Corsair of-6

by Clive Cussler

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  “You know us. It’s always serious. So are you at the tail end of a late night or just getting an early start?” It was midnight in Washington, D.C.

  “To be honest, I don’t even know anymore. It’s all blended into one of the longest few days of my life.”

  “It’s gotta be bad, then,” Max said. “You were in the company during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  “Back then, I was still so wet behind the ears they wouldn’t give me the code for the executive washroom.”

  Max Hanley and Langston Overholt had come from opposite poles of the American experience. Max was blue-collar all the way. His father had been a union machinist at a California aircraft plant, his mother a teacher. His commands during Vietnam had come through merit and ability. Overholt, on the other hand, had been born into a family from such old money they still considered the Astors nouveau riche. He was the result of twelve years of prep school, four years of Harvard, and three more of Harvard Law. Yet the two men had a strong respect for each other.

  “Now I think one of the stalls is named after you,” Max quipped.

  “Enjoy your normal prostate while it lasts, my friend.”

  “So, what’s up?”

  “Libyans are reporting that a fighter jockey on a nighttime training exercise spotted something in the desert just inside their border with Tunisia. A patrol was sent out and discovered a secret base equipped with a Hind helicopter. The place had been hit hard. The gunship was destroyed, and there appeared to be no survivors.”

  “Yeah, I was meaning to tell you about that. Our people stumbled onto it. They took out the Hind and determined it had been modified to fire air-to-air missiles, specifically the”—he looked to Eric, who mouthed “Apex”—“Apex. It’s Russkie-built.”

  “Damn it, Max, you should have told me about that when I told you Professor Bumford had been kidnapped.”

  “No offense, Lang, but you hired us to find the Secretary of State. I consider everything else to be collateral.”

  Max knew Overholt had to be calming himself, because he didn’t say anything for almost thirty seconds. Max wasn’t concerned. They hired the Corporation because they had no place else to turn. How missions were accomplished, the recent fiasco in Somalia notwithstanding, was up to his and Juan’s discretion.

  “You’re right. Sorry. Sometimes I forget you guys get to operate with a level of autonomy I can only dream of.”

  “Don’t worry about it. So what’s this about the chopper?”

  “The Libyans claim they found a computer buried under the command tent, or what was left of it.”

  Max opened his mouth to say that his people had gone over the site, but he knew their search was relatively cursory. Instead, he asked, “What was on the computer?”

  “Links tying the chopper to Suleiman Al-Jama for one thing, and indications that they’ve opened a terrorist training camp right under the Libyans’ noses using a dummy company purportedly opening up an old coal mine.”

  Max and Eric Stone shared a significant look. This was exactly as they had discussed the night before.

  “How are we getting this information?” Hanley asked.

  “Through a deliberate leak to the CIA station chief in Tripoli, a guy named Jim Kublicki. His contact is an opposite number in the JSO, the—”

  “Jamahiriya Security Organization. We know who they are. How good is his source?”

  “Given the level of cooperation we’ve gotten from the Libyans leading up to the summit and the help they provided trying to find Fiona Katamora’s plane, I’d say pretty good.”

  “Or it could all be a trick. The damned Libyans could be into this up to their necks.”

  “Not according to the rest of my news.”

  “Max,” the duty communications officer interrupted, “there’s a call coming in from the Pig.”

  Max glanced at the overhead screen. The dot representing the Pig and the one for Cabrillo’s last known location overlapped. “Wait one sec, Lang. Go ahead, patch through the new call. This is Hanley.”

  “Good morning, Max.”

  By the tone in Juan Cabrillo’s voice, Hanley knew the Chairman was okay. “Hold the line, Juan.” He flipped circuits back to Overholt. “Continue, Lang.”

  “What was that all about?”

  “Nothing. Just Juan checking in. He can hold. What’s the news that’ll convince me this isn’t the JSO or some other faction pulling a fast one?”

