Skeleton Coast

SKELETON

COAST

CLIVE

CUSSLER

WITH JACK Du BRUL

“A NEW CLIVE CUSSLER NOVEL IS

LIKE A VISIT FROM YOUR BEST

FRIEND.”

—Tom Clancy

Clive Cussler’s explosive Oregon Files novels have been hailed as “honestly fabulous” (Kirkus Reviews) and “action-packed” (Publishers Weekly). Now, the author of the bestselling NUMA®and Dirk Pitt®series delivers an explosiveOregon Files novel featuring his unbeatable hero of the high seas—Juan Cabrillo…

1896:Four Englishmen flee for their lives across the merciless Kalahari Desert carrying a stolen fortune in raw diamonds, and hunted by a fierce African tribe. The thieves manage to reach the waiting HMSRove

—only to die with their pursuers in a storm that buries them all under tons of sand…

Today:Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the covert combat ship Oregon have barely escaped a mission on the Congo River when they intercept a mayday from a defenseless boat under fire off the African coast.

Cabrillo takes action, saving the craft…along with beautiful Sloane Macintyre. Sloane is looking for the now-submergedRove , and her search has attracted unwanted—and lethal—attention from unknown forces. But what surprises Cabrillo is her story about a crazy fisherman who claims to have been attacked on the open sea—by giant metal snakes—in the same area.

What begins as a snake hunt leads Cabrillo to the trial of a far more lethal quarry—a deranged enemy whose cadre of followers plans to unleash the devastating power of nature itself against all who oppose them…

PRAISE FOR CLIVE CUSSLER’SNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING NOVELS OF THE

OREGON FILES

DARK WATCH

SACRED STONE

GOLDEN BUDDHA

“Ablaze with action.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Readers will burn up the pages following the blazing action and daring exploits of these men and women and their amazing machines.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Fans of Cussler will not be disappointed.”

—Library Journal

PRAISE FOR

CLIVE CUSSLER’S NUMA®SERIES

“MARVELOUS…simply terrific fun.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“YOU CAN’T GET MUCH MORE SATISFYING.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A GREAT STORY.”

—Tulsa World

“WILDLY ENTERTAINING.”

—New York Daily News

PRAISE FOR

CLIVE CUSSLER’S DIRK PITT®SERIES

“[A] NONSTOP THRILLER…CUSSLER SPEEDS AND TWISTS through the complex plot and hairbreadth escapes [with] the intensity and suspense of a NASCAR race.”

—Publishers Weekly

“CLIVE CUSSLER…IS AT TOP FORM HERE.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A DELIGHTFUL PAGE-TURNER that is almost impossible to put down.”

—The San Francisco Examiner

“THE FUNNEST DIRK PITT ADVENTURE SINCERAISE THETITANIC ! ”

—Rocky Mountain News

DIRK PITT®ADVENTURES BY CLIVE

CUSSLER

Trojan Odyssey

Valhalla Rising

Atlantis Found

Flood Tide

Shock Wave

Inca Gold

Sahara

Dragon

Treasure

Cyclops

Deep Six

Pacific Vortex

Night Probe

Vixen 03

Raise theTitanic !

Iceberg

The Mediterranean Caper

DIRK PITT®ADVENTURES BY CLIVE

CUSSLER AND DIRK CUSSLER

Black Wind

FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH

PAUL KEMPRECOS

Polar Shift

Lost City

White Death

Fire Ice

Serpent

Blue Gold

FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH

JACK DU BRUL

Skeleton Coast

Dark Watch

FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND

CRAIG DIRGO

Sacred Stone

Golden Buddha

NONFICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND

CRAIG DIRGO

The Sea Hunters II

The Sea Hunters

1

KALAHARI DESERT

1896

HE never should have ordered them to leave the guns behind. The decision would cost them all their lives. But had there really been a choice? When the last remaining packhorse went lame they’d had to redistribute its load, and that meant leaving equipment behind. There was no debating the necessity of bringing the water flasks the animal had carried, or the satchels bursting with uncut stones. They’d had to abandon the tents, bedrolls, thirty pounds of food, and the Martini-Henry rifles each of the five men had carried, as well as all the ammunition. But even with these weight savings the surviving horses were severely overburdened, and with the sun beginning to rise once more to pound the desert no one expected their mounts would last the day.

H. A. Ryder knew better than to agree to lead the others across the Kalahari. He was an old Africa hand, having abandoned a failing farm in Sussex in the heady days of the Kimberley rush hoping to make himself a millionaire in the diamond fields. By the time he’d arrived in 1868 the whole of Colesberg Kopje, the hillock where the first diamonds had been discovered, was staked and the fields around it, too, for several miles. So Ryder turned to providing meat for the army of workers.

With a pair of wagons and hundreds of sacks of salt to cure the game, he and a couple of native guides ranged over thousands of square miles. It had been a solitary existence but one that Ryder grew to love, just as he came to love the land, with its haunting sunsets and dense forests, streams so clear the water looked like glass, and horizons so distant they seemed impossible to reach. He learned to speak the languages of various tribes, the Matabele, the Mashona, and the fierce, warlike Herero. He even understood some of the strange clicks and whistles that the Bushmen of the desert used to communicate.

He’d taken work as a safari guide so that rich Englishmen and Americans could adorn their mansion walls with trophies and he had spent time finding suitable routes for a telegraph company stringing lines across the southern third of the continent. He’d fought in a dozen skirmishes and killed ten times that many men. He knew and understood the African people and knew better still the savagery of the land itself. He knew he should have never accepted the job of guiding the others from Bechuanaland across the vast Kalahari wasteland in a mad dash to the sea. But there was always the lure of the big payoff, the siren song of instant wealth that had drawn him to Africa in the first place.

If they somehow made it, if the uncaring desert didn’t claim them, then H. A. Ryder was going to have that fortune of which he’d always dreamed.

“Think they’re still back there, H. A.?”

Ryder squinted into the rising sun so that his eyes nearly vanished into his weathered skin. He could see nothing on the distant horizon but curtains of shimmering heat that formed and dissolved like smoke.

