Chapter 4
The NUMA vessel Lyra had an odd profile for a seagoing ship.
She had been built with a wave-piercing bow, which was smooth and enclosed, like the front end of a Japanese bullet train or, more nautically, the hydrodynamic head of a large shark.
This design had been chosen over the traditional V-shaped bow with the flat open deck behind it in order to give the Lyra great stability in a storm.
Instead of pitching upward as the waves rolled in and then downward as it crashed into the troughs, the Lyra cut through the largest waves, puncturing them and allowing the water to slide upward along the enclosed front of the ship.
A central peak in the hull divided oncoming water, shedding it equally to port and starboard.
This allowed it to face storms head-on and kept the vertical movement to a minimum.
Behind the smoothly curved shape of the bow stood a tall superstructure, which had been pushed forward in a bulldog-like stance.
Behind that lay a long flat deck, perfect for landing helicopters and storing submersibles, ROVs, underwater drones—all the equipment that made searching for sunken objects possible.
Viewed from the side, the ship looked as if it had come to a sudden halt, causing everything above the main deck to slide forward in the process.
While the aesthetics weren’t all that pleasing, the design balanced the ship.
Keeping weight forward helped hold the bow down, enhancing its ability to push through the sea.
The effect was a silky, smooth ride, smooth enough that some of the crew complained that it didn’t feel like being on a ship at all.
Standing in front of the bridge, at the vertex of the arrow-shaped wall a few decks below the towering superstructure, Kurt Austin understood the complaint.
With a bitterly cold wind coming in from the north, ten-foot waves were rolling by.
He watched them ride upward on the hull and then peel away, vanishing long before they reached him.
Only a soft hint of vertical motion suggested he was standing on a ship rather than a concrete pier.
At least he could feel the wind.
With each passing wave, the breeze whipped a cloud of fine spray across the ship, coating the hull, the deck, and the lone madman standing afoul of the weather in tiny crystals of frost and salt.
As Kurt stared at the waves, he thought of the ancient mariners who sailed these waters in small wooden boats powered by sails and oars.
Kurt’s ancestors were mostly central European, but his mother was descended from English stock and insisted that Nordic blood ran in their veins, left over from the Viking conquest of Northumbria in 865 CE.
That ancestry, she insisted, was the source of Kurt’s intense blue eyes and his love of the sea.
True or not, Kurt could feel the kinship with those ancient Vikings.
He was never more alive than when he was out at sea.
He felt the ocean calling, and the louder and fiercer that voice, the better.
At the moment, the sea was just whispering, but it was still trying to tell him something. He was sure of that.
Kurt had flown out of Washington on a NUMA jet, taking off less than an hour after the White House briefing. With Joe Zavala at his side, they’d traveled to a tiny enclave called Hammerfest three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, near the upper reaches of Norway.
From there, they’d taken a helicopter out to the Lyra, which was already searching for a lost vessel: a World War II U-boat that had been hit with depth charges in the closing month of the war.
Some people believed it had gone down with a cache of gold, stolen artwork, or even secret Nazi plans for a Fourth Reich.
If they ever found it, Kurt suspected they’d find nothing but the bodies of scared young submariners, most of whom would have been teenagers, as that was all the Germans had left to fight with by the end of the war.
Needless to say, they hadn’t found the submarine. Nor had hours of trolling along the path of the so-called signal line revealed any trace of the missing C-17. Something told Kurt that wasn’t about to change.
Maybe it was a lack of patience, maybe it was those ancient Viking instincts, but as he stared at the black water rolling by and the whitecaps blowing off the top, he became convinced that they were looking in the wrong place.
As the Lyra sliced cleanly through another incoming wave, the heavy watertight door creaked behind him as it was shoved open against the wind.
Kurt glanced over his shoulder to see Joe Zavala stepping out into the elements, bundled up from head to toe.
He wore a jacket that would have made the Michelin Man proud.
A balaclava covered his mouth and nose, while a thick toboggan hat was pulled down tight over his head and ears.
His hands were covered by large fingerless gloves that looked like oven mitts.
By contrast Kurt wore only basic winter gear; a heavy jacket, a NUMA-issued wool hat that didn’t quite contain his unruly silver hair, and a set of round sunglasses with gold lenses and leather side shields to protect his eyes.
He didn’t even have gloves on—which he would have admitted was a mistake had he been under oath.
“Is that you, amigo?” he said to Joe. “I can’t quite tell.”
Joe pushed the door shut and lumbered toward Kurt. “I drew the short straw, so I had to come out here to see if you’d frozen in place like the hood ornament for the ship. If you want, we can boil some water and unstick your feet from the deck.”
There was a heated track in the middle of the deck that maintained an ice-free path for anyone that had to use it, but Kurt was standing in front of that.
