Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  He’d been so cold for so long — his prison cell never rose above fifty degrees, making sleep nearly impossible — that the warmth of his heated suit was dulling his senses and making his mind drift to near unconsciousness. Only the jarring ride was keeping him awake. The day of his arrest, he’d been in his six-thousand-square-foot apartment in the company of a Burmese courtesan, sipping Cristal. His last real physical ordeal had been basic training when he’d joined the Navy. Brezhnev had been president.

  He craved sleep the way a drunk craved alcohol.

  But there was something bedazzling about this one particular star that held his attention. It didn’t have the cold aloofness of its celestial neighbors, as it straddled the razor’s edge between the earth and sky. It pulsed and seemed to grow, almost calling to him like the way the Sirens called to Odysseus when he was lashed to the mast of his ship. They had tried to draw him to the rocks.

  To danger.

  To his death.

  Stars don’t grow!

  It was the Mil!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Borodin came out of his warmth-induced torpor. He slapped Cabrillo on the shoulder, his shout of warning muffled by his helmet but his urgent squirming making his consternation well understood.

  Juan cranked up the throttle, heedless of the rough terrain.

  At the same time, a call came over his satellite link. Juan heard Max: “Bogey just appeared on your six. He came out of the backclutter of the mountains and is flying nap of the earth. We never saw him coming.”

  “Are you jamming?”

  “Across everything but this frequency,” Hanley replied.

  Juan did the calculations in his head and came up short every time he ran the scenario. The chopper would catch them before they reached the ship. He was just about to order Max to shoot the advancing chopper out of the sky when Yuri pounded on his back again more urgently than before. Cabrillo chanced a look over his shoulder to see the sky light up around the Mil like the corona of a black sun.

  Multiple launch, most likely from a UB-32 rocket pod suspended off the side of the Mil’s fuselage. The range was extreme, and the unguided missiles had a tendency to flare out in a wide swathe, but their explosive warheads were designed to come apart like shrapnel grenades.

  Even as he turned to face forward again, Cabrillo could hear Max over the radio link giving the order to fire.

  Two miles ahead of them, and still hidden by the ice hillocks, the hatch covering one of the Oregon’s multiple 20mm Gatling guns snapped open and the already-spinning pack of six barrels poked from its redoubt. With the sound of some hellish industrial machine, the gun spit out a solid curtain of tungsten rounds. The ship’s weapons control systems were so accurate that there was no need to include tracers in the mix of munitions. The chopper and its pilot and crew never saw what was reaching out from the night for them.

  The five-second burst filled the air with four hundred rounds, and nearly all of them hit the Mil dead-on or plowed into the flying debris as the aircraft came apart. Then the Mil bloomed as its volatile fuel erupted in a fireball that hung in the sky for many long seconds before gravity took hold and slammed it into the ice like a shooting star coming to earth.

  Two rounds had managed to hit the small incoming rockets by pure chance, but still thirty more arced over the ground, fanning out and bracketing the Chairman and Yuri Borodin in a deadly box.

  In those last frantic seconds, Cabrillo tried to steer them out of the deadly inbound swarm, but it was as though the ice was actively trying to thwart his efforts. To either side, ridges rose shoulder high and were too steep for even the Lynx to power over. They were trapped in a shallow canyon with no means of escape but through sheer speed.

  In an ironic quirk of design, snowmobiles don’t do as well on ice as on snow. The tread tends to heat up and cause excessive wear, but at this moment Juan couldn’t care less if the track came apart just so long as it did so after they reached the ship.

  The first explosions rang out behind them and were muted by the walls of ice, but almost immediately other rockets began landing all around the Lynx, each detonation a bright flower of fire and ice. And steel shrapnel.

  The sea ice was shredded by the blasts in a continuing rush of mini-eruptions that turned the air into a whirling boil of snow. More rockets came in what seemed to be an unending assault. Juan felt the odd tugging as bits of shrapnel passed through his bulky snowsuit, and he had his head thrust to the side when one careened off his helmet’s tough plastic shell.

