Hali agreed. He was still working on his computer. “I’ve got one even odder. There was a target at this exact same location the last time we swept this grid.”

George Adams happened to be on duty, piloting the model airplane they used as an aerial surveillance platform. He said, “Don’t need to ask me even once. It’ll take me a bit, though. I’ve got a bird already in the air, but she’s fifty miles the other side of us.”

Juan kicked into overdrive. This wasn’t the time to wait around. There was something off here, and Cabrillo needed answers. “Tell you what, Gomez. Let that one ditch and send up another.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take the loss out of my share.”

Adams did as ordered, kamikazeing the one UAV and launching another off the deck. It still took the better part of thirty minutes for the four-foot plane to approach the target. Juan hadn’t altered the Oregon’s search pattern, but he had slowed its speed so as to not break radar contact. Twenty miles out, Gomez dropped the drone from a comfortable altitude of five hundred feet to a wave-skimming twenty feet.

This was where his instincts and experience as a pilot paid off. They needed to remain below the target’s radar coverage, lost in the acoustical backscatter of heaving waves. There was no finer pilot aboard than Adams, so no one on the mystery ship knew they were being stalked. The drone’s camera showed the dark ocean seemingly inches below the little plane’s landing gear, while ahead the setting sun was a pale blaze of yellow against the horizon.

“There!” Juan called when he spotted a boxy silhouette sitting on the line dividing sky from sea.

Adams, with his superior eyesight, had already seen it and had slightly altered the UAV’s course to intercept.

It took just a few more minutes for expectation to turn into disappointment. This wasn’t the stealth ship. This ship was nearly nine hundred feet long and shaped like a box. Only at her flared bows near the waterline was there any attempt at streamlining the vessel. Forward was a little pillbox of a bridge to break up the monotony of her flat upper deck, while aft her twin funnels were blunt fins clustered on her starboard aft quarter. There was a large, garage-style door amidships, and another on her flat transom. The whole vessel was painted a dull green.

Juan recognized the class of ship immediately. She was a car carrier, a floating, multilevel parking garage that could transport a month’s worth of automobiles from a factory and ship them anywhere in the world. They were common in these waters, as both China and Japan were major car exporters. Why she was going so slowly was something of a mystery, but not today.