Mirage

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Cabrillo was sitting watch in the op center when he got the call from Mark Murphy to meet in the Oregon’s boardroom. Juan checked the time on the main screen. His pet nerds had missed his deadline by only three hours.

They had already docked at Taipei’s new port, nestling like an ugly duckling between two beautiful swans in the form of a couple of cruise ships disgorging passengers for a day of sightseeing in Taiwan’s capital. The truck from the chandlers was already at the dock, and within an hour of their arrival, the crates of perishables and other food had been hoisted aboard.

Juan nodded to the navigator that she had the conn and made his way to the boardroom. Murph and Stoney looked like they hadn’t slept since getting the computer back from Linc. Both men had red-rimmed eyes with bags sagging below them. But they also had knowing grins spreading from ear to ear.

“I take it there’s good news?” Juan asked and took his seat at the head of the table.

“Oh yeah,” Mark said. “We just finished cleaning out Kenin’s last account. All told, he had fifty million in various banking centers all over the world — Caymans, Dubai, Luxembourg. You name it.”

“Well and good,” Juan said. “What about there being another stealth ship? Did they build another one?”

“Sure did,” Eric Stone confirmed. “China paid twenty million for it, plus picked up the tab for Kenin’s luxury retreat in Shanghai.”

In most cases, Cabrillo delighted at being right about something. Not so today. The news sent a chill through to his heart because this meant China was likely emboldened enough to use this new weapon against an American target.

“They were built in 1989,” Stone added. “Originally, the Russians wanted to build one for each of our carrier battle groups. But they abandoned the project after only two were constructed. They were in mothballs at a shipyard and appeared to be all but forgotten. Kenin discovered them two years ago and had them both refurbished, adding some improved technology discovered on Tesla’s mine tender. He knew that the Chinese would be his only potential clients and courted them for months. They finally agreed to the deal at about the same time the disputed gas fields were first mentioned in the media.”

That timing seemed right to Cabrillo. The Chinese knew that if they stuck to their plan the U.S. Navy would intervene. They needed something to counter an American flattop that wouldn’t ignite World War III. In his opinion, he thought Kenin should have held out for more money. Then again, the Russian already had more money than he could spend in a lifetime, so why bother asking for something you’ll never need?

“Are the technical specs on the computer?”

“Sorry, Chairman,” Eric said with an air of hangdog about him. “We cracked every file on his laptop. He had a file describing the capabilities that he used to entice the Chinese, but nothing about how the weapon worked or what equipment he’d recovered off of Tesla’s ship.”

“We’ll keep going over it, Chairman,” Mark replied, “but it’s not looking good. Kenin wasn’t a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy. He didn’t care how the ship functioned, only that it did function.”

“Okay,” Juan said. “Thanks, you two. That was great work. Go hit the sack.”

Cabrillo pulled up a map of the China Sea on the big screen at the far end of the boardroom table and tried to place himself inside the mind of the man in command of the stealth ship. He needed to pre-position himself in front of the carrier battle group and let them come to him since his wake would be visible when the ship was in motion and would surely catch the eye of a pilot flying combat air patrol. It would all depend on the ability to track the unbound carrier group and project its course, a straightforward task because of the constellation of Chinese spy satellites.

Juan could get the battle group’s course from Overholt, so he had the same information as his opponent. The real question was, then, how far out from the disputed islands would I want to take down my quarry? The farther away, the better. However, that decreases the odds of the ships remaining on the projected course. They zigged and zagged at random intervals even as they steamed in a steadily western direction.

He gamed a dozen scenarios and came up with a dozen places he’d lie in wait. It was fruitless yet telling at the same time. Fruitless because, after more than two hours of staring at the map, he was no closer to finding a solution, and telling because it showed how desperately important this was for the Chinese. If the carrier reached the region, any hope of taking the islands by force vanished.

The Chinese had been using the tactic of wearing down the Japanese fleet in hopes that they would abandon the area and thus their claim to the islands. As the world has witnessed with carriers rotating through the Persian Gulf for the best part of two decades, you just can’t wear down the U.S. Navy.

Captain Kenji Watanabe lined up the H-6 in his sights and ever so gently pressed the trigger on his joystick. Nothing happened. As he knew nothing would. He hadn’t armed his F-16’s weapons systems. He banked below the lumbering, twin-engine aerial-refueling plane as it fed avgas to a J-10 fighter jet.

