Chapter 5 #2
“So back to the red herring, then,” Kurt said. “No better way to throw your pursuers off than letting them think they’ve discovered something you overlooked.”
Gamay wondered what it would take to fake this particular kind of signal. She decided she didn’t have enough expertise to really know. It might have been difficult, or as easy as squeezing a bunch of transmit buttons on different radios at the same time.
As she considered this, the computer finished compiling and sorting the data.
This new batch brought up hundreds of vessels both small and large, most of them plowing the Norwegian coast. Checking their beacons and back-tracing their overnight positions quickly ruled them out as being available to help the hijackers. Just as she suspected.
She turned to Kurt, but found him staring intently enough at the screen that she didn’t want to break his concentration. She noticed he wasn’t looking at the center, near the signal line, or the area to the south, where the ships were. He was locked in on the northern half of the image.
She looked at the screen. There was nothing on it. No ships, no boats, nothing but a great wall of white, where the sea ice began its unbroken stretch across the ocean. From there it ran all the way back up over the top of the globe and then down into the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.
The satellite images didn’t cover that distance, in fact they cut off two hundred miles shy of the pole. It didn’t matter really; there weren’t going to be any ships in the ice pack.
“What’s this?” Kurt asked, pointing to a thin black mark cutting through the ice field on an impossibly straight line.
The line ran downward from the top of the screen, keeping true right up until just before it stopped. At that point, a ninety-degree jag to the right followed and then nothing.
“Don’t know,” Gamay said.
“Zoom in on that,” Kurt requested.
Gamay found her curiosity piqued as well. After centering the image, she tapped the zoom key several times.
The image blurred and resolved over and over again until it brought out a colorful slash in the middle of the white ice. Two more clicks revealed that slash to be a red-hulled ship with green decks, parked in the heart of the ice pack.
Gamay clicked zoom once more. The angle of the satellite image allowed them to see some of the ship’s profile and even its markings. While the numbers were unreadable, the design was obvious. As was the huge red five-pointed star in the center of the foredeck.
“Icebreaker,” Gamay said.
“Chinese,” Joe added.
Kurt leaned back and crossed his arms. “What’s it doing out there, I wonder?”
Gamay detected plenty of sarcasm in Kurt’s voice. He obviously thought he knew exactly what it was the Chinese were doing out there.
“What’s that off to the east?” Paul asked, pointing to a discolored area that ran straight for about three-quarters of a mile.
Gamay zoomed once more. The grayish smudge in the surface looked like a road…or a runway.
“Paul,” she said turning, “do you have the C-17’s range data handy?”
“Nine hundred sixty miles from the point where it went dark,” Paul said. “If we’re assuming low-altitude flight, that distance compresses to about seven hundred miles, adjusted for wind.”
Gamay typed a few things into the computer. The Chinese icebreaker was parked five hundred miles from where the military lost track of the EAGL. And yet, it was only a tantalizing hundred and twenty miles from where they were now.
“Well within range,” Joe said.
Gamay sat back and exhaled deep and slow as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time. She knew what was coming next.
“We need to get up there,” Kurt said.
“We’re under orders to scan the signal line,” she reminded him. “Not our regular kind of orders—the ones that you and Joe seem to think of as suggestions, but real orders directly from the White House.”
“She’s right,” Joe said. “This is not a normal situation.”
Kurt looked hurt. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to ask Captain Akers to take his ship off the line. But we don’t need four people to watch a sonar readout or wait for a drone’s AI system to spot a flying fish. You two can handle that.”
Gamay frowned with obvious disdain. She didn’t like being the voice of reason or sounding like the mother hen, but Kurt’s bravado often forced her to act that way.
As far as she could tell, he’d never met a risk he didn’t think was worth taking.
In her armchair psychology review of him she would say his decision-making process was based on an overriding belief in his own ability, a sense that luck was always going to be riding by his side and a default mechanism that told him that even if things did go horribly wrong, he would figure a way to get himself out of the mess somehow.
As long as she’d known him, he hadn’t been wrong. But it only had to happen once.
“And just how do you plan on approaching this ship?” she asked.
“Very carefully,” he replied.
“Not funny,” she said.
“It’s an icebreaker,” Kurt said. “Not a ship of war. It probably has a weather radar and short-range collision-avoidance set designed for navigating traffic near congested harbors. It’s not going to be bristling with antiaircraft missiles and fifty-caliber machine guns.”
She gave a shrug, imagining how Kurt must have driven his mother crazy as a child. Before she could offer more reasons to be cautious Joe spoke up.
“I’m all in for the adventure,” he said, “but aren’t we ignoring the obvious?”
He pointed to the screen. The bright red hull of the Chinese ship stood out against the endless expanse of white ice. The gray swath of a runway was easy to make out, but there was nothing else around. “I don’t see a plane.”
“Joe makes a good point,” Gamay said, grinning.
“What’s at the end of that runway?” Kurt asked.
All eyes focused on the screen. Off one end of the “runway” lay a hundred miles of jumbled ice. Not far from the other end lay the gap of dark water formed where the icebreaker had plowed its way south and made the ninety-degree turn.
“You think it went into the water?” Gamay asked.
“Not sure,” Kurt said. “But I can’t imagine a better way to hide a salvage effort from prying eyes.”
Even Gamay had to agree there was logic to Kurt’s line of reasoning. She kept it to herself. “So, you’re just going to fly up there and knock on the side of the hull with a hammer and ask the Chinese if they’ve seen our missing plane?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Kurt joked. “We should bring a housewarming gift as a pretext for looking around. Just like you do when someone new moves into your neighborhood.”
Joe and Paul laughed at this. The boys, she thought. “I’m sure a houseplant would do wonders for international relations. But then what?”
“We’ll see,” Kurt said. He was already up and sliding the chair back into place.
“And what are we supposed to do while you’re gone?”
“Keep watching those screens,” he said, heading for the door. “Just in case I’ve got it wrong.”