Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  A trio of shots rifled into the bridge, mangling steel and kicking up more sand.

  The sniper didn’t know if he’d hit his target. He was trying to keep Cabrillo pinned, which likely meant he had more men with him, and they were sneaking up under covering fire.

  Juan couldn’t move and he couldn’t stay.

  He snatched off his sunglasses and held the mirrored lens up and just over the windowsill, moving so slowly that it looked as though it was nothing more than a creeping shadow. In its convex reflection he could see the plain separating his position from the sniper’s. He breathed a small sigh of relief. There was no assault team threading their way across the desert. Another shot cracked. The round passed through a window well aft of Cabrillo. The sniper hadn’t seen the glasses and was just firing for effect, but now Juan had his blind pegged thanks to a tiny spark of fire from the weapon’s muzzle.

  The gunman was a little above Cabrillo’s first estimate, tucked into a fold in the hillside. Juan wondered how long the man had been up there. This situation was obvious proof that there was something important about Karl Petrovski’s eerie boat, though Cabrillo had yet to discern any significance. It was just another rusted hulk littering what had once been the seafloor.

  If there were no additional troops coming, why keep an unarmed man pinned down? Why not come yourself and finish the job?

  One explanation popped into Cabrillo’s mind and jolted him into action. The sniper was about to get his wish, but Juan had a trick up his sleeve. He was certain that the vessel had been rigged with explosives. The sniper had been out here eradicating all traces of Petrovski’s discovery. From the sniper’s point of view, either his prey died when the bombs detonated or he would make a run for it and the sniper would pick him off from his aerie. Mission accomplished.

  “Like hell,” Juan spat as he reached the door leading to the aft compartments.

  The hinges were located inside the hallway, so he had to crawl through and partially close the metal door. Protected from the wind, the steel was as hard as the day it had been forged. The hinge pins had bulbous caps that made pulling them out easier for the ship’s crew if the need ever arose. The center one eased out of the hinge as easy as a weed from the ground. The next one came much harder, but Cabrillo managed to free it as well. It was the bottom pin that refused to budge no matter how hard he pulled, and sweat quickly slicked it so he couldn’t find purchase.

  Cursing, Juan pulled up his trouser and peeled back the sock holding his prosthesis in place. The top of the leg where it met his flesh was smooth and rounded to prevent chafing, but there was a hard ridge down by the articulated part of the ankle. He wedged this ridge under the stubborn hinge pin’s cap and hammered on the leg’s heel with his hand. The pin remained rusted in place as though it had been welded.

  He had no idea how much time he had but could imagine the clichéd image of a digital timer ticking down so only seconds remained. He slammed his palm into the leg’s heel again. And again.

  “Come on.” Again. And again.

  Rust particles puffed up from the pin, and then the pin itself moved upward ever so slightly. Each blow to the leg raised it more and more. An eighth of an inch. The next shot pushed it another quarter inch. And then a half.

  Cabrillo’s palm was numb by the time the recalcitrant pin finally popped free and fell to the deck.

  The door dropped against him, bashing his good leg on the shin hard enough to break skin. He estimated the door weighed at least a hundred fifty pounds.

  He dropped to the deck and refitted his artificial leg.

  The unattached door loomed over him, a deadweight that was about to become both his best friend and his worst nightmare.

  Grasping the hot metal, Cabrillo wrestled the door back onto the bridge, making sure to keep his improvised shield between him and the sniper. It took only seconds for the gunman to figure out something was wrong because a pair of quick shots slammed into the door. It felt like someone had swung a sledgehammer with everything he had. The double impacts staggered Juan back a pace so that he was hard up against the pilothouse’s starboard wall.

  He crawled through and heaved the door over the sill after him. The sniper fired two more rounds but could not reach his prey. Juan thrust his shield hard over and jumped down to the main deck. As he intended, the door hit the ship’s outside rail and crushed it flat before falling all the way to the desert floor.