Between them and the fiery sun marched dunes of pure white sand—shifting waves that rivaled towering hurricane swells. With the sun came the wind, which lashed at the tops of the dunes so that sand blew off their crests in stinging clouds.

“Aye, laddie,” he said without looking at the man standing next to him.

“How can you be sure?” H. A. turned to his companion, Jon Varley. “They’ll follow us to the gates of hell for what we did to them.”

The certainty in H. A.’s raspy voice made Varley blanch under his tan. Like Ryder, the four other men in their party were all English-born and had come to Africa to seek their fortunes, though none was as seasoned as their guide.

“We’d best get going,” Ryder said. They’d been traveling under the relatively cool cover of darkness.

“We can cover a few miles before the sun climbs too high.”

“I think we should make camp here,” said Peter Smythe, the greenest member of the group, and by far the worst off. He’d lost his swaggering attitude shortly after entering the sand sea and now moved with the shuffling gait of an old man. White crusts had formed at the corners of his eyes and mouth, while his once bright blue eyes had grown dim.

Ryder glanced at Peter and saw the signs immediately. They’d all shared the same water ration since filling their canteens and jerry cans ten days earlier at a brackish well, but Smythe’s body seemed to need more than the others. It wasn’t a question of strength or will, it was simply the lad needed to drink more to stay alive. H. A. knew to the drop how much water remained, and unless he could find another desert well, Smythe would be the first to die.

The thought of giving him an extra ration never entered Ryder’s mind. “We go on.”

He looked westward and saw the mirror image of the terrain they’d already covered. Sand dune piled upon sand dune in endless ranks that stretched seemingly forever. The sky was turning brassy as light reflected off the infinite desert. Ryder checked his mount. The animal was suffering, and for that he felt guilty—worse than his feelings for young Smythe in fact, for the poor animal had no choice but to carry them across this cruel environment. He used a clasp knife to remove a stone from the horse’s hoof and adjusted the saddle blanket where the pannier straps were beginning to chafe. The animal’s once glossy coat was dull and hung in flaps where its flesh had begun to waste away.

He stroked the horse’s cheek and muttered a few soothing words into its ear. There was no way any of them could ride their mounts. The animals were already struggling under their lightened loads. He took up the reins and started off. Ryder’s boots sank to the uppers as he led the horse down the face of a dune.

Sand shifted under them, hissing and sliding down the embankment, and threatening to send the pair tumbling if either took a misstep. H. A. didn’t look back. The men had no choice but to follow or die where they stood.

He walked for an hour as the sun continued its inexorable climb into the cloudless sky. He’d tucked a smooth pebble between his teeth and tongue to try to fool his body that he wasn’t severely dehydrated.

When he paused to wipe the inside of his big slouch hat the heat scorched the red patch of skin on the crown of his head. He wanted to go for another hour but he could hear the men struggling behind them.

They weren’t yet at the point where he would consider abandoning them, so he led them to the lee of a particularly tall dune and began to erect a sunshade using the horse blankets. The men flopped to the ground, panting as he set up their meager camp.

H. A. checked on Peter Smythe. The young man’s lips were nothing but raw blisters that leaked clear fluid and the tops of his cheeks were burned as if with an iron straight from the brazier. Ryder reminded him to only loosen his boot laces. All of their feet were so swollen that to remove their boots meant they’d never get them back on again. They watched him expectantly as he finally took a couple of canteens from a saddlebag. He unstoppered one of them and immediately one of the horses nickered at the scent of water. The others crowded over and his own mount brushed its head against H. A.’s shoulder.

So as not to lose even a single drop, Ryder poured a measure into a bowl and held it for the animal to drink. It slurped noisily and its stomach rumbled as water reached it for the first time in three days. He poured out a little more and again watered the horse. He did this to all of them first despite his own raging thirst and the angry glares of his companions.

“They die, you die” was all he had to say, for they knew he was right.

Having drunk only a quart of water each, the horses could still be cajoled to eat from the feed bags of oats one of them had carried. He hobbled them with leg ropes and only then did he pass around the bowl for the men to drink. He was even stricter with their ration, each receiving a single mouthful before Ryder secured the water in his pannier. There were no protests. H. A. was the only one of them to have crossed this desolate wasteland before and they deferred to him to see them through.

The shade of the horse blankets was pitiably small compared to the searing oven that was the Kalahari, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, a land where the rain might fall once a year or not for many.

As the sun beat the earth with hammer strokes of heat, the men lay in torpid lethargy, shifting only when the shadows moved with the revolving sun to expose a hand or leg to the brutal onslaught. They lay with their all-consuming thirst, and they lay with their pain, but mostly they lay with their greed, for these were still motivated men, men close to becoming far wealthier than any had imagined.

When the sun reached its zenith it seemed to gain strength, making the act of breathing a battle between the need for air and the desire to keep the heat from entering their bodies. It sucked moisture from the men with each shallow breath and left their lungs aflame.

And still the heat had increased, a smothering weight that seemed to crush the men into the ground.

Ryder didn’t remember it being this bad when he had crossed the desert all those years ago. It was as if the sun had fallen from the heavens and now lay upon the earth, raging and angry that mere mortals were trying to defy it. It was enough to drive a man insane, and yet they endured the long afternoon, praying for the day to finally end.

As swiftly as the heat had built up it began to drop as the sun finally settled toward the western horizon, painting the sand with bands of red and purple and rose. The men slowly emerged from under the sunshade, brushing dust off their filthy clothes. Ryder scaled the dune that had protected them from the wind and panned the desert behind them with a collapsible brass telescope for signs of their pursuers. He could see nothing but shifting dunes. Their tracks had been scoured clean by the constant zephyrs, though it gave him little comfort. The men chasing them were some of the best trackers in the world. They would find them in the featureless sand sea as surely as if Ryder had left a trail of marker stones for them to follow.

What he didn’t know was how much ground their stalkers had gained during the day—for they seemed superhuman in their abilities to withstand the sun and heat. H. A. had estimated that when they entered the desert they had a five-day lead on their pursuers. He felt confident that they held no more than a day’s advantage now. By tomorrow that would be whittled further to half a day. And then? The next day would be when they would pay for abandoning their weapons when the packhorse went lame.

