“Dr. Merrick, my name is Juan Cabrillo. You’re safe now. You were rescued from the people who kidnapped you and are now in the sick bay of my ship.”
Before Merrick could reply, Julia asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Thirsty,” he rasped.
She tipped a glass of water with a straw to his mouth and he took several grateful sips. “How’s your chest?”
He thought about his answer for a moment. “Numb.”
“You were shot,” Juan told him.
“I don’t remember.”
“Susan Donleavy shot you during the rescue.”
“She wasn’t beat up,” Merrick said as a fragment of the memory came back. “I thought they had tortured her, but it was all faked with makeup.”
“Daniel Singer showed up one day when you were being held prisoner. Do you remember that?”
“I think so.”
“He did and you two spoke.”
“Where’s Susan now?” the scientist asked.
“She killed herself, Doctor.” Merrick stared at him. “She did that to prevent us from learning what Singer intends to do.”
“Oil rigs.” Merrick’s voice was fading to a whisper as his body fought the drugs in an attempt to return to unconsciousness.
“That’s right. He planned on attacking oil rigs off the coast of Angola and causing a huge slick. What else was he planning? Did he tell you?”
“You have to stop him. The oil is especially toxic.” His last words were slurred.
“We have,” Juan said. “His assault failed. The slick will be contained.”
“Ship,” he said dreamily.
“There was a ship at the terminal but it wasn’t attacked.”
“No. Singer has a ship.”
“What is he using it for?”
“It was Susan’s discovery. She took it to him. I thought it was only a test, but she had already perfected it.” His eyes closed.
“Perfected what, Geoff? What did Susan perfect? Dr. Merrick?”
“An organic gel that turns water into pudding.”
“Why?” Juan asked desperately, fearing Merrick was slipping away. “What is it used for?”
Merrick said nothing for nearly twenty seconds. “Heat,” he finally whispered. “It gives off a lot of heat.”
And there was the connection Cabrillo had been looking for. Hurricanes need heat and Singer was going to give one a boost. If he released the contents of a vessel laden with Susan Donleavy’s gel into the ocean, probably at the epicenter of a forming storm, the heat would give the weather system a kick start exactly when and where he wanted. That was how he knew when to attack the Petromax terminal. The prevailing winds would carry the oil vapors northward into the hurricane he had helped generate.
Juan knew the seas off Africa’s west coast were the logical place Singer would dump the gel, but the area was vast and there wasn’t enough time to conduct a search. He had to narrow the parameters. “What kind of ship is Singer using?” A tanker was the most likely candidate, but Juan wouldn’t lead the semiconscious man with his suspicions.
Merrick remained mute, his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted. Julia was watching his monitor, and Juan knew the look on her face. She didn’t like what she was seeing.
He shook Merrick’s shoulder. “Geoff, what kind of ship?”
“Juan,” Julia said in a warning tone.
Merrick’s head rolled to face him but he couldn’t open his eyes. “A tanker. He bought an oil tanker.”
The monitor started to wail as his heart rate slowed dangerously. Julia pushed Juan aside, shouting, “He’s crashing! Get the cart in here!” She threw aside the sheet covering his chest as one of her staff raced into the room with a portable defibrillator.
Through it all Merrick managed to open his eyes. They were clouded with pain. He reached out to clutch Cabrillo’s hand, his mouth forming three words he didn’t have the breath to say aloud.
The chirping alarm turned into a continuous tone.
“Clear,” Julia said, the paddles poised over Merrick’s naked torso. Juan took his hand away so Julia could apply the electrical impulse to restart Merrick’s heart. His body convulsed as the charge ran through him and the monitor showed a corresponding spike before returning to flat line.
“Eppy.” The orderly handed Julia a syringe full of epinephrine. The needle seemed impossibly long. She speared the area between two of Singer’s ribs and loaded the drug directly into his heart. “Up it to two hundred joules.”