While the J-10 was a modern aircraft that looked like a cross between his own Fighting Falcon and the Swedish Gripen, the flying tanker was an old Soviet design from the 1950s. Like much of China’s air fleet, it was a knockoff built under license and wouldn’t last five minutes in a real fight. Even the J-10 was really no match for the F-16. It had limited range, hence the need for constant refueling as the aircraft crisscrossed the skies around the Senkaku Islands, and the F-16 was far more maneuverable.

Watanabe’s real advantage was the fact he had probably ten times the cockpit time as the Chinese pilot.

He was seasoned enough to know to give the linked aircraft ample room to perform the tricky operation. The Chinese had only recently perfected air-to-air refueling, so the pilots wouldn’t have much experience. No sense causing an accident with his jet wash. Watanabe came around so he was behind the tandem planes. That way when the J-10 Vigorous Dragon detached from the flying gas station, he’d be on his six. The last Chinese fighter Kenji had done this to hadn’t been able to shake him until he’d finally given up and broke for home base. The veteran pilot felt confident that this new Chinese wannabe ace wouldn’t fare much better.

The swept wing H-6 suddenly dove as it hit clear air turbulence. The J-10 pilot should have backed off and broken connection with the tanker, but instead he tried to stay with the bigger plane and overcompensated. To Watanabe’s horror, the two planes came together and then came apart in a mushrooming fireball that blossomed like a second sun. He threw his own aircraft down and to the left to avoid the devastation and still felt bits of shrapnel pepper the F-16’s airframe. He couldn’t tear his gaze from the awful sight. The wreckage of two destroyed planes finally emerged from the bottom of the explosion like discarded husks. No piece was much bigger than a sheet of plywood, and all of it was charred black.

There would be no parachutes.

Watanabe radioed in his report, hoping, praying that he hadn’t been witness to the trigger event that would send his beloved Nippon to war.

Despite protestations of innocence from the highest level, including an invitation to inspect Kenji Watanabe’s fighter jet to prove it hadn’t shot down the two Chinese aircraft, Beijing couldn’t be mollified. They insisted that this had been a deliberate act and demanded the Japanese withdraw all aircraft and ships from the Diaoyu Islands and cede their sovereignty at once.

China made preparations to send most of her fleet to sea, including troopships carrying over a thousand commandos to occupy the islands by force.

Diplomatic channels hummed with attempts to defuse the situation, but neither side was going to back down. Japan ramped up its own military presence on the islands by commandeering a hydrofoil fast ferry and rushing in troops. The American President had no choice but to order the USSJohn C. Stennis to the disputed territory. He also lit a fire under the Secretary of Defense’s tail to see that the crippled George Washington was back in service ASAP no matter what the lawyers said.

Inside the week, unless America’s calming presence could prevent it, the third Sino-Japanese war was about to erupt.

The Oregon patrolled the seaway leading to the islands like a restless bear in a cage. Back and forth she swept, radar set to maximum, her crew keyed up on caffeine and adrenaline. The weather was cooperative, allowing them to send up drone planes to enlarge their search area. Juan even convinced Langston Overholt to allow them access to satellite data, though, in truth, they didn’t have the expertise it took to interpret the high-res pictures with any degree of accuracy. For that, everyone was relying on the experts at the National Reconnaissance Office, a group even more secretive than the NSA.

For his part, Cabrillo sat in the center of the op center, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He rode the gentle swells that rocked the ship with the ease of a cowboy on a long cattle drive, his body tuned to his environment so that the minor adjustments to posture came without conscious thought. The gimbled cup holder built into his chair was rarely empty, though Maurice secretly switched him to decaf after the third cup. The watch would rotate at regular intervals and yet the Chairman remained a fixture in the room, silently brooding while his eyes darted from display screen to display screen. He checked the radar repeater over the shoulder of the watch stander and the feed from the drones over the shoulder of the remote pilot. And far from being distracted, the crew took comfort in Cabrillo’s steadying attention. As long as he was there, things would be all right.

