Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  “About time you showed up,” Linda Ross chided him. “Air’s getting a tad thin in here, and I was bored. I lost my last cent playing gin rummy.”

  Linda topped out at five feet two, had an elfin face with large eyes and a button nose. She had a few freckles that made her seem even younger and a girlish voice.

  “What happened?”

  “I was about to ask you the same question.”

  Their conversation got derailed for a few minutes as the Emir, whose moniker stretched over eleven names and who Juan called Dullah, short for Abdullah, thanked him again and again for deliverance.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet, old friend. The Oregon is still a half hour away, and I’m afraid if we cut our way down here, the air in the bilge will escape and the Sakir will sink like a stone.”

  He turned to Linda. “What happened after you capsized? How did everyone end up here?”

  “It was her,” the Emir said, beaming at Linda. “She did it. She saved us all. When the ship rolled over, she knew to get us down here as quickly as possible. She knew that water would enter the boat and she rushed us here. You should have seen her, my friend. She was like a lioness protecting her cubs. I could barely pick myself off the floor, and your lovely Linda was organizing us so the strong could help the lame.”

  Juan shot Linda an appraising look. She had a ghost of a smile on her lips, loving the emotional praise from the Emir but too coy to gloat.

  “I tell her already,” Dullah went on, “that I will pay her ten times what you give her to be my personal bodyguard. While my men wandered in a daze, she was saving our lives. I say it again, a true lioness. In all my life I have never seen one so brave, one so strong, one so…”

  Dullah finally ran out of praise, so Linda said, “You forgot the part where I turned water into wine.”

  “I believe you could,” the Emir rejoined.

  Juan looked at her. “Linda, are you sure there’s enough room in here for us and your ego?”

  “Plenty,” she shot back saucily.

  Good job, he mouthed to her, and then addressed the crowd: “I need to speak with an engineer.”

  One of the men stepped forward. “Heinz-Erik Vogel, chief engineer.”

  He was Teutonic, from the top of his blond head to the soles of his work boots, and stood as if at attention. Juan shook his hand.

  “I’m Juan Cabrillo, Linda’s boss.” He went on to explain his theory as to why the ship hadn’t sunk yet, and the engineer heartily agreed, having come to the same conclusion himself. They agreed the best way to get everyone out was to breach the hull plates over the anteroom through which Juan had first entered the bilge. They could better prevent the air from escaping by using its access hatch like an air lock, opening it just long enough to get a group of people inside and then closing it up again while they were helped outside by Cabrillo’s people.

  A second hole would need to be drilled into the bilge and air pumped in at high pressure to make up for the expected losses when the hatch was opened.

  They worked out the precise location of the antechamber as it related to the ship’s propeller shafts, the only reference point Cabrillo would have on the otherwise bare hull bottom.

  When they had settled all the details, Juan turned to Linda. “I’ve got enough air for us to buddy-breathe back to the surface.”

  She didn’t consider his offer for a second. “These are my people now. I’m responsible for them and I’m not leaving them until they’re all safe.”

  He bent and kissed her forehead. “I knew you wouldn’t. Close the hatch behind me. This should take about an hour to set in motion. We can start cutting now, and once the Oregon arrives, Max’ll rig the air hose. When I tap on the hatch three times, that means I’m going to open it. Send through the first five people. Worst injured first, but they need to be quick, so have healthy people help them.”

  “Got it.”

  “Then we’ll lever the hatch closed, clear the antechamber, let the pressure build back up inside here, and do it again.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Okay, hotshot. See you later.”

  It took Juan just ten minutes of quick swimming and a few minutes of decompression to reach the surface and drag himself back onto the Sakir’s hull. Linc was there in an instant to help him off with his gear. “Well?”

  “Linda saved all but a couple of them,” Juan said with a proud smile.

  “Booyah!” Linc whooped. “I knew my girl would pull through. What happened?”

