Marauder (The Oregon Files)

by Clive Cussler

When the shock wave had passed, he looked at Bradley and said, “Are you all right?”

  Bradley gave him the OK.

  “Juan, come in,” Max’s worried voice said over the comm system. “Are you still with us?”

  “The Lollipop Guild is alive and well,” Juan said through his helium-soaked voice box. “Heading back to the Emerald City now.”

  He could see the Nomad hovering below an outcropping. As soon as the SDV was alongside, Juan and Bradley would abandon it and enter the Nomad’s air lock for the decompression cycle while Max took them back to safety below the thermocline.

  As they passed the stern of the Kansas City, the hatch of the rear escape trunk opened, and two men in yellow immersion suits swam out. One began the ascent to the surface. The second man pushed the hatch closed behind him before joining his crewmate.

  At the same time, a second ping emanated from the Barosso. They were trying to confirm that they’d destroyed their target.

  * * *

  —

  Using a pair of binoculars, Captain Vega watched the geyser of water finish erupting and waited for his sonar operator to give the all clear.

  He lowered them and turned to the seaman. “Did we get it?”

  “No, sir. The torpedo exploded prematurely. It was hit by the second defensive torpedo. I’m reading a small sub leaving the stern of the Kansas City.”

  He still had an unidentified hostile down there, one that had fired two mini-torpedoes.

  “Prepare to fire torpedo number two,” he ordered.

  “Aye, captain. Torpedo Two ready to fire in all respects.”

  Before he could give the command to launch it, he heard a sailor yell, “Men in the water!”

  It was an officer on the bridge wing. He was pointing in the direction of the Kansas City’s location.

  Vega raised the binoculars and saw two men in yellow bobbing in the water. He recognized the immersion suits worn by submariners in an emergency. Could they be from the Kansas City? Was the phantom sub actually helping them?

  “Stand down the torpedo!” Vega shouted. “Get a rescue boat in the water.”

  Before the boat got out to them, another two men appeared on the surface. Over the next two hours, twenty-six sailors miraculously came up.

  The mystery sub eventually surfaced. Empty. It was identified as the Kansas City’s SEAL Delivery Vehicle. Vega theorized that a crewman somehow made it out of the dry deck shelter and saved his fellow sailors before succumbing to nitrogen narcosis at that depth and exiting the SDV in a stupor. They’d keep searching for his body until the Americans arrived.

  Vega was so busy with the extensive search and recovery effort that he paid little attention to the cargo ship that sailed slowly by two miles away.

  41

  Having completed the decompression in the Nomad’s air lock, Juan gave Lieutenant Bradley some clean overalls, a bottle of water, and one of the sandwiches they’d brought along. After wolfing down the sandwich and draining the bottle, Bradley dozed during the long ride back to the Oregon.

  When they surfaced in the moon pool, Julia Huxley was there to meet them and take Bradley to the infirmary. Once she had treated his injuries, she brought him to the boardroom, where Juan and Max were waiting with a spread of food laid out by Maurice. Bradley came in with a fiberglass cast on his arm.

  “You sure have been keeping me busy,” Julia said as she escorted him into the room. “I’ve delivered so many patched-up patients to you over the last week or so that I feel like I’m in Groundhog Day.”

  “How’s our new friend doing?” Juan asked as Bradley cautiously took a seat.

  “Hairline of the radius and ulna. But they’ve been healing nicely, thanks to the excellent temporary duct tape cast that Lieutenant Bradley made for himself.”

  “What is this ship?” Bradley asked. “Your medical bay is way better than any I’ve seen in base hospitals.”

  “By the way, he’s been asking a lot of questions,” Julia said. “I told him to wait, but he kept pestering me. Now you and Max can answer them.”

  She closed the door, leaving Bradley looking at Juan and Max with a skeptical expression.

  “I imagine this is all pretty disorienting for you,” Juan said.

  “You think?” Bradley shot back. “When can I get back to my unit?”

