“I know, XO.”

“So once the boarding team is on board, you haul ass for Cape Navarin.”

He gave a curt nod.

“Good. Go.”

The aviators left.

“Chief,” Sara said to Edelen, “I want you on the conn.”

“All due respect, XO, I want you on the conn.”

She gave a half laugh. “Go on up to the bridge. I’m right behind you.”

“Where’s Cape Navarin?” Hugh said.

“About a hundred miles northwest of where we are now. It’s the nearest land.”

He thought about it. “In Russia.”

“Yes.”

“That going to be a problem?”

“The fact that they’ll be out of fuel before they get there is a bigger one.”

BACK OH THE BRIDGE she looked at the radar screen. The Agafia was still there, still not making enough speed to pull out of range, but enough to keep her tantalizingly out of reach. It was almost as if she were playing tag with them, which made no sense to Sara. Perhaps all terrorists were by definition mad.

The Sunrise Warrior was lagging about midway between the other two ships. Sara looked up and out the new Plexiglas windows. She thought she could make out lights off their port bow. She noticed something else, too. “Are we making ice?” she said.

“We are, XO.”

Sara swore, a round and mighty oath. “Assemble a crew to chip ice, Chief,” she said, snapping out the words.

“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said, moving with alacrity.

Sara told Tommy, “I need to be able to talk to the Sunrise Warrior.”

“The VHF is down, XO, like almost everything else. Whatever they hit us with took out all our communications, except for handhelds.”

“I know. How’s your Morse, Tommy?”

“My Morse?” The bosun’s mate looked dubious. “It’s okay, XO. It’s not great, but I can make myself understood.”

“Good.” To the chief, finishing up his pipe for the ice-chipping team, Sara said, “Get me in close enough for them to see our signal.” He hung up the mike. “Aye aye, XO.”

“IS THAT MORSE CODE?” Vivienne said.

“It is, Vivienne, now hush up so I can read it.”

They all waited with varying degrees of impatience. No one had been very happy with pursuing the processor into the storm. For one thing, it made for horrible photography, and Greenpeace was all about film at eleven.

Doyle lowered the binoculars.

“Well?” Vivienne said. “What’d they say?”

“They said those explosions we heard was the Agafia firing on them,” Doyle said.

There were exclamations of disbelief all around.

“Come on, Doyle,” Vivienne said. “A fishing vessel fired on a Coast Guard cutter?”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Doyle said. “And that’s not all they’re saying, Vivienne. They want a favor.”

Vivienne stared at him. “The U.S. Coast Guard wants a favor from Greenpeace?”

“Not exactly,” Doyle said. “They want a favor from you.”

THE FLIGHT CREW HAD finished their second heavy weather traverse in three days on the hangar deck, although this one had been a lot dicier due to the steadily increasing layer of ice that was forming on every surface above water. A crew had already been detailed to the bow with clubs, where the ice was accumulating faster than they could beat it off.

Sams called the bridge. “We’re good to go, XO.”

Sara was standing next to Seaman Royce Lee Cornell, North Carolina-born, a year out of boot camp and barely qualified on the helm.

She could hardly see his black face in the dim light of the bridge. “Hold her steady, Seaman.”

“Holding her steady, aye, XO.” Just turned twenty, Seaman Cornell had the maturity of a petty officer with twenty years in. Mark Edelen had recommended he replace Razo, and it spoke well for Cornell that he was on the bridge before he’d been called to duty.

Sara looked at the indicators hanging from the overhead. Bubbles of air in twin curving plastic tubes full of water, the bubbles rolled back and forth and pitched backward and forward with the motion of the ship, indicating degrees of pitch and roll with a gauge printed beneath. As Sara watched, the roll went to seven, and the pitch went to nine. She swore under her breath. “Let her fall off the wind a little, Seaman.”

“Aye aye, XO,” Cornell said. His hands moved on the small brass wheel. A minute passed, two, and then the Sojourner Truth hit a patch of what felt like relative calm.

“Launch,” Sara said.

On the monitor they saw the rotors increase to a blur and the body of the helo begin to lift. Sara made it to the port wing of the bridge in time to see them appear, and then Sams really goosed it. The helo shot past the bridge in a bright orange blur fifty feet off the deck.

Sara stared after them, until recalled to where she was by the wind and the cold and the snow and the fog and the ice and, oh, the hell with it. She went back inside.

“Will she do it, Sara?” Hugh said.

“Who? Oh. The Sunrise Warrior‘? Yes.”

He was silent. “What?” she said.

“I guess what I meant was, will the rest of them let, what’s her name, Kincaid, do it?”

“Yes,” Sara said firmly, “they will.” She couldn’t stand still. She paced back and forth in front of the controls console and around it several times, not an easy thing to do on a packed bridge in twenty-foot seas, until Chief Edelen said, in a very respectful voice, “Why don’t you have a seat, XO?”

She stared at him. He gestured at the captain’s chair. The back was ripped up but someone had cleaned off the blood and guts and bone.

“No,” she said, a little more strongly than she ought to have. Hugh, standing next to Tommy over the radar screen, looked up. She recovered, and managed a smile. “Thank you, Chief. But no.”

After that, she stood in front of one of the intact forward windows, staring through the fug on the other side of it, praying for the sun to rise.

HARRY SAMS HAD SEVENTEEN years on helos, first with the U.S. Navy and then with the U.S. Coast Guard. He was fond of quoting that old aviation aphorism, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” He didn’t hold with that other old aviation aphorism, “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” either. He not only wanted to bring home his people alive and well, he wanted his craft intact and ready to fly again.

Which was why he was wondering, with the very little portion of his brain allowed to do anything so entirely frivolous, why it was that he was speeding twenty-five feet above twenty-foot swells at a hundred fifty-seven knots with a cargo hold full of Coasties armed to the teeth toward a blip on a radar screen that had already proved itself to be rather better armed than the average Bering Sea catcher-processor.

And then the Agafias lights loomed up out of the driving snow and fog, and there was no time to think of anything but the job at hand.

The processor was pitching and rolling and yawing worse than the Sojourner Truth, which meant it would be noisy on board with the creak and groan of the ship, the slipping and sliding and rolling of everything not lashed down, and the whip and slap of the ocean.

“Target in sight,” he said into the mike, and heard Ryan reply, “Target in sight, aye.” Next to him Laird moved like an automaton, hands in constant motion, senses reaching out to listen to the bird, to what she was saying, how she was handling a tailwind of forty-five knots and gusts of over fifty.

“I’m not making any test runs,” Sams said. “We don’t have enough fuel for that. One shot is all we get. Everybody ready?”

“Ready, Lieutenant,” Ryan said.

“Ready, Lieutenant,” Airman Cho said.