Death Echo

plane and settled deeply in the steel-colored water. Like a skittish cat, the inflatable moved without warning in unexpected directions.
    â€œYou okay?” Josh asked.
    â€œAs in not wanting to hurl?”
    He smiled crookedly. “Yeah.”
    â€œI’m good.”
    He gave her a slow onceover filled with obvious male appreciation and nodded. “Sure are.”
    She laughed. “Thanks, darlin’, but no thanks.”
    Josh looked at her eyes for a moment, nodded, and waited for his next order. No harm, no foul.
    Emma wished she could say the same about her own job. Shading her eyes against the bright afternoon overcast, she looked west, toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Swells from the distant Pacific Ocean, plus choppy wind waves, batted at the twenty-foot-long Zodiac, lifting and dropping the rubber boat without warning. Some of the waves had white crests that streaked the gray water.
    â€œWe good?” she asked. “That wind’s kicking up.”
    â€œWe can take three times the blow, easy.”
    Land looked real far away to her, but she’d learned to trust expert judgment. For all the pilot’s fresh-faced looks, he was utterly at home with the inflatable and Puget Sound.
    â€œLet me know if that changes,” she said.
    Even as Josh nodded, she switched her attention back to the western horizon. Ten minutes earlier, she’d spotted her target when it was only a dark blob squeezed between the shimmering gray sky and the darker gray sound.
    Now the target was a huge ship plowing toward them like a falling mountain. Dark engine smoke boiled up from funnels behind the bridge deck. The deck cargo was a colorful collage of steel shipping containers stacked seven high. The boat was close enough that she could make out its white bow wave.
    â€œThat her?” Josh asked.
    She lifted binoculars, spun the focus wheel, and scanned quickly. On the Zodiac’s shifting, uncertain platform, staring through unstabilized binoculars was a fast way to get seasick.
    The collage of colors leaped forward and became a random checkerboard of blue and white and yellow and red and green, toy blocks for giants playing an unknown game.
    â€œMeet the container ship Shinhua Lotus, ” Emma said, lowering the glasses. “Standard cruising speed close to thirty knots. One hundred and eighty thousand horsepower. Her hull is steel, a thousand feet long. She’s stacked with more than fifteen thousand steel freight containers. One hundred and sixty thousand tons of international commerce at work.”
    â€œGotta be the most boring job in the world.”
    She glanced quickly at him. “What?”
    â€œDriving that pig between ports. Tugs do all the fun bits close in. The ship’s captain mostly just talks on the radio.”
    She looked at the little boat that had carried her out to meet the Lotus . Twenty feet long, six feet wide and powered by two outboard engines. She touched the fabric of the Zodiac’s inflated side tube. It was only slightly thicker than the rubberized off-shore suit she wore. All that supported the boat was the breath of life, twenty pounds per square inch of air pressure.
    And one of the biggest ships ever built was bearing down on them, carrying bad news in the shape of a yacht called Blackbird .
    She lifted the binoculars again. The huge ship overwhelmed her field of view. Everything was a fast-forward slide show. Stacks of shipping containers in various company colors. The windshield of the bridge deck. The hammerhead crane next to the forward mast.
    The black-hulled yacht perched in a cradle on top of stacks of steel boxes.
    Hello, Blackbird. So you made it.
    If that’s really you.
    â€œHow close can you get to the Lotus ?” she asked.
    â€œHow close do you need?”
    She pulled a camera from the waterproof bag at her feet. Unlike the binoculars, the camera had a computerized system to keep the field of view from dancing with every motion of the boat.
    â€œI have to be able to see detail on a yacht sitting on top of the containers. A two-hundred-millimeter lens is the longest I have.”
    That and intel satellite photos, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Too bad I don’t really trust Alara.
    For all Emma could prove, the photos St. Kilda had been given could have been taken on the other side of the world a year ago. Or three years. Or twelve. Not that she was paranoid. It was just that she preferred facts that she’d