The printer spit out another page, and the chief petty officer snatched it. He squinted to read the papers in the dim light of the frigate’s intelligence center, a few compartments down from the Command Information Center.
Shit, he thought. It made no sense. Since CTF-151 had been retasked from hunting pirates around Somalia to chasing a mystery ship off Yemen, the faxes grew increasingly frantic. But this fax was something else altogether.
He was the ship’s intelligence noncommissioned officer, and he had never seen a more classified document. Its level of secrecy used code words he had never heard of, and it came right from the top. “Anything the matter?” asked the junior sailor next to him.
“No,” the chief lied. He sealed the message in an envelope and stamped it TOP SECRET: CAPTAIN’S EYES ONLY.
Be calm, he thought, as he stood up to leave.
“Going to the head,” he told the others as he exited the hatch. He scampered along the passageway of the Oliver Hazard Perry–class frigate, squeezing by a sailor mopping and muttering to himself as he approached the bridge.
“Is the captain here?”
“Negative,” replied the officer of the deck. “Try the wardroom.”
The chief trundled back down the passageway, past the mad mopper, down the ladderwell, and finally to the officer’s wardroom. The admiral was sitting with a few of his top commanders.
The chief knocked on the bulkhead. “Sir, permission to interrupt.”
“Come in, Chief,” the admiral said in a genial tone.
“Sir, this just came in,” the chief said, holding out the envelope.
“You could have called for me.”
“No sir. You will understand once you read it.”
Admiral Balloch took the envelope and nodded to the other officers, who cleared out. He opened and removed the orders, head bobbing as he read. He didn’t say anything.
“Do you wish to respond, sir?”
The admiral shook his head, stood up, and stretched. Orders are orders, Balloch thought. “Do we have the freighter’s last known position and heading?”
“Yes sir. We’ve plotted an intercept course and should be there in a few hours.”
“Plot a new course for the coordinates in this envelope. Tell no one where the coordinates come from, admiral’s orders.”
“Yes sir.”
“And Chief, no one but us knows what’s in this envelope. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir.”
It was good luck they were in my quadrant, the admiral thought. Staring out at a gray and angry sea, he hoped that, maybe, the weather would bring him good luck, too.