He caught sleep when he could, usually when the ship was at the far end of her patrol box and thus less likely to stumble on the stealth ship. He didn’t bother with his bed but rather fell onto the sofa in his office and pulled up a woolen lap robe that had been rescued off the Normandie after she burned in New York Harbor in 1942. He would rouse himself after a couple of hours and use the ritual of shaving to convince his exhausted body he had received enough sleep. Then it was back to the op center, where he would prowl tirelessly just as his ship did.

Cabrillo had just returned from a two-hour catnap when something on radar caught his eye. It was a blip. That was little surprise. Though war clouds gathered, these were busy shipping lanes and would remain so up until the shooting started. Hali Kasim was on watch as both communications officer and radar operator.

“Hali, that target to our north, what’s the range?”

“Fifty miles, give or take.”

“How long has it been on our scope?”

Kasim typed into his keyboard for a minute. “Looks like twenty minutes.”

Cabrillo did some calculating in his head, using the radar’s range and the Oregon’s speed and heading. “She’s doing less than three knots. Does that strike you as odd?”

Hali agreed. He was still working on his computer. “I’ve got one even odder. There was a target at this exact same location the last time we swept this grid.”

George Adams happened to be on duty, piloting the model airplane they used as an aerial surveillance platform. He said, “Don’t need to ask me even once. It’ll take me a bit, though. I’ve got a bird already in the air, but she’s fifty miles the other side of us.”

Juan kicked into overdrive. This wasn’t the time to wait around. There was something off here, and Cabrillo needed answers. “Tell you what, Gomez. Let that one ditch and send up another.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take the loss out of my share.”

Adams did as ordered, kamikazeing the one UAV and launching another off the deck. It still took the better part of thirty minutes for the four-foot plane to approach the target. Juan hadn’t altered the Oregon’s search pattern, but he had slowed its speed so as to not break radar contact. Twenty miles out, Gomez dropped the drone from a comfortable altitude of five hundred feet to a wave-skimming twenty feet.

This was where his instincts and experience as a pilot paid off. They needed to remain below the target’s radar coverage, lost in the acoustical backscatter of heaving waves. There was no finer pilot aboard than Adams, so no one on the mystery ship knew they were being stalked. The drone’s camera showed the dark ocean seemingly inches below the little plane’s landing gear, while ahead the setting sun was a pale blaze of yellow against the horizon.

“There!” Juan called when he spotted a boxy silhouette sitting on the line dividing sky from sea.

Adams, with his superior eyesight, had already seen it and had slightly altered the UAV’s course to intercept.

It took just a few more minutes for expectation to turn into disappointment. This wasn’t the stealth ship. This ship was nearly nine hundred feet long and shaped like a box. Only at her flared bows near the waterline was there any attempt at streamlining the vessel. Forward was a little pillbox of a bridge to break up the monotony of her flat upper deck, while aft her twin funnels were blunt fins clustered on her starboard aft quarter. There was a large, garage-style door amidships, and another on her flat transom. The whole vessel was painted a dull green.

Juan recognized the class of ship immediately. She was a car carrier, a floating, multilevel parking garage that could transport a month’s worth of automobiles from a factory and ship them anywhere in the world. They were common in these waters, as both China and Japan were major car exporters. Why she was going so slowly was something of a mystery, but not today.

The feed suddenly cut out. Gomez cursed. Juan knew what had happened, and it wasn’t the first time. The UAV had been flying so low that a rogue wave had plucked her out of the sky. Such were the accepted dangers of approaching at wave-top altitude.

“And that, my friends,” Adams said, “is why we use unmanned planes and don’t put my backside at risk in the chopper for routine recons.”

“Nothing routine about that.” Cabrillo was out of his chair and standing below the main view screen. “Gomez, run the last few seconds of tape again.”

The chief pilot brought up the final twenty seconds of drone footage. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but Cabrillo made a gesture behind his back to play it a third time. Then a fourth. Finally, on the fifth viewing, just seconds before the wave smashed the UAV into the sea, Juan shouted, “Stop!” He studied the screen shot. “Advance slowly.” The picture turned choppy as it ran. “Stop! What do you see?”

Adams saw the big car carrier at a ninety-degree angle as it was quickly filling the camera lens’s angle. There was barely any wake at her stern and no frothing water at the bows, which meant she wasn’t moving very quickly, but that was something they already knew. Again, he couldn’t see what had so piqued the Chairman’s interest. No one else on duty seemed to see anything either because the crew remained silent.

