Cabrillo adjusted the glasses and looked to where Linc indicated. He thumbed the focus wheel until the image became clear. He saw a ship’s wake where it was widening and flattening into the choppy sea. He followed its trail, but it vanished before he saw the ship making it. Confused, he scanned again. The wake was a white-foaming wedge on the ocean’s surface culminating in absolutely nothing at all and yet its leading edge continued to move away from them.

The impossibility of what he was witnessing dulled his cognitive reasoning, and he continued to stare without comprehension or the ability to accept the reality of it.

A hundred feet in front of the flattened apex of the wake, occasional puffs of white water appeared, like the bow of a ship cutting through the swells, but between these two points was nothing but open water.

Juan blinked and looked harder. No, not open water, a distortion of what open water looks like, a facsimile of nature, not nature itself. Then the reality hit.

“Science fiction. Those two aren’t going to let me hear the end of it.”

“You want me to get closer?” Adams asked.

“No. Keep true. Maybe they don’t know we’ve spotted them.” Juan handed the binoculars back to Linc and keyed on his radio. “Max, you there?”

“Standing by.”

“Go to encrypt beta,” Juan ordered, and Gomez switched to the chopper’s secondary encrypted channel. “You still with me?”

There was a second delay in the rest of their conversation because the computers needed the extra time to decrypt the secure comm line. “Still here.”

“I don’t know how Kenin capsized the Emir’s yacht, but I know how he got close enough to activate the weapon. We’ve got eyeballs on a ship’s wake, only there isn’t a ship making it.”

“Come again.”

“They have some sort of optical camouflage. The ship he used to target the Sakir is, well, it’s invisible.”

“You sure this isn’t a delayed symptom of the bends?”

“Linc sees it, or doesn’t see it, too.”

“Juan,” Lincoln said urgently, thrusting the binoculars back at him. “Check it out now. They must think they’ve cleared the danger zone.”

Juan found the wake again and again followed it to its source. This time, the ship was there, and what a craft it was. It reminded him of the U.S. Navy’s pyramidal Sea Shadow, an experimental stealth ship with a design based loosely on the F-117 Nighthawk. This boat was painted a muted gray that perfectly matched the surrounding seas, and it had sloped, faceted sides that met at a peak about thirty feet above the waves. Unlike the Sea Shadow, it wasn’t a catamaran but a monohull, with a flat transom and a long overhanging deck above her bow. Function rather than aesthetics had gone into her design, making her the ugliest vessel Juan had ever seen.