  “I’m not sure. I think you’d better hear what we have to say first.”

  “I have no idea what’s going on. You rescue twenty-six of the KC’s crew, plus me, but you’re being shot at by the Brazilians? And you’re not with the Navy?”

  “We’re a private organization,” Max said. “But we do most of our work for the U.S. government.”

  “Then why a covert mission to save us?”

  “We’re not exactly in the U.S.’s good graces right now,” Juan said. “They think we’ve been sinking ships.”

  “Have you? Did you sink the KC?”

  “No. A former CIA agent named Zachariah Tate did. Before you went down, did your crew experience any strange behavior?”

  Bradley shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “How did you know that?”

  “He has developed something called a sonic disruptor. We believe it uses sound waves to affect people’s minds. It makes them have terrifying hallucinations and drives them to harm themselves and others.”

  Bradley nodded slowly. “That’s what happened to everyone else on the KC.”

  Juan frowned. “It didn’t happen to you?”

  Bradley shook his head. “I seemed to be the only one who didn’t go crazy.”

  Juan and Max glanced at each other, then Max asked, “Did you have some kind of hearing problem that day?”

  “I had an ear infection. Couldn’t make out anything that people were saying. It finally cleared up a few days ago.”

  “That’s why you were immune,” Juan said. “The same thing happened to our ship, but our crew managed to get away from it . . . You’re sitting in the Oregon, by the way.”

  “Can you tell us if you had any cousins that died recently?” Max asked.

  Bradley narrowed his eyes. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because we think a SEAL aboard your sub was the reason Tate sank her. He had some knowledge that Tate was afraid of.”

  Bradley sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Why should I trust you? You could be working for Tate. You could be Tate, for all I know.”

  “I thought you might be skeptical,” Juan said. “Maybe this will help.” He pressed a button on the tablet in front of him. “Come in, Linc.”

  A few seconds later, Franklin Lincoln opened the door and breezed in. He took a seat next to Bradley, whose eyes lit with recognition.

  “It’s you,” Bradley said with awe. “I mean, Lieutenant Commander Lincoln.”

  Linc grinned at him. “I’m a civilian now, but it’s good to know my rep in the SEALs is as good as ever.”

  “You hold most of the records at the InterService Rifle Championships. The six-hundred-yard mark you set is unbelievable. You’re a legend. They still have your photo up at Coronado.” Coronado, California, on San Diego Bay, was where BUD/S training took place.

  “I’m impressed with what you’ve survived. Living in that decompression chamber for almost two weeks? That took some guts.”

  “Thanks. Man, wait ’til my buddies hear I . . .” Bradley’s voice trailed off, waning from excitement to sadness.

  “I’m sorry about your friends,” Juan said. “But we’re on your side. We want to find out why they died so it won’t be in vain.”

  “Are you going to stop this guy Tate?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Bradley took a breath. “I didn’t have any cousins die recently. But I know someone on the KC who did. Carlos Jiménez. He was my best friend.”

  “Could he
be one of the men who was in the engine room that survived?” Max asked.

  Bradley shook his head. There was a catch in his voice as he spoke. “He went nuts, like everyone else, and attacked me. That’s how I ended up in the DDS. He was in the forward escape trunk when it flooded.”

  “I’m sorry,” Juan said again. “But it’s very important that you tell us anything you can if we’re going to stop Tate from doing something like this to another ship.”

  “Carlos had been pretty upset when we put to sea,” Bradley said. “His mother, who passed away a few years ago, came from Brazil, and he had some cousins from a small town in the eastern Amazon jungle. Carlos had been emailing them and planned to go visit. But they were killed before he could go.”

  “Do you know how they died?”

  “They were gunned down. The police said it was drug dealers, but Carlos didn’t believe them. He thought it was related to something they’d found.”

  “Which was what?” Max asked.