As if sensing the collective confusion, Juan said, “Look about five feet up from her waterline. Does anyone else see a faint white line?” His question was greeted with a chorus of assents. “Any thoughts on what it is?”

This question was greeted by silence. Finally, it was Gomez Adams who figured out what the Chairman had understood immediately. He leapt from his seat. “I’ll have the bird warmed up by the time you’re ready.”

“People,” Juan said, “that isn’t a car hauler. It’s a floating dry dock. That white band is a line of salt rime from the last time she was under ballast.” He keyed on the shipwide intercom. “This is Cabrillo. Battle stations. Battle stations. We’ve found the at-sea base of operations for the Chinese stealth ship. Linc, Eddie, and MacD to report to the chopper pad in full combat gear. We’re going in black.” He issued several other orders and then followed the pilot out of the op center. Max was on his way to relieve his post in command of the ship.

Juan ran to his cabin, yelling for crewmen to make way as he hurried by. Any remnants of his deep exhaustion had fallen away. He switched prosthetics to what he termed his “combat leg.” This was a veritable Swiss Army knife of weaponry. It had a built-in.44 caliber single-shot gun that fired out of his heel, and a place to secrete a Kel-Tec.380 pistol, a small amount of explosives, and a knife. Next, he drew on a black tactical uniform, made of a flame-resistant cloth, and black combat boots. He kept his personal weapons in an old safe that had once sat in a station of a long-defunct southwestern railroad. He spun the dials to open it, and ignored the stacks of currency and gold coins he kept in case of emergencies. They used to have a nice cache of diamonds, but the market had been right to convert those into cash.

The bottom of the safe was a virtual armory. He slipped into a combat vest and rammed a new FN Five-seveN into the holster. He clipped on a tear gas grenade as well as two flashbangs. His main weapon for this op was a Kriss Arms Super V. It was the most compact submachine gun ever built and resembled something out of science fiction, with its stubby foregrip and skeletal butt stock. Its revolutionary design allowed it to chamber the massive.45 caliber ACP round and gave the shooter unparalleled control over a notoriously difficult bullet to fire on automatic. Normally fed with a standard thirteen-round Glock magazine, Juan’s was fitted with a thirty-round extender. He slipped spare magazines into the appropriate pockets.

Had this been an extended mission he would have carried weapons of the same caliber in case he needed more rounds for the Super V, but this was going to be a quick-and-dirty takedown, not a protracted gun battle. The combat harness was already fitted with a throwing knife, garrote wire, a med kit, and a radio, so all he had left to take was a black ski mask and he was ready to go.

He threw open his cabin door and almost knocked Maurice to the deck. As it was, he had to steady the old Englishman to keep him from dropping his silver tray. “You pad around as silent as a cat,” Cabrillo admonished.

“Sorry, Captain. I was just about to knock. I brought you some sustenance.”

Juan was about to tell him that he wasn’t hungry, but suddenly he was famished. “I don’t have a whole lot of time.”

“Take it and go,” Maurice said, pulling the domed cover off the tray. Inside was a steaming burrito, the perfect food to walk and eat. “Shredded beef and pork, and very, very mild.”

Juan grabbed the burrito and put the bottle of electrolyte-infused sports drink into the thigh pocket of his pants. He took off at a jog, calling over his shoulder before taking a monstrous bite, “You’re a good man, no matter what anyone says about you.”

“They actually say I’m a great man,” Maurice called back.

The Oregon had already slowed enough to launch the chopper. Gomez was at the controls when Juan strode out onto the aft deck and started for the aft-most hatch that was the ship’s retractable helipad. The turbine’s whine filled the air, so Juan didn’t hear MacD Lawless run up behind him to tap him on the shoulder. Behind the cockpit, Cabrillo saw Eddie and Linc were already strapped in. Lawless threw him a big toothy grin. Around his neck hung a venerable Uzi, a gun little changed since it first appeared in 1950.

Juan nodded back.

MacD took the last rear seat while Cabrillo swung into the cockpit next to Gomez. The aircraft shook like an unbalanced washing machine as the rotors whipped faster and faster. The noise died somewhat when the two open doors were closed. Juan put on a set of earphones, Adams threw a thumbs-up to the deck worker to pull the restraining chalks that prevented the helicopter from sliding across the deck in rougher seas, and the MD 520N lurched into the sky.

