Corsair of-6

by Clive Cussler

  From the far side of the frigate came an explosion much more powerful than anything felt since the battle had begun. The ship-to-shore rocket had impacted on the inside of the main sluice gates for the Zonzur Bay Tidal Power Station.

  EIGHT ASSAULT RIFFLES POURED their deadly fire into the mouth of the side cave. Stone chips and ricochets filled the air like a swarm of angry hornets. All four Americans were bleeding from multiple hits, though no one had as serious an injury as Eric Stone’s shoulder.

  There was so much coming in at them that there was no way they could return fire, so they hunkered near the entrance as the terrorists advanced behind a wall of lead.

  One gunman suddenly burst into the cave, shouting wildly. He fired from the hip, raking the walls, tearing apart the bed, and blowing books off the shelves. Linda hit him with a three-round burst to the chest before he could aim at any of them, blowing his body back out into the main cavern.

  It had been dumb luck that she had killed him before he got any of them, and she knew that wouldn’t happen again. Next time, the entire team would rush them, and it would be over.

  Linda checked her ammo. She had no spare magazines in her harness, and the clip jammed into her rifle’s receiver was only half full. Eric was out of rounds and held his weapon like a club, ready to defend himself hand to hand. Mark Murphy couldn’t have very many bullets left either, she knew.

  A lifetime of defending her country had come down to this last stand in a dark cave far from home, fighting a bunch of fanatics who wanted nothing more than the right to keep on killing.

  The firing outside the cave slackened slightly. They were preparing for the final push.

  A grenade flew out of the smoke-filled passage and landed in the alcove loaded with chests. The wood absorbed half of the blast, belching splinters and glittering gold coins while the spray of shrapnel peppered the cave walls. Again, no one had been hit, but the concussion left them reeling. Bits of burning wood had landed on the beds and caught the linens on fire. In seconds, the air was choked with smoke.

  Eric screamed something to Linda, but she couldn’t hear him with her ringing ears. They would come now, she was certain. In the wake of the grenade’s detonation, the terrorists had to know they had them. Filthy, aching, emotionally raw, she tightened her finger around the REC7’s trigger.

  But nothing happened for long seconds. Of the seven surviving terrorists, only one or two were firing into the cave now. They were waiting us out, Linda thought, knowing the smoke will force us to them, or hoping we die in the fire.

  Lying prone to get out of the worst of it, Linda took tiny sips of the fouled air, but each breath seared her lungs. Assad’s men were going to get their wish, she thought grimly. They couldn’t stay here much longer. She looked over at Eric and Mark, her eyes questioning. They seemed to read her mind and both nodded their assent. Linda scrambled to her knees and launched herself onto her feet, her shipmates at her side.

  “Let’s go, Sundance,” Mark shouted as they charged into the mouths of the waiting guns.

  They sprinted past the burning drapery over the cave’s entrance and made a good five feet and still hadn’t drawn fire. Linda searched for a target in the wavering light of the ship burning in the distance but spotted no one standing to face them. There was a terrorist sprawled on the ground a few paces from her, a neatly drilled hole between his shoulder blades. Then she saw others they had somehow managed to hit. The cavern floor was littered with them. Her headlong rush slackened until she stood stock-still with a total of eight bodies at her feet.

  She felt a superstitious tingle run the length of her spine.

  One of the men moved weakly, clawing at the sand and gasping for air. Like the first, he’d been hit in the back. Mark kicked the AK out of the man’s reach and rolled him over. Frothy blood from his ruptured lung bubbled from his lips. Linda had never seen Tariq Assad, so she didn’t recognize his distinctive unibrow.

  “How?” he gasped.

  “Your guess is as good as ours, pal,” Mark told him.

  And then over the crackling of the burning Saqr and through the ringing in their ears came a rich melodious baritone singing, “From the hall of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli, / We will fight our country’s battles / In the air, on land and sea.”

  “Linc?” Linda cried.

  “How you doing, sweet stuff?” He emerged from his cover position with his rifle cocked on his hip and a pair of night vision goggles pulled down around his neck. “Got here as fast as I could, but this bod wasn’t made for running across the damned desert.”