He lifted one foot. It came off the metal plate with a firm click, suggesting the spray had indeed created a bond between his boots and the ship.
He cleared the other one as well. “Less likely to go overboard if you’re frozen to the deck. ”
Joe nodded as if that was accepted maritime logic. “Even less likely if you’re inside, where it’s not fifteen below with the windchill.”
Kurt laughed. “At a certain point it’s so cold you don’t feel it anymore.”
“That’s the beginnings of frostbite.”
The truth was, Kurt needed space to think. The crowded, screen-filled sonar room was not a place that allowed the mind to wander. It required focus, even if it was just to ward off the monotony of finding nothing.
Kurt figured Joe knew that. After years of working together Joe knew him better than anyone.
He knew Kurt preferred solitude to chaos, quiet contemplation to loud, chatty rooms. He knew the look that suggested Kurt’s feet might be frozen to the deck of the Lyra, but his mind was a thousand miles away.
“You’re a pilot,” Kurt said to Joe. “How low would you take a C-17 across these waters?”
Joe cocked his head, thinking about the question.
“Having never flown a C-17, that’s a little tough to answer, but I hear it’s a pretty agile aircraft for such a big bird.
It has to be to get in and out of short fields in dangerous places around the globe.
A competent pilot would probably be confident with fifty feet between the bottom of the plane and the top of the waves. Why do you ask?”
“What if there was fog?” Kurt asked, ignoring Joe’s question for the moment.
“Not really a problem,” Joe said. “The plane would be equipped with plenty of terrain-avoidance features to tell the pilot exactly how close to the water he was. Radar altimeters, infrared sensors, even night vision.”
Joe sounded confident. It helped make Kurt’s case. “Which makes a crash unlikely.”
“Unless they ditched it on purpose,” Joe suggested.
Kurt had been thinking the same thing. But that idea begged another question. “Would you want to land in these waters, in the middle of the night, in conditions that suggested ice, fog, and snow flurries?”
Joe shivered at the thought. “Kurt, I grew up in the hottest part of New Mexico, where any temperature below ninety degrees calls for a light jacket. I wouldn’t land here on a calm, sunny day.
You can be sure I wouldn’t ditch an airliner-sized aircraft here in the dark.
But then again,” he added, “I wouldn’t steal a billion-dollar prototype and kill my fellow crewmates to do it, so there’s no telling what the hijackers might be willing to try. ”
Kurt thought that made sense. He asked his next question. “What are the odds of a safe landing? Conditions last night were smoother, but there was fog.”
“The plane is going to sink either way,” Joe said. “But if the swells were small, I think you could get the odds of landing without breaking off major components like the wing and tail down to about fifty-fifty. Maybe sixty-forty.”
That was better than Kurt would have thought, but it didn’t change his mind.
“Even if you did land without a mishap, you still have to get out,” he said.
“The water around us is already three degrees below freezing. The only reason it’s not a solid block of ice is the salt content.
But if you get in that water, you suffer instant cold shock in all your extremities that makes functioning nearly impossible.
Hypothermia follows. Leading to death in less than fifteen minutes. ”
Joe paused, looking out at the water. “Operating over the Arctic, the Air Force would make sure the plane is stocked with life rafts and survival gear.”
“All of which carry emergency beacons that activate when deployed,” Kurt pointed out.
“But the hijackers would know that,” Joe replied. “They might be able to disable them beforehand.”
Kurt didn’t think so. “That stuff is all in sealed containers. Most of it’s designed to self-inflate when put to use. None of it would be easy to access and mess around with in the middle of a flight.”
“Maybe they brought their own rafts.”
“On a top secret test flight?”
The Lyra pierced another wave, this time nosing down a bit, which allowed the wave to slide almost up to the platform. Joe turned his face as the spray flew by, catching the sunlight and hitting the ship’s superstructure with a sound like sleet against a car window.
Joe stamped his feet and then adjusted his hat with the oven mitts. “Before my lips freeze shut, how about you tell me what you’re getting at?”
Kurt figured it was obvious. “The hijackers didn’t wake up yesterday and decide to steal the plane over coffee and donuts.
They would obviously have spent months planning this.
But if they can’t bring their own survival gear, and they can’t use what the Air Force provided, they’d have to have another way off the plane.
Unless they planned to swim for it, they’d have someone here waiting to pick them up. ”
Joe looked out to sea and then back at Kurt. His eyes lit up. He got it. “We’re looking for the wrong thing.”
Kurt grinned through the cold, which was numbing his face at this point. “We need to know if there was a ship out here last night. Anywhere along this line.”
“And if there wasn’t?”
“Then the EAGL isn’t here.”
Kurt noticed Joe nodding, or perhaps it was an involuntary muscular response to keep his core temperature up. Either way it was time to get back inside. “Let’s get to the operations room and see if anyone was out here.”