That initial launch was the highest altitude they reached for the entire flight. Gomez kept them at wave-top height, though now he had peripheral vision to keep from being battered by a crossing wave like the one that took out the UAV. They were so low that the rotor kicked up spume that the windshield wipers could barely clear.

“How we looking, Max?” Cabrillo radioed.

“Looking good. There’s not much traffic out here right now. I can’t see anything within twenty miles of your target unless there’s some small fisherman in her lee.”

“Okay.”

They flew hard for the sun as it continued to radiate over the skyline. True darkness in this part of the world was at least a half hour away. There was no need to talk about a plan. These men had fought and bled together enough to have an almost telepathic connection with one another. While MacD was the newest team member, he’d more than earned the trust of his teammates.

Gomez had swung them south so they would approach the ship from the rear, its blind spot. And with a shocking suddenness, the dot on the horizon blossomed into the ugly, truncated stern of the car carrier/dry dock, if Cabrillo’s theory was correct. If not, they were about to perform an inadvertent act of piracy on the high seas.

The chopper stayed low until the last possible second. The ship’s stern completely filled their field of vision. Juan studied the rear car ramp. It sure looked legitimate, and the white band he thought was salt was much less convincing in person. He felt a tickle of doubt.

It wasn’t too late to abort the mission.

He pulled down his ski mask.

He stayed with his intuition and said nothing as Adams heaved the chopper over the boxy fantail, its skids clearing the rail by inches. He raced up the length of the ship and threw the helo into a hover just feet from the back of the antennae-studded pilothouse. The men opened their doors and jumped to the deck. No sooner were they clear than Gomez reversed course and quickly sank back over the rear of the ship, where he would await word for extraction.

Juan led the team over the railing that protected the path out to the ship’s stubby flying bridges. He could see inside the bridge. There was a helmsman at a traditional ship’s wheel. An officer and another crewman were heading out to investigate the thunder of the helicopter’s rotors. All the men were Chinese. The officer finally noticed the armed men rushing toward the pilothouse and shouted to his companion. Cabrillo opened fire, deliberately shooting over the men’s heads. The bridge door’s glass inset disintegrated, and heavy slugs ricocheted off the ceiling and peppered the far wall.

MacD dove through the opening, shoulder-rolling up to his knees, and kept his weapon trained on the officer. Eddie came next. He covered the helmsman. Cabrillo was the third man, while Linc remained outside covering their rear.

The third crewman had bolted. Everyone was shouting — the ship’s crew in fear and the Corporation team telling them to drop flat.

Juan went after the third man who had fled the bridge via an open stairwell at the back of the room. Cabrillo made it down a couple of steps before someone started firing up at him. At least one bullet hit his artificial leg with a kick like a mule. He quickly climbed back out of the shooter’s line of sight and sent a flashbang tumbling down to the next deck. He turned away and covered his ears, and still the effects were almost paralyzing.

This time, he put his hands on the shiny railings flanking the steps and slid submariner style down to the top deck. The gunman was fast. He was just vanishing through another door, his hands over his ears. Juan triggered off a couple of rounds but didn’t think he’d hit anything. This told him that the sailor recognized a flashbang and knew how to abate its noise and intense light show. Another crewman was still there in what was the chart room/radio shack. He was seated behind an old marine transceiver, clutching at his head as the grenade continued to echo in his skull. Juan clipped him behind the ear with the Super V and the man’s struggles ceased. He slid down to the floor. MacD would be mopping up after him, so he didn’t waste time cuffing the man.

The shooter was headed someplace, and Cabrillo needed to find out where. But, so far, nothing made him certain he was right about this situation. Armed crewmen were rare but not unheard of. And maybe the guy watched a lot of action movies and recognized the grenade.

The exit led to a corridor lined with doors on one side. These would be cabins for the officers. One door flew open, the occupant no doubt alarmed by the noise. The guy was dressed in boxers, and he too had a weapon. Juan didn’t give him the opportunity to use it. He put a round in each of the Chinese officer’s shoulders. It was enough to take him out of the fight but not enough to kill him. Cabrillo refused to use lethal force until he was positive.