“Charging, charging, charging,” the orderly said watching the machine. “Go.”
She applied the paddles again and for a second time Merrick’s body jerked partially off the bed. The line on the monitor peaked again.
“Come on. Come on,” Julia urged and then the beat was back, widely spaced at first but improving steadily. “Get a ventilator in here.” She shot a scathing look at Cabrillo. “Was it worth it?”
He met her gaze. “We’ll know when we find a tanker named the Gulf of Sidra.”
30
THE weather was turning foul as the Oregon raced northward, forcing a delicate balance between speed and the need to keep the wounded from being further injured by the ship’s motion. Julia had torn a page from the nineteenth century by slinging the worst of the wounded in hammocks so they swayed with the swells and were cushioned when the ship was hit by a particularly tall wave. She hadn’t left Merrick’s side for more than twenty minutes since getting his heart started again.
After getting the name, it had taken Murph and Eric less than a half hour to discover that a tanker called the Gulf of Sidra had been anchored off the coast of Mauritania for nearly a month but had weighed anchor the day before. The ship had been owned by Libya’s state oil monopoly until a recent sale transferred her to a newly incorporated Liberian firm called CroonerCo., which Murph recognized as a thinly veiled reference to Singer’s last name.
With that information the duo had been able to calculate an ever widening arc where the vessel could be hiding, an area that would soon include a tropical depression swirling six hundred miles off the African coast. They were driving as hard as they dared for that region.
To narrow the odds further, Juan had again called upon Lang Overholt to use the United States’ government’s halo of spy satellites to search the grid coordinates for the Gulf of Sidra. Now that everyone was aware of the stakes, Overholt had taken Cabrillo’s findings to the CIA’s director. The president was briefed a short while later and orders went out to the Coast Guard and Navy as well as NUMA and the National Weather Service, which was conducting regular patrols of hurricane alley. A guided missile cruiser returning from interdiction patrols in the Red Sea was diverted and a destroyer paying a courtesy call to Algiers cut short her stay and started out of the Mediterranean. There was also a pair of nuclear attack submarines close enough to the area to reach it in twenty hours.
The British government was apprised of the situation and offered to send two vessels from Gibraltar and another from Portsmouth. They would arrive on station days after the Americans, but their help was greatly appreciated.
Juan knew, however, that even with all of these ships streaming in to search for the tanker, the Oregon, with her superior speed, would be the first to reach the edge of the storm and it would fall on his shoulders to stop Daniel Singer.
SLOANE Macintyre weaved down the passageway carrying a dinner tray that Maurice had personally prepared. With her arm still in a sling it was awkward, and she found herself leaning a shoulder against the walls to keep herself steady. It was almost eleven and she didn’t see another soul as she made her way aft. She came to the door she wanted and had to use her foot to tap on it softly. When there was no reply she hit it a little louder with the same results.
She set the tray on the carpeted deck and cracked open the door. She could see dim lighting from inside.
“Juan,” she called softly and retrieved the tray. “You weren’t at dinner so I had Ma
urice fix you a little something.”
She stepped over the threshold, not yet feeling that she was intruding. A lamp spilled a pool of light across half of Cabrillo’s desk. The other half was blushed with the muted glow of a computer monitor. The chair was pushed back as if Juan had just gotten up from working but he wasn’t at the file cabinet or the antique safe. The sofa tucked under a darkened porthole was empty.
She set the tray on the desk and said his name again as she approached his dim bedroom. He lay facedown on the bed and before Sloane took in the whole picture she looked away, thinking he was nude. When she peeked back shyly she saw he wore a pair of boxer shorts nearly the same color as his skin, though a crescent of pale white showed above the boxer’s waistband. Then she feared he wasn’t breathing until his chest expanded like a bellows.
For the first time she allowed herself to stare at his stump. The skin was red and puckered and looked raw, no doubt from all the fighting he’d been involved in. The muscles of his upper legs were large and even in sleep they didn’t seem relaxed. In fact, none of him did. His whole body was tensed. She held her breath to listen carefully and heard his teeth grinding together.