  “Because the Libyans are going to hit the training camp in about two hours. Jim Kublicki is at one of their Air Force bases suiting up now to accompany them in a chopper for verification. If that’s not enough, there’s the possibility that Fiona Katamora is at the base as we speak. Also, the computer provided a clue to track down Al-Jama himself. The chopper and other equipment were funneled into the country with the help of a corrupt harbor pilot named Tariq Assad. They have a record that such a guy exists and has worked for the harbor authority for five years, but there’s nothing in their system before then. No school records. No employment records. Nothing. They believe this Assad is actually a cover name for Al-Jama himself, and are already on their way to grab him.”

  The look Max and Eric exchanged this time was one of absolute horror.

  Juan and the others were twenty-five miles from the terrorist training camp. They had more than enough time to find decent cover before the Libyan assault. The horror the two men shared stemmed from the fact that Eddie Seng and Hali Kasim had been shadowing Tariq Assad since the night the Oregon docked. With stakes as high as they were, Juan hadn’t entirely trusted their Cypriot facilitator, L’Enfant, so he had ordered his best covert operative, Seng, and his only Arab, Kasim, to watch the man for any signs of treachery.

  Other than the fact that Assad spent money like water on a string of mistresses all over Tripoli, they hadn’t discovered anything suspicious. This was why the deadly shoot-out at the roadblock on the way out of the city that first night had been dismissed as a coincidence. Now Max realized Assad had set them up from the beginning.

  Depending on how wide a net the JSO threw to capture him, Eddie and Hali were in real danger of being drawn into it.

  Hanley finally found his voice. “Lang, what you’ve given me changes our tactical picture a hundred and eighty degrees. I need to coordinate with Juan or we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

  “Okay. Keep me pos—”

  Max cut him off and switched phone lines. “Juan, you still there?”

  “I don’t know if I want to talk to you anymore,” Cabrillo said, trying to sound sulky.

  “We got trouble, my friend.”

  The gravity in Max’s voice killed any of the playful relief Juan harbored from being rescued by Linc, Linda, and Mark. “What’s happened?”

  “The Libyans are two hours away from attacking the training camp where you just were. They think the Secretary might be there, so this is both a search-and-destroy mission and a rescue attempt. On top of that, they are going to arrest Tariq Assad because he’s Suleiman Al-Jama.”

  “What about the mine?” Juan snapped.

  “I’m not sure,” Max admitted. “Why?”

  Cabrillo didn’t answer. Hanley could hear him breathing over the secure radio link. He understood the Chairman and knew he must be making a tough choice.

  “Damn,” Juan muttered, and then his voice firmed. “First thing is to get word to Eddie and Hali to watch themselves.”

  “Eric’s on that now.”

  “There are more than two hundred tangos garrisoned at that training camp. If Fiona Katamora’s there—which she may well be, for all I know—she is as good as dead. It’ll take the Libyan strike force twenty or thirty minutes to secure the camp, plenty of time for someone to put a bullet in her head. We’ve got to even the odds.”

  “How?”

  “I’m working on it. Where are you guys?”

  “About eighty miles off the coast.”

 
; “And we’ve got two hours?”

  “More or less.”

  “Okay, Max, I don’t want to hear you grumble about your precious engines, but I need you on the coast as fast you can get here. Sound general quarters, and put Gomez Adams on fifteen-minute alert.”

  “Helm, give me emergency power,” Max shouted. “All ahead flank. Get us to the coaling station dock. Don’t worry, Juan. We’ll get you out of there.”

  STRETCHED OUT on the back bench of the Pig, with Linc stitching up his leg under local anesthetic, Cabrillo looked across the front seat at the Libyan prisoner he and Alana had saved. Fodl was his name, and already the salt tablets and liter bottles of water he’d consumed had revived him tremendously.

  “Yes, you will,” Juan said to Fodl and Max. “All of us.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I N A COUNTRY THAT FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES WAS one hundred percent ethnically homogenous, Eddie Seng should have been at a disadvantage when the Chairman had given him and Hali Kasim the job of tailing their harbor pilot. He hadn’t complained, though. Like Juan, he felt there was something suspicious about Assad, some quality that had made the hairs on the back of his neck stand erect.

