There was a heated track in the middle of the deck that maintained an ice-free path for anyone that had to use it, but Kurt was standing in front of that. He lifted one foot. It came off the metal plate with a firm click, suggesting the spray had indeed created a bond between his boots and the ship. He cleared the other one as well. “Less likely to go overboard if you’re frozen to the deck.”
Joe nodded as if that was accepted maritime logic. “Even less likely if you’re inside, where it’s not fifteen below with the windchill.”
Kurt laughed. “At a certain point it’s so cold you don’t feel it anymore.”
“That’s the beginnings of frostbite.”
The truth was, Kurt needed space to think. The crowded, screen-filled sonar room was not a place that allowed the mind to wander. It required focus, even if it was just to ward off the monotony of finding nothing.
Kurt figured Joe knew that. After years of working together Joe knew him better than anyone. He knew Kurt preferred solitude to chaos, quiet contemplation to loud, chatty rooms. He knew the look that suggested Kurt’s feet might be frozen to the deck of theLyra, but his mind was a thousand miles away.
“You’re a pilot,” Kurt said to Joe. “How low would you take a C-17 across these waters?”
Joe cocked his head, thinking about the question. “Having never flown a C-17, that’s a little tough to answer, but I hear it’s a pretty agile aircraft for such a big bird. It has to be to get in and out of shortfields in dangerous places around the globe. A competent pilot would probably be confident with fifty feet between the bottom of the plane and the top of the waves. Why do you ask?”
“What if there was fog?” Kurt asked, ignoring Joe’s question for the moment.
“Not really a problem,” Joe said. “The plane would be equipped with plenty of terrain-avoidance features to tell the pilot exactly how close to the water he was. Radar altimeters, infrared sensors, even night vision.”
Joe sounded confident. It helped make Kurt’s case. “Which makes a crash unlikely.”
“Unless they ditched it on purpose,” Joe suggested.
Kurt had been thinking the same thing. But that idea begged another question. “Would you want to land in these waters, in the middle of the night, in conditions that suggested ice, fog, and snow flurries?”
Joe shivered at the thought. “Kurt, I grew up in the hottest part of New Mexico, where any temperature below ninety degrees calls for a light jacket. I wouldn’t land here on a calm, sunny day. You can be sure I wouldn’t ditch an airliner-sized aircraft here in the dark. But then again,” he added, “I wouldn’t steal a billion-dollar prototype and kill my fellow crewmates to do it, so there’s no telling what the hijackers might be willing to try.”
Kurt thought that made sense. He asked his next question. “What are the odds of a safe landing? Conditions last night were smoother, but there was fog.”
“The plane is going to sink either way,” Joe said. “But if the swells were small, I think you could get the odds of landing without breaking off major components like the wing and tail down to about fifty-fifty. Maybe sixty-forty.”
That was better than Kurt would have thought, but it didn’tchange his mind. “Even if you did land without a mishap, you still have to get out,” he said. “The water around us is already three degrees below freezing. The only reason it’s not a solid block of ice is the salt content. But if you get in that water, you suffer instant cold shock in all your extremities that makes functioning nearly impossible. Hypothermia follows. Leading to death in less than fifteen minutes.”
Joe paused, looking out at the water. “Operating over the Arctic, the Air Force would make sure the plane is stocked with life rafts and survival gear.”
“All of which carry emergency beacons that activate when deployed,” Kurt pointed out.
“But the hijackers would know that,” Joe replied. “They might be able to disable them beforehand.”
Kurt didn’t think so. “That stuff is all in sealed containers. Most of it’s designed to self-inflate when put to use. None of it would be easy to access and mess around with in the middle of a flight.”
“Maybe they brought their own rafts.”
“On a top secret test flight?”
TheLyrapierced another wave, this time nosing down a bit, which allowed the wave to slide almost up to the platform. Joe turned his face as the spray flew by, catching the sunlight and hitting the ship’s superstructure with a sound like sleet against a car window.
Joe stamped his feet and then adjusted his hat with the oven mitts. “Before my lips freeze shut, how about you tell me what you’re getting at?”
Kurt figured it was obvious. “The hijackers didn’t wake up yesterday and decide to steal the plane over coffee and donuts. They would obviously have spent months planning this. But if they can’t bring their own survival gear, and they can’t use what the Air Force provided, they’d have to have another way off the plane. Unless theyplanned to swim for it, they’d have someone here waiting to pick them up.”
Joe looked out to sea and then back at Kurt. His eyes lit up. He got it. “We’re looking for the wrong thing.”
Kurt grinned through the cold, which was numbing his face at this point. “We need to know if there was a ship out here last night. Anywhere along this line.”
“And if there wasn’t?”
“Then the EAGL isn’t here.”
