Crowe looked down into the basin. Two people in neoprene wetsuits were standing at the edge of the dolphin pool; a slim red-headed woman and an athletically built giant with a long dark mane. She watched as a dolphin swam towards them and poked its head above the water, allowing the giant to stroke its smooth forehead.

'Who's that?' asked Crowe.

'They're in charge of the dolphin fleet,' said Anawak. 'Alicia Delaware and…' he hesitated '. . . Greywolf.'

'Greywolf?'

'Yes, or Jack if you prefer. He answers to both.'

'What do the dolphins do?'

'They're living cameras. They take video footage for us while they're swimming around out there. But we mainly use them for surveillance. Dolphin sonar detects other living creatures long before our systems pick them up. Jack used to work with some of this fleet when he was in the navy. Their vocabulary is pretty big. They use different kinds of whistles – one for orcas, another for grey whales, a third for humpbacks and so on. They can recognise pretty much every decent-sized creature, provided they've been taught the signal, and they can even point out shoals. Anything they don't recognise, they classify as unknown.'

'Impressive,' said Crowe. 'And that good-looking man down there can really speak their language?'

Anawak nodded. 'Better than he speaks ours, I sometimes think.'

THE MEETING TOOK place in the Flag Command Center opposite the LFOC. Crowe already knew most of those present, having met them in the flesh or via video link-up. Now she was introduced to Murray Shankar, SOSUS's lead acoustician, and Karen Weaver, as well as the first officer, Floyd Anderson, and the skipper, Craig C. Buchanan, a wiry, white-haired man who seemed to have been born for a career in the navy. They all shook hands and Crowe took an instant dislike to Anderson, with his thick neck and small dark eyes. She was introduced lastly to a corpulent man, who arrived a few minutes late, sweating profusely. He was dressed in a baseball cap and sneakers. A bright yellow T-shirt bearing the words 'Kiss me, I'm a Prince,' stretched over his expansive belly. 'Jack Vanderbilt,' he introduced himself 'You're not what I expected of E.T.'s mom.'

'Daughter would have been more flattering,' Crowe said drily.

'Hey, would you be dishing out compliments if you looked like me?' Vanderbilt chortled. 'Incredible, isn't it, Dr Crowe? After all those decades pointlessly beaming your hopes and expectations into space, you might even get an answer.'

They all took their seats. General Judith Li addressed the room briefly, summarising the state of play. They knew in advance what was coming. The US had tabled a leadership motion to the UN Security Council, which, in a special meeting held behind closed doors, had voted unanimously in favour of the proposal. America now had the mandate to co-ordinate the logistical and technological battle against humanity's unknown enemy. Japanese and European delegates had reached the same conclusion as the Chateau delegates: mankind wasn't attacking itself; the threat was coming from an alien intelligence.

'Well, I'm pleased to say that we'll soon have a drug that will immunise humans against the killer algae's toxins. The trouble is, the side-effects are pretty nasty, and the drug won't work against mutations of the pathogens, which is what we've been finding in the latest batch of crabs. By now, most of the world's worst-hit regions no longer have any functioning infrastructure. The American government was happy to assume responsibility for the international war effort, but we've had to accept that we're no longer in a position to safeguard our shores. There's also the ongoing problem of the worms. Colonies are continuing to collect along the continental slopes and – more worryingly – on the slopes of volcanic seamounts like La Palma where Dr Frost and Dr Bohrmann are setting up a deep-sea vacuum-cleaner to clear the infestation. In other parts of the world we're still not making any progress with the whales – sonar offensives are futile when you're dealing with mammals whose instincts have been hijacked by an alien intelligence. But even supposing we could control the whales, we still wouldn't be able to jump-start the Gulf Stream or prevent the build-up of methane. Tackling the symptoms doesn't solve anything and we haven't been able to advance to the cause. We're not gleaning any information about what's going on down there, and our underwater cables are being disconnected one by one. The devastating truth about this war is that we're blind and deaf. Let me put it more bluntly. We've lost.' Li paused. 'Who are we supposed to attack? La Palma's going to slide into the ocean and America, Africa and Europe will be swamped by mega-waves. What's the point of fighting back? The fact is, we're not going to make any progress until we know whom or what we're up against – and right now we don't have a clue. So the purpose of this mission isn't to launch an offensive but to open negotiations. We want to make contact with these alien beings and persuade them to stop terrorising mankind. In my experience, it's always possible to negotiate with the opposition, and there's an excellent chance that we'll find our enemy right here – in the Greenland Sea.' She smiled. 'We're hoping to achieve a peaceful solution. And, to that end, we're pleased to welcome the final member of our team, Dr Samantha Crowe.'

Crowe rested her elbows on the table. 'I appreciate the warm welcome.' She glanced at Vanderbilt. 'Some of you may know that SETI's efforts haven't met with particular success. Given the sheer size of the known universe – at present estimated at over ten billion light years – almost anything seems possible, except perhaps the chance of looking in the right direction when an alien signal happens to be coming our way. So, compared with SETI's mission, our current predicament seems positively promising. First, we can be reasonably confident that the aliens exist; and second, we know roughly where they live – somewhere in the ocean and, very possibly, in this particular sea. But even if they turned out to live at the opposite pole, we'd still have narrowed it down. They can't leave the oceans, and a strong sound wave sent from the Arctic can still be heard on the other side of Africa, which gives us good grounds for hope. But there's an even more decisive factor. We're already in contact. We've been sending messages into their habitat for decades. Regrettably, those messages have brought with them destruction, so the yrr haven't bothered with ambassadors or diplomacy: they've launched straight into war. From our point of view, that's tiresome, but for the moment we should set aside our negative feelings and consider the onslaught as a kind of opportunity.'

'An opportunity?' echoed Peak.

'Yes, we have to see it for what it is – a message from an alien life-form that can help us discover how it thinks.' She placed her hand over a stack of plastic files. I've outlined the basis of our approach in these packs. But if any of you thinks this is going to be easy, I'm going to have to disillusion you. No doubt you'll have been wrestling with the question as to what kind of creature could be sending us the seven plagues. I guess you're familiar with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Alien, Independence Day, The Abyss, Contact and so on, and you'll probably be expecting either monsters or saints. Take the ending of Close Encounters. A superior intelligence descends from space to lead the worthy to a better, brighter future. For lots of people, that's a comforting thought, but doesn't it remind you of something? Exactly! There's a strong religious current beneath the surface of these movies. To some extent, the same could be said about SETI. The trouble is, it blinds us to how radically different an alien intelligence is likely to be.'