His back was a patchwork of old scars and new bruises. There were six identical marks that looked as though he’d taken a shotgun blast and what she hoped was a healed surgical incision and not a knife wound because it began just over his kidney and disappeared under his shorts.
His clothing had been tossed onto the floor and as she folded it, she wondered what kind of man would pay such a heavy price to do what he did. He gave no outward sign that at night his dreams gave him a case of bruxism that sounded like he was going to pulverize his teeth. And although he was barely in his forties, he had accumulated two lifetime’s worth of scars. Some force drove him to put himself in danger despite the cumulative effects it was having on his body.
It wasn’t a suicide wish, of that she was sure. She could tell by his easy banter with Max and the others that Juan Cabrillo loved life more than anyone. And maybe that was it. He had put it upon himself to make certain others had the opportunity to enjoy their lives as much as he did. He had made himself a protector even if those he looked after would never know of his efforts. She thought back to their conversation about what he would be if not the captain of the Oregon. He’d said a paramedic, an unsung hero if ever there was one.
When she draped his pants over a wooden valet, his wallet fell to the floor.
Sloane looked over at Juan. He hadn’t moved a muscle. Feeling a twinge of guilt, but not enough to overcome her curiosity, she opened the wallet. All it contained was cash in a variety of currencies. No credit cards, no business cards, nothing to identify him in any way. She should have known. He wouldn’t carry around anything that could link him back to his ship or give his enemies information about who he really was.
Sloane looked over to the office, where the lighting made his desk seem to dominate the space. She padded silently to it, glancing in his direction again before gently tugging open the middle drawer. This is where Cabrillo kept himself. She found a gold and onyx Dunhill lighter and an ornate cigar cutter. She found his American passport and saw nearly every page had been stamped. She preferred his hair short like he kept it now versus the photo taken six years earlier. There were two more U.S. passports, one with the picture of a great slob of a man named Jeddediah Smith, and it took her a moment to realize it was Juan in disguise. There were others from various countries and under different aliases, as well as matching credit cards for all the personas, and shipmaster’s licenses for both Juan and his Smith character. She found a gold pocket watch inscribed to Hector Cabrillo from Rosa and suspected it belonged to his grandfather. Amid the bric-a-brac were a few letters from his parents, his old CIA ID tag, a small four-barreled antique pistol like a riverboat gambler might carry, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, and a rusted Cub Scout pocketknife.
Toward the back of the drawer was an inlaid Turkish box and inside she made a discovery she never expected—a gold wedding band. It was a simple pipe-cut ring, and judging by how little it was scratched, Sloane thought it hadn’t been worn much. She wondered what stupid woman had let a man like Juan get away. They were one in a million and if you were lucky enough to find one you did whatever it took to make it work. She looked more carefully into the box and saw a piece of paper folded so it completely covered the bottom.
She was on the cusp between snooping and prying and glanced over her shoulder to where Juan was sleeping before reaching for the slip of paper. It was a police report of a single-car accident in Falls Church, Virginia, that had claimed the life of Amy Cabrillo. Tears pricked Sloane’s eyes. As she read through the dry report she learned that Juan’s wife’s blood alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit.
A man like Juan would marry once in his life, to the woman he felt certain he could grow old with. The fact that this woman had taken that from him made Sloane hate her all the more. She wiped at her cheek and carefully refolded the report and set everything back into the drawer the way she’d found it. She picked up the tray of food and retreated from the cabin.
Linda Ross rounded a corner just as Sloane got the door closed.
“Hi, roomie,” Sloane said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “I didn’t see Juan at dinner so I brought him some food. He’s asleep.”
“Is that why you’re crying?”
“I…” Sloane could say nothing more.
Linda smiled warmly. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be our secret. For what it’s worth he’s probably the best man I’ve ever met.”
“Have you and he?”