  “It’s going to sound crazy, but they said it was a German U-boat called the Bremen. When they started asking around about it, no one took them seriously until some American guy showed up and pressured them to reveal the location. Carlos’s cousins wouldn’t give up the info. They were scared of him and emailed Carlos about the man’s strong-arm tactics. After our mission, he was going to go down there to look into it with them. But then, just before we set sail, he got word they’d been murdered.”

  Max looked at Juan and said, “That sounds like Tate’s handiwork. But what does he want with a U-boat?”

  “It must be related to the sonic weapon somehow,” Juan said, before turning to Bradley. “Do you know what town these cousins were from?”

  “Somewhere near a tributary of the Amazon River, but I don’t remember the name offhand.”

  Juan sighed with disappointment. They were so close to finding out what Tate was protecting, and now it seemed just out of reach.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Bradley continued. “I can show you exactly where they claimed the U-boat was.”

  Juan leaned forward with renewed hope. “How?”

  Bradley smiled for the first time. “I have a map.”

  42

  THE AMAZON RIVER BASIN

  From the open door of a chartered Agusta six-passenger helicopter, Zachariah Tate watched the jungle pass below, a nearly unbroken expanse of thick green carpet that was slashed only occasionally by one of the muddy brown tributaries of the Amazon. On his headset, he listened to Catherine Ballard recount the latest news about the discovery of the Kansas City. She was sitting across from him next to Farouk, who had his face buried in a laptop.

  “Reports say that it was found by a Brazilian Navy corvette,” she said as she read from her sat-link phone, “and that twenty-six survivors have been transferred to an American Navy destroyer that arrived twenty-four hours later. A massive effort is currently under way by the Navy and the National Underwater and Marine Agency to raise the sub and bring it back to the U.S. NUMA is concerned that the nuclear reactor could contaminate the Brazilian coast if it leaks.”

  “Did they report the names of any of the survivors?” Tate asked.

  Ballard shook her head. “It’s only been a day and a half. They’re still notifying relatives.”

  “Then it’s good we came here. If Jiménez is still alive, it’s only a matter of time before someone comes looking for the Bremen.” He turned to Farouk. “Any sign of it yet?”

  Farouk shrugged without looking up. “It’s a big jungle. If we could ask the people who originally found the U-boat where it was, this would be a lot easier.”

  Tate glared at him. “You think that it was a mistake for me to kill them?”

  Farouk looked up from the computer with alarm. “N-no. I just meant it’s difficult to find it with limited data. You were right to stop them from revealing the U-boat to the world. It could endanger everything we’ve worked for.”

  Tate laughed. “Relax, Farouk. I’m just messing with you. We both thought the Kansas City was a total loss. How could we know some of the sailors would get out two weeks later? Anyway, Jiménez may have died in the wreckage. This search is just for insurance.”

  Farouk smiled weakly. “No problem.” He went back to studying his screen.

  Strapped to the underside of the helicopter was another piece of technology put together by Farouk. It was a LiDAR—a Light Detection and Ranging—imaging system. As the Agusta flew over the jungle, laser beams were being fired downward thousands of times every second. Most of the beams were blocked by the trees, but a good percentage got through to the ground, enough to form a picture of the terrain below by subtracting the tall jungle foliage from the image. It was the same tech archeologists used to map Mayan ruins hidden in Central American rain forests. Farouk’s computer was analyzing the data in real time and creating a map on his laptop. If the distinctive shape of a World War I–era U-boat was within their search grid, it should be easy to spot.

  They had started by scanning all of the tributary banks in the area, but Tate thought the Bremen was unlikely to be found there. It would have been discovered long ago by fishermen cruising along the rivers.

  So now they were searching the jungle’s interior. The U-boat had been abandoned in 1922, and the smaller rivers had shifted course many times in the nearly one hundred years since then. It was very possible that the U-boat had gotten stranded in a cut-off tributary and swiftly overwhelmed by the foliage that raced to cover any bare ground.

  “This is taking forever,” Tate said.

