Janson checked the time. Twenty-three-forty. As he had hoped, they were arriving before midnight. The Vulcan Queen’s third mate—the youngest, least experienced ship’s officer—would still be standing the eight-to-twelve watch. The busy night of ASC helicopters coming and going should lull him into concluding that the unidentified craft was routine traffic. The trick was to stall to get as close as possible, but not so long that the watch officer would get nervous and call the captain, who would be sleeping in his quarters below the bridge.
Janson rigged the fast rope in the side door.
“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen. Please identify yourself and your intention.”
“This is madness,” said Poe. “They’ll think we’re pirates. They’ll shoot us out of the sky.”
“Pirates don’t fly helicopters.”
At a range of less than a mile, the ship looked brilliant as a city. Electric lights covered every inch of her, illuminating the tall square stacks in the stern, the full height of her forty-story drill towers, and the enormous bridge house on the bow. The thousand-foot-long, eighty-foot-high hull was so big it cast a wind shadow. Upwind of it, seas were breaking in whitecaps and slamming against the hull. In its lee the water was flat calm. A supply boat sheltered on that side, moored under a loading boom, bathed in work lamps.
Other offshore service vessels circled, waiting their turn. All three vessels bristled with firefighting monitors, a vivid reminder that the purpose of the vast and complex floating factory was to exploit explosively volatile hydrocarbons. The Vulcan Queen herself was festooned with bright orange fireproof lifeboats. They were free-fall escape craft, perched to slide down sharply sloped slipways and plunge into the sea.
White domes studded the roof of the six-story bridge house. They protected the satellite antennas that received GPS data for the dynamic positioning system that controlled the thrusters and propulsion pods that held the ship in place. Battered by wind and water, the Vulcan Queen neither rolled nor drifted. The DP held her in as firmly as a continent.
“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen.”
Janson answered with a nonchalant oil patch drawl, “ASC 44 Crew Bird dropping in with a load of worms.” “Worms” were novices, new men on the job.
The helicopter was so close now that Janson could distinguish individual derricks and deck cranes. The ship was drilling 24-7. Riggers climbed high in the draw works. Movement on the main deck caught his eye. A squad of security men was unlimbering the ship’s sonic cannon and water guns, though it was hard to believe that any Gulf of Guinea pirates would risk suicide attacking such a big ship.
“ASC 44, I’m still negative on your transponder.”
“I’ve been catching grief on that all day,” Janson apologized.
Janson tapped the pilot’s shoulder.
The Frenchman aimed straight at the helipad that was cantilevered out from the bridge and over the bow of the ship. The landing zone was mere yards from Vulcan Queen’s DP control center, her most vulnerable asset.
The young voice on the radio was suddenly panicky: “Negative! Negative! You can’t land without clearance.”
“I got a whole crew of worms,” Janson protested. “What do I do with these guys?”
He ripped off the headset and pulled on his rope gloves.
Coughing violently, the Frenchman put the machine in a hover fifty feet above the helipad. Janson dropped the fast rope and plunged down the braided line. Four seconds after his boots hit the helipad, he was racing down a flight of steel steps. He hit the landing and swung the corner to the second flight. Two uniformed security officers racing up the flight saw him coming.
They raised short-barrel shotguns to sweep the steps with buckshot.
Janson fired first. The muffled reports of the sound-suppressed MP5 were drowned out by the rotor thud and turbine whine of the helicopter racketing back up into the dark night sky.
He vaulted over the fallen guards and burst through the side door of the bridge.
The quiet, dark room was lit by computer screens and nav instruments.
Janson found only two men, neither a security officer, and knew that he had bet right. Private jets, fleets of helicopters, and giant ships made corporation men feel safe, even when they weren’t.
The DP unit operator and the officer of the watch Janson had snowed on the radio gaped at his weapons and the balaclava that masked his face. The DP operator stayed at his keyboard and monitors. The frightened third mate, who looked twenty years old, fled to the opposite bridge wing door.
