The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  He searched the room as quickly as he could on the off chance Linda was here and then descended to the next level, where he found an identical setup. Thousands of computers sat mutely in their racks with thick data cords linking machine to machine.

  He puzzled at what Croissard needed all this number-crunching capability for. Somehow it must tie in with whatever his man Smith had recovered from the Buddhist temple in Myanmar, but he had no idea how.

  Again, Cabrillo swept the room and failed to find Linda Ross.

  He hated to think that she was on one of the lower levels under the rig’s main deck. It would be a rabbit warren of crawl spaces, corridors, and storage rooms that could take hours to search. He didn’t want to even consider that she could be stashed down in one of the rig’s legs or giant floats. He flicked the light onto the face of his watch and was dismayed to see that he’d already been aboard the J-61 for more than an hour. He also estimated the rig’s list had increased a few degrees in that time. She was still solidly planted on the Hercules, but for how much longer?

  The next level was the accommodations block’s ground floor. His first task was to unlock and prop open one of the doors leading to the catwalk that hung off the seaward side of the structure. The fresh air helped dispel the ozone stench. He also took a moment to check in with Max. Hanley had yet to find a way into the ship. He told Juan that Adams was about to move the chopper onto the rig’s pontoon and use its undercarriage winch to haul him up.

  This level, Cabrillo discovered, was mostly offices as well as changing rooms for the roughnecks. There was no sign of Linda, so he set off once again, descending into the guts of the rig, his tiny light unable to do more than push at the murky gloom.

  A screech of steel on steel boomed and roared through the platform like the shriek of a speeding train slamming on its brakes. Juan felt the whole structure shift and then stabilize. The list increased another couple degrees in as many seconds.

  They were running out of time.

  * * *

  ERIC STONE PUSHED the Oregon mercilessly. Rather than take the command chair in the middle of the Op Center, he remained in his customary seat at the helm, where he had a better sense of how the ship was responding to the waves and therefore could make minute adjustments to eke out the most speed.

  The tramp freighter had never let them down before and she was delivering again, cutting across the sea like an offshore powerboat, her bows slicing cleanly through the water while a boiling wake astern marked her passage.

  They covered the eighty miles to the Hercules in record time, but when they arrived, he knew immediately that they were too late. The heavy-lifter was so far over that she looked ready to capsize at any moment. The towering oil rig astride her deck leaned far out over the water, casting a long shadow that darkened the sea. He imagined only its tremendous weight was keeping it glued in place.

  “Well done, lad,” Max’s booming voice came over the ceiling-mounted speakers. He was in the MD 520N, heading back to the ship to pick up men and supplies that were already waiting.

  “What do you want me to do?” Stone asked, secretly relieved that he wouldn’t be responsible for the rescue attempt.

  “Lay her right up under the rig and shove with everything she’s got,” Hanley said without pause.

  “What?” Eric couldn’t believe his ears.

  “You heard me. Do it.”

  Stone snapped on the ship’s intercom. “Deck crew, lay out every fender we’ve got along the portside rail.” He wasn’t worried about ruining either ship’s paint scheme but was concerned about staving in hull plates.

  Afraid that making waves near the Hercules would send her plummeting into the depths, Eric coaxed the Oregon alongside the ship like she was a skittish colt, all the while ballasting her down so that her rail would slip under the rig’s projecting pontoons. The J-61 loomed over them like a castle on a sinking foundation.

  “Chopper is down,” Max announced as Stone made tiny corrections to their position.

  The two ships came together as gently as a feather falling to earth, the thick pneumatic fenders compressing and easing the contact even further. When the vessels were pressed against each other as snugly as possible, Eric slowly ramped up the Oregon’s athwartship thrusters and cranked the directed-thrust drive-tube nozzles to ninety degrees.

  The effect was immediate. Burdened by tens of thousands of gallons of water flooding her starboard tanks, the Hercules was over nearly twenty degrees, but as soon as the power came up, the Oregon managed to shove her eight degrees closer to vertical. The forces in play were titanic but so carefully balanced that the slightest mistake on Stone’s part would send the twenty-thousand-ton oil platform tumbling off the Hercules and crashing down, and ultimately through the Oregon. The worst part was that unless they could shut the heavy-lifter’s sea inlets and pump her dry again, this was a delaying action at best.

  Max’s dangerous ploy bought them time. Just how much was anyone’s guess.

  * * *

  NO SOONER HAD THE HELICOPTER settled onto the deck than Hanley, with his back aching, practically fell out of his seat in an effort to get out quickly. Julia Huxley was waiting with a wheelchair, her lab coat billowing around her in the rotor wash. Max was grateful for the chair but had no intention of allowing her to wheel him to the infirmary. He locked the wheels with his hands and watched as Mike Trono, Eddie Seng, and Franklin Lincoln—the men who had planned on spearheading the armed takedown of the Hercules—load up gear they would need to breach the ship’s superstructure and stave off a disaster. They couldn’t simply jump aboard the sinking vessel because there was too much of a gap caused by the rubber fenders sandwiched between the two ships.

