containership. A check of her logs and cargo would prove that she spent most of her time transporting goods from Vietnam to Australia and back. In fact, she’d been fully loaded with electronics and only hours from Perth when Dmitry Yevchenko had bought her, lock, stock, and barrel, and diverted her to the south, turning her into a floating command ship for Anton Gregorovich and the commandos the Russian government had put at his disposal.

The Rama was smaller than most containerships of the day, only five hundred and sixty feet at a time when seven-hundred- and eight-hundred-footers were rapidly being dwarfed by thousand-foot behemoths. But what she did not have in size, she made up for in speed, with a top rate of twenty-eight knots.

As Gregorovich gazed at a satellite feed downloaded to them from a Russian satellite, he was thankful for that choice. The Americans had been racing south at nearly thirty knots since the moment Gregorovich had found them.

“Why are we following them?” a man with a heavily bandaged face asked.

“Because you failed to capture the woman,” Gregorovich said.

“We have helicopters and jamming equipment,” Victor Kirov replied. “And twenty trained commandos on board. We could take her now with ease.”

Gregorovich didn’t like having official Russian agents on his team, or even the Red Army commandos they’d sent him, but at least he could trust the soldiers. With an ambitious GRU man like Kirov, that was not possible.

“You’re lucky I allowed you to come aboard, Victor. You’ve lost face with me in more ways than one.”

Kirov bristled at the comment but didn’t respond.

“Don’t you see?” Gregorovich asked. “The Americans know something. They wouldn’t be driving through the waves at flank speed if they didn’t. They are the hounds chasing the fox. We are the hunters on horseback. At this point, it’s best to shadow them from a distance, using the satellite granted us by the Kremlin to keep an eye on them from over the horizon. When they settle on a final location, we’ll act.”

Kirov snorted and shook his head. “If Thero proves to have a workable weapon, the Americans will swarm here like a horde of angry bees. Our little force will be no match for them. We must find him and destroy or take what he is building before he tests it in a way that alerts the world.”

“Take it?” Gregorovich said. “So we have alternate plans now?”

“If some of the technology can be recovered, we are to do so,” Kirov noted.

“Those were not my orders,” Gregorovich said.

“They’re mine,” Kirov replied.

This was odd, Gregorovich thought, but not totally unexpected. He shrugged it off, more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t been told than the actual task.

“And what are we to do with the little toy you brought along?” He nodded toward a case secured to the far bulkhead. A nuclear warhead lay inside. A suitcase bomb. The mother of all suitcase bombs, really.

The Russian designation was RA-117H. While most tactical warheads yield a few kilotons at best — enough to vaporize several city blocks and perhaps devastate a square mile or so — the RA-117H yielded far more. Nearly three times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

“Once we have samples of the technology, we are to activate the weapon and obliterate the site. There are to be no remnants of Thero or his experiments this time.”