Nillson checked the gyrocompass. No doubt about it. The ship was yawing slightly. He stood close to the helmsman’s shoulder. “Keep a tight line, Hansen,” he said with gentle humor. “This isn’t a warship, you know.”

Hansen’s head swiveled on the muscular neck. The reflected glow from the compass imparted an. animal glitter to his eyes and accentuated the deepness of the scar. Heat seemed to radiate from his glare. Sensing. a quiet aggressiveness, Nillson almost. stepped backward in reflex. He stubbornly held his ground, though, and gestured at the course box numerals.

The helmsman stared at him without expression for a few seconds, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

Nillson made sure the course was steady, mumbled his approval, then escaped into the chartroom. .

Hansen gave him the creeps, he thought, shivering as he took another radio fix to see the effect of the drift. Something didn’t make sense. Even with the twodegree correction to the south, the Stockholm was north of the course by three miles.

He went back into the wheelhouse, and without looking at Hansen he ordered, “Two degrees to the right.”

Hansen eased the wheel to ninetyone degrees.

Nillson changed the course box numbers and stayed by the compass until he was satisfied Hansen had brought the ship onto the new tack. Then he bent over the radar, the yellow glow from the scope giving his dark skin a jaundiced tinge. The sweep hand illuminated a blip off to the left side of the screen, about twelve miles away. Nillson raised an eyebrow.

The Stockholm had company.

Unknown to Nillson, the Stockholm’s hull and superstructure were being washed by unseen electronic waves that rippled back to the revolving radar antenna high atop the bridge of a ship speeding toward it from the opposite direction. Minutes earlier, inside the spacious bridge of the Italian Line passenger ship Andrea Doria, the officer manning the radar scope called out to a stocky man wearing a navy beret and a uniform of evening blue. .

“Captain, I see a ship, seventeen miles, four degrees to starboard.

The radar had been monitored constantly at twentymile range since three o’clock, when Superior Captain Piero Calamai walked onto the bridge wing and saw gray wisps hovering over the western sea like the souls of drowned men.

Immediately the captain had ordered the ship rigged for running in the fog. The 572 man crew had been on full alert. The foghorn was blowing automatically at hundredsecond intervals.

The crow’s nest lookout was reassigned to the bow where he’d have a clearer, view. The engineroom crew was put on standby, primed to react instantly in an emergency The doors between the ship’s eleven watertight compartments were sealed.