  Linda threw her arms around the big man, sobbing into his chest, the depth of determination to face her enemies in a suicidal charge dissolving into profound relief at being alive. Mark and Eric pounded his back, laughing and choking on the smoke at the same time.

  “Looks like you guys made a good show for yourselves.” Which, from Linc, was his greatest sign of respect.

  Alana staggered from the cave, her torso bare and once-white bra blackened with soot. She was holding a couple of books as gingerly as she could. Their pages smoldered. When one started burning, Mark took it from her, dropped it on the ground, and kicked sand over it to snuff the flames.

  “I wanted to save more,” she managed between coughs, “but the smoke. I couldn’t. I did get this, though.”

  “What’s that?” Linc asked.

  Dangling from a crudely fashioned chain of silver was a small crystal nestled in a rudimentary setting. The piece of jewelry wasn’t particularly attractive; in fact, it looked almost like a child’s attempt at making a Mother’s Day present out of pipe cleaners and paste. But there was something compelling about it beyond its obvious antiquity, an aura as if it were a presence there in the cave with them.

  A bullet had shattered the stone, so it lay in its cradle in tiny shards no bigger than grains of sugar, and from it oozed a single claret drop.

  “Holy God,” Mark said, dropping to his knees to scoop up the soaked spot of sand. From a shirt pocket, he pulled out a power bar and ripped away its wrapping. He threw the food aside and carefully placed the tiny bit of mud on the paper and twisted it closed. There was a red streak on his palm that mingled with the blood from a deep cut he’d received at some point during the battle.

  “When the covers burned away,” Alana explained, “I realized there was a mummy on the bed, placed on his side facing Mecca as a good Muslim should. This was around his neck. Henry Lafayette must have placed Al-Jama like that when the old man died and left him with his greatest treasure. That is the Jewel of Jerusalem, isn’t it? And that was His blood, preserved for two thousand years in a vacuum within that crystal.”

  “His blood?” Linc asked. “Who His?”

  “Stuffed in that candy wrapper in Mark’s hands may be the blood of Jesus Christ.”

  THE TIDAL STATION’S MASSIVE steel gate stretched for more than a hundred feet above the generating plant set in the desert depression. When the facility was operating at full capacity, the gate could be lowered more than thirty feet to allow water to flow into large-diameter pipes down into the long turbine room more than a hundred feet below sea level. With the sun setting rapidly to the west, the gate had been closed and the turbines idled so crews could remove excess salt left over by the sun’s evaporation, the key to the zero-emissions facility.

  The missile off the Oregon hit the exposed machinery that operated the gate dead center, blowing apart the hydraulic systems and smashing the gears that acted as a mechanical brake. Even the pressure of the ocean it was designed to withstand couldn’t keep the heavy door pinned in place, and it started to lower on its own accord into a recess built into the artificial dike.

  Water spilled over the top of the gate, first in thin erratic sheets tossed by waves lapping against the structure, and then in a solid curtain when it fell below the surface. With less surface exposed to the titanic forces holding back the Mediterranean, the gate accelerated downward. The curtain turned into a gu
sh, and then into a torrent more powerful than the worst levee break on the Mississippi River. Millions of tons of seawater poured though the gap. The pipes to carry the water into the powerhouse were closed, saving the delicate turbines, so the deluge flowed wild and uncontained down the dike into the desert.

  Even when the plant wasn’t active, there was a two-mile exclusion zone around the facility for all shipping. It was a rule Max Hanley had gladly ignored. He’d been shepherding the Gulf of Sidra into the exact right position for when the missile hit. Up on the main view screen, he watched the ocean disappearing into the gap on the far side of the frigate, but, more important, he could feel the pull of the current in the way his beloved ship responded to his controls.

  The Sidra had sheered away from the Oregon as soon as they were in the gravity-induced vortex, sucked toward the opening as surely as if she’d been aimed at it. Max goosed the directional thrusters and closed the gap, keeping one eye on the camera feed showing where Juan would appear.

