“Okay, then let’s rock and roll. Oregon, we’re ready.”
“We’re good to go here,” he heard Mike Trono say over the tactical net.
Max’s reply was letting Mark Murphy unleash a torrent of shells from the Gatling gun. The water and oil soup ten yards off the causeway exploded in a line that extended its entire length. It was as though the ocean had reared up in a continuous wall. The rebels cowered at the sight and sound as they were doused with filthy spray. A soldier stationed on the causeway broke cover to run back to the floating dock.
With the Gatling’s scream overriding the sound of their shots, Linc and Ski got to work, firing as fast as they could. One shot equaled one kill. Every time. After firing five rounds they could see confused soldiers start to look around as their leaders dropped. The two snipers backed away from the edge and shifted further aft. When Linc looked through his scope again he could see Abala screaming at his men. By the fear Link could see written in the faces of Abala’s troops his rants were having little success. In the distance, Mike and his team were cautiously coming down the causeway.
Again, he and Ski found their targets and again the rebel leadership was decimated. A soldier finally realized the shots were coming from above and behind them and looked up at the tanker. The guerilla was about to shout a warning to his comrades but got no further than opening his mouth before Ski dropped him with one of his Barrett’s half-inch slugs.
“Mike, you’re about eighty feet from the first ambush,” Tiny Gunderson said over the radio.
“What are they doing? My Softscreen’s down again.”
“If I were a betting man I’d say talking about giving up. No, wait, my mistake. I think one’s trying to rally them. No, wait again. He’s down. Nice shot, Ski.”
“That was me,” Linc said.
“And courage has left the building,” Tiny crowed. “They’ve dropped their weapons and are reaching for the sky.”
That first sign of capitulation broke the dam for the rest. All along the causeway and on the loading dock men were laying down their arms. Only Abala seemed interested in fighting on. He waved his pistol like a madman. Linc watched him level it at a young guerrilla, screaming at him, presumably, to pick up his AK-47. He shot off half of Abala’s foot before the colonel could murder the unarmed man.
Trono’s team swept through the defeated rebels, tossing their captured AKs into a pile and patting down each man for additional weapons.
Linc and Ski remained in their sniper nest, making sure there were no holdouts until the entire area had been secured.
“That’s the last of them,” Mike announced. He was standing over Colonel Abala, who was on the dock writhing in pain. “Who missed on this guy?”
“That was no miss, son,” Linc said. “Once he gets out of the hospital that’s the cat that’s going to lay this whole thing on Makambo and Singer.”
It took ten minutes for Linc and Ski to get down to the dock. Linc approached Abala and squatted next to him. The rebel colonel was nearly in shock and didn’t acknowledge his presence, so Linc lightly slapped his face until he looked over. Spittle bubbled from Abala’s lips and he had a deathly pallor under his dark skin.
“Remember me, numb nuts?” Linc asked. Abala’s eyes went wide. “That’s right. Congo River, about a week or so ago. You thought you could double-cross us. Well, this is what happens.” Linc leaned close. “Never, and I mean never, mess with the Corporation.”
WHEN the Angolan army finally arrived at the Petromax terminal, the Oregon—with her equipment, her crew, and all of Moses Ndeble’s men, alive or dead—was well over the horizon.
The Angolan forces found that the oil flowing to the loading pier had been shut off and crews had capped the two offshore wells. They also discovered eighty-six corpses laid out next to an administrative building and over four hundred frightened men roped together and locked inside, many of them wounded. One of them, who had a bloody bandage wrapped around his truncated foot, had a sign draped over his neck that read:
MY NAME IS RAIF ABALA. I AM A COLONEL IN SAMUEL MAKAMBO’S CONGOLESE ARMY OF REVOLUTION AND WAS HIRED TO PERPETRATE THIS ACT OF TERRORISM BY DANIEL SINGER, FORMERLY OF MERRICK/SINGER. I UNDERSTAND THAT IF I DO NOT COOPERATE THE PEOPLE WHO STOPPED US TODAY WILL FIND ME.
HAVE A NICE DAY.