  “We must be methodical,” Farouk said. “Any deviation from the search pattern and we could miss it.”

  “And you’re sure that Horváth didn’t reveal the location of the U-boat in his rants?”

  “I wish he had. This is tedious.”

  Istvan Horváth, the Hungarian scientist who invented the sonic disruptor toward the end of World War I, had emerged from the Amazon jungle in 1922 with wild tales of a German U-boat stuck in the middle of the rain forest. He claimed the Bremen, a sub built to be a blockade-runner, had escaped the war unscathed and used a remote Amazon River outpost as its base to raid ships for four years after hostilities had ended.

  No one had believed him, even though the Bremen had indeed disappeared before the war was over and was never seen again. The problem was that Horváth was certifiably insane, driven mad by sickness and his long trek through the bug-infested jungle. He told his rescuers that a disease struck everyone on the sub and killed them before they could put to sea. He was the only survivor and managed to hike his way down the river to the coast, but his wild-eyed stories were considered too fanciful to be anything other than the ravings of a madman.

  Horváth was sent to an asylum in Budapest, where he spent the rest of his life scribbling on the walls of his cell. It was only decades later when Farouk was conducting his own research in sound weapons that he came across an old photo of Horváth in his cell that was printed in a psychiatry journal. Farouk recognized the equations the scientist had written on the walls as the formulas for developing the sonic disruptor. He and Tate snuck into the still-standing asylum and found that the cell had been repainted long ago, but they recovered a trove of archived photographs from Horváth’s time there. To Tate’s delight, Farouk was able to re-create the Hungarian’s work, and even perfect it.

  Then Brazilian locals stumbled across the U-boat, and Tate knew he needed to protect his investment. Horváth’s plans for the sonic disruptor could still be on board, rendering Tate’s monopoly of the weapon useless. He had to keep anyone else from getting their hands on it.

  “We’re running low on fuel, Commander,” the pilot said. “We need to return to gas up.”

  Tate grimaced and looked at the sun in the western sky. “How long will that take?”

  “Including travel time to the heliport and back? An
hour.”

  Tate turned to Farouk. “Do we have time for another run?”

  “Just barely.”

  “Okay,” Tate said to the pilot. “Take us back.”

  “Li will be waiting for us,” Ballard said. “I just heard from him on the radio.”

  “Did he get the supplies?”

  She nodded, which meant Li had acquired two hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosives. Once they located the Bremen, Tate would make sure no one else found any remnant of the original sonic disruptor or its plans by blowing the entire U-boat to smithereens.

  43

  The Oregon navigated the tangle of forks in the vast Amazon Delta until she reached as far inland as she could without going aground. She dropped anchor in the muddy silt, far from any of the major river ports. When the boat garage door slid up, Juan could smell a mixture of flowers, fungus, and mold, which were all critical to the life cycle of the jungle. He didn’t have any worries that they’d be spotted by curious onlookers. Even this close to the coast, towns and settlements were sparse, and the nearest farms were fifty miles away.

  Since the RHIB was a casualty of Overholt’s rescue in Buenos Aires, they’d have to use two Zodiacs to make it the rest of the way up river. In addition to Eddie, Linc, Raven, MacD, and Murph, Michael Bradley had insisted on coming along. Although the Navy SEAL still had the cast on his arm, Doc Huxley had molded the fiberglass in such a way that it allowed him to grasp objects, so he felt that he was up to partaking in the mission.

  Juan initially denied his request to join them, preferring instead to return the lieutenant home to his unit, but Bradley had refused to leave until he helped them find the Bremen and guarantee that his crewmates hadn’t died for nothing. In exchange for bringing him with them on the jungle expedition, Bradley agreed to share his map, which turned out to be a photo of a drawing Carlos Jiménez’s cousins had sent him. Bradley’s phone had gone down with the KC, but he had backed it up to the Cloud before leaving port, so he could retrieve the picture simply by connecting to the internet.