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  “Was that something else I missed when we were supposed to be paying attention?” asked Judy with her customary snarky attitude.

  “No,” said Brooklyn. “Nobody knows anything about it, which is why it’s such an excellent hiding place.”

  Deep in the bowels of the ship, they reached a crowded room filled with machinery. A giant metal shaft ran through the middle of it all, connecting the engine room to the propeller. Because the ship was anchored, the shaft was motionless. Above it was a platform large enough for both girls to hide.

  “No one’s going to find you up there,” Brooklyn said, pointing to the platform. “Climb up and wait. Don’t move until I come for you or somebody else tells you ‘apple jack.’ ”

  Alice took a whiff of the sour smell and was about to make a comment when Brooklyn cut her off.

  “And so help me, if you complain about anything, I’m going to lead them right to you. Got it?”

  Alice nodded. “Got it.”

  “Aren’t you hiding with us?” asked Judy.

  Brooklyn shook her head. “No. I’ve got to make sure a distress signal’s been sent. You two will be safe here.”

  Alice looked at her. “Thank you, um—” Her words trailed off and it was obvious that she didn’t know Brooklyn’s name.

  “Really?” Brooklyn said, incredulous. “We spent five days together in a tiny cabin and you still don’t know my name?”

  “I get it,” Alice said. “I’m a total spoiled toff. But I’d like to make up for that. Tell me your name and I promise I won’t forget it. Ever.”

  Brooklyn went to answer, but then she caught herself. “Actually, it’s better that you don’t know,” she said. “Because when this is all over and people ask you how you survived, it’s best if you don’t mention me at all.”

  2. Sydney

  IN HER THREE YEARS WITH MI6, Sydney had already dangled upside down from a cliff, broken through the ice of a frozen pond, burned off her eyebrows on more than one occasion, and raced along the top of a rapidly moving Indonesian passenger train while carrying an explosive device of her own making. One time she even eluded the Albanian secret police by hiding in a sewage pipe. An active sewage pipe.

  But of all the difficult, dangerous, and terribly malodorous aspects of the job, for Sydney the absolute worst was the fact that she couldn’t tell anyone about it. The trains, the eyebrows, the sewage pipes all had to remain confidential. Only the team could know what they’d done. No one else.

  It was not insignificant that the first word in “secret agent” was “secret.”

  And this week on the Sylvia Earle, keeping that secret had proven particularly frustrating. Surrounded by amazing scientists she wanted to impress, and more than a few full-of-themselves girls she would’ve liked to knock down a peg or two, Sydney couldn’t say a single word about the things that made her life truly spectacular. Instead, her job required her to anonymously disappear into the background.

  She’d done a good job of it too. So good that during the entire hijacking, no one but Brooklyn even noticed she was missing. She wasn’t with the girls corralled on the main deck, nor was she one of the ones the intruders discovered hiding in the laundry room. She was nowhere to be found, because while the Sylvia Earle was under siege, Sydney was underwater.

  Twelve meters to be exact.

  She’d snuck off the ship for some unauthorized scuba diving, hoping to clear her head. Something had been troubling her for weeks, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Lately, she hadn’t felt right about her role on the team, and whenever Sydney needed to straighten out her thinking, her first instinct was always to look toward the ocean.

  She grew up near the beach in Australia and felt most at home when she was in the water, whether that was surfing, swimming, or diving. She was a certified scuba instructor and had trained at the elite Royal Navy diving school. That meant she knew how to do everything from open-ocean rescues to underwater demolitions. It also meant she knew better than to go scuba diving all alone in the middle of the night. But for Sydney, knowing what was right didn’t always mean doing what was right.

  According to her most recent MI6 evaluation, she was “practically allergic to following the rules.” Still, it was rare for her to break so many at one time. At the moment she was in violation of at least six:

  Breaking into the dive locker

  “Borrowing” diving gear without permission

  Going into the water without adult supervision

  Going into the water without sufficient daylight

  Scuba diving without a partner

  And most seriously, going off-grid during an MI6 mission

  This last one was made even worse by the fact that Sydney was the alpha, which meant she was in charge of the mission while they were in the field. Her rationalization for such bad decision-making was that after five days at sea with no trouble in sight, she felt certain the operation was a dud.

  MI6 had it right from the start, she told herself as she suited up in the dive room. London’s a much more likely target than a research ship traveling through the Shetlands.

  Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about the phytoplankton.

  During one of their labs, the chief scientist taught them about bioluminescent phytoplankton: microscopic marine organisms that glowed in the dark. To demonstrate this phenomenon, she turned out the lights and held up a beaker of water containing some specimens.

  When she shook the beaker and it transformed into a swirl of magical blue light, Sydney was mesmerized. When the marine biologist further explained that the sample had just been collected from the waters where the Sylvia Earle was anchored, Sydney began planning.

  Still, it was more dream than scheme until the snoring woke her in the middle of the night. Lady Hawthorne and Judy Somersby snored so much and so loudly, she’d nicknamed them Lady Nosehorn and Judy Bumblebee. Normally she wanted to pummel them with their pillows when they disrupted her sleep, but this time she took it as a lucky break. It was almost four o’clock, and she figured she had just enough time to go for a dive and get back on the ship before anyone woke up.