  In order to save even more time, Eddie would fly over to the ship clipped to the chopper’s winch so he could be lowered onto the pilothouse directly. Three minutes after he landed, Gomez Adams ramped up the engine and lifted away, mindful of his friend dangling beneath the helo’s belly.

  He flew up and over the Oregon and came down again seconds later, peering though the Plexiglas at his feet in order to put Eddie on target. He deftly lowered Seng onto the pilothouse roof just inboard of one of the jutting bridge wings.

  Eddie unclipped himself from the winch, threw a wave, and leapt down to the catwalk.

  Adams then set the chopper down on the forward pontoon, where he’d had to rescue Max moments earlier. Mike and Linc tossed out their gear and jumped free so that Gomez could fly up to the oil platform’s chopper pad and wait for the Chairman to make his appearance.

  * * *

  EDDIE HIT THE FLYING BRIDGE in a tuck roll, springing to his feet an instant after landing. He didn’t bother with the lock but crossdrew a 9mm, shot out the glass half of the door, and leapt through. He hit the deck in another roll and came up next to the navigation console, a massive piece of electronics that spanned almost the entire width of the pilothouse. The room was nearly two hundred feet wide, spartan, and, he quickly discovered, dead. There was no power. All the flat panels were blank, the controls inoperable, and the readouts unlit. It wasn’t only that the crew had killed the engines, but they’d taken the battery backup off-line. The Hercules was truly a ghost ship.

  “Max, you there?” he radioed.

  “Go ahead.” He was halfway to the Op Center.

  “We are seriously screwed. Main propulsion is down. Auxiliary is down, and it looks like they pulled the feeds off the backup batteries.”

  “Do you have anything?” Hanley asked.

  “No,” Seng replied. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This thing’s dead across the board.”

  A moment passed while Max considered their options. “Okay,” he finally said, “here’s what I want you to do. Down in the engine room there will be manual valves to shut off the inlet pipes. You need to reach them and close them. We can’t pump her out, but at least we can stop her from sinking farther.”

  “Is that really enough?” Eric Stone had been listen
ing on the open channel. In the few minutes since he’d laid the Oregon alongside the heavy-lifter, they’d started pushing the Hercules laterally through the water, creating waves that rocked both ships. Already one of the indestructible fenders separating them had exploded under the pressure. “I don’t know how long I can hold her.”

  “Do your best, lad.”

  * * *

  LINC AND MIKE TRONO went for the direct approach. Rather than mess around with torches or blasting charges, Mike fitted an RPG to his shoulder as soon as Adams was clear and fired down at the doorway leading into the ship’s superstructure. The resulting explosion blew the door completely off its hinges and sent it clattering along an internal hallway. He and Linc clambered down the rope that Max had left behind. The paintwork around the destroyed door was on fire from the blast, but they were ready, and Linc sprayed it with a small fire extinguisher and cast the little canister aside when the flames were gone. The metal was still blisteringly hot, so they eased their way through carefully.

  Both carried powerful three-cell batteries and matching 9mm Sig Sauers in case the Hercules wasn’t as deserted as they believed.

  Entering the ship in the condition she was in was the same as a fireman running into a burning munitions factory, but neither man gave it a second thought.

  The interior of the Hercules was in rough shape. The walls were peeling, the floor was lifted in places, and the cabins had all been stripped bare. Wire conduits sagged from the ceiling and walls where their brackets had snapped over the years. She didn’t look quite as bad as the Oregon was meant to, but it was clear she belonged in the breaker yard where her previous owners had sent her. Mike and Linc were making their way up to the bridge when they overheard Eddie and Max on their tactical radios. They turned as if in lockstep and retreated the way they had come.

  The ship’s motion in the water remained sluggish because her ballast tanks continued to fill. However, when she yawed to starboard, she went deeper and recovered slower than when she pitched the other way. With her belly so full she was struggling to remain upright, and no matter how skillful Eric Stone was at the controls of their ship, it was inevitable that the Hercules would capsize.

  To make matters worse, the clouds Cabrillo had seen at dawn had moved into the area, and a freshening breeze was affecting the surface waves, making them march in long columns that slammed into the side of the ship.

  Moving even faster than them, Eddie Seng soon caught up to the pair. All their expressions were the same mask of grim concentration. Juan’s and Linda’s lives depended on them staunching the gush of water flooding the ship’s cathedral-sized tanks.

  While every oceangoing vessel was different, the efficiencies built into the field of maritime architecture meant there were only so many ways to access the engine room, and its placement was always logically thought out. It was because of this that the men quickly descended three decks and came across a metal door stenciled ENGINE ROOM. A chain had been wrapped around the handle and padlocked.

  Linc set about blasting the chain apart, since shooting the lock off with a pistol in such a confined space would most likely end with the shooter catching the ricochet. He stuck a wad of plastique the size of chewing gum onto the padlock, jammed a detonator to it, and hustled the other two men down the hallway and around a corner.

  The blast wave hit them like a hurricane gust, and the noise was deafening even with their ears covered. A thin wisp of acrid chemical smoke hung in the air. The padlock and half the chain links were gone. Eddie quickly stripped away the rest of the chain and was about to throw the door open when the Hercules was caught by a particularly strong wave that seemed to bury its rail in the ocean. For thirty long seconds she hung there, while the massive oil platform shrieked its way closer to oblivion as it slid across her deck.

