Far From The Sea We Know

CHAPTER 41

  Just before dawn, the Valentina arrived at the perimeter of the Honey Pot site, and a Navy sub chaser simply passed them through. There was no outward sign that things were different after they crossed over into the circle.

  Matthew was back in Penny’s cabin, dead asleep. She had considered rousing him, but he still seemed to need more rest. Almost everyone else was awake and working in quiet anticipation. No one spoke to her or even seemed to notice her as she walked the decks. It was as if she were looking at it all through a window with glass so thick that nothing would ever touch her.

  They had entered the circle obliquely and now turned east. The rising sun illuminated the radar mast behind her, then the length of the bridge, like a slow moving fire. The first rays finally reached her on the foredeck and cast her shadow backward, like a giant compass needle telling them to turn back. Only three days before, she had picked out a circle from a few discrepancies in a pile of sonar scans. Now, she wished she hadn’t.

  No one else seemed to think much about the danger they might be sailing into. Well, Chiffrey did, thought Penny, but he always framed the risks as potential threats to national security, not as the immediate perils of closing in on something they knew nothing about. Nothing, except that it had touched most of them in ways they could not fathom.

  To calm herself, she gazed out on the endless water of the Pacific Northwest. The waves moved like grass rolled by a gentle wind across a prairie. For a moment she let herself forget everything and become lost in the spell of the undulating sea. On that prairie-sea, it was as if the tales of far-off hills and mountains were only fables for the easily deceived.

  The rumble of the Valentina’s engines powering down meant they were finally there: the center of the circle. A few errant sea birds wheeled overhead, but everything else seemed the same.