He came to another staircase and used his last flashbang, rushing down even as the thunderbolt reverberated off the ship. He’d seen blood drips on the floor. He’d winged his man, and now the trail would lead him straight to his quarry.

At the bottom of the stairs was another gray metal passageway, with cables and pipes running along the ceiling. The blood looked black in the inadequate lighting, but it was enough to follow. Cabrillo went through the door to his right and stopped short, his mind reeling.

He was wrong. Way wrong.

Ranks upon ranks of sedans were lined up as tidily as cars in an airport’s parking garage. They ran as far as the eye could see. All the colors of the rainbow were represented, and although they were dusty, they shone like jewels in the otherwise dank confines of the legitimate car carrier’s hold. They had hijacked an innocent ship, and Juan had shot two simple sailors. The defeat and guilt were crushing.

He was reaching for his throat mic to tell the others that they had been mistaken when he recognized the decorative badge on all the cars’ hoods. For an instant, he was back in Uzbekistan with old Yusuf, and they were looking at the car in which his brother had died when the ferry he was riding on sank. Like that rusted-out wreck, these cars had the distinctive Viking-ship-silhouette hood badge that Juan had looked up upon his return from the Aral Sea. These were Russian cars. Ladas. And all their tires were flat. The meaning behind this discovery was immediate, and his respect for Russian war planners went up a couple of notches.

Cabrillo started running after the wounded sailor again.

In order for the Soviet stealth ships to be used in case of a war with the United States, they needed to stay close to the carrier battle groups at all times. The carriers were deployed all over the globe, and to shadow them without raising suspicion, the Russians disguised their support ships as car haulers, bolstering this camouflage by going so far as to load them with the iconic Russian car, the ubiquitous Lada. This was in case the ship was ever boarded by customs inspectors. The cars here were dusty and all the tires flat because they’d been locked in the hold since the demise of the Soviet Union. Neither Kenin nor the Chinese had bothered to unload them.

The blood trail led Cabrillo down a spiraling car ramp. He slowed at the bottom to peer out onto this next cargo deck. More Ladas, more flat tires, and so many years in the salt air had covered many of them with lesions of rust. A pistol shot pounded off a fitting next to his head, and a sliver of metal nicked him at the temple. Blood trickled down his jaw. He fired off the rest of his clip, blowing glass and bits of metal into the air, while the shooter crouched behind a Lada wagon. The onslaught was enough to make him break cover and run.

Cabrillo didn’t want to kill the man. He wanted him to keep running and show him how to enter the secret parts of the ship, the ones, like on the Oregon, that customs men never saw. He changed magazines at a run, listening over the comm net to MacD and Eddie coordinate rounding up the rest of the crew.

The shooter descended one more level before making a beeline aft. Juan stayed on him like a scent hound, letting the man get far enough ahead that he didn’t bother taking delaying shots at his pursuer. Finally, Juan saw him come to a door that looked as though it was in the ship’s aft-most bulkhead. They should be directly over the propeller, and Juan should have been able to feel its vibrations through the soles of his boots. He quickly glanced toward the bow.

Cabrillo had an excellent sense of spatiality and knew immediately that the distant gloom of the forward part of the hold was considerably less than the nine-hundred-foot length of the ship. The closet was built into a false wall.

He looked back and could see over the man’s shoulder that it was a storage closet. This was it. The Oregon had the exact same setup. Cabrillo ran, cutting the distance, dodging and weaving around cars, until he accidentally knocked a wing mirror off one of the rustier ones. The noise alerted the gunman. He had been fumbling with something on the closet’s back wall. He whirled and raised his pistol.

Cabrillo already had the Super V tucked hard against his shoulder and cut him down with a quick pull of the trigger that unleashed a half dozen big.45 caliber slugs.

“Eddie, you there?” Juan said. Operational security demanded he not take his eyes off the body, but he knew the gunman was dead.

“Roger.”

“You guys secure?”

“Just the bridge and crew areas. Still haven’t swept the engine room or cargo area.”

“Don’t worry about that. Come aft on deck three. I think I hit the jackpot.”

Juan stalked toward the fallen man and confirmed he was dead. He let the Super V drop down on its single-point sling and dragged the corpse out of the way. He couldn’t find the trigger mechanism that would give him access to the ship’s secret area, so he rigged it with a block of plastic explosives.