  He had no idea how long it would take the sniper to figure out his plan, so he moved quickly, jumping the ten feet to the ground. He manhandled the door into position so that he could drag it backward while he crouched in its shadow. His fingers barely grabbed hold, and the door drove its trailing edge into the loose gravel.

  In seconds, lactic acid was already building in Cabrillo’s thighs and back, and his fingers were going numb. He continued inching forward, dragging the door behind him and staying low so as not to show himself to the sniper. A moment after he emerged from under the side of the derelict ship, the sniper zeroed in and triggered off three shots in rapid succession. Each one hit the door in almost the exact same place.

  The kinetic force of the high-powered rounds made Juan lose his grip, and the door fell down on top of him. He quickly scrambled back to his feet, heaving the door nearly vertical. The sniper fired again, and again his round ricocheted off the door. The metal was dimpled by each hit, and energy transfer made the steel scalding hot, but the rounds just wouldn’t penetrate.

  Juan knew now that the race was really on. The sniper couldn’t shoot him so he’d have to come after him. Cabrillo had to cover a hundred yards to reach his sport utility vehicle. The gunman had almost a quarter mile, but a lot of that was downhill. He was unencumbered while the Chairman had to lug his shield all the way back to the truck or else the sniper would stop charging, raise his rifle, and shoot Cabrillo as he fled.

  Juan hauled the heavy door across the open plain like an anchor he could not drop. Gravel and sand built up where the metal hit the ground, and it felt like he was dragging half the desert with him. His back was screaming by the time he was a quarter of the way to his destination, and his legs shook like jackhammers, yet he didn’t slow or pause. Pain was the body’s way of telling a person to stop doing something. Holding a hand to a candle hurt, so the instinct was to pull it away, but the mind ultimately controlled the body, and you could leave your hand there until the flesh roasted off.

  Cabrillo’s body was telling him to drop the door and rest, but his intellect knew something his body didn’t. If he abandoned his shield, he would die, so he bulled through the pain and kept dragging the door. All the while, the gunman was surely out of his hiding place and running with everything he had.

  As if to verify his suspicion, the sniper fired at him again. The sound of the rifle was much closer — too close — and the impact felt much stronger as the bullet had lost little of its power over the shortened distance.

  Juan craned his head around. The fishing boat he had first thought was the eerie boat was only twenty yards away. The gunman? A hundred? Two? Juan had no way of knowing and risked getting his head blown off if he peeked around the door.

  For perhaps the tenth time, he lifted the door slightly higher onto his shoulders so it would skip over the mound of debris accumulating at its base as he was dragging it along. Juan decided to shift position, lowering the door so that it glided easier across the sand but more than doubling the strain on his arms, legs, and back. His teeth ached from clenching his jaw so tightly, but he somehow managed to quicken his pace.

  Sensing that his quarry was escaping after all, the sniper fired off a wild volley of shots on the fly, triggering his semiautomatic as fast as he could cycle it. Several rounds hit the door, but most peppered the ground to either side of the Chairman.

  Like any race, the last leg was the hardest fought, and both men were pushing with their all. Cabrillo gave a primal shout as he towed the heavy door, his legs pistoning against the stony ground. He loo
ked again and saw the prow of the fishing boat was a tantalizing five yards away.

  He let the door drop to the ground and started sprinting. The sniper was forty yards back and running flat out and was caught off guard by Cabrillo’s sudden change in tactics. He didn’t have the time to bring his rifle up, so he fired from the hip just as Juan lunged out of view around the boat’s bow.

  Juan felt a wasp sting of pain on his neck as the hastily fired shot hit the steel hull just as he crossed around it, and he was stung by flecks of dislodged metal. The truck was just a dozen paces away.

  He launched himself over the UAZ’s hood just seconds before the sniper reached the boat and fired at him again. The driver’s-side window shattered. Juan hit the ground on the far side of the truck, rolled to his feet, and reached through the open passenger window, his eyes now on the gunman for the first time since the battle began. The man wore khakis from head to toe, but not the clothes of a native Uzbek or Kazakh. He looked like he’d stepped from a Beretta clothing catalog.

