Coming in now was his first real weather, and he had his numb, pained fingers crossed. His creation had certain historically precise features yet to be fully tested in high seas. He had built her in the style of ships in Homer's time, which meant she was hardly more than a raft with washboard sides. Four meters across the beam, with a shallow draft of a meter and a half, she was undecked except for a longitudinal gangway over the cargo and platforms at the bow and stern, protected with latticework to deflect enemy spears. It did not help much, however, against the swell. The keel extended forward at the bow, supposedly for additional lateral plane, and that was a plus when reaching with the wind abeam or tacking to windward, but now, running downwind, it increased her tendency to sheer about. All his strength was needed on the tillers just to keep her aright.
There were other problems. Maybe, he thought, Ulysses had them, too. He'd reproduced the ancient Aegean practice of tying the ends of the longitudinal wales together at the stern, then letting them extend on behind the ship and splay outward like the tail feathers of some magnificent phoenix. Although he loved the beauty of it, now that "tail" was catching the wind and making steering even tougher.
Probably should have left the damn thing off, he'd often lectured himself. But no: Odyssey II had to be exactly authentic . . . or what was the point? No guts, no glory. The ancient Greeks were the astronauts of their age, the Aegean their universe, and he wanted to recapture the triumphs and the fears of Homer's time, if only for a fortnight.
"Sir, we got an RQ from the Glover." Alfred Konwitz, a twenty-year-old Oklahoman with a thirty-eight-inch waist and known to the evening radio shift affectionately as Big Al, lifted off his headphones and reached for his coffee, extra cream and sugar, which he kept in a special Thermos cup.
The United States has two bases on the southern Mediterranean island of Crete, strategically close to Libya and the Middle East in general. They are the naval and air base at Souda Bay, which is large enough to accommodate the entire Mediterranean Sixth Fleet, and the communications base at Gournes, in the southern outskirts of Iraklion, Crete's capital city.
He and Staff Sergeant Jack Mulhoney were at Gournes, on the fourth floor of the faceless gray building that housed operations for the massive battery of antennas. They both knew the Glover was a Garcia-class frigate, technically part of the Sixth Fleet, on a routine but classified intelligence-gathering assignment a hundred kilometers northwest of Souda Bay.
"They've got an Israeli chopper Mayday," Konwitz continued. "They need a verify. See if it's a scheduled op or what."
Jack Mulhoney was busy with paperwork—more damned forms every day—and did not really want to be bothered. He got off at midnight, and the staff officer had ordered it completed and on his desk, by God, by 0800 tomorrow. Or else.