“Put him through,” Cabrillo ordered.
“Captain Cabrillo, consider this your final warning,” Commander Martin said. Juan could hear through the clipped speech that the officer’s teeth were clenched. “If you do not stop immediately, I will order the circling Vikings to open fire on your ship.”
Cabrillo didn’t doubt Martin’s sincerity. But he was also tired of dealing with the man. “Commander, an Iranian submarine just took a potshot at a fully loaded supertanker. I’m not going to wait around for them to come after us. I will be clear of your interdiction sphere before you arrive and there isn’t much you can do about it.”
“You will—” Martin’s voice suddenly cut out. He came back on the line thirty seconds later. Juan couldn’t quite place the new tone in his voice. Awe? Fear? Respect? Some combination of all three? “Captain, you are free to leave the area at your own discretion.”
Cabrillo wondered who Langston had gotten to make the call. It had to be the commander in chief for Naval Operations for the Indian Ocean or one of the Joint Chiefs. Whoever it was, it was nice to have some pull in Washington.
“I thought you’d see it our way. Thank you and good luck. By the way, the Iranian Kilo’s taking on water, so if you want a look inside her I suggest you hurry. Oregon out.”
A meaty hand appeared under Juan’s chin. He pulled his wallet from his pant pocket and slapped a twenty-dollar bill into Max’s palm.
Max sniffed the money as though it was a fine cigar. “Like taking candy from a baby.”
“Doesn’t surprise me you know what that feels like.” Cabrillo stood. “Nothing like a little naval battle before breakfast to make you hungry. Navigator, what’s our ETA at the rendezvous site?”
“Not until midnight,” Eric replied.
“Okay, I’ll want senior staff on watch, so shuffle your schedules as needed. I have to go call Langston, thank him for his help, and then explain why we’re only delivering one rocket torpedo.” As he made to leave the Op Center, he grabbed the twenty from Max’s hand. “For costing us that second torpedo, you still owe the Corporation four million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty bucks.”
CHAPTER 6
THE SALT TANG OF SEAWATER STRUCK DR. JULIA Huxley as soon as she opened the door to the ballast tank that doubled as a swimming pool. Because of the way the Oregon was configured, it was more of an Olympic-length lap pool, measuring one hundred and sixty-four feet long, but it was only two lanes wide, and flanked by a narrow catwalk tiled in pale marble that was striped with nonskid adhesive tape. The lighting was a mix of fluorescent and incandescent bulbs that gave the illusion of sunshine. The walls were of matching tile, and were a constant source of concern for the cleaning crews, because when the tank was filled to ballast down the ship the glossy marble was inevitably smeared with algae.
Though not much of a swimmer herself, Hux knew the four basic strokes. Freestyle was the speed stroke, breast was for endurance, the backstroke was a quirk of the body’s buoyancy in motion, and the butterfly was the power stroke. It took an incredible amount of strength for a swimmer to haul his arms and upper torso completely out of the water, arch to launch himself forward, and pull himself through the water. She paused at the head of the pool to watch the lone swimmer flying down his lane doing the butterfly. He moved as if he were born to swim, with long, fluid movements, and not a bit of energy wasted, his body sawing up and down like a porpoise, as his arms broke free, with barely a splash with each stroke.
When she looked closer, she noticed waterproof weight bands clamped around his wrists, to make the workout even more difficult. To her way of thinking, this went beyond exercise and leaned toward masochism. Then again, she hadn’t used the ship’s fitness center for a while and tended toward yoga to keep most of the unwanted pounds off her curvy frame.
She had long gotten over how well Juan had adapted to losing his leg. He never let it stop or even slow him. Like everything else in his life, he took it as a challenge to be conquered.
Cabrillo made a crisp flip turn at the far end of the pool and powered his way toward her, his blue eyes obscured by a pair of goggles, his mouth opening wide for every breath. He must have seen her, and knew his time alone was coming to an end, because he suddenly accelerated, pouring on the power to finish the last part of his swim as though it was a sprint.
As the ship’s doctor, Hux knew everything about the crew’s medical status, and she would have sworn Juan was half his age by the way he swam.
