“Based largely on a journal written two hundred years before Christ,” Michaels said. “It describes their locations and geographical features very accurately, so they didn’t just pull their claim out of thin air.”

“Maybe,” Morse said. “But somebody else can worry about it. Our problem involves the Stalwart. I think it was out there spying for the CIA.”

“Hold it,” Harris asked. “You telling me the pres wouldn’t have known about that?”

Morse looked at him.

“Not if it’s black-boxed as an unacknowledged special access program and someone conveniently forgot to tell her. It happens, Leo. I know the funny smell. Some people in the Company breathe it every day, and it’s one reason I’m no longer with them.” She paused. “Those four CIA advisers—” she made air quotes “—are the giveaways. When you sent me the info about them, it put that cruise in a whole different light. Stalwart was conducting espionage ops. And I’m guessing the Chinese found out and did something about it.”

“You mean hijacked it,” Harris said. “You think they outright grabbed a United States vessel and crew as hostages.”

“Or worse.”

He looked at her. “We need to find out what the ship was doing out there.”

“Yes.”

“And get into Seven Winds’s computer system. Find out who came aboard at that port call.”

“Yes.”

Harris shook his head. “If you’re right, I’m thinking this is gonna be bad.”

“As bad as it gets.”

“Then, we damn well better hope you’re wrong.”

Morse sat looking at him and Michaels for a long moment.

“We’d better,” she said, nodding. “Because it looks like a recipe for war if I’ve ever seen one.”

The North Pacific

It was four in the morning over the Pacific Ocean five hundred miles northwest of Oahu, where the merchant ship Xingyun Liwu, or Lucky Gift, plodded toward Honolulu Harbor in the reddish predawn twilight.

Sailing under Chinese flag, the vessel measured seven hundred feet in length and almost two hundred feet from port to starboard at its widest point, roughly the dimensions of two football fields. Double-bottomed with a bulbous bow, it carried thirty thousand tons of large-diameter, hot-rolled steel pipes for delivery to American buyers. The seamless corrosion-resistant pipes had been manufactured in Cangzhou, China, and shipped in climate-controlled intramodal containers that could be easily transferred to trucks, rail trains or even cargo planes and then shuttled to their endpoints all across the mainland.

At about four thirty, the crankshaft that drove the Xingyun Liwu’s gargantuan two-stroke diesels hissed and shuddered to a halt. The ship was just north of where the submerged Hawaiian Ridge and a line of undersea rock formations called the Necker Ridge crossed the Tropic of Cancer, their outcrops infamous among seamen for creating treacherous passage. But here the bottom was flat and silty and the calm blue surface clear of natural obstructions.