Mirage

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Max Hanley was a born pragmatist. He liked Cabrillo’s idea of laying up the ship for a bit and letting the entire crew take a vacation. He also knew where they could get a replacement for the Nomad 1000 submersible and he figured its current location was as good a place as any to let the crew off.

He had been negotiating with a Taiwanese university that happened to have a Nomad they no longer needed. The school had once been a technical training facility for commercial fishing, and the submersible had been an unsolicited gift. Max could have always bought a new one from the manufacturer, but he was not one to waste a penny, let alone several million dollars.

Max choppered in ahead of the ship as it sailed for Taipei, to meet with university staff. His cover was that he was brokering the deal on behalf of a start-up oil exploration company, the industry that snapped up the lion’s share of U.S. Submarines’ yearly production of Nomads and Discos. The Oregon was the freighter he had hired to transport the submersible to the offshore petroleum fields of the Gulf of Mexico.

The inspection went well. The school had mothballed the Nomad properly and had checked on her frequently. The batteries took a charge, although Max already knew they’d need to be replaced. Certain things one didn’t buy used. He had fresh ones aboard the ship. All the electronics and mechanical systems worked, and he found no corrosion or damage to any of the hydraulic lines. The only problem they found was the manipulator hand on the end of the robotic arm didn’t work properly. To Max, it was a simple fix, but he got them to shave a few thousand off the price.

When the Oregon arrived, it captured the attention of hundreds of students. They gawked at the massive vessel that blocked their view of the bay and open ocean beyond. Max had arranged a customs inspector to be here from Taipei and he signed off on the loading.

Juan himself, dressed like a scruffy sea dog for the benefit of the onlookers, was at the controls of the ship’s main crane. Crewmen rigged the lift, using slings under the submersible’s thirty-foot hull, and an hour after arriving it was lying crossways on the forward hold and the ship was ready to sail. Max had to stick to his role as broker, so he would drive to Taipei.

The Taiwanese capital was on the northern tip of the island, and they could have steamed there in about fourteen hours, but Cabrillo took the Oregon out of traditional sea routes, both for coastal vessels and those crossing the Pacific for ports in the Americas. And he needed the cover of darkness. A ship deploying a mini-sub, while uncommon, wasn’t unheard of. The ship leaving the area without seeming to recover the mini-sub would raise questions.

Because the Nomad was untested, Juan would let no one else make the initial dive. In the hours it had taken to reach a secluded spot of ocean, the crew had replaced the old batteries with new ones and had attached a system of inflatable bladders to the hull should the mini not respond to Cabrillo’s control. There were safety divers in the water as well, and the area around the Oregon was lit with powerful spots above and below the surface.

After being lowered into the water and having its shackles removed, the mini-sub’s tanks were slowly flooded by Juan. He blew them as a test when the seas overtopped his viewing bubble. He rose as pluckily as a toy submarine in a bathtub.

So then he went for it, diving down along the Oregon’s steel flank and then rising gently into the moon pool. More crew were in place to secure the lifting cables. In moments, the sub was safely stowed in its new home, and Cabrillo was heading to the dining room for a late supper.

He noted the asparagus he was served had come from a can. It was a good thing they were berthing soon. All their fresh provisions had run out, and he was told, when he asked the mess attendant, that they were down to three rather unpopular ice-cream flavors.

Juan couldn’t sleep that evening, and it had nothing to do with fresh vegetables or butter rum taffy ice cream. Something nagged at his subconscious, some little kernel jabbing into his mind that exhaustion couldn’t nacre over like an oyster encasing a bit of sand with pearl. At midnight, he resigned himself to wakefulness and got out of bed. He slipped on his leg and dressed in the clothes he’d discarded an hour and a half earlier.

He wasn’t in the mood for a drink, and sitting alone in his cabin held no interest. Julia Huxley was one of those remarkable people that needed just a few hours of sleep per night. He sought her out and found her not in her cabin but down in medical. She was on the Internet as part of a service for people who had immediate medical questions but no access to doctors.

“Hey, Juan. Can’t sleep?” she greeted when he paused at the door to her office off the main examination room.

Her office was a small cubical barely big enough for her desk and a spare chair. One wall was covered with framed diplomas and awards. She’d confessed once that her version of the “ego wall” wasn’t for her but her patients. Seeing her so lauded tended to put them at ease.

“Master of the obvious,” Juan smiled back and took the spare chair.

“Let me just finish up here. I’ve got a guy in Fiji who I think is having an attack of shingles.” She and her patient typed back and forth for another couple of minutes. “There. Done. Poor fellow is in for a miserable time. So, what’s on your mind?”

“I don’t know,” Juan admitted. “Something.”

