The Last Line by Anthony Shaffer

Angeles, Southampton, New York. Most of them had multiple ports of call, which complicated things. We focused on the ones heading for U.S. ports, of course. Nothing.”
    â€œSo we’re back to square one,” Chavez said. One of the ship photographs enlarged as the others disappeared from the screen. She was an ancient freighter, rust streaked and decrepit. “One of the vessels on our list was a small tramp, the Zapoteca. Liberian flagged, but owned by Manzanillo Internacional, a Mexican import-export company. We got curious because Karachi is a long way outside her usual range.”
    A box of stats opened alongside the photograph, and Teller skimmed down through the information quickly. The Zapoteca displaced 1,800 tons, was 252 feet long at the waterline, and had a beam of just over 40 feet. She was single screw; her power plant was a Burmeister & Wain Alpha 10-cycle diesel delivering 1,200 horsepower. She had a range of 3,000 nautical miles at 12 knots and usually carried a complement of ten men. She’d been launched in 1951 by Frederikshavn Vaerft & Terdok; originally she’d been Danish. She’d been sold to Colombia in 1985, then sold again to Manzanillo Internacional in 1996.
    Interesting.
    â€œColombia, then Mexico,” Teller said. He exchanged a glance with Procario. “The cartels?”
    Procario nodded.
    â€œWe checked that,” Wentworth said. “The corporations owning the Zapoteca, both in Colombia and in Mexico, are legit.”
    â€œBut mostly she stuck to a coastal run between Barranquilla and either Veracruz or Tampico,” Chavez pointed out. “That’s just fifteen hundred nautical miles—say, five or six days at twelve knots. But from Karachi? She’d have to take it in two- and three-thousand-mile legs, refueling along the way. That’s over thirteen thousand nautical miles and forty-five days, not counting the time spent in each port.”
    â€œMaybe they were on a horse run,” Procario suggested. “Might be worth it. A hell of a lot of heroin comes out of Afghanistan by way of Karachi.”
    â€œThat was a possibility,” Larson said, “but unlikely. The Mexican cartels produce their own heroin in northern Mexico. Why send one ship halfway around the world for a few more tons of the stuff? So we began wondering what the Zapoteca might be carrying besides drugs, especially when she didn’t show up at Veracruz like she was supposed to. We began a rather intense and thorough search with our NRO assets.” Part of the DoD, the NRO—the National Reconnaissance Office—was one of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. Headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, it designed, built, and operated America’s spy satellites. Larson moved his fingers over the interactive tabletop and brought up a new photograph. It had been shot obliquely from overhead, from high up and off the vessel’s port stern. Enlarged, the level of resolution and crisp detail was astonishing. You could see coils of rope on the deck, streaks of rust down her side, and crewmen going about their work. One man in blue jeans and a T-shirt appeared to be leaning against the railing along the fantail, balanced somewhat precariously. The resolution was good enough to show his head and what might have been a beard, but not quite sharp enough to show facial features.
    â€œWhat’s that one doing?” Teller asked, pointing.
    Chavez grinned. “Taking a piss.”
    Sure enough, Teller could just make out the man’s hands, folded together below where his belt buckle might be.
    The gesture was so completely human that Teller smiled. The CIA, in his opinion, relied entirely too much on what it referred to as its technological assets—looking at satellite imagery and listening in on cell phone intercepts. Satellites were good if you were tracking tanks or army movements or even individual ships, but they rarely helped you track individual