Janson got there first with his MP5 leveled at his chest.
“Easy, son. No one’ll get hurt.” He herded the third mate next to the DP operator, who was hunched over his instruments. “Do your job,” Janson told the DP man. “Move only to maintain your ship’s position. Do not let her drift. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
To the third mate Janson said, “Call Captain Titus. When he answers, give me the handset.”
The mate did as he was told and passed Janson the phone with a trembling hand. Janson spoke. “Captain Titus, come up to the bridge to greet the president of Isle de Foree.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“We have secured the bridge of your ship, Captain Titus,” said Janson, the “we” intended to keep them guessing about the size of his force. “Tell no one. Do not permit your security people to come with you. The first armed man we see, we start shooting DP computers.”
“Are you out of your mind? The ship—”
“Your ship will immediately fall off-station. She will drift out of control. She will tear up the six miles of riser pipe and drill string that American Synergy Corporation has driven to the seabed at a cost of a hundred million dollars. Come now. Alone. Use the stairs, not the elevator. Now!”
Janson backed against a bulkhead where he could cover the elevator and the stairs and the doors to the bridge wings. “Open the door for the captain,” he ordered.
The third mate did. Janson heard pounding footsteps. Only one man storming up the companionway. The captain burst into the bridge. He was a bull-necked, close-cropped bad-tempered-looking man in khaki, and if he feared a heavily armed, masked commando it did not show.
“Who in hell are you? What are you doing on my ship?”
“We’ve taken your ship,” Janson repeated. “There will be no killing and no damage if you do exactly what you’re told. If you don’t, I’ll take out the DP.” Janson gestured at the third mate. “Radio the helicopter; clear him to land.”
The mate looked at the captain.
“Do it!” shouted the captain.
The S-76 thundered down from the sky, the noise only slightly muffled by the pad over the bridge. After an agonizingly long wait, Ferdinand Poe appeared at the bridge wing door, leaning heavily on the Angolan co-pilot. The co-pilot helped him in, handed Poe the machine gun he had carried for him, and fled.
“Are you all right, sir?” Janson asked him.
Poe caught his breath and said, “Perfectly.”
Janson said, “Captain Titus, this is your host, Acting President of Isle de Foree Ferdinand Poe.”
Titus roared, “Who the hell do you think you are, boarding my ship on the high seas? Goddamned pirates.”
Ferdinand Poe bristled. “We are not on the high seas, Captain.”
“What?”
“We are on the sovereign territory of Isle de Foree. And you are my country’s guest.”
“Maritime law—”
“Maritime law permits you to sail through our territorial waters. But as long as your drill strings and risers attach you to our seabed, you are on Isle de Foree’s property.”
“Detaching them,” Paul Janson noted, “is a simple matter of me shooting up those computers.” He pointed his MP5 at the DP controller.
“I get the picture, goddammit. What do you want?”
“What ASC brass are aboard?”
“All of ’em. Half of goddamned Texas.”
“What sort of security do they have?”
Captain Titus hesitated.
Janson said coldly, “This no place for a shoot-out. You have two hundred hands working aboard your ship, Captain—sailors, technicians, tool pushers, drillers, roughnecks, stewards, and cooks. Answer me very carefully.”
“I have a four-man ASC security detail.”
“How many more did Mr. Case bring with him?”
The captain’s shoulders sagged. “Ten.”
“What sort?”
“Militia.”
Janson and Poe exchanged a quick glance.
Captain Titus straightened up again. He looked Janson in the eye and spoke like an officer accustomed to leavening authority with common sense. “Mister, they’ve got you outmanned and outgunned. Why don’t you save a lot of innocent people a lot of sorrow and put down your weapons?”
FORTY-TWO
Three decks below the Vulcan Queen’s bridge, fifteen men and three women who had flown most of the night and day from Houston ate at a long table in the drill ship’s conference room. The table was laid in white linen and heavy silver. Quietly efficient black stewards served.