Their only chance was to find enough water tonight for the horses so they could ride them once again.

Not enough of the precious fluid remained to water the horses, and the men’s ration was half of what they’d had just after dawn. For Ryder it was like adding insult to injury. The warm trickle seemed to just seep into his tongue rather than slake his thirst, which was now a gnawing ache in his stomach. He forced himself to eat some dried beef.

Looking at the raw-boned faces around him, H. A. knew that tonight’s march was going to be torture.

Peter Smythe couldn’t stop himself from swaying where he stood. Jon Varley wasn’t much better off.

Only the brothers, Tim and Tom Watermen, seemed okay, but they had been in Africa longer than Smythe or Varley, working as farmhands on a big Cape cattle ranch for the past decade. Their bodies were more acclimated to Africa’s brutal sun.

H. A. ran his hands through his big muttonchop sideburns, combing sand from the coarse graying hair.

When he bent to tighten his boot laces he felt twice his fifty years. His back and legs ached fiercely and the vertebrae popped when he stood again.

“This is it, lads. You have my word that tonight we will drink our fill,” he said to bolster their flagging morale.

“On what, sand?” Tim Watermen joked to show he still could.

“The Bushmen who call themselves the San have lived in this desert for a thousand years or more. It’s said they can smell water a hundred miles off and that’s not far off the mark. When I came though the Kalahari twenty years ago I had a San guide. The little bugger found water where I would have never thought to look. They scooped it from plants when there was a fog in the morning and drank from the rumen of the animals they killed with their poison arrows.”

“What’s a rumen?” Varley asked.

Ryder exchanged a glance with the Watermen brothers as if to say everyone should know the term. “It’s the first stomach in an animal like a cow or antelope where they produce their cud. The fluid in it is mostly water and plant juice.”

“I could go for some of that now,” Peter Smythe managed to mumble. A single drop of claret-red blood clung to the corner of his cracked lip. He licked it away before it could fall to the earth.

“But the San’s greatest ability is to find water buried under the sand in dried-out riverbeds that haven’t flowed in a generation.”

“Can you find water like them?” Jon Varley asked.

“I’ve been looking in every streambed we’ve crossed for the past five days,” H. A. said.

The men were startled. None of them had realized they’d crossed any dried-out rivers. To them the desert had been featureless and empty. That H. A. had known about the wadis increased their confidence that he would see them out of this nightmare.

Ryder continued, “There was a promising one day before yesterday but I couldn’t be certain and we can’t afford the time for me to be wrong. I estimate we’re two, maybe three days from the coast, which means this part of the desert gets moisture off the ocean, plus the occasional storm. I’ll find us water, lads. Of that you can be sure.”

It was the most H. A. had spoken since telling the men to dump their guns and it had the desired effect.

The Watermen brothers grinned, Jon Varley managed to square his shoulders, and even young Smythe stopped swaying.

A cold moon began to climb behind them as the last rays of the sun sank into the distant Atlantic, and soon the sky was carpeted with more stars than a man could count in a hundred lifetimes. The desert was as silent as a church save for the hiss of sand shifting under boots and hooves and the occasional creak of leather saddlery. Their pace was steady and measured. H. A. was well aware of their weakened condition, but never forgot the hordes that were surely on their trail.

He called the first halt at midnight. The nature of the desert had changed slightly. While they still slogged through ankle-deep sand there were patches of loose gravel in many of the valleys. H. A. had spotted old watering holes in a few of the washes, places where eland and antelope had dug into the hard pan searching for underground water. He saw no sign of humans ever using them, so he assumed they had dried out eons ago. He didn’t mention his discovery to the men but it served to bolster his confidence in finding them a working well.

He allowed the men a double share of water, sure now that he could replenish the canteens and water the horses before sunup. And if he didn’t, there was no use in rationing, for the desert would claim them on the morrow. Ryder gave half his ration to his horse although the others eagerly drank theirs down with little regard to the pack animals.

A rare cloud blotted the moon a half hour after they started marching again, and when it passed, the shifting illumination caused something on the desert floor to catch Ryder’s eye. According to his compass and the stars, he’d been following a due-westerly direction, and none of the men commented when he suddenly turned north. He paced ahead of the others, aware of the flaky soil crunching under his boots, and when he reached the spot he dropped to his knees.

It was merely a dimple in the otherwise flat valley, no more than three feet across. He cast his gaze around the spot, smiling tightly when he found bits of broken eggshell, and one that was almost intact except for a long crack that ran like a fault line along its smooth surface. The shell was the size of his fist and had a neat hole drilled through the top. Its stopper was a tuft of dried grass mixed with native gum. It was one of the San’s most prized possessions, for without these ostrich eggs they had no way to transport water. That one broke when they were refilling could have very well doomed the party of Bushmen who last used the well.

H. A. almost felt their ghosts staring down on him from the ancient riverbed’s bank, tiny little spirits wearing nothing but crowns of reeds around their heads and rawhide belts festooned with pouches for their ostrich eggs and quivers for the small poisoned arrows they used to take game.

“What have you found, H. A.?” Jon Varley asked, kneeling in the dirt next to the guide. His once shining dark hair fell lank around his shoulders, but he had somehow maintained the piratical gleam in his eyes.

They were the eyes of a desperate schemer, a man driven by dreams of instant wealth and one willing to risk death to see them fulfilled.

“Water, Mr. Varley.” Though twenty years his senior, H. A. tried to speak deferentially to all his clients.

“What? How? I don’t see anything.”

The Watermen brothers sat on a nearby boulder. Peter Smythe collapsed at their feet. Tim helped the lad move upright so his back was against the water-worn rock. His head lolled against his thin chest and his breathing was unnaturally shallow.

“It’s underground, like I told you.”

“How do we get it out?”

“We dig.”

Without another word the two men began scraping back the soil that a Bushman had laboriously used to refill the precious well so that it didn’t dry out. H. A.’s hands were broad and so callused that he could use them like shovels, tearing into the friable earth with little regard to the flinty shards. Varley had the hands of a gambler, smooth and, at one point, neatly manicured, but he dug just as hard as the guide—raging thirst allowing him to ignore the cuts and scrapes and the blood that dripped from his fingertips.