He reached her in a froth of water that spilled onto the landing and forced her back to save the Gucci loafers she was wearing with a pair of khakis and a simple oxford shirt. Over that, Julia sported her ubiquitous lab coat. He slapped the edge of the pool and looked up at the big timer’s clock on the wall behind her.
“Damn, I’m getting old,” he said, and stripped off his goggles and the weights from around both wrists.
“Could have fooled me.” Julia tossed him a towel as he heaved himself from the water in one fluid motion.
“I’ve been down here for thirty minutes,” Juan said, running the thick towel over his body. If he felt self-conscious wearing a Speedo in front of her, it didn’t show, but with his physique there was nothing to be embarrassed about. “Five years ago, I could have done at least fifteen more laps.”
“And five years ago, I didn’t have crow’s-feet. Get over it,” she said with a smile that revealed the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes were laugh lines and not a sign of impending dotage.
“What do they say, ‘youth is wasted on the young’?”
“I have a feeling you didn’t waste much of yours, Juan Cabrillo.”
He chuckled but didn’t deny it. “You aren’t dressed for a swim, so you didn’t come down here to work off that excellent beef Wellington we had for dinner. What gives?”
A look of concern darkened Huxley’s face. “We have a little problem. Well, it’s actually Max’s problem, but I think it should affect all of us.”
Julia wasn’t a trained psychologist, but her medical background and calming demeanor made her the ship’s de facto counselor.
Cabrillo draped the damp towel over his shoulders and gave Hux his undivided attention. “Talk to me.”
“He got a call this evening from his ex-wife.”
Juan interrupted, “There are three to choose from. Which one was it?”
“Lisa. Number two. The one in Los Angeles he had the kids with. He didn’t give me all the details, but his ex thinks their son has been kidnapped.”
Juan didn’t react for a couple of seconds. None of Max’s wives knew what he did for a living. Like most of the crew, Hanley told his family that he was a sailor working for a small shipping company, so Cabrillo didn’t think the abduction could connect back to his work for the Corporation, but he couldn’t discount the idea. They had made a lot of powerful enemies over the years. He finally asked, “Have there been any ransom demands?”
“No, not yet. She thinks she knows who’s behind the kidnapping but has gotten nowhere with the LAPD or FBI. She wants his help getting the kid back.”
Max’s son would be about twenty-two or twenty-three by now, Juan recalled. His daughter was a few years older, a newbie attorney doing environmental law. Kyle Hanley hadn’t lasted a year in college and had been drifting around L.A.’s counterculture scene ever since. He’d been busted a couple of times for minor drug possession, but Juan thought he’d done a stint in rehab two years ago and had remained clean. Though they’d been divorced for a few years before Juan had founded the Corporation, he remembered meeting Max’s second wife on a couple of occasions. Max had assured Cabrillo that she had once been a loving, wonderful woman, but something had changed her into a shrewish paranoid who accused him of infidelity while it was she who was having affairs.
Max had done the best he could with their children’s upbringing, paying far above what the divorce decree called for in terms of alimony and child support. Their daughter
had turned out to be a bright, ambitious woman but their son, Kyle, was one of those people who believed life owed him, and no matter how he was approached he rebuffed any offers to help him find his way.
Juan knew that Max would do anything to help the kid, and he suspected why his second-in-command hadn’t come to him directly with his problem. Had he done so, Juan would have offered the full services of the Corporation to rescue Kyle, and Max would never ask for that kind of favor. “God, he can be stubborn.”
“He said the same about you,” Hux replied. “He wouldn’t even consider coming to you with this because he was sure you’d demand he take your help. He told me in no uncertain terms that this was his problem, not the Corporation’s, and that he’d handle it on his own.”
Cabrillo expected no less, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t frustrated by Hanley’s pigheadedness. “What’s his plan?”
“As soon as we transfer the torpedo, he’s going to ask you to divert the Oregon to Karachi, the nearest city with an international airport where he can catch a flight to Los Angeles. After that, he wasn’t too sure.”
