"How long to produce clean copy?"

"Have to do it at this end.. say a couple of hours. That's what the S&T guys say, anyway. You know the real beauty of this?"

"Tell me."

"Airplanes are about the last place you can't bug. Our S&T guys have been playing with it for a long time. What made the breakthrough came from the Navy - very black project. Nobody knows we can do this. The computer codes are very complex. Lots of people are playing with it, but the actual breakthrough is on the theoretical side of the math. Came from a guy at NSA. I repeat, Sir John, nobody knows this is possible. Their security guys will be asleep. If they find the bug, they'll think it's an amateur attempt to do something. The receiver I put aboard won't actually recover anything usable to anyone but us -"

"And we'll have a guy recover that also, to back up the aerial transmissions."

"That's right. So we have double-redundancy - or triple, I never have figured what the right terminology is. Three separate channels for the information, one in the plane, and two being beamed out from it."

Ryan raised his coffee mug in salute. "Okay, now that the technical side looks possible, I want an operational feasibility evaluation."

"You got it, Jack. Goddamn! It's good to be a real spy again. With all due respect, watching out for your ass does not test my abilities all that much."

"I love you, too, John." Ryan laughed. It was his first in too long a time. If they could pull this one off, maybe that Elliot bitch would get off his back for once. Maybe the President would understand that field operations with real live field officers were still useful. It would be a small victory.

CHAPTER 25

Resolution

"So, what's the story on the things?" the Second Officer asked, looking down at the cargo deck.

"Supposed to be the roof beams for a temple. Small one, I guess," the First Officer noted. "How much more will these seas build ?"

"I wish we could slow down, Pete."

"I've talked to him twice about it. Captain says he has a schedule to meet."

"Tell that to the fuckin' ocean."

"Haven't tried that. Who do you call?"

The Second Officer, who had the watch, snorted. The First Officer - the ship's second in command - was on the bridge to keep an eye on things. That was actually the captain's job, but the ship's Master was asleep in his bed.

MV George McReady was pounding through thirty-foot waves, trying to maintain twenty knots, but failing, despite full cruising power on her engines. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks in the clouds for the full moon to peek through. The storm was actually breaking up, but the wind was holding steady at sixty knots and the seas were still increasing somewhat. It was a typical North Pacific storm, both officers had already decided. Nothing about it made any sense. The air temperature was a balmy ten degrees Fahrenheit, and the flying spray was freezing to ice that impacted the bridge windows like birdshot in duck season. The only good news was that the seas were right on the bow. George M was a freighter, not a cruise liner, and lacked anti-roll stabilizers. In fact, the ride wasn't bad at all. The super-structure was set on the after portion of the ship, and that damped out most of the pitching motion associated with heavy seas. It also had the effect of reducing the officers' awareness of events at the forward end of the ship, a fact further accentuated by the reduced visibility from flying spray.