Mirage

havoc on her impeller blades and the motors that controlled their fine pitch.

“Saddle up,” Gomez Adams announced. He tossed a bag of hand tools to one of his hangar apes — the nickname for the men who serviced the helo — and settled himself into the pilot’s seat. A hum grew from the equipment when he hit the master switch and started the takeoff procedure.

While Juan and Linc jumped aboard, the pilot jacked his helmet into the chopper’s radios and did a communications check. “Max, you in the op center yet?”

“I’m here. Talk about your rude awakenings.”

Cabrillo had his own helmet on and spoke. “Have you seen the video?”

“Hali just showed it to me. You go get her, Juan.”

They would have reacted just the same had Linda not been on the Sakir, but her presence there made this rescue especially poignant.

“Don’t you worry about that. Anything on the radar plot?”

“Nothing to be concerned with.”

“Keep an eye out. Kenin had to use either a ship or another submarine to pull that off. Ping active as you follow us, and watch for surface contacts. You know about L’Enfant?” Juan asked.

“Hali told me the little rat sold us out.”

“True, but he didn’t spill that we could track Kenin’s sub and had the capability to sink it. I don’t think Kenin knows we have a chopper or that the Oregon’s the fastest ship in the world for her size.”

“Good point.”

“Kenin underestimated us once. Let’s pray he does it again.”

“Understood. We’ll keep an eye out.”

“We’ll do the same.”

The crew never wished one another luck before a mission, so Max repeated his earlier plaint. “You bring her back.”

“Roger.”

Juan curled his fingers in frustration while they waited for temperatures in the single turbine to reach the correct levels. Only then did Adams engage the transmission, and the rotor began to turn, lazily, at first, and then it vanished in a blur of motion. At the tail of the craft, rather than a second, smaller rotor, the chopper vented its exhaust through ducted ports for gyroscopic stability.

“Max,” Adams radioed, “how we looking on winds across the deck?”

“You’re clear,” Hanley replied.

“Then we’re out of here.” He applied more power and eased up on the collective so that the angle of the rotor blades changed and they began to bite into the air.

The chopper lifted from the deck and barely cleared the fantail railing while the Oregon pulled away from under it. They adopted a nose-down attitude to pick up some speed and then rose steadily into the sky. Occasional patters of rain pelted the windshield as they clawed their way up to a thousand feet and continued to accelerate southward.

“You did the calculations, right?” Juan asked.

“Yes. I put us over the target with fumes left in the tank if we maintain a speed of one hundred thirty knots.” Gomez glanced over his shoulder to look at Cabrillo for a second. “Not to be the Negative Nelly of the group, but what happens if the yacht isn’t there anymore?”

“We ditch and wait for the Oregon in this life raft here, and when we’re saved, I deduct the price of the chopper from your stake in the Corporation.”

“I can follow you on the first two, but number three doesn’t seem too fair to me.”

“He’s pulling your leg,” Linc said. “Otherwise, he’d have to deduct the cost of replacing the Nomad from his own share. Eddie told me the emergency ascent was the Chairman’s idea.”

Juan grinned, thankful for the banter to keep him from dwelling on Linda’s predicament. “How’s this. If we ditch, we’ll call it square.”

“Sounds good.”

Linc spent most of the flight studying the ocean through a pair of powerful binoculars that even his massive hands could barely fit around. He would watch individual ships plying the Atlantic seaboard until he was certain they were no threat. Then something caught his eye, and he kept watching it far longer than any other target. He finally passed the binoculars over his shoulder and pointed to a spot about forty degrees off their route. “Juan, what do you make of that?”

Cabrillo adjusted the glasses and looked to where Linc indicated. He thumbed the focus wheel until the image became clear. He saw a ship’s wake where it was widening and flattening into the choppy sea. He followed its trail, but it vanished before he saw the ship making it. Confused, he scanned again. The wake was a white- foaming wedge on the ocean’s surface culminating in absolutely nothing at all and yet its leading edge continued to move away from them.

The impossibility of what he was witnessing dulled his cognitive reasoning, and he continued to stare without comprehension or the ability to accept the reality of it.

A hundred feet in front of the flattened apex of the wake, occasional puffs of white water appeared, like the bow of a ship cutting through the swells, but between these two points was nothing but open water.

Juan blinked and looked harder. No, not open water, a distortion of what open water looks like, a facsimile of nature, not nature itself. Then the reality hit.

“Science fiction. Those two aren’t going to let me hear the end of it.”

“You want me to get closer?” Adams asked.

“No. Keep true. Maybe they don’t know we’ve spotted them.” Juan handed the binoculars back to Linc and keyed on his radio. “Max, you there?”

“Standing by.”

“Go to encrypt beta,” Juan ordered, and Gomez switched to the chopper’s secondary encrypted channel. “You still with me?”

There was a second delay in the rest of their conversation because the computers needed the extra time to decrypt the secure comm line. “Still here.”

“I don’t know how Kenin capsized the Emir’s yacht, but I know how he got close enough to activate the weapon. We’ve got eyeballs on a ship’s wake, only there isn’t a ship making it.”

“Come again.”

“They have some sort of optical camouflage. The ship he used to target the Sakir is, well, it’s invisible.”

“You sure this isn’t a delayed symptom of the bends?”

“Linc sees it, or doesn’t see it, too.”

“Juan,” Lincoln said urgently, thrusting the binoculars back at him. “Check it out now. They must think they’ve cleared the danger zone.”

Juan found the wake again and again followed it to its source. This time, the ship was there, and what a craft it was. It reminded him of the U.S. Navy’s pyramidal Sea Shadow, an experimental stealth ship with a design based loosely on the F-117 Nighthawk. This boat was painted a muted gray that perfectly matched the surrounding seas, and it had sloped, faceted sides that met at a peak about thirty feet above the waves. Unlike the Sea Shadow, it wasn’t a catamaran but a monohull, with a flat transom and a long overhanging deck above her bow. Function rather than aesthetics had gone into her design, making her the ugliest vessel Juan had ever seen.

He guessed she was making about fifteen knots, so more than likely if she was running from the scene of the crime, this was her maximum speed.

“So what do you want me to do about it?” Hanley asked.

At sea, the preservation of human life took precedence over everything else, there was no doubt about that. He couldn’t order the Oregon to deviate from her course and intercept this bizarre new weapon. And none of their missiles had the range to hit it, but that didn’t mean they were impotent.

“Give me a few minutes to figure out the vectors and relative speeds. I want you to be ready to launch Eddie and MacD in a RHIB to go after them.”