Doug Case hid an amused smile at the diners’ pasty faces and stringy hair. ASC company lore held that no one in the oil business worked harder than ASC’s so-called officer corps. No matter how long they’d traveled, no matter how far they’d come, ASC executives hit the ground running, rolled up their sleeves, and went straight to work. All the while pretending they didn’t wish they were showering off the sixteen-hour plane ride and falling facedown on their mattresses.
Tonight, work was a full-press media massage to sell the special partnership between benevolent American Synergy Corporation and the grateful, stable island nation of Isle de Foree. Straight to work meant hosting egghead reporters from NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times, at a sustainable dinner of Isle de Foreen reef fish caught by artisanal fishermen. Rolling up sleeves involved sharing exclusive news of a major commercial ultradeepwater oil discovery. How major? The mother of all reserves. “Oh, and by the way, our old friend President for Life Iboga has come home to stabilize his nation.”
The fabled, ancient, and rarely seen “Buddha,” CEO Bruce Danforth himself, led the charm attack, demonstrating that he respected the media by being bluntly unapologetic. Despite Doug Case’s vaunted title President of Global Security, this was the first time he had been in the same room with the reclusive CEO, and he was deeply impressed. The Buddha was pushing ninety, but he was a damned sharp ninety.
“Coal,” Buddha addressed the dinner table in a roundabout answer to an NPR query, “will be the primary source of energy in the world for another hundred years. Oil will be the secondary source. Natural gas the third. Whether we like it or not, the methods of energy conversion established by James Watt’s steam engine and Charles Parsons’s steam turbine are still with us. Heat is power. Improved, refined, enhanced—heat is still power. And we will create eighty-five percent of that heat—that power—by burning fossil fuel.”
Case glanced at ASC’s vice president of media relations. The poor fool, who spent a large portion of his workdays attempting to convince dubious reporters that ASC was a green corporation passionately committed to renewable energy, winced.
Danforth noticed and did not look pleased. “Young man,” he said in a dangerous tone that brooked no argument, “you look tired from your journey. You should go to your cabin and rest. Now.”
The PR man left the table, ashen faced.
Danforth raised a wrinkled finger and when he had everyone’s attention, again, repeated the NPR question that had prompted his blunt statement. “Will American Synergy impede the development of renewable sources of energy that currently supply the other fifteen percent? Of course not. We don’t have to. ASC has no need to limit the potential of renewable energy. Physics will do it for us.”
“Physics or the free market?” came a question down the table.
Case’s phone vibrated. News from Black Sand Prison. Hopefully getting better.
He backed his chair from the table to take the call while the Buddha gave the woman who had asked a smile that had melted female hearts for decades before she was born and proceeded not to answer her question. “ASC invests millions to develop renewable sources. We reap a tax deduction. And if ASC’s scientists do stumble past the current laws of physics, we will hold the patents.”
Clearly, Bruce Danforth loved running the biggest oil corporation in America and would stay in charge until they carried him out in a coffin. Long enough time for Doug Case to develop a lasting relationship with the man. Particularly if Buddha, not Helms, was his private mentor, The Voice.
Case put his phone down and drove his wheelchair between Bruce Danforth and Kingsman Helms.
“Poe’s people are putting up a hell of a fight at the prison. Iboga’s advance party is falling back.”
The Buddha’s old, yellowish eyes fixed unpleasantly on Case. Nearby executives and reporters pretended not to be trying to hear, which they could not, as the CEO of American Synergy Corporation was an expertly quiet mutterer and his words did not carry. “You did not predict this, Douglas.”
“No, Mr. Danforth,” Case admitted with a sinking heart. Acting President Poe’s hotly fought defense of the prison was not in the plan. At this moment Iboga’s freed officers were supposed to be welcoming him at the airport for a triumphal march to the Presidential Palace.
“Nor did you, Kingsman.”
“No, sir.”