“I’ll admit he’s as handsome as the devil and the thought crossed my mind when I first came aboard; but no we haven’t and never will. He’s my commander and my friend and both are too important to screw up with an affair.”
“But that’s all it’ll ever be, isn’t it? I sense he’s a one-woman man and any opportunity has passed.”
“You know about Amy?”
“I was snooping and saw the police report.”
“Don’t tell Juan you saw that. He doesn’t think any of the crew knows he’s a widower. Max made the mistake of telling Maurice once and, well, Maurice gossips like an old woman. And yeah, it would probably only be a short-term thing but not because he’s in mourning over Amy. He’s got another love, one no woman can compete with.”
“The Oregon.”
Linda nodded. “So think through what you want to do before you do anything.”
“Thanks.”
As they walked away Juan’s cabin door opened slowly and he peered down the corridor. The sound of his desk drawer opening had wakened him but he’d feigned sleep so as not to embarrass Sloane. He would have to talk to Max about his inability to keep a secret and Maurice, too, for that matter. He closed the door again, thinking that what he overheard made a decision he’d been contemplating a bit more difficult.
JUAN was in the living room of the guest cabin talking with Moses Ndebele. His men were resigned to their beds, nearly incapacitated by seasickness. He enjoyed Ndebele’s intellect and his ability to forgive considering how harshly he’d been treated by his government. Unlike some men, who when they gain power trample freedoms and impoverish their people in a quest for wealth and personal glory, Ndebele really did want what was best for Zimbabwe. He spoke of economic reforms, of getting the country’s once thriving agriculture sector back to its former capacity. He talked about power sharing among the tribes and an end to the nepotism that ruined many African nations.
More than anything else he wanted his people to no longer fear their own government.
Cabrillo was more convinced than ever that making his bargain with Moses had been the right call. They had the chance to restore what had once been a shining beacon in sub-Saharan Africa and make it again the envy of the continent. Of course, all it would take was to find a boat lost for a century that had sunk somewhere in about a thousand square miles of ocean.
He felt the ship suddenly veer. He judged the turn to be at least fifteen degrees and was getting to his feet when his phone chimed.
“Someone found her,” he said, knowing it was Max with the news they’d been waiting thirty hours to hear. He mouthed an apology to M oses as he strode from the room.
“She was detected by something called Mag-Star,” Hanley said. “Apparently it’s a new military satellite that can detect the distortion a large steel-hulled ship has on the earth’s magnetic field.”
Juan was familiar with the technology. “How far are we from her?”
“Another hundred and fifty miles and, to answer your next question, we’re still the closest of all the vessels vectoring in.”
Calculating speed and distances Juan said, “That’ll put us on her about sunset, not that we’ve seen the sun in a while.”
The Oregon had been steaming under a roiling veil of cloud cover since before dawn, while the seas had built to fifteen-foot waves that pounded her hull. The ship had no problem shouldering aside the swells; she was designed to absorb much worse and at speeds greater than she was making, but the wounded were taking a beating despite Hux’s best efforts. The wind hovered around thirty knots with gusts edging Force Eight on the Beaufort Scale. Although the rain hadn’t started yet, the forecasts predicted it would hit within a couple of hours.
“Taking down the Gulf of Sidra in this storm’s going to be tough enough,” Max remarked. “Darkness is only going to make it worse.”
“Tell me about it,” Juan said. “I’ll be there in a second.”
Moments later he strode into the operations center. The regular watch standers were being replaced by the Corporation’s best team. It was difficult because the ship was pitching violently and the crew had to keep one hand continuously braced against a counter or bulkhead. Eric Stone was already at the helm; Mark Murphy, sporting a shirt that advocated nuking the whales, was sliding into the weapons station while Hali was jacking into the communications systems. Linda Ross arrived while Eddie and Linc stood against the back wall, as different as Mutt and Jeff in every aspect but competence.
Skeleton Coast Page 39