  “Come on, buddy. We don’t have all day.”

  The Chairman suddenly burst through the frigate’s hatchway, holding the hand of Secretary Katamora. Max steepened his angle and closed the gap, so the two ships brushed just enough to scrape a little paint off her hull. Juan was on the Sidra’s railing at that exact moment. He lifted Fiona off the deck and hurled her onto the Oregon, where she fell into the waiting arms of a still-woozy Mike Trono.

  As soon as Juan’s boots hit the deck, Max pulled the big freighter away from the stricken frigate and opened the throttles as far as they would go. The warship was also desperately trying to get clear of the maelstrom. Smoke belched from her stack and her props beat the water frantically, and yet she lost more ground with every passing moment.

  The Oregon’s revolutionary engines gave her ten times the power, and once water was humming through the tubes her lateral motion checked and she started to pull away. Max even eased back on the controls a touch, never wanting to push his babies harder than he had to.

  The Sidra’s hull slammed into the open sluice intake at a perfect broadside. Water continued to rush under her keel, but half the floodwaters were suddenly contained once again. Balanced precariously, with the sea pressing in on the hull so her steel moaned at the strain, the crew could do nothing as the ship that had foiled their perfect plan steamed serenely away.

  On the Oregon’s deck, the Corporation operators who’d been blown back by the RPG clustered around the Chairman and his guest. So little time had elapsed since that fateful moment that medical staff hadn’t even arrived, but it looked as if Doc Huxley and her team weren’t going to be busy after all. The injuries appeared minor.

  Juan stuck out a hand to formally introduce himself to Fiona. “I want to say it is an honor to meet you. My name’s Cabrillo, Juan Cabrillo. Welcome aboard the Oregon.”

  She brushed aside his hands and hugged him tightly, repeating her thanks into his ear over and over again. The thing about adrenaline heightening one’s senses was that it had that effect on all of them, so before Fiona realized how much Juan was enjoying the contact he gently untangled himself from her willowy arms.

  “I know you’re a woman of many accomplishments, but I wonder if acting is among them?”

  She looked at him askance. “Acting? After what we just went through you’re talking about acting. You call me nuts.”

  He slipped an arm around her waist to lead her into the ship’s interior. “Don’t worry, you get to play yourself, and we just practiced the scene I want to reproduce for Ali Ghami.”

  “You know?”

  “I even know how he got leverage on Qaddafi. His grandson was in Switzerland on vacation when he was killed in a car crash. The crash was staged and the boy kidnapped. If Qaddafi ever wanted to see the kid alive again, he had to make Ghami Foreign Minister, not knowing that he had just made one of the worst terrorists in the world a senior government official and given him access to everything he needed to pull off his little caper.”

  “And you?” Fiona asked. “How do you fit in with all of this?”

  He gave her a squeeze. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  EPILOGUE

  THE SENIOR STAFF WAS ASSEMBLED ON THE AFT HELICOPTER pad when George Adams brought Hali Kasim back to the ship from a Tripoli hospital. Hux had a wheelchair standing by, and she turned away from the chopper as it flared in over the Oregon’s fantail.

  The skids kissed dead center. Gomez killed the turbines. Everyone rushed forward under the spinning blades to pound on the rear door glass, laughing and aping for Hali as he sat strapped in, a johnny pulled loosely over his heavily bandaged chest. He’d undergone five hours of surgery to repair the damage Assad’s bullet had done to his internal organs and endured a week of hospital food before his doctors would allow him to leave.

  But he was the last of them home after what had been perhaps the toughest mission the Corporation had ever undertaken. At dawn, they had rendezvoused with their two wandering lifeboats full of ex-prisoners. The Foreign Minister already had his old job back and was at the conference. Adams had picked up Linda and the others from the desert cave not long afterward. When they had emerged from the cavern, they discovered Professor Emile Bumford bound and gagged at the entrance. The two gundogs who’d gone into the drink during the attack on the Sidra had been picked up, half-drowned, by the rescue Zodiac with nothing worse than flash burns on their hands and faces. Hux and her staff had patched them up, tended Alana’s hands and Eric’s shoulder, and removed what seemed like a pound of stone shrapnel from the group Mark dubbed the “Fantastic Four.”

