The captain vaulted out of his chair and said curtly, “I’ll try to raise District on e-mail.”

“Aye aye, sir.” She waited for the door to close behind him. “Captain’s below.” She pretended not to hear when someone gave a low whistle.

She walked over to stand behind Tommy at the radar. “Where are they, Tommy?” Tommy pointed. Sara looked up to the horizon. They were headed south by southwest, and they and the blips on the screen were now both well and truly inside the Doughnut Hole.

The Doughnut Hole was a roughly triangular area in the center of the Bering Sea, far enough away from the United States and Russian coastlines to form a no-man’s-ocean outside of any nation’s jurisdiction. It had been so overfished during the last century that it was now closed by international treaty to allow the native marine species, especially pollock, to repopulate. What the fishing vessel the Sojourner Truth was now in pursuit of thought they could pull out of the Doughnut Hole was a question only they could answer. Sara had a feeling that Captain Lowe, who had been tried pretty far on this patrol, was determined to have an answer.

An hour later one of the lookouts posted above called down a sighting. Out came the binoculars.

Sara braced her legs against the swell and peered forward. The rise and fall of the waves intermittently obscured the stern, but not for so long they couldn’t make out the name.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Mark Edelen said.

“No gear in the water, though, ma’am,” Tommy said, eyes glued to binoculars.

“I’ll be with the captain, Chief,” Sara said.

The door to the captain’s cabin was closed. Sara rapped on it hard enough to make her knuckles sting. “It’s the XO, Captain.”

“Enter.” She opened the door and she stepped inside. “Close it, XO.”

She closed the door without comment. The captain was sitting at his desk, in front of his computer. He didn’t look happy, and Sara didn’t imagine that what she was about to tell him would make him any happier. “Captain-”

He jerked a thumb at the monitor. “Make ready to go to flight quarters, XO.”

“-the fishing vessel has been- What?”

“Go to flight quarters,” he said. “Make ready to bring our helo back on board.”

“Helo? I thought our helo was in St. Paul.”

“So did I.”

“Captain,” Sara said, and found herself momentarily and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. She tried again. “Captain, St. Paul is over three hundred nautical miles from here. They can’t make it that far on their fuel tanks.”

“Not without a good southeasterly,” he agreed. “They refueled midway.”

She thought quickly, and remembered the cutter they had passed the day before going in the opposite direction. “The Alex Haley?”

He nodded.

“They did, what, a hot refueling?”

“They did an in-flight refueling,” the captain said, “a little over the midway point.”

Sara wondered for how much longer Lieutenants Sams and Laird were going to be members in good standing of the United States Coast Guard. “Sir, far be it from me to leap to the defense of an aviator, but this just doesn’t sound like something either Lieutenant Sams or Lieutenant Laird would do. They’re both pretty cautious.”

“Not all that cautious, it would seem,” the captain said with dangerous calm.

“They’re going to be dragging by the time they get here,” Sara said, appalled at the notion of bringing the helo back on board with exhausted aviators at the controls.

“Yes,” the captain said, but he didn’t fool Sara. He was almost vibrating with worry. And rage.

All she could think to say was “Why?”

“Apparently they’ve got a VIP on board.”

She gave up trying to maintain any semblance of cool and said, “Who absolutely positively has to get here overnight.”

“That’s right.”

“Who? And for god’s sake, why?”

“They won’t say. They say the VIP will explain upon arrival.”

Sara tried to think of a reason so important to put a helo on the nose of forty-five-knot winds and fly three hundred miles, and failed. “Are they going to make it?”

“They’ve got something of a tailwind, so I’m told. That hurricane of NOAA’s is giving them a little push in our direction.”

“I just bet it is,” Sara said.

“And then the e-mail went out again before I could ask District what the-what they’re up to,” Captain Lowe said, gesturing toward the computer. “But not before I got us a letter of no objection.”

By which was meant, District was leaving the method of pursuit and interdiction of the fishing vessel they’d caught in the Doughnut Hole up to the discretion of the captain of the Sojourner Truth.

She opened her mouth and he waved her to silence. “I know, XO, we say we don’t shoot anybody over fish. But I’m tired of these guys stepping all over us. I want to throw a little scare into them. Let’s send them home with a story to tell about how crossing the line into U.S. territory is, to paraphrase that known felon, Martha Stewart, not a good thing.”

“You can shoot at these guys with my great good will, Captain,” she said cordially. “You can sink them and I might be so upset I’d have to make myself another cappuccino.”

He looked taken aback. “I beg your pardon, XO?”

She met his eyes. “It’s the Agafia, sir.”

JANUARY

ON BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

CAPTAIN LOWE RETURNED TO the bridge, Sara on his heels. “Flight quarters,” he said. Everyone stared.

“Flight quarters,” he repeated.

“We’re bringing our helo back on board,” Sara said when nobody moved.

Everyone stopped staring at the captain and started staring at her.

“Flight quarters,” she said patiently.

“But, XO, the Agafia,” Ops said. He even pointed at the outline of the ship nearing a threateningly black horizon that also seemed to be moving, only toward them instead of away. “We’re half a mile off and they’re still way inside the exclusion zone.”

“Flight quarters, Ops,” the captain said in a deceptively gentle voice. He even smiled.

“Aye aye, sir,” Ops said.

Hats were whipped off smartly and the news was piped to the crew. Shortly thereafter phones began to ring as various members of the deck crew called the bridge to see if they were serious. Assured that the bridge was, they began to assemble aft, not without a lot of nonverbal communication that indicated a certain lack of faith in the sanity of the entire command structure of the U.S. Coast Guard. Shortly thereafter the hangar was retracted, and as if that was the signal, the radio sparked into life, signaling the approach of the helo.

“Tallyho!” Mark Edelen said, pointing, and they all looked east to see a bright orange speck against the now black clouds boiling up out of the south.

“Put our nose on the seagull’s ass, Chief,” Sara said.

“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said. “Helm, zero-seven-zero, all ahead full.”

“Zero-seven-zero, all ahead, aye, Chief.”

“XO,” the captain said.

“Sir?”

“Get aft. I want that VIP standing in my cabin talking fast thirty seconds after they hit the deck.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said.

She hit the portside hatch at not quite a run, registering by the wind on her cheek that the temperature had risen a couple of degrees since she’d last taken the air on deck, and slid down the ladder with her elbows on the railings.

“Hey, XO, you’re out on deck without your float coat,” said Seaman Rosenberg as she trotted past. She wanted to flip him off but it didn’t suit either her rank or his.

She hit the main deck and fetched up behind a cowling. The helo was running up on the stern about a hundred feet up. They throttled it way back and approached the hangar deck on tiptoe, nose down, tail up. The closer they got, the smaller the deck looked to Sara. The swell was increasing in height, pushed up by the approaching storm, and the stern bobbed and weaved like Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.