  That same moment of impact, Yuri gave a choking, wet gasp and slumped heavily against Cabrillo’s back.

  Juan knew his friend had been hit but had no idea how badly. The last of the missiles were exploding in their wake as they motored out of the Kill Box. He reached a hand behind him, feeling along Borodin’s side, and when he brought his hand back, the white nylon appeared black with blood. With the chopper down, he flicked on the Lynx’s headlight. In its glow, he looked more carefully at his hand. The blood was loaded with tiny bursting bubbles, like a thick cherry soda.

  Borodin had been lung-shot.

  They had a mile to go.

  “Max, do you copy?”

  “We’re right here. Tell me you weren’t anywhere near those rockets.”

  “Smack-dab in the middle of them. Yuri’s hit in the lungs and is hemorrhaging badly. Get Julia down to the boat garage.” Julia Huxley, a Navy-trained physician, was the Oregon’s chief medical officer.

  “You still want to transfer to the RHIB?” Max asked.

  “No time. Move the ship as close as you can to the edge of the ice.”

  “That’s gonna leave a gap of about two hundred feet.”

  Juan didn’t hesitate in his reply, “No problem.” Secretly he thought, Big problem.

  The wind had eroded the ice into a ridge that ran eastward in a long arcing curl, as if one of the rolling breakers off Waikiki had been flash-frozen. Juan took the Lynx into it, the throttle cranked until his wrist ached. He could feel Yuri’s weight shift down as the machine climbed the ice chute and then was straightened again by the centripetal force of their speed. They dropped out of the flume at its end. The ice became as rough as corrugated steel, forcing Juan to slow fractionally. Every bump and jostle wracked his body like he was being worked over by a prizefighter. He hoped that Borodin had lost consciousness if only to spare him further pain.

  He shot the Lynx between two icy hummocks, around a third, and there before him, so tantalizingly close, lay the Oregon, every light ablaze so that she looked as cheerful and festive as a cruise ship. Wisps of sea smoke coiled up from the water trapped between the ship and the ice.

  From this low vantage he couldn’t see that Max was using the ship’s bow and stern thrusters to edge the 550-foot vessel closer to the ice sheet, but he knew his old friend was doing everything he could to close the gap.

  Terrain be damned, Juan pushed the snow machine until its motor screamed in protest and a rooster tail of ice particles burst from under the studded tread. It looked like they were roaring out of a fogbank of their own creation. He aimed amidships, where a large, garage-style door had been opened. This was the bay where they could launch any number of small watercraft, from eight-man RHIBs to sea kayaks. Light filled the space within, a beacon to Cabrillo and his gravely injured passenger.

  “Hold on,” Juan said unnecessarily as they neared the end of the ice pack.

  There wasn’t a sharp delineation from ice to ocean but instead a gradual fragmentation of the surface below the machine. What was once solid turned into bobbing chunks, and thinned further until the machine was supported by mush the consistency of a convenience store Ice-E. The tread’s metal studs found no purchase. It was only their momentum, and what little thrust the track got from skimming across the slurry, that kept them afloat.

  And then they were over clear water that was as still as a millpond and hazed by vaporous fingers of fog. Still, the Lynx kept them going, its wake of icy
mist turned into a proper tail of creaming water. Juan leaned back as far as he dared to keep the skis from plowing into the sea, a real possibility that would cartwheel the two of them like rag dolls. He saw they were drifting a point or two from their destination and compensated by shifting his body, mindful that Yuri’s weight would also factor into the maneuver. Cabrillo had been snowmobile skipping, as this move was called, a few times, but never with a passenger on the back of the sled and never with the stakes so high.

  The Lynx’s Rotax engine performed flawlessly, and they skimmed across the water, not with the jerky hops of a flattened stone skipped by a child but with the even power of a craft seemingly built for the task. As they drew closer, the ship loomed larger and larger until it completely blocked Cabrillo’s view of the ocean beyond. He realized that speed had become a factor in another way. They were going much too fast to hit the Teflon-coated ramp into the garage. At their current velocity, they would fly up the ramp like a water-skier and crash into the far wall with so much force that the safety netting would tear them to shreds. Yet if he backed off too soon, the Lynx would drop off plane and sink like a brick.

