for moment. What can I safely say to who? "No, that will not be necessary."
"As you like. The offer stands." Smith's voice mellowed. "So tell me, Major, hearts, bridge, or poker-which is your game?"
Chapter Sixteen
Off Reykjavik, Iceland
In another ocean, half a world away, a second ship sailed.
The captain of the deep-ocean trawler Siffsdottar had thought that his ship's long run of bad luck had at last come to an end. Now he wasn't so sure.
The North Atlantic fisheries had been a depressed industry for a long time, and cheeseparing and procrastination on the part of the trawler's owners had not made matters any easier. Finally, as it inevitably must, the neglected maintenance had caught up with them. Siffsdottar had spent most of last season held up in the yards with a protracted and expensive series of engine room casualties. The owners, as owners inevitably do, found it easier to blame the ship rather than themselves.
Siffsdottar had been facing the breakers' yard, and her captain and crew the beach when, like a miracle, a last-minute reprieve had appeared: a month-long charter by a film company for enough money to pay off the repairs and poor season both. Only they must sail immediately to meet a production deadline.
For once the owners and crew were in accord. They were happy to oblige.
But when the "filmmakers" had come aboard they had proved to be a gang of twenty extremely tough-looking men, even by the standards of the hard-bitten trawler crew. There had also been a decided lack of camera equipment, just a good deal of electronics and radio gear.
And the guns. Those hadn't made an appearance until after they had gotten under way. Two of the "filmmakers" lounged at the rear of the darkened wheelhouse now, each of them with an automatic pistol thrust openly in his belt.
They offered no explanation, and the trawlermen decided it prudent not to ask for one.
The leader of the filmmakers, a tall, burly red-bearded man who relayed his orders in strangely accented English, had laid in a course to the west-northwest, their destination being a set of nameless GPS coordinates deep within Hudson Bay. He had also instructed that the trawler's radio be disabled. His people would handle all communications for the voyage, "for business reasons."
Siffsdottar's captain now strongly suspected that his owners had made yet another bad business decision. But as the flashing point light at Iceland's westernmost land's end drifted past to starboard, he also suspected that there was little he could now do about it. Instead he would fall back on an ancient Icelandic survival mechanism: strict, stolid neutrality and a hope for the best. It had seen Iceland through a number of the world's wars essentially untouched. Perhaps it would suffice here.
Belowdecks, the Command Section had taken over the main salon as the operations center. Seated at the big mess table, Anton Kretek splashed three fingers of Aquavit into a squat glass. Taking a slurping gulp, he grimaced. This Icelandic liquor was muck, but it was the muck that was available.
"Do you have the reports from Canada Section yet?" he demanded irritably.
"Downloading now, Mr. Kretek," the chief communications officer replied from his laptop workstation. "It will take a moment to decrypt."
The Internet had proven a boon to the international businessman and the international criminal alike, providing instant, secure communications from point to point anywhere on the planet. A dinner-plate-sized sat phone dish, deployed in the trawler's upper works, linked them into the global telecommunications net, and the finest in commercial encryption programs sealed their Internet messaging away from prying eyes.
A portable laser printer hissed and spat out a series of hard-copy sheets. Pushing his chair back from the communications desk, the communicator passed the hard copy over his shoulder to the waiting Kretek.
Taking a small torpedo-shaped Danish cigarillo from the ashtray, the arms merchant puffed and read, the strong tobacco smoke blending with the salon's background smell of diesel and fish oil.
Kretek frowned. There was good news and bad in the dispatches. The attempts to disrupt the joint Russian-American investigation had failed. Kretek hadn't had high hopes for the effort in the first place. The group's point man in Alaska had been forced to hire and equip whatever was available at short notice, in this case, local Russian mafia street trash.
The ad hoc interceptor dispatched to kill the investigators' helicopter had failed to return. As there had been no news reports of an attack on the government expedition, or of a plane lost, it