“Anything’s better than nothing.”
Another mortar dropped near the ship, this time missing the port rail by inches. The rebels had them bracketed. The next rounds would fall with impunity all over the Oregon and her decks were not nearly as heavily armored as her flanks.
“Damage control teams, get ready,” Juan said over the shipboard net. “We’re going to take some hits.”
“Holy God,” Hali shouted.
“What?”
“Brace yourselves!”
Juan hit the collision alarm as he saw the wave on both the radar screen in the corner of the big monitor as well as the feed from the stern cameras. The surge stretched from bank to bank. Rearing up more than ten feet and easily traveling at twenty knots, the roiling wall of water bore down on them relentlessly. One of the Swift boats tried to twist away and race ahead of the swell, but was caught midway through its turn. The wave hit the vessel broadside. The patrol craft flipped instantly, tossing men into the maelstrom where they were crushed by the rolling hull of their boat.
Pirogues simply vanished with nothing to mark their passing, and the rebels lining the shore taking potshots at the Oregon fled for high ground as water washed away everything in its path.
Juan took his hands away from the controls a moment before the wave slammed into the Oregon, flexed his fingers like a pianist about to perform an impossible overture, and lightly rested them back on the keys and joystick that would maneuver his ship.
He brought the unclogged drive tube up to twenty percent just as the swell lifted the stern of the Oregon out of the mud. Like being caught in a tsunami the vessel lurched from a dead stop to twenty knots in an instant as a pair of mortar shells exploded in her wake, shots that would have blown through her rear cargo hatches and destroyed the Robinson R44 helicopter stored on a retractable elevator.
Juan scanned engine readouts, pump temperatures, speed over the bottom, speed through the water, and his position and course, his gaze darting from one screen to the next in an unending cycle. The ship was actually making only three knots through the water but was racing down the river at closer to twenty-five, borne onward by the tremendous pressure of water escaping over the Inga Dam.
“Max, tell me the instant that second tube clears,” he called out. “I don’t have enough steerage speed.”
He edged the throttle higher, fighting the current as it tried to slam the Oregon into an island that had reared up in the middle of the channel. His fingers danced over his keyboard. He called up the bow and stern thrusters as needed to keep the ship straight and more or less centered as the dark jungle blurred passed.
They careened around a tight bend in the river, the flow pushing them hard for the opposite shore, where a small cargo ship that had been headed upriver had been pushed into the riverbank, its stern thrust far out into the Congo. Juan slammed on full power to the thrusters, laterally shoving the Oregon as far to starboard as he could. The hull scraped against the coastal freighter with an ear-splitting shriek and then they were clear.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” Eric quipped even though he was awed by Juan’s handling of the vessel. He knew he wouldn’t have made the turn and avoided the ship.
With the river boiling all around them they were swept further downstream, carried along like a leaf in a gutter, barely able to control their course until Juan could eke more power out of her engines. Time and again he had to fight the river to keep the Oregon from grounding or plowing into the riverbank, each escape seemingly closer than the last. They did hit a shoal at one point, the ship decelerating hard as it gouged a furrow through the muddy riverbed. For a moment, Juan feared the freighter would grind to a halt again because the computer had shut off the pulse jet, but the current was strong enough to drag them over, and as soon as the bottom was free the ship picked up speed like a sprinter out of the blocks.
Despite the danger, or maybe because of it, Cabrillo found he was enjoying the challenge. It was a test of his skills and the capabilities of his ship against the vagaries of the raging flood—the epic struggle of man versus nature. He was the type of man who never backed away from anything because he knew his limitations and had yet to meet a situation he didn’t think he could handle. In others this trait would come off as cockiness. In Juan Cabrillo it was simply supreme confidence.
“Scouring action has cleared the second tube,” Max announced. “Just be gentle on her until I get a team into it to check for damage.”