  “She got everyone down into the bilge after the Sakir rolled but before it completely filled with water. They’re in there now, inside a bubble of pressurized air. I worked out with the ship’s engineer how to rescue them and not have this tub sink from under our feet. What about the Oregon?”

  “Launched MacD and Eddie twenty minutes ago, and, if you could see past the rudder, you’d know she’s about ten minutes from pulling alongside of us.”

  “Perfect.” Juan strode over to the chopper to open a line to Hanley. He laid out what they would need, and Max promised to have it ready by the time they arrived.

  While Linc got the cutting torch ready, Juan changed out of his scuba suit, dried himself with a rag Gomez promised was clean, and threw on the outdoor clothes he’d grabbed from his cabin, complete with rubber boots that went up to his knees.

  As soon as the Oregon was in position on the windward side of the Sakir so that her massive bulk shielded the work crew from the worst of the storm, a Zodiac shot out of the boat garage, trailing a thick rubber hose. Max was at the controls, and with him were some of his boys from the engineering staff.

  There was no time for small talk. The storm was intensifying. Soon waves would sweep clear across the hulk and suspend any attempt at getting the survivors out. From the measurements Vogel had given him, Cabrillo marked out a three-by-three-foot spot on the hull, and Linc got busy with the torch. Molten metal was soon drizzling through the cuts he made as the torch slowly ate the inch-and-a-half-thick plate. Hanley had brought over a second plasma torch, and he was at Linc’s side cutting with abandon. Farther along the hull, the Oregon’s engineers were preparing to drill a hole to insert the air hose. They had tubes of industrial contact glue ready to seal the hose into place once the nozzle was inside the bilge. Gomez Adams was warming the chopper for the short hop back to the hangar.

  In all, Cabrillo’s people were working like the well-oiled machine he knew them to be.

  Juan had told Linda that they’d be ready in an hour. He missed that deadline by only two minutes and that’s because he didn’t factor in the time it would take Max to set up a hydraulic ram down in the antechamber. They would need its power to close the hatch against the pressure of air gushing out. Fortunately, it wasn’t high enough to warrant decompression for those trapped inside.

  Cabrillo gave her the signal, she tapped back that she was ready, and Juan opened the hatch. In the explosive blast of air, five people tumbled into the antechamber, sprawling on the ground in a tangle of limbs. One woman screamed when her already-broken leg was smashed against the far wall. Max activated the ram and it slammed the door closed, as promised.

  “What do you think?” Cabrillo asked. The ship didn’t feel like it had settled any deeper.

  “How should I know? You didn’t leave a barometer in there. Gunner’s manning the compressor. He should be able to tell the back pressure. That’ll give us an idea of when we can let out the next group. But truth be told, I think it worked like a charm.”

  Juan grinned. “Me too.”

  By being patient and cycling air back into the bilge space, it took forty minutes for the last group, including Linda, Vogel, and the Emir, who had insisted despite everyone’s entreaties not to wait, to emerge from the bowels of the ship. Max dogged down the hatch while the last survivors picked themselves up.

  Dullah shook Juan’s hand again. “Now we are, as you say, out of the forest?”

  “Close enough, my friend, clos
e enough.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  In an idealized, fictional world, the Oregon would have been over the horizon as soon as the passengers were rescued and on their way in pursuit of the stealth ship. But this was reality. And the reality was that the Atlantic is considered “our pond” by both the U.S. Navy and by the Coast Guard.

  No more than a minute after the Emir crawled out of the bilge, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter painted in the Coastie’s traditional orange-and-white thundered over the hulk at fifty feet, filling the already-stormy air with water kicked up by the rotor wash.

  Juan had known this was coming and had already shut down the Oregon’s military-grade radar suite and had been tracking the inbound bird on the far weaker civilian equipment. If the chopper didn’t have the gear to detect the differences, the cutter streaming in after her surely would, and that would raise questions the Chairman didn’t want to answer. Another question he wanted to avoid was how a ship that had been seen loitering off Philadelphia had gotten this far south so quickly.

