The President thought that sounded reasonable, but he had misgivings. “What for? No point in finding the plane if we can’t get down to it for six days.”
“We should still increase our presence.”
The President looked back at the map with the highlighted courses on it. He noticed the planes were hugging the coastline. He asked if that was the case or just a false impression.
“They are,” the chief said. “So are the Russian ships.”
“Why?”
“Shallow waters,” the chief said. “They must think that’s where the plane went down.”
“So, they have information we don’t have,” the President realized. “From where?”
“Unknown,” the chief said. “The CIA is looking into it. But they’ve developed no intel yet. Should I have NUMA move their search toward the coast?”
The President continued staring at the map, trying to take it all in at once. “No,” he said. “NUMA’s our best hope to actually find the plane. Keep them on the signal line until they’ve cleared it. We can best help them by distracting the Russians.”
The chief looked uneasy. “How do you intend to do that?”
“Shallow waters,” the President said, repeating what the chief had said earlier. He leaned forward to share his view of the map. “Find a shallow area around one of these islands,” he began, pointing out Bear Island and then Spitsbergen. “Send a couple of recon flights over it, have them fly a search pattern and drop sonar buoys. Make it look good. And then ask the Norwegians to send out a ship or two in support. I want the Russians and Chinese to think we know something they don’t. I want them to consider that shallow waters can be found somewhere other than the Norwegian or Russian coasts.”
The chief gave an approving grunt. “And if NUMA clears the signal line without finding the plane?”
“Then send them anywhere on earth they want to look next.”
Chapter 18
Had the President asked Kurt where to look next, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. He was out of ideas. Joe might have said the Bahamas or Hawaii or anywhere near the equator. At this point, they seemed about as likely to find the EAGL in the tropics as in the Arctic.
Having been briefed about the Russian deployment and given an update on the Chinese icebreaker, Kurt found the icebreaker a more pressing concern. Not surprisingly it had finally abandoned the crumbling runway and left its icehouse station behind. But the ship wasn’t heading back to China, instead it had come grinding southward through the ice and out into the Barents Sea.
“Where is she now?” Kurt asked.
He was standing on the bridge with Joe and theLyra’s captain. A radar specialist, helmsman, and a couple of other crewmen stood by.
“Ahead of us,” the captain said, taking over the radar console. “About thirty miles out. They’re basically matching our course, but at a slower speed. In a few hours, we’ll be close enough to shake hands.”
“Front-running us,” Joe said. “Hoping to come across the plane before we do.”
“Makes more sense than looking behind us,” the captain said.
Kurt had to agree with that. Truthfully, there wasn’t all that much left of the signal line to search. They’d covered seventy percent of it now. By using the drones and the towed array sonar, they’d cleared a ten-mile-wide swath without finding any sign of the plane. By noon the next day they’d have covered the whole area. Although, at this point the Chinese would have covered it before them.
Racking his brain for an answer, Kurt looked over the chart. Just beyond the end of the signal line lay a group of desolate islands named Franz Josef Land, the largest and closest of these being Zemlya Georga.
At first blush, Kurt could imagine the hijackers making for the shallow waters of the island. If they didn’t have a ship to pick them up, ditching the plane close to shore was the next best option. With a little luck they could put it down close to the beach and then swim—or row a lifeboat—ashore.
But there were still problems with that plan. For one, the signal line ended ten miles from Zemlya Georga, not a thousand yards from the beach. More important, the only people on those islands were Russian military personnel. If the plane had landed near the islands, it would have been seen on radar. In which case the Russians wouldn’t be scouring the Norwegian coast for it. He asked the others for their opinions.
Joe put it like this. “If the hijackers wanted to go to Russia, they could have just gone to Russia.”
No matter how many times he thought it through, Kurt was certain they were missing something. Somehow, it seemed, all three nations were missing something.
“Let’s get a message off to Washington,” he said. “Have the NSA, or whomever picked up this crash signal, confirm that it couldn’t possibly extend all the way to Zemlya Georga.”
The captain nodded. He’d get it sent through NUMA’s comm network. “In the meantime, stay the course?”
Kurt thought that made the most sense. “Might as well. And when we catch up to the Chinese, we can ask them to give us the Otter back.”