Buddha’s dry, cracked lips barely moved. “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”
Kingsman Helms looked stricken. As well he should, thought Doug Case. The oil executive had never been in a gunfight. Case had. He took charge.
“I had hoped that Iboga’s advance party would wrap things up before he landed, Mr. Danforth. But I guarantee that the moment Iboga himself steps off that plane with fresh men and weapons, he will turn the tide.”
FORTY-THREE
Iboga, who had purchased every seat in the Business Class section of the TAAG 224 from Luanda, spread out a topo map of Porto Clarence and rehearsed the run from the airport to Black Sand Prison. Nine mercenary commandos sat nearby, paying close attention to the returning dictator. Victory, the release of Iboga’s officers, would depend on disciplined adherence to his bold plan. None of this small force doubted it would work. Regardless of rumors of drug-addled cannibalism and his almost comical rolls of neck fat bulging from his yellow kaffiyeh, it was immediately apparent that Iboga was first and foremost a soldier who knew his business.
The snipers were first off the plane when they landed.
Their mission was to break up checkpoints and ambushes with long-range fire. While the rest of the assault force bullied the ground crew into quickly unloading their rocket launchers from the cargo hold, a waiting taxi raced the marksmen through the empty streets, dropping one at a key intersection with the beach road and delivering the other to Parliament House, a neoclassical building with a tall, spindly clock tower. The clock read ten minutes until midnight. An Iboga loyalist pointed the way to circular stairs. From the open belfry the sniper could cover the last mile of the beach road that Iboga would travel to Black Sand Prison.
The tower was a hundred feet tall, the stairs steep. The sniper was sweating in the humid night air and his weapon case was growing heavy when he reached the four-sided clock. One more story to the bell. He dragged himself up that last flight and stepped into the open. It was pitch-black. In the distance he could see the front of Black Sand Prison harshly bathed in floodlights. He scoped it through binoculars. Dead soldiers were scattered on the ground in front of the walls. The walls themselves were pocked by hundreds of rounds of assault rifle fire and scorched by grenade explosions. But the gates were still closed.
The defenders, who were sure to be spooked and bloodied from repe
lling the first attack, were in for a shock when Iboga’s force attacked with rockets. The sniper pulled down his night goggles and knelt to open his gun case.
“This seat is taken.”
He whirled toward the sound of a woman’s voice and pawed his pistol from its thigh holster.
“Don’t,” she said.
He had missed her in the dark before he donned his night gear. She was crouched like an elf, close enough to touch, an eerie vision tinted phosphorus green. She had light-enhancing glasses, too. Panoramics that covered most of her face. She had a pistol with a noise and flash suppressor in her hand and a Knight’s M110 SASS on a bipod. The semiautomatic sniper rifle was pointed at the prison.
Stupid woman. What the hell did she think she could hit at a thousand meters? Excellent gun, though, better than his; excellent night glasses, too, far better than his. An unexpected opportunity to upgrade. He faked a clumsy lunge at her to force her off-balance and sprang sideways, drawing his pistol. His last sight on earth was a flash from hers.
* * *
JESSICA KINCAID LISTENED until she was sure no one else was coming up the stairs. Then she lay prone on the stone floor of the bell tower and zeroed her rifle in on the prison’s iron doors. In five minutes she heard a car on the beach road moving at high speed. Headlights flicked through the palm trees that lined the road. A second vehicle was right behind it. And then a third. They passed her position and kept going.
“Let them get close,” she muttered, but Freddy and his boys were pumped by the first fight to defend the prison. They opened fire too soon on the lead car.
Sure enough, the car stopped in time. Three guys with guns piled out, unscathed, and dove for cover in the trees. The second car stopped behind the first, the third behind that. Three more men tumbled out of each, professionals moving fast and low.
Iboga appeared brighter in the thermal-enhanced panoramics than the commandos around him. The fat man emitted more heat. His kaffiyeh headdress showed up darker than his skull, as did the rocket launcher that he was waving like a drum major’s mace to rally his men and coordinate their attack.
Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Command Page 31
