The recently renamed Eleutheria’s fax whirred on the bridge and spit out a weather report as soon as the radio operator turned it on. The navigator read it, then handed it to the captain, then turned the fax off again. Fax machines were hard to track and easily forgotten, but it could be done.
“Fair weather?” the captain asked, taking the paper.
“Fair weather.”
“Good. Last time we sailed these waters, there were seventeen-foot waves.”
“That’s the Arabian Sea for you.”
Captain Goncalves walked across the bridge, examining the report. There was more here than the weather, but only he could read the code. His contacts had changed the exchange location. Again. Whoever they were, this commission was careful. Good thing, since he’d spotted aircraft more than once this morning, and the captain knew they weren’t flying training missions this far out.
He lit his pipe. Dolphins frolicked in the bow wake as the ship cut nine knots due south, along the sixty-two-degree longitude line, out beyond the reach of the regular cutters that policed the ocean’s freeways, and well beyond the coastal patrol boats. His longitude. The smuggler’s route. The sea spray wet the deck and the prow sliced the waves, a few hands working the endless tasks of repairs and keeping the rusty scupper shipshape.
The captain smoked as he watched the men work, then looked upward. He couldn’t see anything above him but scattered clouds—even the seagulls had given up and flown back to shore—but he knew they were up there: satellites, passenger planes, drones, naval jets, weather balloons released weeks ago in Madagascar or Mumbai, still drifting on the upper currents, tracking. Always tracking.
But not tracking me, he thought, crumpling up the fax and tossing it overboard.
He would give the men half an hour, then order the new coordinates, as coded into the weather report.
“I’m picking up radio chatter, probably a fax, but no Navtex or AIS signals. Sending you the location. Confirm.”
The U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon, a flying surveillance platform, was thirty-five thousand feet in the air. It could track a small boat hundreds of miles away, eavesdrop on any kind of electronic communication, read billboards from cruising altitude, and more. But this Boeing 737 could also kill. It could launch sonobuoys, depth charges, SLAM-ER cruise missiles, torpedoes, and Harpoon antiship missiles. The P-8 redefined Flying Fortress, and it was looking for just such an anomaly: a fax being received by a boat that, according to AIS info, wasn’t there.
The supervisor looked at the blip sent to his screen. It was within their search area, and profiled like a smuggler. “Confirmed. Magnify.”
With a few keystrokes, blue ocean became a ship, as the camera zoomed in.
“We have a group-three freighter, aft pilothouse.”
Meets our target description, the supervisor thought. “Ship name?”
The operator zoomed in further, so he could see the letters on the ship’s stern. “I read E, L, E, U, T, H, E, R, I, A. Eleutheria.”
“Flag?”
The operator checked, swiveling the camera.
“Malaysia.”
A second passed as the plane’s computer looked up the ship against a classified database stateside. The Office of Naval Intelligence, located outside Washington, DC, collected information on nearly everything that floated at any given time. The Eleutheria’s last known port was in Singapore, according to the computer, but that was six months ago. It must have been running black ever since. That was illegal, but far too common. It was possible it had been in Gwadar, but doubtful. Ships like this usually stopped in even more dubious ports of call.
“A negative. Not our target,” the supervisor said.
“Why do you say that?”
“This ship is carrying contraband for sure, but its heading and position indicates it’s coming from the Far East, having rounded the tip of India.”
“But it matches our target profile,” the operator said.
“So does every fourth freighter in the Indian Ocean. We can’t call in SEAL Team 6 every time we see a ship of this class.”
The operator stared at the screen, not fully convinced.
“Besides, would you transport nukes in that rusty scupper?”
The operator shook his head.
“It’s not our ship. Log it and move on,” the supervisor said. It’s a smuggler, he thought. Just not our smuggler. At least now it was in the navy’s database.