What had brought everyone to battle stations was an announcement from Linda that a contact thirty miles from the Oregon had suddenly changed course and was heading for the ship. In the world of maritime operations, efficiency was the name of the game. A deviation of a degree or two could add hundreds of miles to a journey and thus cost more money. Unless there was an emergency, and with the radios quiet there wasn’t, the approaching vessel was up to something. And because they’d been warned what to expect, the crew of the Oregon knew what was coming.

Cabrillo took his command station in the middle of the room and surveyed the high-tech equipment around him. He believed when he’d designed the op center he’d been subconsciously influenced by the bridge on the old TV show Star Trek, right down to the large flat-screen monitor above Stone’s and Murph’s heads. But it wasn’t the weapons or the sensors or the computers that made the Oregon such a formidable opponent. It was the people in this room and those supporting them throughout the ship. That had been Juan’s greatest accomplishment, not the steel and electronics and guns, but assembling the finest crew he’d ever had the pleasure of knowing.

“Sit rep,” he called, turning on the computer screens near his centrally placed chair. The Kirk Seat, as Murph called it.

“Contact bearing oh-seventeen degrees and closing at twenty knots. Range is twenty-one miles.” Linda Ross answered without looking up from her screen. Like the others, she was dressed in black battle fatigues, a SIG Sauer pistol belted around her waist.

“What do you make of her?”

“Approximate size is seventy feet, and I can tell she has a single screw. She’d been running at four knots, as though she were trolling, before turning on us. It sounds like one of the fishing boats the pirates are using.”

“Anything on the radios, Hali?”

“Nothing from the target, Chairman. I’ve got regular chatter from a pair of bulk carriers well outside our grid.”

Juan dialed in the Oregon’s hangar bay. “This is Cabrillo. I want the pilot suited and the Robinson on five-minute alert for takeoff.” He then punched up the ship-wide channel. “This is the chairman speaking. We have a target closing in that looks like the real thing. It’s unlikely that the men aboard her are very high on the food chain, so we need prisoners not corpses if we’re to cut off the head of the organization. Don’t, I repeat: Do not take unnecessary risks, but if it’s a choice between a kill or a capture, try to take them alive. Good luck to all.”

His eyes swept the room once again. There was neither grim fatalism nor any expectant gleams in the faces around him. The next move belonged to the pirates, and the crew waited with cool efficiency.