Juan dialed up the second tube and immediately felt his ship respond. She was no longer sluggish coming about and he had to use the thrusters less and less. He checked their speed—twenty-eight knots over the bottom and eight through the water. He had more than enough speed to control the freighter, and now that they’d covered several miles the once-turbulent flow had started to even out. Colonel Abala’s forces were either dead on the river or left far behind and the two choppers he’d stolen had peeled off soon after the wave hit.
“Eric, I think you can take her from here on down to Boma.”
“Aye, Chairman,” Stone replied. “I have the helm.”
Juan sat back in his chair. Max Hanley placed a hand on his shoulder. “Hell of a piece of driving if I say so myself.”
“Thanks. Don’t think I want to do that again anytime soon.”
“I’d love to say we’re out of the woods, but we aren’t. Battery charge is down to thirty percent. Even with the current at our backs we’re going to run out of juice a good ten miles from the sea.”
“Do you have any faith in me at all?” Juan asked, pained. “Weren’t you here when Eric said mean high tide is in…” Juan checked his watch. “An hour and a half? Ocean’s going to run fifteen or twenty miles inland and turn the Congo brackish. Might be like running regular gasoline in a race car engine but there’s enough salinity to spool up the magnetohydrodynamics.”
Max cursed. “Why didn’t I think about that?”
“For the same reason I get paid more than you. I’m smarter, more clever by half, and much better looking.”
“And you wear your humility like a well-tailored suit.” Max then turned serious. “Soon as we get to Boma I’ll get some of my engineers into the tubes, but from what I could tell from the computer I think they’re okay. May not be at hundred percent, but my gut tells me they don’t need to be re-lined.”
Though he carried the title of president within the Corporation and was tasked with a lot of the day-to-day affairs of running a successful company, Max most enjoyed his role as the Oregon’s chief engineer, and her state-of-the-art engines were his pride and joy.
“Thank God.” Replacing the lining of the drive tubes was a multimillion-dollar job. “But I don’t want to be in Boma any longer than necessary. Once we pick up Linc and Eddie I want us in international waters just in case Minister Isaka can’t keep the heat off us for opening their dam,” Juan said.
“Good thinking. We can check the tubes in the open ocean about as easily as tied to a dock.”
“Anything else from the damage reports you’ve gotten?”
“Other than a broken X-ray machine down in medical and Maurice squawking about a whole lot of broken dishes and glassware, we came through okay.” Maurice was the Oregon’s chief steward, the only member of the crew older than Max. Better suited to the Victorian age, Maurice was also the only non-American aboard. He’d served in the British Navy, overseeing the mess on a number of flagships before being cashiered out because of his age. In his year with the Corporation he’d quickly become a crew favorite, throwing the perfect parties for everyone’s birthdays and knowing which delicacies they preferred from the ship’s highly trained cooking staff.
“Tell him to go easy on what he orders this time. When we lost all those dishes racing to save Eddie a few months back Maurice replaced them with Royal Doulton to the tune of six hundred dollars a place setting.”
Max arched an eyebrow. “Quibbling over a few pennies?”
“We lost forty
-five thousand dollars’ worth of finger bowls and sorbet cups.”
“Okay, a couple of dimes, then. You forget that I’ve seen our latest balance sheets—we can afford it.”
Which was true. The Corporation had never been in better financial shape. Juan’s gamble at forming his own private security and surveillance outfit had surpassed even his most optimistic estimates, but that also meant there was a downside. The need for such organizations in the post–Cold War world was a sobering fact of life in the twenty-first century. He’d known that without the polarizing effects of two dominant superpowers, regional flare-ups and terrorism would proliferate all over the globe. Being in a position to make a profit from conflicts, provided they had a say in which side they chose to help, was both a blessing and a curse that wracked Cabrillo in the sleepless hours of the night.
“Blame my grandmother,” Juan said. “She could stretch a dollar for a mile and have change left over. I used to hate going to her house because she always bought stale bread to save a couple of cents. She’d toast it, but you could tell, and toasted bologna sandwiches are about as disgusting as you can get.”