  He eased the throttle slightly to get a feel of how the machine would react and a panicked second later opened the taps to full again as the tips of the skis dipped sharply. There were no calculations he could perform. In truth, there were, but he’d need a supercomputer or Mark Murphy’s brain to do it. This was by gut alone.

  To those on the Oregon, it looked as though the Lynx’s driver was hell-bent on suicide as the sled flew across the water at fifty miles per hour, shooting for the steel side of a freighter that towered over them like a castle over a pair of riders on a horse.

  Juan felt he’d left it a moment too late and instinctively tensed his body for a crushing hit. In fact, his timing was perfect. Just yards shy of the ramp, he eased off the accelerator and let the Lynx slow until it was pushing a heavy bow wave that ate up even more momentum. The craft entered the hull as it began to founder, and then the skids hit the submerged ramp, and she crawled out of the sea with such perfect control that Cabrillo barely had to tap the brakes to bring them to a gentle stop.

  There was a half-second pause, when everything seemed still in his mind, before a team began swarming from behind bulkheads and equipment, wading through churned-up water that sloshed across the ramp and still cascaded off the snowmobile like a gundog shedding water after a retrieve. A warning alarm went off, indicating the garage door was closing. Hands reached for Yuri Borodin to move him onto a waiting stretcher. No sooner was he disentangled from Juan’s snowsuit than Juan had flung his helmet aside to check on his friend.

  Julia Huxley — Hux or Doc to most of the crew — was already standing over Borodin while an orderly kept the Russian from falling off the gurney. Dressed in scrubs, and mindless of the freezing water in which she stood, the Navy-trained physician first flipped up the visor of Yuri’s helmet.

  As if held back by a dam, a wall of blood poured out of the visor opening and down the lower part of his helmet and splashed like a wave across his chest. The helmet had been so tight that whenever Borodin coughed up blood from his punctured lung, it pooled around his jaw and steadily rose with each violent paroxysm. She unstrapped his helmet, certain he had already drowned. But as soon as it came free, dripping more blood into the water still sluicing around her feet, he coughed, spattering her medical face shield and chest.

  Juan gave them room as an orderly slapped a scalpel into Julia’s hand. She began cutting away the bulky white snowsuit while another aide prepped an IV, ready to refill Yuri’s nearly drained veins with Ringer’s lactate, as a stopgap until they could get him transfused from the ship’s blood bank.

  The heavy-duty arctic gear fell away under Hux’s knife until Yuri’s painfully thin and pale chest was exposed and one arm was laid bare for the IV drip. Froth oozed from the hole in Yuri’s skin every time his chest fought to expel air from his body and seemed to suck back into the obscene little mouth on each inhalation. The rest of his exposed body was a sea of welts and mottled bruises from weeks of beatings.

  From the red medical case on a nearby rolling tray Hux grabbed an occlusive patch and tore away the wrapper. This type of battle dressing allowed air to be expelled from the wound but would not let air back in, giving Yuri’s collapsed lung a chance to reinflate. She and her team gently rolled Borodin onto his injured side. This position made it easier for the uninjured lung to function. Only then did she whip the stethoscope from around her neck and check for Borodin’s heartbeat. She hunted across his bruised and whip-scarred chest like someone with a metal detector sweeping a beach. And like the beachcomber, it appeared she hadn’t found what she was looking for.

  “BP?” she asked.

  “Barely registering,” replied the orderly monitoring the cuff.

  “Same with the heartbeat.” Julia looked up to see the Ringer’s were flowing wide-open and knew she could do no more here. “Okay, people, let’s get him to medical.” Her voice had the crisp command of a person who was in complete charge.

  She exchanged a glance with Cabrillo, her somber dark eyes telling him everything he needed to know.

  “Nyet,” Borodin wheezed. Somehow he levered open his eyes.

  “Sorry, no nyet yet,” Hux said, laying a hand on Yuri’s arm. “Let’s move it!”