  Max’s latest invention would take care of that. He had recently replaced the steel plating on the Oregon’s fantail, where the ship’s name is traditionally emblazoned, with a highly sophisticated variable electromagnet microgrid. A computer controlled which of the tiny magnets that made up the array were energized. In this way, when a mist of iron filings was sprayed onto the plates by a retractable nozzle, any name Hanley devised would be spelled out. When he cut power, the old name and flag nation — in this case, Wanderstar, out of Panama — blew away on the wind. He’d typed in a new name, for which they had all the proper documentation, into the system and activated the nozzle. The magnets attracted the minute filings and spelled out Xanadu, from Cyprus, while the excess metal fell into the Atlantic. The system was so precise that from even a few feet away, it looked like paint that was flaking off in places, in keeping with the general shabbiness of the rest of the ship.

  In the past, it took the crew up to thirty minutes to change the ship’s name. Now it took less than ten seconds.

  Cabrillo fished an encrypted walkie-talkie from his back pocket when the Coast Guard chopper had backed off to assess the situation. “Talk to me, Max.”

  “That bird’s off the cutter James Patke out of Norfolk. She should be here in about a half hour. The Oregon’s now the Xanadu. Eric’s up in the wheelhouse making the changes, both there and in the captain’s cabin, should they want to board us.”

  “I’ll need my Captain Ramon Esteban ID,” Juan said. It was the identification that went with their Cypriot disguise.

  “Stoney’s putting it in the desk in your cabin.”

  “We’d better make this look good. Lower one of the life rafts as if we planned on taking the survivors with us. Then jam up the davit controls so the Coasties will have to take them off our hands.”

  “Already ordered,” Max shot back, then added with mild rebuke, “Do you think this is my first time at this?”

  “No. But it is our first time dealing with the U.S. Coast Guard and not some Third World facsimile more interested in bribes than rescue.”

  “Roger that. We’ll be all right.”

  The Coast Guard chopper approached again, this time with its side door racked open and a rescue diver seated with his legs dangling into space. When they were one hundred yards off the port beam of the wallowing derelict, and at an altitude of thirty feet, the diver slid from his perch and dropped like an arrow into the churning ocean. The helo immediately swept farther away to make the swim easier for their man. Max and his team took this opportunity to remove the hydraulic ram they’d installed and surreptitiously dump it overboard. With the air hose already retracted aboard the Oregon, this was the last bit of evidence that the rescue had been far more complicated than they were about to admit.

  The diver reached the side of the Sakir, and Juan was there to give him a hand out of the water.

  “Master Chief Warren Davies,” the man said as he pulled off his fins and attached them to a belt slung around his wet suit.

  “Captain Ramon Esteban.”

  “What’s the situation, Captain?”

  “This is a luxury boat,” Juan said with a melodious Spanish accent. “I think it was hit by a rogue wave and obviously capsized. We were on our way to Nassau when we spotted the wreck. Two men had been thrown into the water, but we found them on the hulk. They told us that they heard banging from inside the hull. We used a torch from our ship to cut our way in and found all these people. We were about to move them into one of our lifeboats, but we are having trouble with the davit controls.”

  Juan pointed to the Oregon. Her portside lifeboat hung halfway down her side, but was angled with its stern pointed toward the water and its bow skyward. A couple of deckhands appeared to be working on the controls.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem so long as this tub stays afloat,” Davies said. “Our cutter will be here soon. What about injuries?”

  “We are assessing that now. You have medical training?”

  “Tons. Let’s go check on the survivors.”

  For the next half hour, Cabrillo played the part of concerned captain, all the while knowing his quarry was getting farther and farther away. Via walkie-talkie he got regular updates from Max, but idling in the area was driving him nuts. Finally, the James Patke appeared out of the curtains of rain sweeping the ship. She was a sleek, modern ship with a hunter’s sharp lines. Her five-inch deck gun was mounted in a stealthy angular turret unlike the old domes of past generations. She could easily have passed for a Navy warship except for her white hull and blazing orange stripe. No sooner had she hoved to than two inflatables were launched off her stern deck and were shooting across the intervening distance ahead of rooster tails of churned water.

