onboard routines became a ritual. The psychopath Ibrahim remained mainly in his cabin, and the good news was that most of the time he was violently ill. Of the remaining seven men, the engineer tended his engines, set at maximum speed regardless of fuel use. Where the Countess was going, she would need no fuel for a return journey. For Martin, the twin enigmas remained unanswered. Where was she going, and what explosive power lay beneath her decks? No one seemed to know, with the possible exception of the chemical engineer. But he never spoke, and the subject was never raised.
The radio expert kept a listening watch and must have learned of a sea search taking place right across the Pacific and at the entrances to the Straits of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. He may have reported this to Ibrahim but made no mention of it to the rest.
The other five men took turns in the galley to turn out plate after plate of cold canned food, and took turns at the wheel. The navigator set the heading-always west, then south of due west to the Cape of Good Hope. For the rest, they prayed five times a day, read the Koran yet again and stared at the sea.
Martin considered attempting to take over the ship. He had no weapon other than the chance to steal a kitchen knife, and he would have to kill seven men, of whom he had to presume that Ibrahim had one or more firearms. And the men were scattered from the engine room to the radio shack to the fo’c’sle. If and when they came close to a clear target on shore, he knew he would have to do it. But across the Indian Ocean, he bided his time.
He did not know whether his message in the dive bag had ever been found or was tossed with the bag into some attic unread; and he did not know he had triggered a global ship hunt.
“This is Dr. Berenson. Who am I speaking with?”
Michael Linnett took over the speakerphone from the sergeant and lied. “I am with the sheriff’s office at Mazama,” he said. “Right now, I am in your cabin in the wilderness. I’m sorry I have to tell you there has been a break-in.”
“Hell, no. Dammit, is there damage done?” the tiny voice speaking from Seattle asked.
“He broke in by smashing the main front window with a rock, Doctor. That seems to be the only structural damage. I just want to check on theft. Did you have any firearms here?”
“Absolutely not. I keep two hunting rifles and a shotgun, but I bring them out with me in the fall.”
“Okay. Now, clothing. Do you have a closet with heavy winter clothing?”
“Sure. It’s a walk-in, right beside the bedroom door.” Captain Linnett nodded to his team sergeant, who led the way by flashlight. The closet was spacious, full of winter kit.
“There should be my pair of arctic snow boots, quilted pants and a parka with zippered hood.”
All gone.
“Any skis or snowshoes, Doctor?”
“Sure, both. In the same cupboard.”
Also gone.
“Any weapons at all? Compass?”
The big bowie knife in its sheaf should have been hanging inside the closet door, and the compass and flashlight should have been in the drawers of the desk. They were all taken. That apart, the fugitive had ransacked the kitchen, but there had been no fresh food left there to rot. A newly opened-and emptied-can of baked beans and a can opener lay on the countertop with two empty cans of soda. There was an empty pickle jar that had been full of quarters, but no one knew that.
“Thanks, Doc. I’d get up here when the weather clears with a team for a new window, and file a claim for the loss.”
The Alpha leader cut the connection, and looked round at his unit. “Let’s go,” was all he said. He knew the cabin, and what the Afghan had taken shortened the odds, and maybe even now they could be against him. He put the fugitive, who must have spent over an hour in the cabin to Linnett’s half hour, at two to three hours ahead, but now moving much faster. Swallowing his pride, he decided to bring up some cavalry. He called a pause, and spoke to Fort Lewis again.
“Tell McChord I want a Spectre and I want it now. Engage all the authority you need-the Pentagon, if you have to. I want it over the Cascades and talking to me directly.”
While waiting for their new ally to show up, the twelve men of Alpha 243 pressed on hard, pushing the pace. The sergeant tracker was at point, his flashlight picking up the marks of the snowshoes of the fugitive in the frozen snow. They were pushing the pace, but they were carrying much more equipment than the man ahead of them. Linnett estimated they had to be keeping up, but were they gaining? Then the snow started. It was a blessing and a curse. As the deceptively gentle flakes drifted down from the conifers around them, they covered the rocks and stumps, permitting another quick pause to switch from shoes to the faster skis. They also wiped out the trail. Linnett needed a guiding hand from heaven, and it came just after midnight in the form of a Lockheed-Martin Hercules AC -130 gunship, circling at twenty thousand feet, above the cloud layer but looking straight through it. Among the many toys that Special Forces are given to play with, the Spectre gunship is, from the viewpoint of the enemy on the ground, about as nasty as it gets.
The original Hercules transport plane was gutted and her innards replaced with a cockpit-to-tail array of technology designed to locate, target and kill an opponent on the ground. It is seventy-two million dollars’ worth of pure bad news.
In its first “locate” role, it does not depend on daylight or dark, wind or rain, snow or hail. Mr. Raytheon had been kind enough to provide a synthetic aperture radar and infrared thermal imager that can pick out any figure in a landscape emitting body heat. Nor is the image a vague blur; it is clear enough to differentiate between a four- legged beast and a two-legged one. But it still could not work out the weirdness of Mr. Lemuel Wilson. He, too, had a cabin, just outside the Pasayten Wilderness, on the lower slopes of Mount Robinson. Unlike the Seattle surgeon, Wilson prided himself on his capacity to overwinter up there, for he had no alternative metropolitan home. So he survived without electricity, using a roaring log fire for heat and kerosene lamps for lighting. Each summer, he hunted game, and air-dried the meat strips for winter. He cut his own logs, and foraged for his tough mountain pony. But he had another hobby.
He had enough CB equipment, powered by a tiny generator, to spend his winter hours scanning the wave bands of the sheriff, emergency services and the public utilities. That was how he heard the reports of a two-man aircrew down in the wilderness and teams of professionals struggling toward the spot. Lemuel Wilson was proud to call himself a concerned citizen. As so often, the authorities preferred the term “interfering busybody.” Hardly had the two airmen broadcast their plight, and the authorities replied with their exact positions, than Lemuel Wilson had saddled up and ridden out. He intended to cross the southern half of the wilderness to reach the park and rescue Major Duval. His band-scanning equipment was too cumbersome to bring along, so he never heard the two aviators were rescued anyway. But he did make human contact. He did not see the man come at him. One second, he was urging his pony through a deeper-than-usual snowdrift, the next a bank of snow came up to meet him. But the snowbank was a man in a space-age, quilted silver, two-piece suit. There was nothing space age about the bowie knife, invented around the time of the Alamo and still very efficient. One arm round his neck dragged Wilson off his pony; as he crashed down, the blade entered his rib cage from the back and sliced open his heart.
A thermal imager is fine for detecting body heat, but Lemuel Wilson’s corpse, dropped into a crevasse ten yards from where he died, lost its heat fast. By the time the Hercules AC-130 Spectre began its circling mission high above the Cascades thirty minutes later, Lemuel Wilson did not show up at all. “This is Spectre-Echo-Foxtrot calling Team Alpha. Do you read me, Alpha?” “Strength-Five,” reported Captain Linnett. “We are twelve on skis down here. Can you see us?”
“Smile nicely and I’ll take your picture,” said the infrared operator four miles above them.
“Comedy comes later,” said Linnett. “About three miles due north of us is a fugitive. Single man, heading north on skis. Confirm?” There was a pause-a long pause.
“Negative. No such image,” said the voice in the sky.
“There must be,” argued Linnett. “He is up ahead of us somewhere.” The last of the maple and tamarack was well behind them. They emerged from the forest to a bare scree, always climbing north, and the snow fell straight on them without being filtered by branches. Way behind, in the darkness, stood Mount Lago and Monument Peak.