  The man stopped less than twenty feet away and started swinging his rifle up to his shoulder for the kill shot.

  Cabrillo’s hand found the familiar shape of Yusuf’s old AK-47, the weapon he insisted they bring along because smugglers used the old seabed to carry contraband into and out of the country. He pulled it out of the passenger footwell enough so that he could swing the barrel toward the sniper.

  The stock of the sniper’s rifle was just six inches and a half second away from the optimum firing position when Cabrillo found the safety and trigger and loosened a twenty-round burst through the shattered driver’s window. Several of the shots never made it out of the SUV, but enough did, and his spray and pray worked.

  The sniper shook as if he’d grasped a live electrical cable when eight of the erratically fired bullets raked his body from hip to head. Juan didn’t have the strength to stop the AK barrel’s inevitable rise on auto, and his last shots punctured the UAZ’s roof. He finally willed his finger off the trigger as the gunman collapsed in the sand.

  He let the AK drop from his hand and he sagged to the ground, his back leaning against the truck. He gulped lungfuls of air. He had no concern about the sniper miraculously coming to get him. This wasn’t a movie. The man was clearly dead. Still, Juan gave himself only ninety seconds before levering himself back to his feet.

  He rounded the SUV and then staggered to the sniper. Like his clothes, the sniper didn’t have the facial features of a native. He looked—

  The explosion knocked Cabrillo off his feet, and the concussive wave blew rust scale off the old fishing boat as if it had been hit with a hurricane-force wind. The sound echoed and rolled across the desert like thunder, and, seconds later, bits of rock and stone and steel rained from the sky. Cabrillo lay on the ground, his hands clamped behind his head to protect it until the hail of debris stopped and just dust and smoke drifted over him.

  He stayed on his hands and knees and crawled over to the fishing boat and looked beyond. The prow of the eerie ship was simply gone. All that remained was a smoking hole in the desert floor, a crater the size of an Olympic pool. Thermite, he thought. The sniper had used thermite and a timed detonator to do this much damage. Juan realized now that the largest piece of the ship remaining was the door he himself had used.

  He went to it now and gave it an affectionate pat. “Didn’t know I was saving you while you were saving me.”

  It was only then he noticed the small brass plate that had been affixed near the door’s lower side. He hadn’t seen it when he was unpinning the hinges because the passageway was so dark, and the inside of the door had faced the sniper the entire time he’d used it as a shield. He had to wipe away a smudge of dirt to read what had been etched on the old identification tag.

  Stamped into the little piece of brass were just a couple of words. It would be days before he understood the implications of what he read, and a few weeks for the ramifications to be felt, but in those first few seconds all he had to go on was his own confusion.

  C. KRAFT & SONS SHIPYARD

  ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA

  CHAPTER NINE

  Manhattan had once been ringed by piers, like spokes projecting from the axle of a bicycle tire, and nearly every inch of the island’s coast was given over to maritime commerce. The advent of containerization and the booming value of the city’s property had closed all but a few anchorages, and those were reserved mostly for cruise ships. So for the Oregon, there was no triumphant trip up the East or Hudson rivers to dock before the most famous skyline in the world.

  Instead, after passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, she found herself berthed in Newark, New Jersey, amid acres of metal containers and rows of cars that had been off-loaded from the factories of Europe. By today’s commercial standards, she was a wilting flower amid oceangoing behemoths. At 550 feet, she was dwarfed by the panamax and super panamax ships that lined the docks, and her appearance was that of a hag next to a group of beauty queens.

  Her hull was a mismatch of paint colors that was peeling so badly it looked like the ship had some hideous skin condition. Her decks were littered with trash and old machinery that no longer worked. She had a central superstructure, with a large funnel, just aft of amidships. Bridge wings thrust out port and starboard from it. The pilothouse’s glass was filthy with dried salt, and one small pane had been patched over with a piece of delaminating plywood. Three cranes serviced her forward six cargo hatches while another pair of cranes aft could load and unload her remaining two holds. There was just a trace of champagne-glass grace to her fantail, while her bow was a blunt blade that looked as if it fought the sea more than thrust it aside. From outward appearances, she looked like an old tramp steamer that should have been scrapped many years ago.