  Having a suspicion and proving it were two separate things, though, and there was no getting around the fact that every one of Eddie’s relatives going back a couple hundred generations was Chinese and nearly all the people walking the streets of Tripoli were born in the Middle East.

  But it wasn’t quite all bad. There wasn’t a city on the planet that didn’t have an enclave of Chinese immigrants. And on that first night, while Hali trailed Tariq Assad, carrying a hand-lettered card proclaiming he was a mute to cover the fact that he spoke no Arabic, Eddie had gone off in search of Tripoli’s Chinatown.

  What he found came as a shock, though, upon reflection, it shouldn’t have been. Buoyed by petrodollars, Libya, and especially Tripoli, was undergoing a building boom, and a number of the projects were being erected by construction firms out of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Apart from the workers brought in, there was also a large support system of restaurants, bars, shops, and brothels, catering strictly to a Chinese clientele, that was nearly indistinguishable from Eddie’s New York Chinatown home.

  And, like New York, there were both legitimate and illegitimate layers of society. It had taken him only a few minutes of wandering to find gang symbols that he recognized spray-painted on a couple of the storefronts. And a few minutes more to see the symbol he wanted. It was small, just a few inches tall, and was sprayed in red paint on an otherwise plain gray metal door. The door was set in a heavy-duty structure of a warehouse, with a row of windows running only along the second floor.

  Eddie knocked, using a code he knew from home. No one answered the door, so he knocked again, this time as a civilian would, a few hard raps with his knuckles. Judging by the dull echo he heard, he guessed the door was solid steel.

  The door creaked open after a few seconds, and a boy of about ten poked his head around the jamb. There would be three or four armed men just out of sight. The boy didn’t say a word.

  Neither did Eddie.

  He pulled out the tails of his shirt and turned, exposing his back up to the shoulder blades.

  The boy gasped aloud, and suddenly Eddie felt other eyes on him. He slowly lowered his shirt again and faced the door. He took it as a good sign that the two gang members now studying him had their pistols lowered.

  “Who are you?” one asked.

  “A friend,” Eddie replied.

  “Who gave you the tattoo?” asked the second.

  Eddie glanced at him with as much disdain as he dared. “No one gave it to me. I earned it.”

  On his back was inked an elaborate, though now-faded, tattoo of a dragon fighting a griffin. It was an old gang symbol of the Green Dragon Tong, from when they had battled a rival gang for control of the Shanghai docks back in the 1930s. Only senior members of the Tong or especially brave foot soldiers were allowed it on their skin, and, given the global reach of the Chinese underworld, Eddie had known it would gain him entrée here.

  He just hoped they didn’t test it because Kevin Nixon had applied the stencil only a few hours earlier from a catalog of gang and prison tattoos he kept aboard the Oregon.

  “What are you doing here?” the first thug asked.

  “There’s a man who works at the harbor. He owes people I represent a great deal of money. I want to hire some of your guys to help me keep an eye on him until it’s time to collect.”

  “You have money?”

  Eddie didn’t bother to answer. No one in their right mind would make such a request without being able to pay for it. “Four or five days. Eight or ten guys. Ten thousand dollars.”

  “Too tough to exchange. Make it euros. Ten thousand.”

  With the currency rates the way they were, that was almost fifty percent more. Eddie nodded.

  And, just like that, he had enough men to keep Tariq Assad under twenty-four-hour watch, while he and Hali waited in a flea-bag hotel that the Tong controlled. The gang supplied updates on Assad’s movements every six hours via disposable cell phones, so over the course of a few days they had a pretty good pattern of his movements.

  Generally, Assad worked eight hours on the night shift at the dock, though he would usually take off for a couple if no ships were expected. On those nights, he went to an apartment not too far from the harbor where he kept a mistress. She wasn’t the prettiest of the ones he frequented, but she was the most convenient.

  After work he went home to be with his family, slept maybe six hours, and then went out to have coffee with coworkers before visiting other apartments dotted around Tripoli. Eddie asked his new employees to put together a list of the women’s names, and when he asked Eric Stone to cross-reference them using the Oregon’s computer it came back that Assad was bedding the wives of midlevel government employees. Even the plain girl near the harbor was the sister of the deputy director of the Energy Ministry.

