to put in for a while. See if we can find somewhere for Ari to connect.”
Mendonza turned the wheel slightly to the right, and immediately the boat’s sharp nose swung around by about fifteen degrees. Favor and Mendonza stood together in the cockpit, watching the nose tick up and down as the hull shot through the chop.
After a few minutes, Mendonza said, “Ray, it’s almost crunch time. What’re we going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Favor said. “Let’s see if we can get those aerial photos. That’ll give us an idea.”
“And without the pics? We don’t know fuck-all about what’s on the island. And it’s not like we can do a quiet little recon, cruise around it a few times to check it out. This is a sweet boat, but it’s not going to sneak up on anybody.”
“We don’t back off now,” Favor said. “You decide this doesn’t work for you, that’s no problem. We can turn the boat around, I’ll take you back to Zambo. No questions asked, no hard feelings. Ari and Stick, same deal. But I’m going to do this.”
“You know I don’t back off,” Mendonza said. “I’m just asking.”
“Fair enough,” Favor said. “All else fails, I guess we wing it.”
Mendonza looked over and saw that Favor was grinning. Grinning.
Mendonza couldn’t help it—he found himself laughing out loud.
He said, “I guess it wouldn’t be the first time.”
About an hour later they spotted the tops of palm trees in the southwest horizon. Mendonza steered toward them. The trees seemed to rise up out of the ocean, finally revealing a ragged line of low coral islands, most no larger than an acre or two, connected by shallow white flats that lay just below the surface. Mendonza cut the engines back and idled down the string of islets until he reached the largest of the group.
He motored in close and anchored. The navigation display showed 14.2 miles to Devil’s Keep.
The sea was calmer here in the shallows. Stickney jumped down into waist-high water. Arielle handed him the laptop case, then she climbed over the side and down into the water. She followed Stickney through the surf as he held the case high above his head, up onto a beach of powdered-sugar sand, over to a spot away from the trees.
Favor and Mendonza watched from the boat as Arielle adjusted the angle of the antenna, tilting it slightly in the bed of sand.
One last adjustment, and her hand left the antenna. Connected.
She turned to the laptop. Her fingers worked at the keyboard.
She looked up and spoke a word to Stickney.
Stickney turned to the boat and showed a thumbs-up.
The images were online.
The file was large, almost half an hour’s download. Arielle sat beside the laptop the entire time, drinking from a bottle of water that Stickney carried out to her, watching the data counter flash on the screen. When it was done, she packed the machine in the case and gave it to Stickney, and he walked it back through the surf and handed it up to Mendonza.
Favor pulled Stickney aboard, and they both helped lift Arielle aboard. She dried her hands on Favor’s shirt and said, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
She took the laptop down into the cabin and opened it on one of the padded benches. The others followed her down, nearly filling the cramped space, and they gathered around the screen.
She opened the file in an image viewer.
The screen showed the island’s mottled half-moon shape, alone in a dark sea. At first it seemed identical to the Google Earth image that they had seen a few days earlier. But this image didn’t blur as Arielle began to enlarge it. Instead, new levels of detail emerged with each tap of the key. The island now filled the screen, yet the image was perfectly sharp. It showed a cluster of three buildings at the south end of the half-moon, and several other smaller structures scattered nearby, some half hidden among the trees. It showed a white outboard runabout tied up at a stubby dock at the curved eastern side of the island.
She pressed another key combination and moved her index finger on the touch pad. The island seemed to tilt and spin. It showed elevation. This image was a composite of more than a dozen high-resolution photos taken at various angles during the aircraft’s single pass. The process was called photogrammetry, extracting elevation data from 2-D photos to produce a near 3-D rendering. From directly above, the island appeared flat. But