  They quickly beached themselves on the Sakir’s slowly sinking hull — air was escaping from the bilge through the hole they had drilled — and since there was no place to tie them off, one sailor was detailed to hold their painter lines. The men aboard were medical personnel burdened with hard cases of gear, a couple of able seamen, and an officer who approached Cabrillo with an outstretched hand. “Commander Bill Taggard.”

  “Captain Ramon Esteban.”

  “Master Chief Davies has already filled us in on what you’ve accomplished. Damn fine piece of work, Captain.”

  “I loved the Poseidon Adventure as a boy,” Juan said with a disarming shrug. “I never thought I would live it.”

  “You said this was caused by a rogue wave?”

  “Yes, we experienced it ourselves. A real monster that came out of nowhere. We were bow on to it, but I suspect this vessel took it broadside.”

  “Strange, because we’ve contacted local shipping and no one reported any rogue waves.”

  Cabrillo lightly tapped the hull with his boot. “I think this is evidence enough, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  Coasties began loading litters with the worst injured into the inflatables for the quick ride back to the cutter. The rest of the survivors, cold and miserable, waited their turn on the shrinking hulk. Each minute saw the ocean eat up another few inches of deck space as the derelict continued to sink. Cabrillo’s mind flashed to the painting of the survivors of the wreck of the Medusa as they huddled on their raft while it sank. If Taggard didn’t speed up his rescue, he saw the same thing playing out here.

  It took two more trips to evacuate the rest of the survivors. As they’d worked out earlier, the Emir gushed over Cabrillo’s heroism and vowed to make him a rich man for saving his life. Cabrillo in turn acted the hardened sea veteran and said it was his duty and could not take financial reward for doing the right thing. This was all played out for the Coast Guard’s benefit, and it seemed that Taggard bought the act. He didn’t ask to board the Oregon or ask many questions about her at all. He had what he needed for his report, and though he couldn’t promise the names Xanadu or Ramon Esteban wouldn’t reach the media, he intimated that their rol
e in the rescue would be downplayed. Budget battles loomed, and an operation like this made his service look good in the eyes of Washington.

  The two shook hands, and while the Coasties returned to their cutter, Cabrillo and his team returned to the Oregon. The “problem” with the davit had been rectified and the lifeboat was secured once again. They made a show of lugging their little inflatable up the lowered boarding stairs and stowing it on the cluttered deck. No sooner were they aboard than Max had them moving off deeper into the storm, keeping track with their stated destination of Nassau, the Bahamas. He kept to the course and a speed of just twelve knots until the threat detection gear showed they had steamed beyond the cutter’s effective radar range.

  Only then could they go after the stealth ship being pursued by MacD and Eddie in the RHIB. Cabrillo was still in the shower when he felt the engines spool up and the ship begin to pour on the power. They’d lost several hours on their target, and it felt as though Max intended on making it up as fast as possible. Ten minutes later, dressed in jeans and a Norwegian roll-neck sweater, Cabrillo entered the op center.

  “How are our boys?” he asked, taking his command seat.

  “Still in pursuit,” Max replied.

  “What’s their fuel status?”

  “If we can maintain forty knots, we’ll reach them when they still have an hour’s reserve.”

  “That’s a bit tighter than I like,” Juan remarked. “If we’re delayed, they’ll need to break off the chase so they don’t run out.”

  “Not much we can do about that,” Hanley said. “Coasties took their time reaching the wreck. Could’ve been worse if they’d wanted to board us and go over our papers.”

  Juan didn’t reply. What so concerned him was that in these seas, his men needed to keep headway in the RHIB to avoid being swamped by a wave. If their fuel load dropped to a certain point, they would need to slow down to stretch out their time under power. That meant letting the stealth ship escape.