“Okay, to honor your grandmother, I’ll tell Maurice to stick with Limoges this time,” Max said, and sauntered back to his station.
Hali Kasim approached Juan carrying a flatscreen clipboard. A frown turned down the corners of his mouth and made his gunslinger mustache droop.
“Chairman, the Sniffer caught this a couple minutes ago.” The Sniffer was their name for the dedicated surveillance array that swept the electronic spectrum for miles around the ship. It was able to siphon in everything from regular radio broadcasts to encrypted cell phones. The ship’s supercomputer sifted through the minutia every half second, trying to detect a grain of intelligence wheat in all that chaff. “Computer just broke the code. I’d call it high-end civilian or mid-level military encryption.”
“What’s the source?” Juan asked, taking the glowing clipboard from his communications expert.
“Satellite phone broadcasting from forty thousand feet.”
“That means either a military aircraft or an executive plane,” Juan said. “Commercial jetliners rarely fly above thirty-eight thousand.”
“That’s what I think, too. Sorry, we caught just the beginning of the conversation. Sniffer went down the same time as the radar and by the time it was back up the plane was out of range.”
Juan read the single line aloud. “…not quite so soon. We’ll have Merrick at the Devil’s Oasis by four A.M.” He read it again silently and looked at Hali, his face a mask. “Doesn’t mean much to me.”
“I don’t know what the Devil’s Oasis is, but when you were on the dock unloading the weapons Sky News broke the story that Geoffrey Merrick was kidnapped along with an associate from his company’s headquarters in Geneva. Working backward given the information provided by the wire services, a fast executive jet would put Merrick and his kidnappers right over our heads at the time we intercepted this call.”
“I assume we’re talking about the same Geoffrey Merrick who runs Merrick/Singer?” Cabrillo asked.
“The billionaire whose inventions in the field of clean coal have opened up a world of possibilities for the industry and made him one of the most hated men on the planet by environmental groups because they still think coal’s too dirty.”
“Any ransom demands yet?”
“Nothing on the news.”
Juan made his decision quickly. “Get Murph and Linda Ross working on this.” With her background in Naval Intelligence, Ross was the perfect choice to spearhead the research and Murph was the best at finding obscure patterns in an avalanche of information. “Tell them I want to know exactly what’s going on. Who took Merrick? Who’s in charge of the investigation? What and where is the Devil’s Oasis? The works. Plus background on Merrick/Singer.”
“What’s our interest in him?”
“Altruism,” Cabrillo said with a piratical smirk.
“Nothing to do with the fact he’s a billionaire, huh?”
“I’m shocked you’d think that of me,” Juan said with convincing indignation. “His wealth never left my mind—I mean, entered it.”
6
JUAN Cabrillo sat behind his desk, his feet propped up on the inlaid wood, as he read Eddie’s and Linc’s after-action reports off his tablet PC. Despite what had to have been a hair-raising series of events, both men made the material dull, exhorting their partner’s contribution to the mission over their own and downplaying the dangers until it almost read like stereo instructions. He jotted a couple of notes using a light pen and sent the electronic reports to the computer’s archive.
He then checked the weather services. The ninth major Atlantic storm of the year was forming to their north and while it wasn’t a threat to the Oregon, he was interested because so far three storms had become hurricanes and the season was only a month old. Forecasters were predicting that this year would rival or even top the number of named storms that slammed the United States in 2005, destroying New Orleans and severely damaging Texas’s Gulf Coast. The experts claimed that this was part of a normal cycle of hurricane severity and frequency; however, environmental groups were clamoring that the superstorms were the result of global warming. Juan put his stock with the forecasters, but the trend was troubling.
The weather along Africa’s southwestern coast looked clear for at least the next five days.
