The Hamlet Warning by Leonard Sanders

Author:Leonard Sanders [Sanders, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-07-13T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Minus 4 Days, 13:28 Hours

The tanker overshot the Mona Passage. That was the consensus of Johnson’s experts. Simply poor navigation, they said. The ship’s track, monitored in the suite at the Jaragua as reported from Langley, showed that the ship maintained a steady west-southwest heading 22.3 nautical miles beyond the point where a turn to port normally would be expected. The experts assumed that the ship’s captain, uncertain of his exact fix, made landfall to confirm his navigation with visual or radar sightings.

Loomis suspected otherwise. He pointed out that the ship was equipped with Loran. He believed the ship’s eccentric course might have been for another purpose. But Johnson sided with the experts.

“They say Loran isn’t all that accurate,” Johnson argued. “Sometimes returns from the ionosphere confuse things. Captains who depend on Loran sometimes wake up lost. Among younger crews, celestial navigation is becoming a lost art. They depend on Loran. And we checked. The ship doesn’t have the more accurate short-ranged Decca system.”

“What exactly is your constant aerial surveillance?” Loomis asked. “Satellites?”

“Loomis, if I knew I probably couldn’t tell you. And if I could, you probably couldn’t understand it. My impression is that it’s some sort of infrared, heat-seeking gadget. The experts swear by it.”

“And you trust the experts.”

“Don’t you?”

“The experts told the people in Johnstown that if that old dam did break, it’d only raise the level of the river eighteen inches. The experts told the thirty thousand people in St. Pierre that if old Mount Pelée did blow her top, there was no threat to human lives. The experts …”

“All right, I get your point. So sometimes the experts are wrong. You have some other way of watching that ship?”

“What do those surveillance scans look like? You ever see one?”

“No. But I imagine they’d be gibberish to us common folk — swirls of color and so forth, requiring a high degree of interpretation.”

Loomis examined the tracks on the plot map and measured distances. “They weren’t far from land here, and here,” he pointed out. “I’d feel much better if we asked your people for a recheck of those two points.”

“The ship maintained speed each place,” Johnson said. “I don’t see how they could have off-loaded cargo underway at fifteen knots.”

“Johnson, as an intelligence officer, you have a few shortcomings,” Loomis told him. “Any third-rate deck crew in the navy could do that trick in their sleep.”

“But the track of any other vessel would show.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m guessing. A wooden-hulled diesel, with exhaust discharge under water, moving into the track of a large ship, might not show up very well. Not unless the interpreter were looking for it specifically.”

“All right,” Johnson said. “I’ll ask Langley for a restudy of those points. I’ll tell them the Dominican Republic’s resident expert doubts their competence.”

*

With all preparations made, Loomis left the Jaragua suite for the night and returned to his quarters. He showered and sprawled across the bed. When he awoke, María Elena was beside him and the telephone was ringing.

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