They excavated two feet of earth and still no sign of water. They had to expand the hole because they were much bigger than the Bushmen warriors whose job it was to dig these wells. At three feet H. A.

took out a scoopful of dirt and when he dropped it away from the hole a thin layer clung to his skin. He rolled it between his fingers until he’d produced a little ball of mud. When he squeezed it a quivering drop of water shone in the starlight.

Varley whooped and even H. A. cracked an uncommon smile.

They redoubled their efforts, slinging mud from the hole with reckless abandon. Ryder had to put a restraining hand on Varley’s shoulder when he felt they’d dug deep enough.

“Now we wait.”

The other men crowded around the well and they watched in expectant silence as the darkened bottom of the excavation suddenly turned white. It was the moon reflecting off water seeping into the hole from the surrounding aquifer. H. A. used a piece torn from his shirt as a filter and dipped his canteen into the muddy water. It took several minutes for it to fill halfway. Peter moaned when he heard it sloshing as H.

A. lifted it from the hole.

“Here you go, lad,” Ryder said, handing over the canteen. Peter reached for it eagerly but Ryder didn’t let go. “Slowly, my boy. Drink it slowly.”

Smythe was too far gone to listen to H. A.’s advice; his first massive gulp sent him into a paroxysm of coughing and the mouthful of water was wasted on the desert floor. When he’d recovered he took tentative sips, looking sheepish. It took four hours to recover enough water for the men to drink their fill and finally manage to eat their first meal in days.

H. A. was still watering the horses when the sun began to brush against the eastern horizon. He was careful with them so they wouldn’t bloat or cramp, and fed them sparingly, but still their great bellies rumbled with contentment as they ate and managed to stale for the first time in days.

“H. A.!” Tim Watermen had gone over the riverbank to relieve himself in private. He stood silhouetted against the dawn frantically waving his hat and pointing toward the rising sun.

Ryder plucked his telescope from his saddlebag and raced from the horses, climbing the hill like a man possessed. He smashed into Watermen so both fell to the dust. Before Tim could protest, Ryder clamped a hand over his companion’s mouth and hissed, “Keep your voice down. Sound travels well over the desert.”

Lying flat, H. A. extended the telescope and set it against his eye.

Look at them come, he thought.God, they are magnificent .

WHAT had brought these five men together was Peter Smythe’s utter hatred of his father, a fearsome man who claimed to have had a vision of the archangel Gabriel. The angel had told Lucas Smythe to sell everything he owned and travel to Africa to spread the word of God among the savages. While not particularly religious before his vision, Smythe devoted himself to the Bible with such urgency that when he applied to the London Missionary Society they considered denying his application because he had become a zealot. But in the end the Society accepted him if for no other reason than to get him away from their offices. They sent him and his begrudging wife and son to Bechuanaland, where he was to replace a minister who’d died of malaria.

Away from the constraints of society at a tiny mission in the heart of the Herero people, Smythe became a religious tyrant, for his was a vengeful God who demanded total self-sacrifice and severe penitence for even the most minor transgressions. It was nothing for Peter to be cane-whipped by his father because he mumbled the last words of a prayer or be denied dinner for not being able to recite a particular psalm on command.

At the time of the family’s arrival, the Herero king, Samuel Maharero, who had been baptized some decades earlier, was in a bitter dispute with the colonial authorities, and thus shunned the German minister sent to his lands by the Rhenish Mission Society. Lucas Smythe and his family enjoyed the patronage of the king even if Maharero was hesitant of Smythe’s rantings of hellfire and brimstone.

While young Peter enjoyed his friendships with the king’s many grandchildren, life as a teen near the royal kraal was tedium punctuated with moments of terror when the Spirit seized his father, and he wanted nothing more than to run away.

And so he plotted his escape, confiding in Assa Maharero, one of the king’s grandsons and his best friend, what he intended to do. It was during one of their many strategy sessions that Peter Smythe made the discovery that would change his life.

He was in a storagerondoval , a circular hut the Herero used to store fodder when the fields were too barren for their thousands of cattle. It was the place he and Assa had chosen as their hide out, and though Peter had been there dozens of times, this was the first he noticed that the hard-packed earth along one mud-and-grass wall had been dug up. The black soil had been carefully tamped down but his sharp eye spotted the irregularity.

He used his hands to dig into the spot, and discovered that there was only a thin layer of soil laid over a dozen large earthen beer pots. The jugs were the size of his head, and a membrane of cowhide had been stretched over their tops. He lifted one from its resting place. It was heavy and he could feel something rattling around inside.

Peter carefully worked the stitches around the rim, loosening them just enough so that when he tipped the pot a few unremarkable stones dropped into his palm. He began to shake. While they looked nothing like the stylized drawings of faceted stones he’d seen, he knew by how they scattered the meager light in the hut that he was holding six uncut diamonds. The smallest was the size of his thumbnail. The largest more than twice as big.

Just then Assa ducked through the arched doorway and saw what his friend had uncovered. His eyes went wide with terror and he quickly looked over his shoulder to see if any adults were about. Across the fenced stockade a couple of boys were watching some cattle and a woman was walking a few hundred yards away with a bundle of grass perched atop her head. He leapt across therondoval and took the beer pot from Peter’s startled fingers.

“What have you done?” Assa hissed in his odd German-accented English.

“Nothing, Assa, I swear,” Peter cried guiltily. “I saw that something had been buried and I just wanted to see what it was, is all.”

Assa held out a hand and Peter dumped the loose stones into his palm. The young African prince spoke as he tucked the stones back under the leather cover. “On pain of death you must never speak of this to anyone.”

“Those are diamonds, aren’t they?”

Assa regarded his friend. “Yes.”

“But how? There are no diamonds here. They’re all down in the Cape Colony around Kimberley.”

Assa sat cross-legged in front of Peter, torn between his oath to his grandfather and pride at what his tribe had accomplished. He was three years younger than Peter, just thirteen, so youthful boasting won out over his solemn promise. “I will tell you but you must never repeat it.”

“I swear, Assa.”

“Since diamonds were first discovered, men of the Herero tribe have traveled to Kimberley to work in the pits. They worked a one-year contract and came home with the pay the white miners gave them, but they also took something else. They stole stones.”

