Gamay took a sip of the coffee, surprised at how fast it was cooling down. “Did you check the AIS database?”
She was referring to the automatic identification system that tracked the movements of most commercial ships and anything carrying a reporting transponder or beacon.
“Of course,” Kurt said. “Aside from our ship, nothing has come through this stretch of water in the last forty-eight hours. But if you were planning to pick up hijackers from a ditched aircraft, you wouldn’t be broadcasting your position.”
Joe chimed in, looking Paul’s way. “Your drones are covering a pretty wide swath. Have you seen any traffic?”
Paul shook his head. “No ships, no boats, not even a periscope. No wreckage, no rafts, no flotsam or even jetsam of any kind. Noteven a flying fish, but as we all know, they prefer tropical waters, so I wouldn’t expect to find many of them this far north.”
Paul winked at Gamay as he finished the statement, and she hid behind the oversized cup once more.
“Can you get them out a little farther and up a little higher? I’d like to use them for recon instead of a lower-altitude search and rescue pattern.”
“I can,” Paul said. “But there’s no need to. Gamay has satellite data going back to a few hours before the plane went missing. We were looking at it earlier.”
Gamay put the mug down as Kurt and Joe turned their focus in her direction. “We weren’t looking for ships,” she said while tapping at the computer keyboard. “Just infrared signatures that might indicate a fuel slick on the surface, which could theoretically be spotted using changes in reflected sunlight. We can delve deeper and have the computer look for smaller features. How small do you want to go?”
“Can it resolve down to fifty feet?” Kurt asked.
Gamay typed a command code and the computer began looking for odd features in the satellite data fifty feet or larger. It was a slow process, and it resulted in dozens of false readings where frothing whitecaps covering more than fifty feet in length were reported as boats, only to be dismissed after human eyes studied the images.
“Bump the size up to seventy-five feet,” Kurt said, “and add an infrared. Say…at least ten degrees warmer than background.”
This time the program ran faster. It found nothing in the overnight data and only four possibilities in the daytime images, but they all turned out to be artifacts caused by concentrated solar reflections.
“Zip, zilch, zero,” Gamay said.
She looked at Kurt. His eyes were focused, his face impassive. She couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or pleased. Most likely he was just busy calculating what this new data meant.
“Widen the search field,” he said calmly.
“How far?”
“A hundred miles to either side.”
She made the adjustment and ran the program again. Once more, only a few solar reflections, but no ships.
“Widen the search,” Kurt said again.
This time they picked up a dozen ships, but all of them were proudly broadcasting their AIS information, and back-tracing their courses revealed that none of them had been anywhere near the search area during the night.
“Widen it again,” Kurt said. “As far as you can go.”
“That’ll cover halfway to the North Pole,” she replied.
“Do it. Use all the data.”
Gamay wasn’t sure what good that would do. The infrared data suggested the search line was clear of traffic the night of the incident. Finding a ship several hundred miles away wouldn’t change that. “Whatever we find will be too far away from the line to have been here the night before,” she told Kurt.
“Maybe the line is notthe line,” he said.
“You think the signal is a red herring?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or even something less sinister like a data error at the receiving station or an atmospheric event. Either way we’re putting a lot of stock in a one-second burst of radio static.”
“It occurred an hour after the plane was taken,” Joe reminded him. “Be quite a coincidence to have a data glitch at that exact time and place.”
“So back to the red herring, then,” Kurt said. “No better way to throw your pursuers off than letting them think they’ve discovered something you overlooked.”
