There she was. Lounging on a deck chair in a disappointingly one-piece bathing suit, that long blond hair wrapped up in a bun behind her head. He walked toward her, pretended he was going to step past between her chair and the pool, then stopped and did a dramatic double take. 'Tricia?'
She opened her eyes and looked up at him, frowning as she tried to place his face.
'Tricia Johnson!' he exclaimed. 'Gosh, it's been… what? Five years?'
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Do I know you?'
'David Llewellyn!' he told her. 'Penn State University? Pennsylvania? Way up there in the mountains? My God, it's good to see you!'
Tentatively she shook his offered hand. She still looked puzzled, trying frantically to remember his face or his name, but she was smiling. People, Llewellyn knew, and women especially, didn't want to appear to be rude and so tended to assume they'd simply forgotten if a stranger claimed to know them. And they tended to be friendly and go along with the flow of conversation while they tried to figure it out.
'I'm so sorry,' she said. 'I knew a lot of people at Penn State, but…'
I'll just bet you did, Llewellyn thought. A gorgeous girl like you would have been Miss Popularity. He laughed. 'You don't remember me, do you?'
Her nose wrinkled charmingly as she tried to think. 'I think… maybe…'
'We had an economics class together. Professor Marston, remember?'
'Yeah! Yeah, I think I remember you now!'
Llewellyn had been a psych major during his college days — though he'd never been within three thousand miles of Penn State. It actually didn't take much to plant false memories that were as real as the real thing. All you needed was an initial hook and a confident tone of voice.
'Mind if I join you?' He gestured toward the deck chair next to hers. 'If I'm bothering you, I'll just — '
'Oh, no! No! Sit down, please!'
'I was kind of a wallflower back then,' he told her with a self-deprecating shrug. 'I don't blame you if you don't remember. I did have a major crush on you, though. You have no idea how much I wanted to ask you out, but I could never get up the nerve. Anyway, you had a boyfriend… Tom? Ted?'
'George, actually.'
Llewellyn snapped his fingers. 'George! That was it! How is George? Is he with you now?'
'He dumped me for an art major. Ancient history. What about you… David, you said? What are you doing these days?'
'Ah, the heady world of international finance,' he said with an airy wave of his hand. 'Moved to England to take a job with a British banking firm, and it's been up, up, and away ever since!'
'Oh, really?'
'Well, I couldn't manage a cruise like this flipping burgers, right?'
It truly was amazing how much information could be gleaned from various sources, once you had a person's Social Security number or, in Great Britain, their National Insurance number. With Tricia Johnson's credit history, in particular the information on her student loan, he'd been able to get a transcript of her four years at Pennsylvania State University and dug up the names of several of her professors.
He knew her address — in upstate New York — and he knew she'd been working as a waitress and as an exotic dancer since college, never quite able to pull her life together. He knew she'd been briefly married, that she was now single, and that she was deep in debt. He'd also learned she had grandparents living in England — Suffolk — and that they were quite well-off, well-off enough to purchase this cruise package for her. His guess was that she'd visited them for the summer after an unhappy divorce and that they'd given her the cruise as an opportunity to 'find herself,' or some such.
It was a good thing he'd found her first.
He looked at the bar overlooking the pool. 'May I buy you a drink?'
'That looks like the plutonium ship there,' Vandergrift said, lowering his binoculars. 'I see smoke, but I can't see the Ishikari.'
Captain Eric Phillips continued watching through his own binoculars. The Atlantis Queen was approaching from the southeast, slowing now until she was barely making headway. It was possible that the Ishikari was hidden behind the bulk of the freighter, but Phillips feared the Japanese escort ship had already sunk. A pillar of oily black smoke was still boiling off the sea, but as far as he could tell at this distance, still almost half a mile, the smoke was coming off of burning oil on the surface of the ocean itself.
As soon as the SOS had come in, the Queen's radio room had been in touch both with the other ship, the Pacific Sandpiper, and with her own head office back in Southampton. Phillips had been told that the Sandpiper was carrying 'classified cargo' and that approach to the huge vessel normally was restricted… but that the Queen was authorized now to approach and render all possible aid. The Sandpiper's escort, Southampton informed him, was a Japanese destroyer escort of twelve hundred tons, the Ishikari, with a crew of ninety. There'd been an explosion on board the escort — no details beyond that — but the ship was believed to be in danger of sinking. Other ships and aircraft were en route, including military vessels to take over escort duty on the Sandpiper; but in the meantime the Queen was to assist with rescuing survivors and providing emergency medical treatment.
'Classified cargo' might be any of a number of things, but Phillips knew that the Pacific Sandpiper and her sister vessels — Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail — were purpose-built ships for carrying radioactive materials in heavy, sealed canisters. Information on the vessels was available on the Internet, and various antinuclear protest groups routinely picketed both the ships' home port at Barrow and their destination at Rokkasho, Honshu, usually with a fair amount of press coverage. That classified cargo would be several tons of processed and highly radioactive plutonium, enough, he'd read in an article about the ships, to construct sixty nuclear weapons.
The same article had stressed how safe the shipments were — how well shielded the containers were, how comprehensive the safety features of the transports were.
'What's that on her forward deck?' Vandergrift asked.
'Helicopter,' Phillips replied. 'Looks like the one that passed us a while ago. Must be helping with SAR efforts.'
'Doesn't look like they're doing much search and rescue now. Think they've already finished?'
'I don't know. Please pass the word to Dr. Barnes. I expect we'll have mass casualties coming on board as soon as we reach that other ship.'
'Yes, sir. How are we going to take them aboard?'
It was an interesting problem in marine logistics. The Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long. The Pacific Sandpiper, if he remembered the article right, was a third of that, about 325 feet long, and her main deck would be about thirty feet above her waterline. The simplest means of getting injured men from the Sandpiper's deck onto the Queen would be to bring the two ships close alongside, securing them together with lines and rigging a gangway across from the Sandpiper's deck into either one of the A Deck cargo doors or, possibly, directly into the quarterdeck access on the First Deck. One of the cargo deck entryways would be best, Phillips decided. The ship's infirmary was on A Deck to begin with, and there'd be no need to haul injured crewmen down one of the ship's ladders.
The touchy part would be doing all of this at sea. They would put out fenders, of course, to keep the hulls of the two vessels from grinding together… but the seas were rough enough and high enough that there would be a certain amount of danger involved. Not enough to hole one of the ships, certainly, unless someone did something incredibly stupid, but there would be a considerable risk of injury, or of someone falling over the side.
He picked up an intercom handset. 'Sparks!' he called.
'Yes, Captain?' The Queen's chief radio officer was Peter Jablonsky, the radio shack just aft of the bridge.
'Raise the Pacific Sandpiper, please. Tell them I intend to come alongside their starboard side. Ask them if they have injured on board.. and ask them if we should lower boats to help look for survivors.'
'Very well, Captain.'
'To answer your question, Number One,' Phillips continued, 'I'm not sure. I think the best thing to do would be to rig a gangway from their forward deck up to our port side A Deck cargo access and bring people on board that way.'