  For thirty minutes the plan worked perfectly as she glided through the water and created a ribbon of light in her wake. The problems that had been nagging at her now seemed distant. And the fact that she was breaking the rules gave her rebel heart a thrill. She was relaxed and exhilarated all at once.

  Then she heard the motor.

  It was much too small to be the engine of the Sylvia Earle, but the high-pitched whine was unmistakable. There was another boat in the water, and judging by the sound, it was moving fast.

  From this depth, it looked like little more than an inkblot flickering above. When it stopped alongside the Sylvia Earle, adrenaline flooded Sydney’s system. She had to get back as quickly as possibly, but she had to be careful. If she moved too fast, it could cause serious health problems that would make the situation worse.

  Halfway to the surface she needed to make a five-minute decompression stop so her body could adjust to the changing water pressure and expel the dissolved gases that had accumulated in her bloodstream.

  While she waited, she heard the engine come to life again and looked up to see that the second boat was now moving around to the back of the Sylvia Earle. She was now close enough to make out the outline and could tell that it was a Zodiac, a high-speed, high-performance inflatable that carried up to a dozen people. The Royal Marines used them for commando raids, although she felt fairly certain there were no Royal Marines on this vessel.

  She checked her dive watch and saw that she had to wait another four minutes, thirteen seconds. Rather than get angry with herself for winding up in this situation, she tried to use the time to develop a strategy. She ran through the plan they’d devised at the start of the mission. It was solid, and although Brooklyn was still new to MI6, she’d already proven that she was an excellent operative. Sydney was confident she’d be able to get Alice and Judy to the hi
ding spot in the stern thruster machine room. That meant the two of them should be safe for the time being.

  What would Mother do? she asked herself.

  Mother was the MI6 agent in charge of their team. He had little sayings he called Motherisms, designed to help them remember the keys to spycraft. She tried to think of a relevant one and came up with Anything that you think is wrong, is something that can make you strong. It was a reminder that she needed to turn negatives into positives, weaknesses into strengths.

  She was out of position, which was a negative. But she was also someplace where nobody would ever suspect her to be, which could be a huge positive. She had the element of surprise on her side.

  Fifteen seconds.

  That’s close enough, she thought as she furiously started kicking her fins and raced to the surface.

  First, she checked to see if there was anyone on board the Zodiac, and once she saw it was clear, she swam over to it and pulled herself up to peek over the gunwale. That’s when she saw the brown wooden box with rope handles and really began to panic.

  “Blimey!” she exclaimed, recognizing it from her training. “This is bad news.”

  The box was a British Army munitions container that held PE4—military-grade plastic explosives. More troubling, the lid was off, and she could see that it was empty. She had to assume the contents had been weaponized and placed somewhere on the Sylvia Earle.

  Staying calm was getting harder to do.

  She looked to see if there was a radio so she could call for help, but all she found was a small yellow walkie-talkie. She turned it on, making sure to keep the volume low. No one spoke at first, but then she heard an exchange.

  “Have you found them?” a voice asked impatiently.

  “No,” came the reluctant answer. “Their cabin’s empty.”

  “And Karl?”

  The was a brief pause before, “No sign of him either.”

  The first speaker made a frustrated noise and barked, “Find them now!”

  Sydney didn’t know who Karl was, but she assumed the other people they were looking for were Alice and Judy, which meant Brooklyn had done her job. That’s my girl, she thought, happy for the news. Now it’s my turn. What do I do? she asked herself as she returned her focus to the explosives. How can I help?

  Another Motherism came to her. When there’s a doubt, just figure it out.

  Figuring it out meant figuring out where the bomb was. She thought she should be able to do that. Not only did she have extensive explosives training, but she’d also studied detailed diagrams of the Sylvia Earle when she and Brooklyn were first given the assignment.

  If I were a villain, where would I put a bomb? she asked herself. The bridge? The engine room? One of the cabins?

  Then she considered the fact that the Zodiac had momentarily stopped alongside the Sylvia Earle They wouldn’t put it on board the ship, she thought with a smile of realization. Someone might find that. They’d attach it to the outside.

  Sydney pulled the diving mask back down over her face and quietly slipped into the water. It was time to work.

  3. 21 Minutes, 13 Seconds

  MAIN DECK–RV SYLVIA EARLE

  EMIL BLIX HAD NEVER KIDNAPPED anyone before, and his lack of experience was beginning to show. It had started off well enough with the storming of the bridge, but since then, things had gone steadily downhill. First, it took much longer than expected to get everybody up to the main deck. Then one of his henchmen disappeared after pleading over the walkie-talkie for something that sounded like “amp-li-dope.” But most importantly, his men couldn’t find the two people he’d come to kidnap.

  “Where are they?” he demanded as he held up photographs of Alice and Judy. He was talking to a dozen girls huddled together on the ship’s marine mammal observation platform. This was where they’d been a day earlier, eyes wide with amazement, watching a pod of orcas swimming off the starboard bow. Now their eyes were filled with fear as Blix paced back and forth in front of them.