29
THE shabby appearance of the Oregon was expertly applied camouflage to make her look neglected, but the dilapidation of the Gulf of Sidra was the real thing. For twenty years she’d tracked back and forth across the Mediterranean carrying her loads of oil while her owners eked every penny of profit they could. If something broke it was replaced with a used part, hastily repaired with duct tape and bailing wire, or discarded altogether. When her sewage treatment plant went down it was bypassed and repiped to dump directly into the sea. Her air-conditioning system merely moved hot air around the superstructure rather than cooled it. And with the galley’s walk-in cooler not working, the chefs had to balance taking food out of the freezer and letting it thaw but not spoil.
Her black hull was streaked with rust while bare metal showed on her superstructure, and her single funnel was so streaked with exhaust that it was impossible to tell it had once been painted green and yellow. The only modern piece of equipment aboard her was the new escape pod hanging over her stern, put there at the insistence of her captain once he learned where they were sailing.
With a beam of a hundred and twenty feet and the length of three football fields, the Gulf of Sidra was a huge ship, though small in comparison to the 350,000-ton tanker that had been berthed at the Petromax terminal. Her outdated design left her seven holds capable of carrying only 104,000 tons of crude.
Though she had become a fixture lying at anchor outside the Mauritanian port of Nouakchott, a hazy silhouette against the western horizon that had been there for weeks, her departure went largely ignored. She’d steamed from the city as soon as Daniel Singer had arrived from Angola and had put more than two hundred miles between herself and the coast.
She was chasing a tropical depression moving across the Atlantic that had the potential to build into a hurricane. It was the storm Singer had been waiting for, the perfect conditions to test what the world’s brightest meteorological minds and the most sophisticated computer models said would happen.
With the temperature in his cabin hovering above a hundred degrees, Singer had taken to spending as much time as he could on the wing bridge, where at least the ship’s seventeen-knot speed created a breeze.
He’d just gotten word over the BBC wireless service that Samuel Makambo’s attack had been foiled by Angolan troops. Nearly a hundred guerillas had been killed in the swift counterattack and four hundred captured. Singer wondered briefly if Colonel Abala, the only rebel who could identify him, was among the living or the dead and decided it didn’t matter. If he was linked to the assault the publicity of a court appearance would only spread the word. He’d hire the flashiest lawyers he could find and get his case shifted to the World Court in The Hague. There he would use the opportunity to put humanity’s treatment of the earth on trial.
What truly bothered him about the failed attack was that estimates put the amount of oil spilled at about twelve thousand tons. Though an environmental catastrophe, it was far short of the million tons he’d been planning on. There would be no cloud of benzene arsonic acid lacing the storm and spreading its poison across the southeastern United States. It would be a punishing storm, the worst hurricane to hit America in recorded history, but without the noxious contamination he feared it wouldn’t touch off the panic he’d expected.
He knew he would have to contact the media and explain once the storm was over—or better yet, when it was about to make landfall—how a chance battle in a remote part of the world had prevented a catastrophe. It would be one more example of how interconnected the earth was, how we were leaving our future to the vagaries of chance.
Adonis Cassedine, the ship’s master, stepped out from the
bridge. Unlike his handsome mythological namesake, Cassedine was a sour-looking man with an unshaven face and rodent-sharp eyes. His nose was askew from being poorly set after a break, so the smudged glasses he wore tilted off one of his cauliflower ears.
“I just got a report from a container ship a hundred miles in front of us.” Sunset was still hours away and already his breath smelled of the cheap gin he swilled. To his credit, however, he didn’t slur his words and his body only swayed a little. “They are encountering Force Four conditions with winds out of the northeast.”
“The storm is forming,” Singer said. “And just where we need it to be. Not too far out that it has settled on its course, but not too close that it could fail to coalesce.”
“I can get you there,” Cassedine said, “but I don’t like it.”
Here we go again. Singer was already angered over Makambo’s failure. He didn’t want to hear another complaint from this washed-up rummy.
“This ship, she is old. Her hull is rotting and what you have in her holds, it’s too hot. It is weakening the metal.”