“We’re coming,” Eddie announced over the radio when he and MacD approached Cabrillo’s location. No sense in getting killed by friendly fire.

“Any trouble?”

“Nothing a club over the head with the barrel of an old Mr. Uzi here couldn’t fix,” MacD drawled. “What’s up? We swabbing the decks for them?”

“Watch and learn.” Cabrillo backed them away from the utility closet and keyed the electronic detonator. The blast was an assault on the senses, loud and concussive, and it carried, echoing up and down the rows of cars.

He had blown a hole through the back of the closet. Beyond was something out of a James Bond movie. The aft section of the ship, a good hundred fifty feet in length, was a cavernous open space ringed with metal catwalks and staircases. Down below, water sloshed gently against a pair of piers that rose almost twenty feet. Thrusting out of the water between the docks was a cradle made of timbers that would secure the stealth ship, once it was in position, and the mother ship refloated to its proper trim.

To Juan’s disappointment, the cradle was empty. The stealth ship was out there, hunting the Stennis.

Atop one of the piers was a small structure that had to be a control room. It had a big plate-glass window overlooking the floating dock. The three men took off running across the catwalk and down the stairs. The door to the control room didn’t have a lock. MacD nodded to Juan, who opened it. As soon as it was ajar, Lawless tossed a flashbang, and Juan slammed the door to contain the blast.

The grenade went off with a roar that bowed the plate glass but didn’t shatter it. Cabrillo threw open the door again. Two Chinese men, wearing mechanic’s overalls, were staggering around, dazed and nearly half mad from the blast. Juan tackled one, MacD the other. No sooner were they down than Eddie had them cuffed.

Cabrillo studied his surroundings, finally taking a chair at what looked like the main controls. Everything mechanical was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and then he noticed the room was painted that bland green the Soviets so loved. The computers were new additions. Mark Murphy had met up with the Chairman just before he’d stepped out on deck and handed over a standard-looking flash drive.

“Some of my best work,” he’d said with pride. “Plug it in to a USB port and it does the rest. I call it the Dyson Oreck Hoover 1000, ’cause it’ll vacuum up anything.”

Cabrillo slid the drive into position and, moments later, the dormant computer came to life. After that, there really wasn’t much to see. Mark said a curser would appear on the otherwise blank screen and start to blink when his device had sucked all extractable information out of the system.

He wished they could use the ballast controls to scuttle the ship, but there would be mechanical fail-safes in place to prevent that. Better off just to set scuttling charges and be done with it. While he waited for the computer to do its thing, he split the rest of the C-4 he carried to Eddie and MacD to take care of that particular task.

“Linc, you copy?”

“Roger that.”

“Round up our prisoners and see to it they get to a lifeboat.”

“Gotcha.”

“Don’t launch yet. I’ve got two more down here.”

“You find the stealth boat?”

“No, but this was definitely its base.” A curser started blinking, just as Mark had programmed. Juan plucked the drive from the USB slot and eyed it. “And we might have been given a look under her skirts.”

Ten minutes later, the crew had been jettisoned from the ship in her encapsulated lifeboat. Eddie had found two more men down in engineering. One would go down with his ship, foolishly thinking he could kick a gun out of Seng’s hands. The charges had been laid, and Gomez Adams had the chopper resting lightly on the deck. Though the craft weighed less than a ton, it had such a small footprint that it put tremendous pressure on whatever it landed on. Keeping the revs up prevented it from damaging the deck plate and potentially trapping itself.

The men climbed aboard the chopper, and Adams, wearing night vision goggles for it was now fully dark, lifted them away. They let Linc do the honors since his had been the most boring part of the operation. He thumbed the detonator.

The blasts were little more than bursts of bubbles from under the waterline, and it looked like something so puny would have no effect on the elephantine ship. But Eddie was a master at demolition, and MacD had been an eager student. Aiding them was the fact that Juan had firewalled the ship’s big diesel engines. The forward momentum had water pumping through the strategic holes Seng and Lawless had punched through the hull. And as the speed increased, so too did the volume of water. This would keep going until the engines were swamped, but even then inertia would keep the water coming.

The car carrier would slip under the waves within the hour.