“I heard that the men are searched before they are allowed to leave the miners’ camps, even their bums.”

“What our men did was cut their skin and place the stones inside the wound. When it scarred over there was no evidence. Upon their return they reopened the wounds with assegais and retrieved the stones to present to my great-grandfather, Chief Kamaharero, who had first ordered them south to Kimberley.”

“Assa, some of these stones are pretty big—surely they would have been discovered,” Peter protested.

Assa laughed. “And some Herero warriors are pretty big, too.” He then turned serious as he continued the tale. “This went on for many years, as many as twenty, but then the white miners discovered what the Herero were doing. A hundred were arrested and even those who hadn’t yet hid a stone under their skin were found guilty of stealing. They were all put to death.

“When the time is right we will use these stones to throw off the yoke of the German colonial office”—his dark eyes shone—“and we will again live as free men. Now, swear to me again, Peter, that you will tell no one that you have discovered the treasure.”

Peter’s gaze met that of his young friend and said, “I swear.”

His oath lasted him less than a year. When he turned eighteen he left the little mission in the center of the royal compound. He told no one that he was leaving, not even his mother, and for that he felt guilty. She alone would have to bear the weight of Lucas Smythe’s righteous tirades.

Peter had always felt he was a survivor. He and Assa had camped dozens of times on the veldt, but by the time he reached a trading station fifty miles from the mission, he was nearly dead from exhaustion and thirst. There he spent a couple of the precious coins he’d hoarded from birthday presents from his mother. His father never gave him anything, believing that the only birth the family should celebrate was that of Jesus Christ.

There was barely enough to pay the wagon master to take him to Kimberley on the buckboard of a twenty-oxen span returning south with a load of ivory and salted meat. The wagon master was an older man wearing a huge white hat, and had the thickest sideburns Peter had ever seen. Tagging along with H.

A. Ryder were a pair of brothers who’d been promised grazing land by the Cape colonial office only to find it already occupied by Matabele. With no desire to fight an army, they had prudently chosen to return south. Also with the party was a lean, hawk-faced man named Jon Varley.

In the weeks they trudged south, Peter never did get a sense of what Varley did or what had brought him so far from the Cape Colony; all he knew was that he didn’t trust the man as far as he could spit.

At camp one night following the dangerous crossing of a river where Peter saved the life of one of Ryder’s oxen by actually jumping on the animal’s back and riding it across like a horse, Varley revealed a cache of liquor. It was fiery cape brandy, as raw as pure spirits, but the five of them sat around a campfire digesting a meal of guinea fowl that Tim Watermen had taken with his shotgun and drank the two bottles empty.

It was Peter’s first taste of alcohol and, unlike the others, the brandy went to his head after only the first tentative sips.

It was inevitable that talk would turn to prospecting since it was second nature for anyone in the bush to keep a sharp eye for minerals. It seemed every day a new diamond field or gold reef or coal mine was staked and someone became an instant millionaire.

Peter knew he shouldn’t have opened his mouth. He’d made a pledge to Assa. But he wanted to fit in with these rough-and-ready men who spoke so knowledgeably about things he himself was unaware.

They were worldly, especially Varley and H. A., and Peter wanted them to respect him more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. So with lips made slack by brandy he told them of the dozen clay pots filled with uncut diamonds in the royal kraal of King Maharero.

“How do you know this, boy?” Varley had hissed like an adder.

“Because the lad’s father is the preacher in Hereroland,” H. A. had answered and looked at Peter. “I recognize you now. I met your old man a couple of seasons back when I went to see the king about hunting concessions on his land.” His steady eyes swept the group. “He’s been living with the Herero, what, five years now?”

“Almost six,” Peter answered proudly. “They know me and trust me.”

Before another fifteen minutes had passed they were discussing openly the possibility of stealing the beer pots. Peter went along with the scheme only after the others promised that the five of them would only take one container each and leave seven for the Herero people; otherwise he wouldn’t tell them where the stones were located.

At a trading post a further hundred miles south, H. A. Ryder sold his wagon and its precious load for half of what he could have fetched for the ivory in Kimberley and outfitted the men with proper horses and gear. He’d already decided the course they would take out of the Herero empire, the one that afforded their only chance of escape once the theft was discovered. The trading post was at the end of a newly laid telegraph line. The men waited three days while Ryder made arrangements with a trader he knew in Cape Town. H. A. shrugged off the staggering cost of what he ordered, figuring he’d either be a millionaire able to pay the debt or a corpse lying in the searing Kalahari sun.

It was impossible to sneak into the royal kraal. Runners reported their presence to the king as soon as they crossed into his domain. But H. A. was known to the king, and Peter’s father was surely eager to have his son returned to him, though Peter suspected he’d be given a treatment worthy of Job rather than that of the prodigal son.

It took a week to reach the kraal from the border and Samuel Maharero himself greeted the riders when they finally reached his camp. He and H. A. spoke for an hour in the king’s native tongue, the guide giving him news of the outside world since the king was in exile by order of the German colonial office.

The king in turn told Peter, to his great relief, that his parents had just left for the bush, where his father was baptizing a group of women and children, and wouldn’t return till the following day.

The king granted them permission to spend the night but denied H. A.’s request to hunt on Herero land, as he had four years previously.

“Can’t blame a man for trying, Your Highness.”

“Persistence is a white man’s vice.”

That night they’d stolen into therondoval . The hut was packed to the roof poles with hay and they had to burrow into the pile like mice to reach the spot where the diamonds were hidden. It was when John Varley plucked a second pot from the ground and dumped its contents into a saddlebag that Peter Smythe realized he’d been duped from the beginning. The Watermen brothers, too, emptied several pots into their bags. Only H. A. kept his word and took the contents of only one of the beer pots.

“If you don’t take them, I will,” Varley whispered in the dark.

“Your choice,” Ryder drawled. “But I’m a man of my word.”

As it was they didn’t have enough bags for all the stones, and after stuffing pants pockets and anything else they could, four of the big pots remained unmolested. H. A. carefully reburied the cache and did everything he could to hide the theft. They left camp at dawn, thanking the king for his hospitality.