“And I showed you the engineers’ reports that say the hull can take the thermal load.”
“Bah.” Cassedine dismissed the statement with a wave. “Fancy men in suits who know nothing of the sea. You want to take us into a hurricane and I say the ship will break in two when we hit Force Six.”
Singer moved closer to the captain, using his superior height to intimidate the Greek. “Listen to me, you damned lush. I am paying you more money than you’ve seen in your lifetime, enough to keep you in a bottle for decades. For that I expect you to do your job and stop bothering me with your predictions, your concerns, or your opinions. Do I make myself clear?”
“I am just saying—”
“Nothing!” Singer roared. “You are saying nothing. Now get out of my face before your breath makes me sick.”
Singer kept glaring at Cassedine until the captain backed off, as he knew he would. Singer believed most alcoholics were weak, and this one was no different. He was so far gone he would do just about anything he was told in order to keep up a constant state of inebriation. He felt no qualms exploiting such weakness, just like he’d felt no qualms exploiting the naïveté of Nina Visser’s eco-crusaders or Samuel Makambo’s greed. If that was what it took to make people stand up and notice the destruction they were doing to their planet, so be it. Hadn’t Geoffrey Merrick exploited Singer’s own genius to create their invention? Singer had done the lion’s share of the work while Merrick had taken the credit.
All along everyone believed Singer preferred to stay out of the limelight and in the background. What a load of junk. What person wouldn’t like to receive the praise of their peers, the accolades, the awards? Singer had wanted all that, too, but it was as if the media only saw one half of Merrick/Singer, the telegenic half, the half with the easy smile and the charming anecdotes. It wasn’t Singer’s fault that he froze at the lectern and looked like a cadaver on TV or came across as an idiot savant in an interview. He’d been given no choice but a shadow existence—only it was under Merrick’s shadow he’d had to live.
Again he cursed that his former partner wasn’t here, denying him the opportunity to lord it over him. He wanted to look Merrick in the eye and scream, “It’s your fault! You let the polluters keep destroying the environment and now you are going to see the consequences.”
He spat over the Gulf of Sidra’s side, watching his saliva fall until it became part of the ocean, a drop in the biggest bucket in the world. Singer had been like that once, a small piece of something so much larger than himself it was impossible to believe he could make a difference.
He would be insignificant no longer.
CABRILLO’S first order when he returned to the Oregon was to send her charging northward, to where Africa bulged into the Atlantic and where the hot winds blowing off the Sahara eventually evaporated enough water to spawn hurricanes. He didn’t return to his cabin until he’d overseen the refitting of his ship. The Liberty’s hull was scrubbed and her tanks refueled and she was back on her davit. The two submersibles had had their coating of oil scoured off with solvents and brooms, their batteries recharged, and all the equipment that had been removed put back. The Gatlings, 40 mm, and .30 calibers had all been checked over, their barrels and receivers cleaned and their ammo bins refilled. Armorers were repacking the AK-47s given to Moses’ men and tagging the almost five hundred guns they had taken back from Makambo’s forces. Juan hadn’t forgotten the bounty Lang Overholt had put on those weapons’ return.
But as busy as he’d been, he couldn’t come close to the work Dr. Julia Huxley and her team were performing in medical. They had twenty-three patients to look after, a total of thirty-one bullets to remove, and enough organs and limbs to put back together it seemed she’d never leave surgery. The instant she stripped off one pair of bloody rubber gloves an orderly snapped on a fresh pair for her to tackle the next injured man. At one point her anesthesiologist quipped he’d passed more gas than a judge at a chili contest.
But after fifteen straight hours of work, she sewed closed a bullet graze on Mike Trono’s shoulder, a wound he didn’t even remember receiving, and knew there were no more. When Mike had hopped off the table Julia had rolled onto it with a theatrical groan.
“Come on, Hux,” Mike teased. “Getting the injuries is a lot tougher than fixing them.”
