“What in Washington isn’t?” He shook his head with annoyance. “Okay, tell them I’ll be there.”
“Also, Hiram is outside. He said you wanted to see him.”
“Send him in.”
Pochinsky slipped out the door and was replaced by a bearded man with shoulder-length hair. Dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Allman Brothers Band T-shirt, Hiram Yaeger looked like he was headed to a biker bar. Only the intense blue eyes behind a pair of granny glasses revealed a deeper intellectual pursuit. Far from a roadhouse barfly, Yaeger was in fact a computer genius whose greatest love was writing software code. Managing NUMA’s state-of-the-art computer resource center, he had built a sophisticated network that collected detailed oceanographic data from a thousand points around the globe.
“So, the savior of the mighty Sea Splendour has returned.” He plopped into a chair opposite Pitt. “You mean to tell me they didn’t whisk you off on a free round-the-world cruise for saving the most expensive ship in their fleet?”
“They were more than willing,” Pitt said. “But Loren’s on a diet, so the ship’s buffet would have been wasted. And my shuffleboard game’s a bit rusty, so there was really no point.”
“I’d be happy to take the trip for you.”
“And risk the whole agency falling apart without your presence?”
“True, I am rather indispensable around here.” Yaeger lofted his nose in the air. “Remind me to mention that at my next performance review.”
“Done,” Pitt said with a grin. “So I take it you found something on the Tasmanian Star?”
“The basics. She was built in Korea in 2005. At a length of five hundred and ten feet and a capacity of fifty-four thousand deadweight tons, she’s classified as a Handymax dry bulk carrier. She was fitted with five holds, two cranes, and a self-dispensing conveyor system.”
“Which can make for a nice stairwell,” Pitt noted.
“She’s owned by a Japanese shipping company named Sendai, and has seen steady service in the Pacific, primarily as an ore carrier. On her last voyage she was under contract with an American petrochemical company. She departed Perth three and a half weeks ago, with a recorded cargo of bauxite, bound for Los Angeles.”
“Bauxite.” Pitt pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. He retrieved the silver rock he had picked up from the deck of the Tasmanian Star and laid it on his desk. “Any idea of the value of the bauxite she was carrying?”
“I couldn’t locate the ship’s insured value, but depending on the grade, the stuff sells for around thirty to sixty bucks a ton on the open market.”
“Doesn’t make sense someone would hijack a ship over it.”
“Personally, I’d go for a freighter full of iPads.”
“Any theories on where our thieves may have run to?”
“Not really. I took the coordinates you gave me where the ship changed course, but I came up dry. NRO satellite images were a week old. That’s a dead part of the Pacific. It doesn’t garner much attention from the spies in the sky.”
“Tapping the National Reconnaissance Office? I hope you didn’t leave any footprints.”
An accomplished hacker when circumstances dictated, Yaeger feigned insult. “Footprints, me? Should anyone even notice the intrusion, I’m afraid the trail leads to my favorite Hollywood celebrity gossip website.”
“A true shame if the government were to shut that down.”
“My sentiments precisely. I do have a theory, though, about the Tasmanian Star’s appearance in Valparaiso.”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“The ship made an abrupt southerly turn nine days ago, some seventeen hundred miles west of Costa Rica. One of our free-floating weather buoys bit the dust in that area of the Pacific about the same time. Turns out, a pretty significant tropical storm blew through that area, although it petered out by the time it hit Mexico. We recorded force 9 winds before we lost the buoy.”
“So our pirates may have had to abandon their heist in a hurry.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. Maybe that’s why they left most of the cargo, and left the engine running.”
Pitt thought for a moment. “Are there are any islands in the area?”
Yaeger pulled out a tablet computer and called up a map of the area where the ship’s course changed.
“There’s a small atoll called Clipperton Island. It’s only about twenty miles from the position you gave me . . . and dead-on along that same heading.” He looked at Pitt and shook his head. “Nice deduction.”