Odessa Sea (Dirk Pitt 24)

“Are they still aboard?”

“They’re in the warehouse.”

“Lock them in one of the caves for now. We’ll dispense with them later.” He closed the laptop and rose from his chair.

“I see the Besso beat us back,” Vasko said. “The reconfiguration went well.”

“Yes, the crew worked around the clock to change her appearance. It should be enough to pass a casual inspection. By the way, her new name is Nevena.”

“I thought by now she’d be headed to the Mediterranean.”

“She should be, but another project came up. Something we need to jump on just as soon as the Macedonia is on her way.”

He opened the door to a small anteroom. A heavyset man was bent over a table inside, poring through a stack of documents. Beside him, a small bowl contained some metal tags. The man looked up with mild disturbance.

“Ilya,” Mankedo said. “Say hello to Dr. Georgi Dimitov.”

23

Ana found Giordino refilling a coffee cup in the Burgas Police Department break room. Across the corridor, they could see Pitt arguing with the chief of police.

“How’s he doing?” Ana asked.

“Ready to eat someone’s liver for breakfast. Beyond notifying the Coast Guard, the chief constable’s reaction in searching for the Macedonia has been, shall we say, minus four hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Absolute zero?”

Giordino nodded.

“I’m working through Europol to notify coastal towns in Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine. I’m not sure the local police can do a whole lot more.” She looked at Pitt, whose green eyes seemed afire. “I’ve never seen him so intense.”

“He doesn’t take kindly to anyone messing with his ships—or his people. He has a lot of friends aboard the Macedonia.”

“Loyalty means a lot to him?”

Giordino nodded. “You better know it. He’d swim the Atlantic if it meant helping a friend. On top of that, he’s not one to take no for an answer.”

“We better get him out of the chief’s hair before he gets himself thrown into a jail cell. I’ve got the video link with Washington set to go.” Ana poked her head into the chief’s office and retrieved Pitt.

He shook his head. “I finally convinced him to send some investigators to the dock. Should have been done hours ago. Any word from the Coast Guard?”

“They are organizing their resources and will be initiating search efforts shortly. The wet weather, unfortunately, will hamper an air search.”

She led Pitt and Giordino down the corridor to a darkened room with several chairs and a computer in it. A video conference link to the computer monitor showed two men at a table with a NUMA logo on the wall behind them. Hiram Yaeger, the ponytailed head of NUMA’s computer resource center, sat next to Rudi Gunn, Pitt’s deputy director. Both had a weary look from working into the wee hours of the morning.

“Good morning, gentlemen, and thanks for hanging in with us,” Pitt said. “What can you tell us from your end?”

“Our satellite link with the Macedonia was severed at 12:05 a.m. local time,” Yaeger said. “I checked the regional AIS system, which tracks the position and identity of all commercial vessels via satellite. It was deactivated a few minutes later. Both systems show the ship’s last recorded position as the commercial terminal in Burgas Harbor.”

“So the systems were disabled even before the ship left port,” Pitt said.

“That’s what the data indicates.”

“Someone knew a thing or two about hijacking,” Giordino said.

“Assuming it was a hijacking, every hour counts,” Gunn said. “The Macedonia is rated at a top speed of seventeen knots. Eleven hours have elapsed, so by now she could be two hundred miles from Burgas. That could place her anywhere from Ukraine to the gates of the Dardanelles.”

“We’ve issued alerts to all regional country Coast Guards,” Ana said. “The Bulgarian Coast Guard will be initiating sea searches out of Burgas and Varna, supplemented by an air search once the weather improves.”