She didn’t open her eyes when she replied, “First of all, that little scratch you got doesn’t even qualify as an injury. The cat I used to have clawed me worse than that. Second, if you don’t appreciate my work I’ll be more than happy to pull the stitches and let you bleed a while longer.”
“Tsk, tsk, what about your Hippocratic oath?”
“I had my fingers crossed when I took it.”
He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, Doc. Thanks.”
No sooner had Mike left the OR than a shadow blocked the lights hanging over the table. Julia levered open her eyes to see the chairman looming over her. By the grim look on his face she saw he knew.
“I want to see her.”
Julia got off the table and led Cabrillo through to another part of the medical bay, a small chilled room with a single table in the center. Four stainless-steel drawers were built into one wall. Without saying anything, she slid open one of them to reveal a nude body enclosed in an opaque plastic bag. Juan tore the plastic covering the head and stepped back to study the pale gray face of Susan Donleavy.
“How’d she do it?”
“It was a nasty way to die,” Julia said, ten times more exhausted now than she’d been a moment earlier. “She stuck out her tongue as far as she could and let herself fall forward. Her chin slammed the deck and her teeth severed her tongue. She then rolled over and basically drowned in her own blood. I can’t imagine what it takes to fall like that and not try to stop it with your hands.”
“She was cuffed.”
“She could have turned her head at the last second.” Julia looked at the body sadly. “For all we know maybe she did it again and again until she got her courage up for a final attempt.”
Cabrillo didn’t say anything for a moment. He was remembering the boat chase in Sandwich Bay after he and Sloane had found Papa Heinrick murdered. The driver he’d been following had intentionally crashed his boat into the shore rather than risk capture. He had thought maybe it was out of fear, that he didn’t want to face an African prison, but the truth was the guy had sacrificed himself for the cause. Just like Susan Donleavy.
“No,” he said with certainty. “She did it right the first time.”
“You’ve reviewed the security tapes from her cell?”
He turned to face her. “Don’t need to. I know the type.”
“Fanatic.”
“Yup. Biting off the tongue was an acceptable alternative to hara-kiri for captured Japanese soldiers during World War Two.”
“I’m sorry, Juan. Scuttlebutt around the ship is that she migh
t have known some more useful information.”
“She did.” He looked at Julia. “And I think Geoff Merrick knows it, too. I need you to wake him.”
“Forget it. His blood pressure’s still too low. I’ve barely checked his wound for fragments and am only now getting his infection under control. I admit his coma’s much shallower, but his body’s refusing to come around.”
“Julia, I don’t have a choice. Singer ordered the raid this morning at a specific time because he’s got something else planned. He kidnapped Merrick because he wanted him to see what it was. When Linda interviewed Susan she said that Singer spent a few hours at the Devil’s Oasis talking with Merrick. I am willing to bet he spilled the whole thing then.”
“Are you willing to bet his life?”
“Yes,” Juan said without hesitation. “Whatever Singer’s up to is likely to involve a hurricane. I think he’s devised a way to shape them somehow. Do you need me to lay out what that means? You took leave to volunteer in New Orleans after Katrina.”
“I was born there.”
“We can stop another city from suffering the same fate. Julia, you have full autonomy over medical decisions on this ship but only because I say you do. If you would prefer me to give you an order, I will.”
She hesitated, then said, “I’ll do it.
Juan knew he should ask Linda to conduct the interview, it was her area of expertise, but he wasn’t extracting information from a reluctant captive, only talking to a half-conscious victim. “Let’s go.”
Hux grabbed some supplies from the OR and led Cabrillo through to the recovery rooms. Where once Geoffrey Merrick had a room to himself, he now shared the space with three wounded Africans. His sunburned face was covered in gel to help his skin heal, but beneath it Juan could see the scientist remained pale. After checking his vital signs Julia injected a stimulant into his IV drip.
Merrick came around slowly. At first his eyes remained closed and the only sign of movement was his tongue attempting to lick his dry lips. Julia moistened them with a wet cloth. Then his eyes fluttered and opened. His looked from Julia to Juan and back to the doctor again, obviously disorientated.
Skeleton Coast Page 38