  It was just after six, and the early morning air was cold and damp. A fourteen-year-old named Ashlee tried to sound brave as she said, “We don’t know. We were all asleep. Nobody saw them.”

  “One of you must know!” he seethed. He’d taken off his ski mask once their phones had been confiscated, and they could see that his cheeks were flush with anger. “If you don’t tell me, things are going to turn out very bad!”

  This threat had the dual distinction of being both ominous and truthful. The explosive device he’d attached to the hull of the ship was set to go off in twenty-one minutes, thirteen seconds. Emil Blix was running out of time.

  Brooklyn surveyed the scene from a hiding spot behind a metal staircase leading from the main deck up to the pilothouse. She was crouched down low, watching it unfold through the opening between two steps. None of the ship’s crew or scientists were among those on the observation platform, and she assumed that meant the adults were being held somewhere more secure. But Sydney wasn’t with them either.

  Where are you, Syd? she wondered. What are you up to?

  EXTERIOR HULL–RV SYLVIA EARLE

  Sydney’s head was filled with numbers and she was trying to keep them straight. The first was sixty-five. That was the length in meters of the Sylvia Earle. She knew that because she’d learned everything she could about the ship while she was preparing for the mission. Sixty-five meters didn’t seem very long when you were looking at a schematic on a computer screen. After all, one lap in an Olympic-size pool is only fifty. But it sure felt long as she swam alongside the ship looking for an explosive device. Her progress was slowed because she had to check above and below the waterline, contend with the ocean current, and, unlike Olympic swimmers, carry a load of heavy scuba gear designed for safety, not speed.

  The second number was fifty. That’s where the needle pointed on her air pressure gauge. It was marked in red because once you reached it, you were supposed to end your dive. At best, she had about fifteen minutes of air left in her tank, but that was only if she kept her breathing calm and level. As the adrenaline raced through her body, she was undoubtedly taking deeper breaths and depleting what little air she had remaining.

  She located the bomb toward the rear of the ship. It was about a meter below the waterline and attached to the steel hull by a magnetic device known as a “limpet mine.” She’d learned about them at the Royal Navy diving school. One troubling detail she remembered was that they were sometimes set to automatically explode if anyone tried to tamper with them.

  More troubling, though, was the location of the mine. Limpets weren’t designed to blow up ships or sink them like torpedoes. They were meant to disable them. When this one exploded, either by remote detonation or timer, it would blow a hole in the hull, and water would begin rushing in. When the Coast Guard and Navy arrived on the scene, rescuers would be busy evacuating passengers and trying to salvage the ship, giving the intruders extra time to make their getaway.

  But the location of this mine created an additional danger. As Sydney swept the beam of her dive light across the hull, she could see the side thruster used to stabilize the ship. It was just a few meters away. That meant the mine was attached to the outside of the stern thruster machine room.

  If Brooklyn had followed the plan, then Judy and Alice were right in the heart of the blast zone.

  MAIN DECK—RV SYLVIA EARLE

  Brooklyn knew there was a third MI6 agent somewhere on the ship, but she didn’t know who it was. She and Sydney had tried to figure that out during the trip, and after leaning toward one of the scientists for a few days, they’d settled on Hannah Delapp as their prime candidate. Hannah was the second mate, and they suspected her because she was the newest member of the crew, having just joined for this sailing. Her primary job was to watch the bridge on the overnight shift, but during the afternoon, when she should’ve been sleeping, she was often up and about keeping an eye on things.

  “Total spy,” Sydney had declared
knowingly.

  Hannah would’ve been on duty when the ship was seized, which meant the hijackers might have overwhelmed her before she could send a distress signal. Brooklyn had to assume that no one onshore knew they were in danger. As much as she wanted to find Sydney, her top priority was activating the Ship Security Alert System. The SSAS worked like a silent alarm in a bank. If Brooklyn could trigger it, no one would hear anything on board the Sylvia Earle, but warning bells would sound back on the mainland and help would immediately be rushed to their location.

  The problem was that the button for the SSAS was on the bridge, and Brooklyn didn’t know how to get there without being seen by the hijackers. She needed to create a massive diversion to distract them long enough for her to sprint up the stairs and into the room before anyone realized what was happening.

  The best idea she could think of was to activate the giant A-frame crane on the fantail of the ship. It was designed to lift boats and buoys out of the ocean, but maybe she could use it to lure the intruders out of position. If she could just get it to start moving, then the hijackers would have to investigate, and that might buy her all the time she needed. She was trying to figure out how to operate it remotely when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  A very large hand.

  She turned to see that her old friend Mr. Amplidope had managed to break out of the closet in the wet lab. His jaw was swollen, there were red blotches all over his face, and his lips were bloated and purple. Despite this, Brooklyn acted like they were long lost friends.

  “Hey, look at you,” she said with a smile. “You’re recovering nicely. Did you find the antitoxin?”

  He didn’t answer so much as he growled while he put a tight grip on her shoulder and moved her out from behind the stairs. Brooklyn’s mind raced as she tried to come up with anything remotely resembling a plan as he led her over to Blix.