  “Nyet,” Borodin managed to rasp again. “Ivan?” He called to Juan, using his Russian name.

  Juan leapt forward so he stood over Yuri’s supine body. “Easy, my friend. You’re going to be okay.”

  Borodin smiled a bloody smile, his teeth stained crimson like a shark’s after a meal. “Nyet,” Yuri said a third time. “Kenin.”

  “I know all about Pytor Kenin,” Juan assured him.

  “Chairman,” Hux said edgily.

  “One second.” Juan didn’t want to look at the rebuke on her face. He knew as well as she did that every second counted. He also knew that Yuri Borodin understood this fact even better than them.

  Borodin coughed, and the effort seemed to tear something deep within his body. He winced, his eyes screwed tight as he rode a wave of pain. “Aral.”

  The word dribbled from his lips.

  “The Aral Sea?” Juan asked. “What about it?”

  “Eerie boat.”

  “I don’t understand.” Juan could see — all of them could see — that Borodin had seconds left.

  “What about the Aral Sea and an eerie boat?”

  “Find Karl Petrov — Pe-trov—” The syllables came further and further apart. Juan bent down so his ear was barely an inch from his friend’s bloody mouth. “Petrovski.”

  The effort to get the name out was the last gasp of a dying man. His skin, if possible, looked even paler, more translucent, like the waxy rind of one of Madame Tussauds dummies.

  “Yuri?” Juan called with a desperation he knew would go unanswered. “Yuri?”

  Borodin’s Adam’s apple gave one final thrust, one more attempt to speak. With his lung so full of blood, there was hardly enough air to form his dying word. It whispered past his unmoving lips already laced with the icy touch of death. “Tesla.”

  Julia pushed Juan out of the way, rolled Borodin onto his back, and leapt atop the gurney so she was astride her patient like a jockey on a horse. She was a curvy though petite woman, but when she started chest compressions she did it with strength and vigor. The orderlies took up positions to guide the rolling stretcher to the Level 1 trauma center within the labyrinthine corridors of the Oregon’s secret passages.

  Cabrillo watched them disappear through a watertight door, blew out a long breath, and then moved to an intercom box mounted on a wall. He barely noticed the crewmen securing the boat garage from battle stations.

  “Op center,” came the voice of Max Hanley. Not knowing the situation, Max wisely kept his usual repertoire of bad humor and sarcastic remarks to himself.

  “Max, get us out of here,” Juan said, as if leaving the scene of the a
ct could somehow bury the fact. “This mission was a bust.”

  “Aye, Chairman,” Max replied gently. “Aye.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  He sat slouched against the corner of his desk for the next fifteen minutes, his cabin lights dim, his eyes pointed at the floor but seeing nothing. The space had been his home for years. Its current inspiration was the set of Rick’s Café from the movie Casablanca and had been pulled off with some of Kevin Nixon’s Hollywood set-designing friends. Usually it was a place of solace for Cabrillo. Until the phone rang, it was merely a void.

  The replica Bakelite phone trilled, and he snatched up the handset before the first ring ended. He said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Juan.” It was Julia Huxley. “I just called it. He’s gone.”

  “Thanks, Hux,” Cabrillo said in a monotone. “I know you did all you could.”

  He settled the heavy handset back onto its cradle.

  From the brief exchange of looks he’d shared with the ship’s physician back in the boat garage, he’d known the inevitability of Yuri’s death but couldn’t motivate himself to do anything until he’d received verification. He’d failed. It didn’t matter that he’d busted Yuri out of the prison and got him to within a mile of the Oregon. Juan blew out another long breath.

  Cabrillo stripped off the remains of his snowsuit and stuffed it and his prison garb and the bloody boots into a plastic bag for incineration. He strode into a green-marble bathroom and hit the brass taps of a multiheaded, glass-enclosed shower that was big enough to hold six. As steam began pouring over the top of the enclosure, he unstrapped his artificial leg, gave the toughened skin of his stump a quick massage, and then stepped into the hot spray.