  Given that Assad wasn’t particularly attractive by anyone’s standards, his conquests were all the more impressive.

  Eddie and Hali both concluded that Assad was nothing more than a mildly corrupt harbor pilot with an overactive libido and one hell of a pickup line. That was until Max Hanley called with his bombshell announcement. Assad’s ingratiation into the bedrooms of Libya’s government took on a whole new and darker aspect.

  JUAN LISTENED OVER THE phone as Eric Stone described the route the old rail spur took through the mountains toward the coast, twenty-odd miles away. The satellite pictures didn’t give the gradient of the line, but Juan’s tracking chip had put him at nearly a thousand feet above sea level when he’d gotten off the helicopter at the terrorists’ training camp.

  From the outline of a plan that was forming in his mind even as Eric spoke, Cabrillo decided it was going to be one hell of a wild ride.

  Worse, though, the timing was going to be incredibly tight, and he could think of no excuse he could have Overholt pass on to the Libyans to delay their assault without tipping his hand.

  Adding to his problems, he hadn’t slept more than six hours out of the past forty-eight, and, judging by the appearance of his three shipmates, they weren’t faring much better.

  “What is it?” Linc asked, his surgical gloves covered with blood as he finished the last of the tight stitches. He had sewn the cut in Juan’s leg by layering three rows of catgut, moving from the deepest part of the wound out to the skin, so there was no way it would reopen. With a local anesthetic keeping the pain to a dull ache, Juan felt confidence in his body’s abilities.

  “What?”

  “You just chuckled,” Linc replied, snapping off the gloves and stuffing them into a red biohazard-containment box.

  “Did I? I was just thinking that we are so deep over our heads right now I don’t know if what I have in mind is going to work.”

  “Not another of your infamous plan C’s?” Linda groaned. She stood just outside of the Pig
, looking over Linc’s massive shoulder.

  “That’s why I laughed. Gallows humor. We’re well past C and into D, E, or F.”

  There were two options facing Cabrillo but no real choices. He was about to put them all into a shooting gallery, with the Pig playing the role of sitting duck.

  Linc duct-taped a gauze pad over Juan’s wound, and said, “If Doc Huxley has a problem with my work, tell her to take it up with your HMO.”

  Juan struggled back into his pants. They were ripped in a dozen places, and so crusted with sand that they crackled when he drew them over his hips, but the Pig didn’t carry any spare uniforms. He did a couple of deep knee bends when he leapt to the ground. The cut was tight, but both the stitches and the anesthesia held.

  The sun had yet to show itself over the distant mountains, so the stars blazed cold and implacable overhead. Cabrillo studied them for a second, wondering—and not for the first time—if he would live to see them again.

  “Mount up,” he called. “The show’s gonna be mostly over by the time the Oregon arrives, and we’ve got a lot of grim work ahead of us.”

  “Just curious, Juan,” Linc said casually. “Who are these people we’re going to rescue? Political prisoners, common criminals, what?”

  “I think maybe they’re the key to this whole thing.”

  Linc gave a little nod. “All right.”

  “If you ask me,” Mark said and started to add, “I’ve got a bad feeling about—”

  Cabrillo cut him off with a look.

  Forty-eight minutes, by Juan’s watch, ticked by before he judged they were ready. Barely. He had seen the quality of the guards looking after the prisoners and knew they weren’t a serious threat in small numbers, but there were forty or so of them, and if his timing was off the two hundred more he hoped to lure from the training camp would reach the mine before everyone had made good their escape.

  On their approach to the mine, they had left Linc to make his way to higher ground overlooking the stockyard behind the old administration buildings. With a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, the ex-SEAL could have accurately hit targets from well over a mile away. His effective range with the smaller REC7 assault rifle was still an impressive seven hundred yards, and for what Juan had planned Linc would be taking significantly shorter shots than that. The Pig was just out of sight of the mining camp, atop the narrow trail where the day before the desert patrol had returned with the body of the escapee.