  Alana had remained on the Oregon for just a night. She was anxious to return to Arizona and her son. Unfortunately, without any kind of provenance and with its crystal ruined, no one would risk their career by saying definitively if the necklace she’d found was indeed the fabled Jewel of Jerusalem. The real team of archaeologists who’d been excavating the Roman villa had been sent into the caverns after the pall of smoke had been extracted. The Saqr had been reduced to ashes, and only the gold remained in the side chamber. But it in itself was a numismatist’s wildest dream come true. The gold was mostly in the form of coins from every nation of Europe and every corner of the old Ottoman Empire, stretching back hundreds of years. It was the accumulated hoard of generations of the Al-Jama family, and even the most conservative estimate put the coins’ worth ten times higher than the value of the gold alone.

  The delegates at the Tripoli Accords had already declared that the proceeds of the sale of so many perfectly preserved and diverse coins would help fund antipoverty programs across the Muslim world. And that was only the beginning of the sweeping reforms the leaders had on the table.

  A half dozen helping hands eased Hali Kasim out of the chopper and into the waiting wheelchair.

  “You don’t look so bad to me,” Max said, wiping at his eyes.

  “I’m still on pain meds, so I don’t feel so bad either,” Hali replied with a grin.

  “Welcome back.” Juan shook his hand. “You sure took one for the team this time.”

  “I’ll tell you, Chairman, I don’t know what was worse: getting shot or getting so completely bamboozled. Mossad agent, my brown butt. I just hope he suffered in the end.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Linc said. “Lung shot’s about the worst way to go.”

  The bright note about the archaeological finds from the tomb were the three books Alana had managed to save. One was Henry Lafayette’s Bible, which he’d left with his mentor, and another was Suleiman Al-Jama’s personal Koran. The third was a detailed treatise on ways the two great religions could and should coexist if all of the faithful were strong enough to live up to the moral standards set down in the sacred texts. The writing had already been authenticated, and while some of the diehards called it a forgery and a Western trick, others—many, many others—were heeding the Imam turned pirate turned peacenik’s words.

  No one kidded themselves, least of all Juan Cabrillo, th
at terrorism was about to end, but he was optimistic that it was on the wane. He’d have no problem with that, even if it meant that the Oregon would head for the breaker’s yard and he would light out for a tropical retirement.

  Everyone followed Hali as he was wheeled into the ship except for Max and Juan. They lingered over the fantail next to the Iranian flag their ship sported. Water churned in the big freighter’s wake as she started to get under way again.

  Max took out his pipe and jammed it between his teeth. The fantail was too windy and exposed to light it. “Couple pieces of good news for you. A team of NATO commandoes raided the new base Ghami’s people were building in the Sudan. With their leader imprisoned, they put up only token resistance. Not so, however, the ones still in Libya. The last of them tried to storm the prison where he’s being held.”

  “And . . .” Juan prompted.

  “Shot dead, to a man. A single guard was killed by a suicide blast when he tried to take one of them prisoner. Oh, hey,” Max exclaimed, suddenly remembering something, “I read your final report this morning about this whole fur ball. Question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “On the Sidra, when you went back after the Secretary told you not to shoot Ghami’s bodyguard . . .”

  “Mansour.”

  “Right, him. You wrote you kneecapped him. Is that true?”

  “Absolutely,” Juan said without taking his eyes off the horizon. “Marquis of Queensbury rules, remember? Those are the restrictions we’ve placed on ourselves. Come to think of it, actually, I could have been a little more detailed in the report. I didn’t mention that Mansour was bent over one of his men trying to get his weapon in such a way that his head was on the other side of the knee I blew out. I don’t believe the good Marquis ever said anything about bullets overpenetrating.”

  Max chuckled. “I think that’s true. Say, what was it Hux told you just before Hali arrived?”