Juan checked his watch. They were due at the rendezvous coordinates in two hours. Once they finished up, they could reach Karachi in about twenty hours. The Corporation’s Gulfstream jet was in Monaco in preparation for their next mission. Although he could get the plane to Pakistan’s largest city in time, he believed flying commercial would be faster. It would mean leaving behind weapons and other contraband that wouldn’t make it through airport security, but he had enough contacts in L.A. to get what they might need so he wasn’t too concerned about that.
He had a mental list of questions, but he would wait to talk to Max directly.
The ship’s onboard computer flipped the lights in the pool area on and off a couple of times. Juan had programmed it to alert him the rendezvous was coming and to finish up his swim. He slipped on a terry robe and a pair of flip-flops. Hux walked with him as they exited the pool. He made certain to securely dog the waterproof hatch. “I’ll talk to him tonight and make sure he sees the error of his ways,” he said.
“That’s why I brought this to you. Max can’t go it alone.” It was clear Julia was relieved, though there wasn’t much doubt Juan would help his best friend.
“Thanks, Hux. One day, Max’s obstinacy is going to get him into trouble, but not this time.”
AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, a freshly showered Juan Cabrillo strode into the Operations Center. Stone and Murphy were in their chairs at the helm and weapons control. Hali sat at the communication’s station, while Linda Ross covered the sonar suite. Unlike during their escape from Bandar Abbas, there was a relaxed feeling in the room. Transferring the remaining rocket torpedo from the Oregon was going to be a relatively straightforward job. When Max entered a few minutes later, the atmosphere seemed to chill by a couple of degrees. He went straight to the engineering console without a word to anyone.
Juan slid out of his chair and approached him.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Hanley said, not looking up from his computer monitor.
“We’ll lay in a course for Pakistan as soon as we’re done, and I’ll get someone on buying us plane tickets. In the morning, you and I are going to sit down together and figure out our next move.” Max glanced up at Cabrillo and was about to protest. Juan held up his hand. “Our next gig is a straightforward eavesdropping job. Linda and Eddie can handle it without us.”
“This isn’t your fight,” Max said.
“Like hell, it isn’t. Someone kidnapped a member of your family. To me, it’s the same as if they’d taken one of my parents. I would expect nothing less than your help, so don’t expect me not to be here for you.”
Max paused a beat before saying, “Thanks, Juan.”
“Don’t mention it.” He returned to the command chair, the matter settled. “Linda, anything yet?”
“Negative, but there’s still twenty minutes to go.”
“Okay. Max, everything set on your end?”
“The torpedo’s up on deck in a sling and a technician is standing by the derrick controls.”
“Hali, anything on radar or over the comm channels?”
“No, sir. We’re in about the deadest spot you can find in the Indian Ocean. I haven’t seen or heard from another ship in about eight hours.”
The rendezvous was to take place far from conventional shipping lanes to avoid detection from freighters and tankers, and, in an area devoid of much sea life, that would attract commercial fishing vessels. The timing of their operation coincided with a gap in satellite coverage, just in case anyone was looking down from above.
Fifteen minutes trickled by before Linda called out, “Contact. I’ve got machinery noises almost directly below us, four hundred feet down. Ballast tanks are being purged.” She washed the noise picked up by the passive sonar through the computer to cross-check the sound with a loop of tape provided by Overholt. “Confirmed. It’s the USS Tallahassee, making for the surface.”
“Very good,” Juan said. “Helm, keep sharp. You dent that sub, you bought it.”
Another few minutes passed as the Los Angeles Class fast-attack submarine climbed up from the depths, rising so slowly that she was dead silent from more than a couple miles away. Eric Stone had split his computer display so he could watch the sonar returns as well as the Oregon’s GPS coordinates, to make certain the sub wouldn’t crash into the underside of the hull. It was the responsibility of the crew aboard the Tallahassee to hold their position stable relative to the freighter. Any corrections would come from Eric’s controls.
“One hundred feet and fifty,” Linda said. “Her ascent is slowing. Slowing. Leveling off at one hundred.”
“She’s holding about two hundred yards off the port beam,” Eric said.
