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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.