Maharero asked Peter if he had any message for his mother. Peter could only mumble to tell her he was sorry.

LYING on the crest of the dune above the water hole, H. A. allowed himself just a moment to watch the king’s men.

When they’d started out after the thieves there had been an entireimpi , an army of a thousand warriors, tracking them from the tribal lands. But that had been five hundred miles ago, and the hardship had whittled their numbers. H. A. estimated there were still more than a hundred of them, the very strongest, and they ran at a ground-eating pace despite their own hunger and thirst. The sun was just high enough to glint off the honed blades of their assegais, the stabbing spears their people used to vanquish any who stood in their way.

H. A. tapped Tim Watermen on the leg and together they slid to the bottom of the dry wash where the others clustered nervously. The horses had picked up on the sudden shift in mood. They shuffled their hooves in the dust and their ears twitched as if they could hear the approaching danger.

“Mount up, lads,” Ryder said, accepting the reins from Peter Smythe.

“We’re going to ride?” he asked. “Through the day?”

“Aye, boy. It’s that or one of Maharero’s warriors going to garland his hut with your insides. Let’s go.

We have only a mile on them and I don’t know how long the horses are going to take the heat.”

Ryder was aware that had they not found water last night, the Herero would have been on them like a pack of wild dogs by now. As it was, only one of his canteens was full when he threw a rangy leg over his horse’s broad back. They climbed out of the wadi abreast, and all five men turned when they left the shadow of the depression and felt the raw sun burning at the backs of their necks.

For the first miles, H. A. kept them at a steady trot that gained them a mile for every three on the advancing Hereroimpi . The sun baked the earth and dried their sweat the instant it burst from their pores. Under the protection of his big slouch hat, H. A. had to ride with his eyes closed to slits to protect them from the blinding reflection off the dunes.

Resting under a sunshade as the Kalahari turned into an oven was bad enough, but trying to cross the empty waste under its brutal onslaught was the hardest thing H. A. had ever done in his life. The heat and the light were maddening, as if the fluid in his skull was being boiled. The occasional sip of water did little more than scald his throat and remind him of his raging thirst.

Time lost meaning and it took all of Ryder’s concentration to remember to check his compass to steer them ever westward. With so few distinctive landmarks to guide him, his navigation was more guesswork than science, but they pressed on because there was no alternative.

The wind, like the sun, was their constant companion. H. A. estimated they weren’t more than twenty miles from the South Atlantic and had expected a breeze off the ocean to hit them head-on, but the wind kept at them from the rear, always pressing them onward. Ryder prayed that his compass hadn’t malfunctioned and the needle that was to guide them to the west was somehow leading them deeper into the raging interior of the molten desert. He checked it constantly, relieved that the men had strung out somewhat so no one could see the consternation on his face.

The wind grew and when he looked back to check on his men he could see the tops of the dunes were being eaten away. Long plumes of sand were cast from crest to crest. Grit stung his skin and made his eyes tear. He didn’t like this at all. They were heading in the right direction but the wind wasn’t. If they were caught out in a sandstorm without adequate cover there was little chance they’d survive it.

He debated calling a halt to erect a shelter, juggling the odds of a major storm hitting them, their proximity to the coast, and the enraged army that wouldn’t stop until every last man in their party was dead. Sunset was in an hour. He turned his back on the wind and nosed his horse onward. Despite its flagging pace, the animal was still faster than a man on foot.

With a suddenness that left H. A. reeling he reached the top of one more featureless dune and saw that there were no more. Below him spread the slag gray waters of the South Atlantic and for the first time he could smell its iodine tang. Rolling waves turned to white froth as they roared onto the broad beach.

He lowered himself from his horse, his legs and back aching from the long ride. He didn’t have the strength to whoop for joy so he stood silently, a ghost of a smile on the corners of his lips as the sun retreated into the cold dark waters.

“What is it, H. A.? Why’d you stop?” Tim Watermen called when he was still twenty yards back and just coming up the final dune.

Ryder looked down on the struggling figure, saw that Tim’s brother wasn’t far behind. A bit further back, young Smythe clung to his horse’s back as the animal followed in its brethren’s footsteps. Jon Varley wasn’t yet in sight. “We made it.”

It was all he had to say. Tim spurred his horse for the final ascent and when he saw the ocean he let out a triumphant yell. He reached down from the saddle and squeezed H. A.’s shoulder. “Never doubted you for a second, Mr. Ryder. Not for one damned second.”

H. A. allowed himself a laugh. “You should have. I sure as hell did.”

The others joined them within ten minutes. Varley looked the worst of the group and H. A. suspected that rather than rationing his water, Jon had drunk most of it in the morning.

“So we’ve reached the ocean,” Varley snarled over the crying wind. “What now? There’s still a bunch of savages after us and in case you didn’t know we can’t drink that.” He thrust a shaky finger at the Atlantic.

H. A. ignored his tone. He pulled his Baumgart half hunter from his pocket and tilted it toward the dying sun to read its face. “There’s a tall hill a mile or so up the beach. We need to be on top of it in an hour.”

“What happens in an hour?” Peter asked.

“We see if I’m the navigator you all hope I am.”

The dune was the tallest in sight, towering two hundred feet above the beach, and on its crest the wind was a brutal constant weight that made the horses dance in circles. The air was filled with dust, and the longer they stayed on the hillock the thicker the dust seemed to get. Ryder made the Watermen brothers and Jon Varley look up the beach to the north while he and Peter kept watch to the south.

The sun was well down as seven o’clock came and went according to H. A.’s pocket watch.They should have signaled by now . A weight like lead settled in his stomach. It had been too much to ask: crossing hundreds of miles of empty desert and thinking he could come within a few miles of a specific spot on the coast. They could be a hundred or more miles from the rendezvous.

“There!” Peter cried and pointed. H. A. squinted into the darkness. A tiny red ball of incandescence hung close to shore far down the coast. It stayed within sight for no more than a second before vanishing once again.

A man standing at sea level can see approximately three miles before the curvature of the earth blocks his view. By climbing the bluff, H. A. had extended their range to eighteen and a half miles in either direction. Adding the height the flare had climbed, he guessed their rendezvous was about twenty miles down the coastline. Hehad led them across the barren wastes to within sight of their target, a remarkable feat of navigation.