Unlike his disheveled appearance playing at a greedy officer aboard a tramp steamer the night before, the morning found Cabrillo freshly showered and wearing a pair of English-cut blue jeans, a Turnbull and Asser shirt open at the throat, and a pair of deck shoes without socks. Because people would see his ankles, he had donned a prosthetic right leg covered in flesh-toned rubber, rather than one of his more mechanical-looking limbs. He kept his hair short, just longer than a crew cut, and despite his Latino name and heritage, his hair was bleached almost white by a California upbringing spent mostly in the sun and surf.
The armored porthole covers had been lowered so his cabin was bathed in natural light. The teak wainscoting, floors, and coffered ceiling gleamed with a fresh coat of polish. From his desk he could see through to his bedroom, which was dominated by a massive hand-carved four-poster, and beyond to the head, with its Mexican tile shower stall and copper Jacuzzi tub and sink basin. The rooms had the masculine smell of Juan’s aftershave and the occasional La Troya Universales Cuban cigars he enjoyed.
The décor was simple and elegant, and showed Juan’s eclectic tastes. On one wall was a painting of the Oregon plowing through an angry sea while another had glass-fronted shelves for some of the curios he had picked up from his travels, a clay figurine of an Egyptian ushabti, a stone bowl from the Aztec Empire, a prayer wheel from Tibet, a piece of scrimshaw, a Ghurka knife, a doll made of seal fur from Greenland, a piece of raw emerald from Columbia, and dozens of other items. The furniture was mostly dark and the lighting was discreet and recessed, while the throw rugs on the floor were silk Persians in bright colors.
The one telling thing in the room was the lack of photographs. Where most men at sea had pictures of their wives and children, there were no such snapshots in Juan’s cabin. He had been married, but her fatal drunk driving accident eleven years ago was a pain Juan had tucked deep inside and refused to acknowledge.
He took a sip of rich Kona coffee, noted the service set, and smiled.
Two of the things that enabled him to recruit and keep some of the best from America’s armed forces and intelligence services were he paid well and spared no expense on his crew, be it pricey china in the mess hall and Le Cordon Bleu–trained chefs in the galley or the decorating allowance he gave each new team member to redo their private cabins. Mark Murphy had used up most of his budget on a sound system that could shake barnacles off the hull. Linda Ross had engaged a New York City decorator in her cabin, while Linc’s was as Spartan as a Navy barracks—the money instead going toward the Harley-Davidson he kept in the
hold.
The Oregon sported a large fitness facility with saunas, and when not on an assignment one of her ballast wants could be half filled and turned into an Olympic-length swimming pool. The men and women of the Corporation lived well, but as exemplified in this most recent mission, they also lived dangerously. Every member of the crew was a stockholder and while the officers enjoyed the lion’s share of the profits, Juan’s favorite task at the end of an operation was signing bonus checks for the technicians and auxiliary personnel. That would total some $500,000 for the job they’d just pulled off.
He was just about to start typing his report to Langston Overholt, his old friend at the CIA who brought the Corporation a great deal of business, when someone knocked on his door.
“Come.”
Linda Ross and Mark Murphy stepped into his cabin. Where Linda was perky and petite, Murph was gangly and awkward with shaggy dark hair, a goatee that a single swipe with a razor would erase, and a habit of wearing nothing but black. One of the few on the ship without a military background, Mark was a certified genius who had earned his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty. He’d gone into R&D for a defense contractor where he’d met Eric Stone, who was in the Navy then, but a short-timer with a contract to come and work for Juan. Eric had convinced Cabrillo that the young weapons expert would be a perfect fit for the Corporation, and in the three years since, and despite Murph’s taste for punk music and how he would turn the ship’s deck into a skateboard park, Juan couldn’t have agreed more.
Cabrillo glanced at the antique chronograph across from his desk. “Either you two completely struck out or you hit a home run to get back to me this quickly.”
“Let’s say we’re on third,” Murph said, adjusting the bundle of papers in his arms. “And for the record I don’t like sports metaphors because I don’t get them half the time.”
“So this was a slam dunk more than a Hail Mary.” Juan grinned.
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