THE OREGON PATROLLED the seaway leading to the islands like a restless bear in a cage. Back and forth she swept, radar set to maximum, her crew keyed up on caffeine and adrenaline. The weather was cooperative, allowing them to send up drone planes to enlarge their search area. Juan even convinced Langston Overholt to allow them access to satellite data, though, in truth, they didn’t have the expertise it took to interpret the high-res pictures with any degree of accuracy. For that, everyone was relying on the experts at the National Reconnaissance Office, a group even more secretive than the NSA.

For his part, Cabrillo sat in the center of the op center, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He rode the gentle swells that rocked the ship with the ease of a cowboy on a long cattle drive, his body tuned to his environment so that the minor adjustments to posture came without conscious thought. The gimbled cup holder built into his chair was rarely empty, though Maurice secretly switched him to decaf after the third cup. The watch would rotate at regular intervals and yet the Chairman remained a fixture in the room, silently brooding while his eyes darted from display screen to display screen. He checked the radar repeater over the shoulder of the watch stander and the feed from the drones over the shoulder of the remote pilot. And far from being distracted, the crew took comfort in Cabrillo’s steadying attention. As long as he was there, things would be all right.

He caught sleep when he could, usually when the ship was at the far end of her patrol box and thus less likely to stumble on the stealth ship. He didn’t bother with his bed but rather fell onto the sofa in his office and pulled up a woolen lap robe that had been rescued off the Normandie after she burned in New York Harbor in 1942. He would rouse himself after a couple of hours and use the ritual of shaving to convince his exhausted body he had received enough sleep. Then it was back to the op center, where he would prowl tirelessly just as his ship did.

Cabrillo had just returned from a two-hour catnap when something on radar caught his eye. It was a blip. That was little surprise. Though war clouds gathered, these were busy shipping lanes and would remain so up until the shooting started. Hali Kasim was on watch as both communications officer and radar operator.

“Hali, that target to our north, what’s the range?”

“Fifty miles, give or take.”

“How long has it been on our scope?”

Kasim typed into his keyboard for a minute. “Looks like twenty minutes.”

Cabrillo did some calculating in his head, using the radar’s range and the Oregon’s speed and heading. “She’s doing less than three knots. Does that strike you as odd?”