  The Oregon fought her with everything she had, but the damage was done. The rig had moved enough to upset the heavy-lifter’s center of gravity, and her list was now as bad as ever. The wave had dealt her a fatal blow.

  “That’s it,” Max called over the radio. “Get out of there. That goes for you too, Juan.” He waited a beat. “Chairman, can you hear me? Juan? Juan, if you’re receiving this, get off the rig. Damnit, Juan. Answer me. You are out of time.”

  But Cabrillo never answered.

  16

  JUAN WAS SO DEEP INTO THE J-6I RIG THAT ITS STEEL BLOCKED his walkie-talkie from sending or receiving. He probably wouldn’t have heeded Max’s warning anyway. He’d pushed too hard to fail now.

  The guts of the platform were as confusing as a Cretan maze, with countless passageways that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves. It didn’t help that his little light stabbed just a few feet into the darkness. He’d cracked his head several times on unseen obstructions and had bruises on his shin and quite possibly dents in his prosthesis.

  Cabrillo had a highly developed spatial sense and had known when the Oregon had first arrived and shouldered the ship closer to an even keel. He could also tell that she was now losing the fight to keep the Hercules on the surface. The ship’s list was the worst it had ever been, and when the rig had slid across the deck several feet, he knew he was out of time, and yet he didn’t falter and didn’t question if he had done enough and should get out.

  He tore down a flight of open metal stairs two at a time, cradling his bad arm with his good to lessen the impact. Down this deep the rig was an industrial forest of massive cross braces, bulkheads, and thick columns. The floor was bare metal coated in a thin layer of spilled crude that had congealed to the consistency of tar. It was slick and sticky at the same time.

  “Linda?” he roared, and in the silence that followed his fading echo he thought he heard something. He called her name again, louder.

  There!

  It was muffled and indistinct, but he heard a response. He raced toward the sound of a woman screaming for help. In the far corner of the space was a closed-off room without windows. A wedge had been rammed under the door as an added precaution, though the handle was locked from the outside.

  “Linda?”

  “Is that really you?”

  “Galahad to the rescue,” he said, and dropped onto his butt to hammer at the wedge with his artificial leg.

  “Thank God!” Linda breathed. “You have to get us out of here!”

  “Us?” Juan said between blows.

  “Soleil Croissard has been a prisoner here for weeks.”

  Even as he worked to free them, Cabrillo’s mind went into overdrive. There was no logical reason for Roland Croissard to imprison his daughter and then try to kill her. She was here as a hostage and thus leverage to get him to do someone else’s bidding. Smith? He didn’t seem the type. He was a henchman, not a mastermind. Someone else entirely. They’d spent untold hours tearing into Croissard’s life, only there weren’t any clues to his goals because they weren’t his goals at all. Some other person was offstage pulling all the strings, and they had no idea who. And if getting the mysterious item out of the jungle temple had been the goal, Croissard was most likely dead, leaving the Corporation with nothing.

  The wedge finally popped free and skittered away. Cabrillo got to his feet and ripped open the door. Linda Ross came at him in a rush, ignoring his slinged arm. She wrapped her arms around him in a hug that for Juan was equal parts pain and joy.

  Behind Linda was another woman, who in the weak glow of the penlight and after so many days of deprivation still managed to be stunningly beautiful. Her raven hair was raked back into a ponytail, exposing large brown eyes.

  “Miss Croissard, I’m Juan Cabrillo.”

  “Oui, I would have recognized you from Linda’s description.” Her accent was charming.

  “We need to get out of here, like now.”

  With Cabrillo in the lead, they made their way back up through the labyrinthine oil platform. Juan was on automatic pilot, trusting his memory to find the straightest route out to freedom, while another section of his mind worried over the
identity of whoever was behind the enigmatic John Smith. He’d pump Soleil for information later. Maybe she had an inkling of what was happening, but, for now, Cabrillo looked at the problem with just the facts he knew.

  He tried the walkie-talkie now that they were closer to the main deck. “Max, can you hear me?”

  After a squelch of static he thought he heard, “’Ta ’ere.”

  “Max?”

  “ ’Et outta ’ere ’ow.”

  “We’re almost clear.”

  As they kept rushing up the final set of stairs, the reception improved. “Juan, Gomez is standing by on the pad, but you have less than a minute. We can’t hold her any longer.”

  “Max, listen carefully. Put an armed guard on MacD Lawless. If he tries to get to a phone or radio, shoot him.”

  “What? Why?” Hanley’s incredulity made his voice crack.

  “I’ll explain when I see you. Do it.”

  The last steps were so slanted, it was like running through a fun house, and when they finally burst out the door to the catwalk suspended over the sea, all three of them crashed into the railing because they couldn’t stop their onward rush. Running along the walkway, with the Oregon’s deck one hundred feet below them and at a twenty-plus-degree angle, made them all realize that Max’s promised minute was overly optimistic. They had seconds before the rig toppled.