Death Wave

central mechanism inside the derrick. The tubing appeared to be hexagonal rather than a cylinder, which surprised her.

“Okay,” Telach told her. “That’s fine. We need to see the approaches now, if you could manage it.”

“I don’t see any easy way down there,” Lia said over the radio link as she pulled back on the zoom and panned across the crater. “The inner slopes of the bowl are bare gravel, rock, and cinders. I can see one more … no, two more armed guards on the crater rim opposite from our position. There are poles set up around the drill site perimeter, with what look like floodlights. I suspect the crater walls are pretty brightly lit at night.”

She continued describing what she could see for another few minutes. Then CJ tapped her arm and pointed. Another guard was walking along the crater rim, three hundred feet away, but moving slowly in their direction. He was taking his time, his weapon slung, and he appeared bored. They hadn’t been seen yet.

“Okay,” she told the Art Room. “There’s a sentry coming. We’re going to move back downslope.”

Staying flat against the slope, they alternately slid and crawled down the side of the volcanic cone until they were again within the shelter of the pines. From there, they made their way farther down the hill until they returned to the place where they’d left their bikes.

“What now?” Carlylse asked. “Back to Fatima?”

“No,” Lia said. “I think we can follow some of these lower trails along the west flank of the ridge south. I want to see where else they have roadblocks — and to see if they have any more drill sites.”

“More pedaling?”

“More pedaling.”

“You know,” Carlylse said, “you spies are supposed to run around in souped-up Aston Martins and high-tech aircraft, not goddamned bicycles, for Christ’s sake.”

“We’ll take that under advisement, Mr. Carlylse. But the agency has had to cut back a lot lately. Budget constraints, you know.”

They mounted up and started back down the road.

CIC, USS LAKE ERIE

NORTH OF SOCOTRA

GULF OF ADEN

SUNDAY, 1605 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“Good picture,” Dean said.

“Ought to be,” Captain Morrisey replied. “The hardware cost enough.”

Dean and Akulinin stood inside the CIC, the Combat Information Center, of the Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruiser Lake Erie, a darkened shipboard compartment every bit as high-tech as the Art Room back at Fort Meade. Large-screen monitors were everywhere, watched intently by Navy enlisted personnel, both men and women, seated at workstation consoles. Captain Morrisey had brought them down a few minutes ago, their security classifications taking them past several checkpoints manned by no-nonsense Marine guards.

The largest monitor display showed a high-def television image, an aerial view of a rust-streaked cargo ship. Her name, Yakutsk, could be read on her prow.

“I thought you’d want to see,” Morrisey said. He pointed. “It’s begun.”

Two small wooden boats were approaching the Yakutsk from astern, their outboard motors churning up frothing wakes. A crewman on the Yakutsk’s fantail appeared to be shouting, though there was no sound with the picture. He was holding an automatic rifle.

“Can we get a closer view?” Dean asked.

“Nothing easier.” Morrisey spoke with a technician at a nearby console, and the image zoomed in, focusing on the man on the Yakutsk’s fantail.

“What’s the range?” Akulinin wanted to know.

“Three miles,” Morrisey said.

“Do they know we’re watching?”

“I doubt it very much,” Morrisey replied. “The Fire Scout is small, and it’s stealthy. We could be a lot closer and they’d never see us.”

The remarkably high-quality pictures were being relayed from a MQ-8B Fire Scout, a Navy UAV. Dean had watched them launch the craft from the Erie’s helicopter deck earlier. The unmanned aircraft looked like an odd mix of helicopter and submarine, with a teardrop-shaped body and the rotors attached to what looked like a submarine’s conning tower. The craft was twenty-three feet long with a rotor diameter of just over twenty-seven feet, painted gray and weighing a ton and a half. It carried a sophisticated array of sensors and cameras that let it see in the dark or in bad weather, and was said to be able to zero in on the glowing tip of a man’s cigarette from five miles away.

The Fire Scout was the smartest robot in the Navy’s inventory, with the ability to take off, patrol, and land on the pitching deck of a ship at sea without help from a human teleoperator. Stealth characteristics gave it a tiny radar profile, and its engine and rotor noise had been suppressed to a fluttering whisper. Wth an endurance of over eight hours, it could silently stalk its assigned target without the enemy even knowing it was there.

The man on the Yakutsk suddenly raised his AK to his shoulder and fired a burst down at the water, the picture sharp enough to show spent casings flash in the sunlight as they spun across the deck. A technician in the Erie’s CIC panned the image on the big screen to focus on one of the pursuing boats. A man in a ragged T-shirt and jeans had just stood up in the pitching craft, an RPG balanced on his shoulder. In the next instant, there was a puff of smoke from the back of the tube, flaring out over the water, and the warhead streaked toward the ship’s fantail.

The technician pulled the view back then, just in time to show the silent flash of the grenade exploding on the Yakutsk’s deck. The gunman there pitched backward and sprawled on the deck, dead or badly wounded. The pursuing boats, meanwhile, had drawn up to either side of the cargo vessel’s stern, and the men on board were unshipping ladders with hooks on the ends. Dean watched, fascinated, as the men hooked the ladders against the ship’s side and began swarming up onto the deck.

“Do you ever get the feeling,” Akulinin said, “that it’s 1801 all over again?”

“Barbary Pirates,” Dean said, nodding. “Only this time they’re Somali.”

“We beat them back then,” Morrisey said. “We could do it again if the damned politicians would let us.”

In 1801 through 1805, and then again in 1815, the young United States Navy had fought two wars against the Muslim city-states on the North African coast. Two hundred years later, Somalian fishermen had discovered it was more profitable to hunt for ships both close inshore and in international waters, board them, and hold ships, cargos, and crews for ransom. Most of the vessels targeted had been cargo ships like the Yakutsk, though the pirates had also begun capturing yachts and pleasure craft as well. As in the early 1800s, countries were finding out that paying the ransoms encouraged more and more attacks — but the lack of anything like a real government in Somalia meant that there were no courts where captured pirates could be tried, no venue for enforcing international law.

Realists like captain Morrisey, repeated pointed out that shooting captured pirates and sinking their boats would stop piracy in these waters in fairly short order. The international community, however, was unable to embrace what they saw as murder; most European states had long since abolished the death penalty, and summarily executing pirates went beyond the pale. While capital punishment was still legal in the United States, the government was not about to permit executions on the high seas, not when such measures would bring a storm of protest from the comfortable politically correct. So piracy and murder were subsidized and encourage by governments unwilling to meet force with force.

The pirates were all on board the Yakutsk now, racing along the decks. There appeared to be about fifteen of them, heavily armed with rifles and RPGs. Dean and the others aboard the Erie watched as a bearded man stepped out of a watertight door in the ship’s superstructure brandishing an AK assault rifle, only to be shot down by the boarders.

“Is this all going out to the Puzzle Palace?” Dean asked. Their implants and belt antennae didn’t work here within the shielded and electronically protected confines of the Aegis cruiser’s CIC.

“Absolutely,” Morrisey told him. “They’re seeing this at the same time we are, with maybe a half-second delay off the satellite.”

“Good.”