The men had been awake for forty-eight torturous hours, but the thought that their hardships were almost at an end, with a king’s ransom for a reward, buoyed them those last miles. The bluffs sheltered the broad beach from the intensifying sandstorm, but dust was clouding the waters along the surf line as sand settled onto the ocean. The once white crests were mud brown, and it seemed the seas were sluggish under the tons of sand blowing into it.

At midnight they could see the lights of a small ship anchored a hundred yards from shore. The vessel was steel-hulled and coal-fired, a littoral cargo ship about two hundred feet long. Her superstructure was well aft, punctured by a single tall funnel while the forward part of her hull was given over to four separate hatch covers for her holds, serviced by a pair of spindly derricks. Sand blasted at the ship and H. A.

couldn’t tell if her boilers were still fired. The moon was mostly hidden by the storm, so he couldn’t be sure if there was smoke coming from her funnel.

When they were abreast of the steamer, H. A. plucked a small flare from his saddlebag, the only item besides the stones he’d refused to leave behind. He ignited the flare and waved it over his head, yelling at the top of his lungs to be heard over the gale. The men joined him, whooping and hollering, knowing in a few minutes they would be safe.

A searchlight mounted on the ship’s flying bridge snapped on, its beam cutting through the whirling sand and coming to rest on the group of men. They danced in its glow as the horses shied away. A moment later, a dory was lowered from the lifeboat mount, a pair of men working the oars with swift professional strokes that cut the distance in moments. A third figure sat in the back of the craft. The men rushed into the water to greet the boat as its keel sliced into the sand just inside the surf line.

“That you, H. A.?” a voice called out.

“You damned well better hope so, Charlie.”

Charles Turnbaugh, first officer of the HMSRove , leapt from the dory and stood knee deep in the surf.

“So is this the biggest cock-and-bull story I’ve ever heard or did you actually do it?”

H. A. held up one of his saddlebags. He shook it, but the wind was too fierce for anyone to hear the stones rattling around inside. “Let’s just say I’ve made your trip worth your while. How long have you been waiting for us?’

“We got here five days ago and have been firing a flare every night at seven just like you asked.”

“Check your ship’s chronometer. It’s running a minute slow.” Rather than make introductions H. A.

said, “Listen, Charlie, there’s about a hundred Herero bucks after us, and the sooner we’re off the beach and over the horizon the happier I’ll be.”

Turnbaugh began directing the exhausted men into the dory. “We can get you off the beach but not over the horizon for a while.”

Ryder put a hand on his dirty uniform jacket. “What’s the matter?”

“We grounded ourselves when the tide went out. The shoals and sand-bars along the coast are always shifting. Come next high tide we’ll float free. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, one thing,” Ryder said before stepping into the little boat. “Do you have a pistol?”

“What? Why?” H. A. twitched his head over his shoulder to where the horses huddled together, growing more terrified as the storm strengthened.

“I think the captain has an old Webley,” Turnbaugh said.

“I’d be obliged if you fetched it for me.”

“They’re just horses,” Varley said, huddled in the dory.

“Who deserve something better than dying on this forsaken beach after what they did for us.”

“I’ll do it,” Charlie said. H. A. helped push the little craft until she floated free and waited with the horses, talking to them soothingly and rubbing their heads and necks. Turnbaugh returned fifteen minutes later and silently handed over the weapon. A minute after that, H. A. climbed slowly into the dory and sat unmoving as he was rowed out to the tramp freighter.

He found his men in the wardroom devouring plates of food and drinking enough water to make each of them look a little green. H. A. took measured sips, allowing his body to adjust. Captain James Kirby stepped into the small room with Charlie and the ship’s engineer just as H. A. took his first bite of stew left over from the officers’ mess.

“H. A. Ryder, you’ve got more lives than a cat,” the captain boomed. He was a great bear of a man with thick dark hair and a beard that reached midway down his chest. “And if it had been anyone other than you making such a damned fool request I would have told them to shove off.”

The two men shook hands warmly. “At the price you’re charging I knew you’d wait until hell froze over.”

“Speaking of price?” One of Kirby’s bushy eyebrows climbed halfway up his forehead.

Ryder placed his saddlebag on the floor and made a show of undoing its buckles, drawing out the moment until he could taste the crew’s greed. He opened the flap, rummaged through the bag’s contents until he found a stone he thought appropriate, and set it on the table. There was a collective gasp. The light in the wardroom was just a pair of lanterns hanging from hooks in the ceiling but they caught the diamond’s fire and cast it around so it looked like they were standing inside a rainbow.

“This ought to pay you for your trouble,” H. A. deadpanned.

“With a little change left over,” Captain Kirby breathed, touching the stone for the first time.

A rough hand woke H. A. the following morning at six. He tried to ignore it and turned away on the tiny bunk he was using while Charlie Turnbaugh was on duty. “H. A., damnit. Get up.”

“What is it?”

“We’ve got a problem.”

The grimness in Turnbaugh’s voice brought Ryder instantly awake. He swung off the bunk and reached for his clothes. Dust spilled from the cloth as he struggled into his pants and shirt. “What is it?”

“You have to see it to believe it.”

Ryder was aware that the storm continued to blow stronger than ever. The wind screamed over the ship like an animal trying to claw its way in while even stronger gusts made the entire vessel shudder.

Turnbaugh led him up to the bridge. Dun light filtered though the windscreen and it was almost impossible to see theRove ’s bow only a hundred and fifty feet away. H. A. saw the problem immediately. The storm had dumped so much sand on the freighter’s deck that the weight of it pinned her to the bottom despite the rising tide. Furthermore, where once they had a hundred yards of water between them and the beach, now less than fifty separated ship from shore.

The Kalahari and the Atlantic were locked in their eternal struggle for territory, a fight between the erosive actions of waves verses the awesome volume of sand the desert could pour onto the waters.

They had fought each other since the dawn of time, constantly reshaping the coastline as sand found weaknesses in the constant scouring of current and tide and struggled to expand the desert a foot or a yard or a mile. And all this played out with little regard to the ship caught in the tumult.