“That narrows it down,” Julia teased with a grin. “Okay, try this. How long has something been bothering you?”

“Just tonight. I’ve been on top of the world since escaping Shanghai and then when I went to bed tonight, I couldn’t fall asleep. I’m getting this feeling that I’ve missed something.”

Hux suddenly looked grave. “You and I have been through a lot together.” Julia had overseen Juan’s recovery from having his leg blown off. “I know you, and I know when you think you’ve overlooked something that you are probably right. You have.”

“I know,” Cabrillo said. “That’s what’s making this so tough.”

“We can assume this has to do with our past mission, so why don’t we go through it together.”

And they did, from the very top when Yuri Borodin’s aide-de-camp, Misha Kasporov, rang them to tell them about Borodin’s illegal incarceration up to the moment the Discovery 1000’s hatch closed in the Huangpu River for the ride back to the Oregon. She hadn’t realized how close some of the calls had really been and rebuked him for being reckless. He took her remarks the way a lifetime smoker takes the advice of their doctor to quit. Great tip, but it ain’t gonna happen.

“It has to be L’Enfant’s betrayal,” Julia concluded for him. “Everything else about this is pretty straightforward, at least by your standards.”

“Obviously we can never use him as a contact anymore. He might have come through with Kenin’s location, but the trust is broken. We both recognize that. And, yes, he’s the best in the world at what he does, but there are others we can turn to.”

“So you’re saying that isn’t it?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Juan raked his fingers through his hair, which was now the length of a Marine recruit’s. “Kenin deduced who we are after we rescued, well, almost rescued Yuri. He must have known our reputation because he immediately started eliminating any connection to his optically stealthed ship. He also leaned on L’Enfant to find out where we were going to be. He sent his ship out to capsize the Sakir and I assume sink us as well.”

Juan paused as something began to gel in the back of his mind. “What do you think it cost to develop that stealth ship?”

“Who knows? Even if he had Tesla’s formula for making a ship invisible and samples of his equipment, we’re still talking a hundred million at least.”

“Exactly, and yet he risked it to go after a Sheik’s boat and us. If he had access to a submarine, surely he had people in the surface fleet loyal to him. Why didn’t he just launch a few ship-killing missiles at us and Dullah’s yacht?”

“We could have shot them down,” Julia pointed out.

“He didn’t know that. He threw a hundred-million-dollar asset at a hundred-dollar problem. That bothers me. This was also his big score, his final act of thievery before leaving Mother Russia for good. It’s inconceivable that someone was willing to pay that kind of money to kill an Emirate’s sheik who happens to be our client at the time. That is too big of a coincidence.”

He grabbed the phone off Julia’s desk and dialed Mark Murphy’s room. Murph answered on the second ring. Juan could tell he was on speakerphone.

“How are you two coming with that laptop?”

“We just got it back from Linc,” Eric shouted over some god-awful techno playing in the background.

“Turn that noise down,” Juan admonished.

“Noise?” Mark shot back with indignity. “That’s the Howler Monkeys.”

“I’m sure it is.” The volume thankfully dropped. “Why did Linc have the computer?”

“You didn’t get my e-mail?”

“Obviously not or I wouldn’t be asking.”

“The laptop was booby-trapped with a packet of C-4. Eric and I figured it might be rigged, so we X-rayed it first. Good thing we did. We guessed the charge goes off after the computer is opened and the password’s not entered within a certain amount of time. Linc needed until tonight to remove the detonator and explosives.”

“How long before you guys get anything?”

“We’re just starting on the password now. After that, there’s no way to know how many levels of encryption Kenin used. My guess is, a ton.”

“How long?” Juan demanded again, his tone harsh and accusatory.

“Days. Weeks. There’s no way to say. Sorry, Chairman.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Juan snapped. “That’s an order.”

He slammed down the phone. Julia looked concerned.

“They work better when they think I’m mad and make unreasonable demands.”

“So that was theater?”

“Partially,” Juan said. “But we need answers quickly.”

“I don’t understand,” she admitted. “What’s the rush?”

“You know that conflict between China and Japan over some islands?”

“Yeah, something about sovereign rights and newly discovered oil or gas or something.”

“I don’t think it was a recent discovery. I think China has known about it for some time. I remember when I was rescuing Yuri he asked me about current events. I made some lame joke, but I mentioned that the civil war in Sudan was winding down.”

“And?”

“China was a major backer in that conflict because they were getting a lot of their oil from the region. They stopped funding the war because they realized they won’t need to import fossil fuels from Africa if there are decades’ worth right off their coast.”

“But the Japanese,” Julia said by way of roadblock.

“Could do nothing without our help. And what do we do in situations like this where two naval powers are butting heads?”

