Fire Ice

"Ayup?" Jenkins cringed. "Did she say, 'ayup'?"

Howes shook his head. "I've lived Down East my whole life, and I've never heard anyone say 'ayup.' Wouldn't know what it means."

Trout suppressed a smile. Mumbling an apology, he explained that Gamay had seen too many episodes of Murder; She Wrote, which had been set in the Hollywood version of a Maine town. Jenkins cut him off. With clear excitement in his voice, he pointed to a large blip on the radar screen. '"There she is. No doubt about it."

Austin, who was leaning over his shoulder, looked at the target to the southeast. "Ayup," he said.

Jenkins gu

Austin said, "I've been listening to the NOAA report on the radio."

"I don't need the squawking of a computer-generated voice to tell me there's a storm on the way," Jenkins said, with a grin. "You just have to know how to read the signs."

Since leaving port, Jenkins had watched the clouds gather and thicken and the sea spectrum shift to an oily gray. The breeze had moved a couple of compass points to the east. "If we get our work here done quickly, we can get back to port ahead of the storm. Problem is that if the sea and the wind kick up, it could be dangerous hauling back on our net."

"I understand," Austin said. "Paul and I will get ready."

"Might be a good idea." Chief Howes said, his easygoing voice gaining an uncharacteristic tautness. "We've got company."

The chief was pointing at a huge, dark shape that loomed from the gathering fog. As the amorphous mass grew closer, it lost its spectral aspect, and the lines that had been softened by the vaporous mists hardened into the silhouette of a very large ship. The vessel was completely black, from the waterline to the top of the single fu

The radio crackled with excited voices. One fisherman said, "Jeez, Roy, what's that thing? Looks like a floating hearse."

“Hearse," said another voice. "Looks like the whole damned funeral parlor."

Austin smiled at the chatter. Anyone listening to the comments would know they hadn't been rehearsed. Jenkins warned his fellow fishermen to keep a sharp eye out so they wouldn't be run down. They didn't have to be told twice and gave the monster ship a wide berth. Austin estimated the ship's speed at around ten knots.

The Ataman Explorer seemed to slow as it came nearer. A dot detached itself from the deck. The speck grew larger, buzzing like a hornet stirred from its nest. Moments later, the black helicopter flew low over the fishing fleet. Jenkins and Howes gave the aircraft a friendly wave. The chopper circled the fishing fleet a few times, then headed back to the ship.

From inside the pilothouse, where he and Trout were do

"Guess we passed inspection," Austin said.

"That was a lot friendlier than the reception Gamay and I got when we poked around Ataman's property in Novorossiysk."

"You can thank Jenkins for that. It was his idea to have lots of witnesses so Ataman would stay on the straight and narrow."

Austin was glad that he had listened to Jenkins when he'd asked if he'd be willing to offer his services. Jenkins pointed out that there was safety in numbers. Since the vessel was sitting in prime fishing grounds, it was not all that suspicious for boats to be trawling in the area. In fact, Austin could see a half dozen fishing boats tending their nets on the way out.

Austin had based his plan on the successful infiltration of the sub base from Captain Kemal's fishing boat. Penetrating the sub pens had been easy compared with what he had in mind now. Unlike the scruffy Cossacks, who were more interested in playing people polo than standing guard, watchful and well-armed sentries would be ma

Then Austin caught the break he was looking for. The ship plowed to a stop and floated dead in the water. Jenkins ran his boat as a trawler when he wasn't going after lobsters, and it was fitted out with a drumlike stem hauler to handle the net. With the help of the chief, he got the net in the water. Then the Kestrel got under way again and made a sweep by one side of the ship, a hundred yards off. The maneuver gave those on the ship a chance to inspect the fishing boat at close range. What they didn't see were the two divers hanging off the opposite side of the boat.

After traveling about halfway along the length of the ship, Jenkins cut the Kestrel's engine to an idle and went out onto the deck. He and Howes tinkered with the hauler, as if there was a problem. During the pause, Austin and Trout dropped into the water and dove under the boat. They wanted to get deep and out of the way of the net.

It was agreed that Jenkins would make a sweep by one side of the ship, then trawl for a couple of miles before turning back and returning on the other side. That gave them an hour to get on board the ship and back. They would keep in touch with Jenkins using their underwater communicators to talk to a hydrophone Trout had hung into the water before they went over the side.

They swam deeper, moving their legs in a steady flutter that ate up the distance. They could hear the muffled grumble of the fishing boat engine as Jenkins got under way again and dove to thirty-five feet, where the visibility was still fair.

With powerful scissors kicks, they covered the distance to the ship in a short time.

The gigantic hull emerged from the murk like the body of an enormous whale asleep on the surface. Austin signaled Trout to go deeper. When they were directly under the massive keel, they looked up and snapped their lights on. It was hard not to be u

"Now I know how a bug feels just before someone steps on it," Trout said, gazing up at the massive hulk.

"I was thinking the same thing, but I didn't want to make you nervous."

"Too late. Where do you want to start?"

"If I interpreted the satellite photos correctly, we should find what we're looking for at midships."

They swam slowly upward until the ship's barnacle-encrusted bottom entirely filled the lenses of their face masks. In the beam of his light, Austin saw what he was looking for, a rubber-edged seam that ran across from one side of the flat-bottomed hull to the other. "Bingo!" he said.

When Austin had first looked at the satellite pictures, he'd noticed an open area around one of the derricks that rose from the deck. Someone had carelessly left off a tarp that covered the opening and he could see down into a black void. He was sure he was looking into a "moon pool," a docking space similar to that on the Argo and other NUMA ships.

Austin knew from experience that odds favored the pool's gates being closed. It was standard operating procedure, otherwise the drag from the open sea would slow the ship down. But he remembered that some NUMA ships had a smaller pool used for launching ROVs. He saw what he was looking for on the port side, forward of the larger moon pool, an indented rectangle about twelve feet square. When they swam close, they saw that the gates of the ROV launch well were shut tight.