“Get ready, Lawrence,” Weddell said. “Remember, you’ll have only twenty seconds to acquire the signal.”

“I know.”

Of course he does.

Weddell turned to Pearson. He was responsible for disabling the drone’s automated self-destruct, which would engage if the drone’s sensors detected an unauthorized signal controlling it. “Doug, are you ready to go?”

“Let’s do this,” Pearson said, rubbing his hands together.

“Okay. On my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

Weddell pressed the ENTER button, and the pulse bombarded the drone. His screen confirmed that he had a direct hit.

“Go, Lawrence!”

Kensit began typing furiously. The seconds ticked by. All Weddell could do from this point was watch. He kept his eyes on the monitor above him. The drone remained on its original heading.

“Status, Lawrence.” The countdown timer he’d programmed into his laptop gave them ten more seconds.

“I’m isolating the control subroutines,” Kensit said, which was as close as Weddell would get to an estimate from him.

More ticks. The wait was excruciating. For the first time in the entire process, Weddell was completely powerless.

“Five seconds, Lawrence!”

More typing.

“You can do it, Kensit,” Pearson said.

Kensit’s fingers flew across the keyboard, and then he pulled them away like a concert pianist finishing a minuet.

“I know,” he said. “We now have control.” He looked pointedly at Pearson. “Try not to make my brilliance a moot point.”

Although this drone wouldn’t actually explode if Pearson couldn’t disable the autodestruct, a switch inside the X-47B would trip in the event the autodestruct sequence wasn’t terminated. The inspectors checking the drone later would know that the hijacking mission had failed. There would be no partial credit.

Pearson used the tablet as deftly as Kensit had manipulated his keyboard. Weddell was focused on entering new targeting coordinates into the nav system. He finished just as Pearson called out in triumph, “Take that, Uncle Sam! We done got your drone!”

Weddell and Pearson clapped and slapped palms. All they could get from Kensit was a raised eyebrow and a shrug, as if he shouldn’t celebrate something that he fully expected to happen.

The festivities became short-lived when Weddell noticed the X-47B turning on the monitor. It should have been heading away from them on the course toward the barge. Instead, it was flying directly toward them.

And it was descending.

“What the hell is going on, Lawrence?”

Kensit shook his head in bewilderment. “This can’t be.”

Pearson took his feet down and stared at Kensit. “What did you do, Larry?”

“I didn’t do anything to cause this.”

“Cause what?” Weddell asked.

“The drone is locked onto the signal we’re broadcasting.”

“What?” Weddell tried to disengage the signal they were broadcasting, but the computer wouldn’t respond. “How is that possible?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.”

Weddell looked up at the monitor. The X-47B was growing larger on the screen every moment. They had less than a minute before the drone and its payload of fuel completed its kamikaze attack and blew the boat apart. “Can you reprogram it?”

Kensit just gaped at his screen, perplexed and mute.

Weddell rushed over and shook him by the shoulders. “I said can you reprogram it?”

For probably the first time in his life, Kensit uttered the words “I don’t know.”

“You’ve got to try or we’re all dead.” He wheeled around and pointed at Pearson. “See if you can engage that autodestruct.”

Pearson nodded furiously and hunched over his tablet. Weddell raced for the door at the front of the room.

“Where are you going?” Kensit asked.

“If you guys can’t reassert control, I can at least stop our antenna from broadcasting.”

He threw open the door and ran up to the bridge, where he found the captain staring at the drone diving toward them.

“Get us moving—now!” Weddell shouted.

The captain didn’t need to be told why and throttled up the engine.

Weddell climbed up onto the top deck above the bridge where the antenna was located. If he disconnected the power cable, the broadcast would cease. Even if the drone had locked onto their initial position, moving the ship would get them out of its path.

He reached the antenna and was about to reach for the cable when the ship lurched forward. He was thrown back, tripped on a railing, and struck his head against the bulkhead.

He saw stars for a few seconds and shook his head to clear them before crawling toward the antenna. The black cable leading to the dish lay exposed on the white deck.

He glanced up and saw the slash of white wing plunging toward them, the drone’s black air intake gaping like the maw of a manta ray. The banshee wail of the jet engine foretold a fiery end if he couldn’t disable their broadcast. It looked like neither Kensit nor Pearson had been successful.

Weddell grasped the power cable with both hands and yanked it. The cable held firm. He braced his feet against the dish’s rotating pedestal and put everything he had into it, his muscles straining in protest.

With a sudden pop, the cable flew backward in a shower of sparks, sending Weddell tumbling.

He picked himself up and saw the cable had completely disconnected from the antenna. There was no way it was still broadcasting.

The water splashed in whitecaps from the bow, indicating that they were now doing a good twenty knots. They’d have plenty of distance from the drone’s impact.

Weddell turned his attention back to the drone so that he could tell the crash investigators exactly where it went down. But to his horror, the drone continued to make adjustments in its course.

It was still aimed straight at them, no more than five seconds away.

He scrambled to his feet in a mad dash to jump overboard, but he was far too late. Time seemed to compress as the drone plunged into the ship and exploded.

His last thought before the fireball consumed him wasn’t of his wife or his mother or his German shepherd, Bandit. It was focused on the fact that this event was no accident. Frederick Weddell used his brain’s final impulses to wonder who it was that killed him.

Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela

Present day

Harbormaster Manuel Lozada shook his head in disbelief as his boat approached the rusting hulk that he was about to inspect before it unloaded its cargo at the La Guanta docks. He shielded his eyes from the setting sun to give himself a better look. From a distance the pattern of mottled green paint on the hull seemed designed to camouflage the ship for a jungle cruise, but up close he could see that it was just a sloppy patch job, with various shades of puke green splashed on the sides to cover up bare spots, and even the newer paint was now flaking away.

As his boat passed by the stern, Lozada could make out the name Dolos on the champagne-glass fantail, the only mark of elegance on an otherwise profoundly ugly vessel. The flag flying from the jackstaff was of a Liberian registry, which matched the information he’d obtained independently.

The ship was large—560 feet long—but nothing compared to the massive supertankers that berthed at the Pamatacual oil terminal only five miles away. The Dolos wasn’t a containership, but rather an old tramp steamer that carried whatever needed to be transported between the less prominent ports of the world. This one in particular looked like it should have been sent to the scrapyard last century. If it ever got caught in even a minor gale, Lozada wouldn’t be surprised if the old girl broke in half and sank.