“Ask Max or Eddie. They’re your military guys.”

“Come on, Hux. Everyone knows what we do.”

“We send in an aircraft carrier.”

“Exactly. Force projection at its finest. And it’s not just a carrier. It’s a whole battle group with several destroyers, a frigate, some cruisers and two submarines. They all act as a screen to keep the carrier safe. The system is so well designed that it’s also considered impervious to attack. Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, the Soviets figured they would need at least a hundred cruise missiles to have a hope of taking out just one carrier.”

“O-kay,” Julia drew the word out. “In comes our carrier, both sides back down, and crisis averted.”

“Think it through, Doc.”

And the horrifying thought that had nagged at Juan’s mind until he’d talked it out with her too. She blanched. “There’s another of those stealth ships out there.”

“That’s got to be it. The ship was conceived before the Soviet Union dissolved as a way to counter our carriers. The Russians don’t need something like that anymore, but a burgeoning and increasingly hostile China would love to be able to take out a big nuclear carrier and do it in such a way that they can’t be blamed.”

“Would they be so bold?”

“This has been coming for years,” Juan said. “All the hacking into our computer systems and industrial espionage. We’ve been in a closet war with China for at least a decade. Now that energy independence is within their reach, they will do anything to fulfill its promise.” A fresh thought struck Cabrillo. “Sinking the Sakir was a demonstration to the Chinese of the weapon’s power. They must have been monitoring the sinking from the rendezvous ship that escaped us when we were dead in the water. Kenin chose Dullah’s yacht to get back at me, and I bet he even got some Middle East faction to pony up some dinars for the hit on Dullah too.”

“What do we do?”

“I’ll alert Langston but without anything concrete, like Kenin’s computer having a file labeled ‘bill of sale,’ there isn’t much he can do. The Navy won’t act on anything so insubstantial.”

“Our vacation is going to end before it even starts, isn’t it?”

Juan just gave her a look. He called the op center and asked the duty officer to track down the location of the nearest carrier battle group. If it was called in to the region, he needed to know its route since the Chinese would place their deadly stealth ship directly in its path. He was relieved to learn ten minutes later that the Johnny Reb, as the USS John C. Stennis was nicknamed, had just left Honolulu en route to the Navy base at Yokosuka, Japan. They had a few days’ breathing space even if the President ordered her into the disputed area immediately.

There were other practical considerations to take care of. Cabrillo thanked Julia and headed to the office just off his stateroom. He roused Max from his Taipei hotel suite to tell him the change in plans and to meet the Oregon at the Bali District piers the following day. They had already reserved a berthing space for the two weeks they’d planned for the Corporation-wide vacation. Cabrillo called the port authority to tell them they would only need it for a few hours.

The penalty for the change had been stiff, and Cabrillo wasn’t sure if he was on the right track. Thanks to them being over the international date line, it was one o’clock yesterday afternoon in Washington, D.C. He called Langston Overholt.

After explaining the situation, Cabrillo asked his old mentor and the CIA’s Spook Emeritus what he would recommend.

“This isn’t actionable intelligence, Juan,” the octogenarian said. “It’s guesses and supposition. Which from you are usually enough to go to the Secretary of Defense, but on this, I’ll need something more.”

“Like proof from Kenin’s laptop?”

“That would only show that he had sold such a weapon to the People’s Republic. Unless he also had their battle plans, I don’t think we can do much of anything. Of course I will pass along a memo of interest and that might get a nonspecific threat warning to the carrier group’s commanding admiral. But you must understand that if they do get sent in to intervene on this whole Senkaku/Diaoyu islands mess, they will already be at maximum alert status. Your crying ‘Bogeyman’ won’t change a thing.”

Cabrillo had expected as much. That was the problem with Washington. Bureaucratic inertia was measured at a glacial pace. The system wasn’t designed for quick lateral thinking. The news was not all bad. Langston continued, “I will talk with Grant down at the China desk to see what they’ve heard. We are aware that China is taking this much further than they have with other disputed islands, like their row over the Spratlys. Japan doesn’t want to back down either, which is why we’ve dispatched the John Stennis.”

“I thought there is a carrier already based in Japan,” Juan said.

“The George Washington, yes. There was a fire aboard her a week ago. A sailor was killed. They claim she’s not fit for sea duty.”

There was an odd tone in Overholt’s voice when he said this, and Cabrillo suspected he knew what caused it. Lang was a World War II veteran. They sent ships back into the fight just days after they took hits from kamikazes. Today, it would take months for safety inspectors and inquest panels and JAG attorneys to make the decision that the carrier was seaworthy.

“We are monitoring the situation,” Overholt said. “Where are you going to be?”

“Trying to guard the entrance to the East China Sea.”