  As Cabrillo made his way across the quay following a taxi ride from JFK, he couldn’t imagine a more beautiful vessel in the world. He knew that her dilapidation was artful window dressing, a ruse that gave her such anonymity that she went unnoticed in any of the Third World ports she frequently called upon.

  The Oregon’s papers were in order, and a customs inspection turned up nothing suspicious. Her bills of lading said she was carrying rolls of paper from Germany to various ports in the Caribbean, and when the hatches were popped, the inspectors did see the curving tops of enormous paper drums, each weighing more than eight tons.

  Of course, the paper drums, like the ship’s rough façade, was just that: a façade. The rolls were only a foot thick and covered over the top of the hold like the false bottom of a spy’s briefcase and weighed less than a thousand pounds.

  He climbed up the ship’s gangplank and looked aft, as was his ritual. The ship normally flew the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one more ruse on top of all the others, and it was his tradition to give it the one-fingered salute. To make their stay here less problematic, the Oregon carried Panamanian registry, and that nation’s quartered and starred white, blue, and red standard hung from the jackstaff.

  The interior of the ship’s superstructure matched that of her exterior, with gloomy passages, peeling paint, and enough dust to fill a child’s sandbox. The floors were mostly bare metal or cheap vinyl tiles. Only the captain’s cabin had carpet, but this was an indoor/outdoor variety that was about as plush as burlap. Secreted throughout the accommodations block were doors that led to the hidden and much more opulent spaces where the crew actually lived and worked.

  Juan went to one such door, passing through the grease-laden galley and seedy mess area. The secret door opened using a retinal scanner hidden in the belly button of a bikini-clad beauty adorning a travel poster plastered to the wall with other cheap decorations that would be seen to amuse a crew of misogynist seamen.

  As the door slid open seamlessly, Juan entered the luxurious interior of the Oregon proper. Here, the carpets were plush, the lighting discreet and pleasing, and the artwork the labor of some of the world’s masters. This was the secret her outer disguises masked — t
his, and the fact that the ship was armed to the teeth.

  She sported launchers for surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, as well as 20mm Gatling guns and a monstrous 120mm cannon hidden in the bow that could be deployed through clamshell-type doors. Of the dozen old oil drums sitting on the deck, six held remotely controlled.30 caliber machine guns that were operated from the Oregon’s high-tech op center. These were used to repel pirates, and more than a few off the Somali coast had felt their sting.

  The Oregon also possessed a sophisticated suite of sensors that made her optimal for intelligence-gathering operations in places the United States could not send in her own spy ships. They’d lingered near any number of adversarial nations, such as Iran and Libya before its fall, gathering signal intelligence that satellites couldn’t detect. One recent mission had them posted off the coast of North Korea, armed with an experimental high-energy laser “loaned” to them by Sandia National Laboratories. The result had been the spectacular though inexplicable, at least to them, failure of that reclusive regime’s test launch of its Unha-3 long-range missile.

  Juan chatted up a few crew members as he made his way to his cabin to shower off nearly twenty-four hours of travel. He still had grit from Uzbekistan under his nails. He dressed in charcoal slacks with a striped button-down shirt and custom-made shoes from Otabo.

  He had time to enjoy a Cobb salad in the dining room, surrounded by overstuffed leather furniture and a gentlemen’s club’s cozy atmosphere, before heading to the Oregon’s boardroom for a status meeting with his senior staff.

  The room was rectangular in shape and done in a sleek modern style, with a glass table and black leather chairs. Had they been at sea, portals would be opened to give the room natural light, but since they were hard against the Newark pier it wouldn’t do to give dockworkers a glimpse of the ship’s true interior.