“Slide us over so she’ll surface within fifty yards, please, Mr. Stone.”
Eric punched up the bow and stern thrusters to shove the eleven-thousand-ton ship laterally through the water, placing her exactly on her mark, and reactivated the dynamic positioning system so the computer would hold them steady.
“She’s coming up again. Ten feet per minute.”
“Very good, Sonar. You have the conn.”
“I have the conn,” Linda repeated. Juan got up and went to the elevator in the back of the Op Center, joined a second later by Max. Together, they rode up to the Oregon’s bridge. As soon as the floor hatch opened, they could feel the sultry night air.
The ramshackle bridge was pitch-black, but both men were so familiar with their ship they didn’t need light to make their way aft to a set of stairs that would take them to the main deck. Outside, the stars shone with particular brilliance because the sliver of moon had yet to rise.
Over the port rail, the inky water began to grow agitated as the three-hundred-and-fifty-foot submarine neared the surface. Her conning tower appeared first, and then the vessel seemed to grow as she shed water, fore deck and long aft deck emerging, as well as her stiletto rudder. She came up on an even keel so slowly that there were hardly any waves. She rode low in the water, menacing in her silence, like a sea monster basking on the surface.
Juan had a handheld walkie-talkie and brought it to his lips. “Mr. Stone, ballast us down about fifteen feet. I want our decks to be lined up a little closer.”
Eric acknowledged, and a moment later the pumps that filled the tanks spooled up and the Oregon began to settle deeper in the water.
“Deck crew, get those fenders over the sides.” Juan’s order was met with a frenzy of activity, as men lowered thick rubber bumpers down to just above the waterline. Unlike the old truck tires they used in port partly as disguise, these were modern cushions, and could take a tremendous amount of pressure before failing.
Over on the Tallahassee, part of her deck just fore of her sail began to articulate upward, emitting the faint red glow of battle lights. This was the loading port for the twenty-four Mk 48 ADCAP torpedoes the boat could carry. For this mission, she was
carrying less than a full complement of the Advanced Capability weapons in order to accept the Iranian rocket torpedo, which was sitting on the Oregon’s deck on a wheeled trolley. The cases of captured computer information were secured to the torpedo.
Cabrillo keyed his walkie-talkie again. “Okay, Helm, shove us over using the thrusters, twenty-five percent power.”
“Twenty-five, aye.”
The Oregon began to move toward the waiting submarine, creeping slowly enough to let the water she was pushing dissipate rather than rock the Tallahassee. Several officers watched from the sub’s conning tower, using night vision binoculars.
“Ease off, Mr. Stone,” Juan ordered, judging distance and speed with an expert eye. The ships were less than twenty feet apart. “Very good, now, ten percent opposite side.”
Water frothed at the thruster ports as Eric used them to stop the ship with only ten feet separating them from the submarine.
“Hold us here, if you please,” Juan said over the scrambled channel.
“Nice piece of ship handling,” a voice boomed from the Tallahassee’s conning tower.
“Thank you,” Juan called back. “Are you ready to receive the package?”
“I was led to believe there were two packages,” the sub’s captain shouted.
“Slight change of plans, following a dustup this morning in the Sea of Oman.”
“How’d it work?”
“Believe it or not, flawlessly.”
“Very well. We’re ready. Our satellite window closes in four minutes forty seconds.”
Juan turned to the technician waiting next to the derrick controls. Though the crane looked like it was ready to topple at any moment, it was rated to lift seventy tons. Slack was taken up, and the sling cradling the rocket torpedo rose off the deck. Other men were standing by with guide ropes to prevent the weapon from spinning as it was lifted clear of the railing. The long boom rotated on its axis to swing out over the waiting submarine, where sailors stood by to receive the torpedo.
One of the sailors guided the lift using universal hand gestures, rotating his finger downward to call for more cable as the weapon came down into their waiting hands. They locked it into the boat’s autoloader and unstrapped it from the cradle. The lead sailor spun his hand over his head to indicate the torpedo was free and they could recover the crane. No sooner had it vanished into the hull than the large door began to close.
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