“I need every available hand to start shoveling,” Kirby said darkly. “If the storm doesn’t abate, this ship is going to be landlocked by nightfall.”

Turnbaugh and Ryder rousted their respective crews and using coal shovels from the engine room, pans from the kitchen, and a hip bath from the captain’s washroom they ran into the raging storm. With scarves covering their mouths and the wind so strong that talking was impossible, they pushed mounds of loose sand off the deck and into the water. They raged against the tempest, cursing it because every shovelful they heaved over the side only seemed to come back into their faces.

It was like trying to hold back the tide. They managed to get one hatch scraped clean only to see the amount of sand piled onto the other three had doubled. Five adventurers and a ship’s compliment of twenty was no match for the storm that had traveled across thousands of square miles of seared earth.

Visibility was cut to almost zero, so the men worked blind, their eyes tightly closed to the stinging grit that assaulted theRove from every point on the compass.

After an hour of frantic work, H. A. went to look for Charlie. “It’s no use. We have to wait and hope the storm slows.” Even with his lips touching Turnbaugh’s ear Ryder had to repeat himself three times to be heard over the shrieking wind.

“You’re right,” Charlie screamed back and together they went to recall their men.

The crews staggered back into the superstructure, shedding cascades of sand with each step. H. A. and Jon Varley were the last ones through the hatch, H. A. out of duty to make sure everyone was all right, Varley because he had a rat’s cunning to never give in when he was certain of a reward.

It was still difficult to hear out of the wind inside the companionway.

“Dear Jesus, please let this end.” So awed by the force of nature arrayed against them, Peter was almost in tears.

“Do we have everyone?” Charlie asked.

“I think so.” H. A. sagged against a bulkhead. “Did you do a head count?”

Turnbaugh started counting off his people when there was a sharp rap on the hatchway.

“Good God, someone’s still out there,” someone called.

Varley was closest to the hatch and undogged the latches. The wind slammed the door against its stops as the gale whipped into the ship, scouring paint from the walls with the merest touch. It appeared no one was there. It had to have been a loose piece of equipment rattling outside.

Varley lurched forward to close the door and had it almost shut when a bright silver blade emerged a hand’s span from his back. Gore dripped from the spear’s tip, and when it was pulled from the raw wound blood sprayed the stunned crew. Jon pirouetted as he collapsed to the deck, his mouth working soundlessly as his shirt turned crimson. A dark wraith wearing little but feathers and a cloth around his waist stepped over Varley with an assegai in his hands. Behind him more shapes were primed for the charge, their war cries rivaling even that of the storm.

“Herero,” H. A. whispered with resignation as the wave of warriors burst into the ship.

THE storm was a freak of nature, a once-in-a-hundred-years occurrence that raged for over a week, forever changing the coast of southwest Africa. Once mighty dunes had been rendered flat, while others had grown to newer and even greater heights. Where once there were bays, now great peninsulas of sand thrust into the cold waters of the South Atlantic. The continent had grown five miles bigger in some places, ten in others, as the Kalahari won one of its battles against its arch foe. The map would have to be redrawn for hundreds of miles up and down the coast, that is if anyone cared to map the forlorn shore. Every sailor just knew to stay well off the treacherous seaboard.

Of theRove and all those aboard her, the official report listed her as lost at sea. And that wasn’t far from the truth, though she lay not under hundreds of feet of water, but under an equal amount of pure white sand, nearly eight miles inland from where the icy waves of the Benguela Current pounded against Africa’s Skeleton Coast.

2

THE LABORATORIES OF MERRICK/SINGER

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND

PRESENT DAY

SUSANDonleavy sat hunched like a vulture over the eyepiece of her microscope and watched the action unfold on the slide as though she were a god of Greek mythology being entertained by mortals.

And in a sense she was, for what lay on the slide was her own creation, an engineered organism that she had breathed life into as surely as the gods had molded man out of clay.

She remained motionless for nearly an hour, enraptured by what she was seeing, amazed that the results were so positive this early in her work. Against all scientific principles, but trusting her gut, Susan Donleavy removed the slide from the scope and set it on the workbench next to her. She crossed the room to where an industrial cooler hulked against one wall and removed one of several gallon jugs of water kept at precisely sixty-eight degrees.

The water had been in storage for less than a day, having been flown to the lab as soon as it had been collected. The need to keep fresh water samples was one of the principle expenses of her experiments—nearly as costly as the detailed gene sequencing of her subjects.

She opened the jug and smelled the salty tang of ocean water. She dipped a dropper into its surface and siphoned up a small amount, which she then transferred to a slide. Once she had it centered under the microscope, she peered into the realm of the infinitely tiny. The sample teemed with life. In just a few milliliters of water there were hundreds of zooplankton and diatoms, single-celled creatures that formed the first link of the food chain for the entire ocean.

The microscopic animals and plants were similar to the ones she’d been studying earlier, only these had not been genetically modified.

Satisfied that the water sample hadn’t degraded in transport, she poured some into a glass beaker.

Holding it over her head, she could see some of the larger diatoms in the glare cast by the banks of fluorescent lights. Susan was so focused on her work she didn’t hear the door to the lab open, and since it was so late she didn’t expect anyone to be disturbing her.

“What have you got there?” The voice startled her and she nearly dropped the beaker.

“Oh, Dr. Merrick. I didn’t know you were here.”

“I’ve told you, like I tell everyone in the company, to please call me Geoff.”

Susan frowned slightly. Geoffrey Merrick wasn’t a bad sort, really, but she disliked his affability, as if his billions shouldn’t affect the way people treated him, especially staffers at Merrick/Singer who were still working toward their doctorates. He was a year over fifty, but kept himself in shape by skiing nearly year-round, chasing the snows to South America when summer came to the Swiss Alps. He was also a bit vain about his appearance, and his skin remained too tight following a face-lift. Though a doctor in chemistry himself, Merrick had long since given up lab work and instead spent his time overseeing the research company that bore his and his ex-partner’s names.

“Is this that flocculent project your supervisor ran past me a few months ago?” Merrick asked, taking the beaker from Susan and studying it himself.

Unable to lie to get him out of her lab Susan said, “Yes, Doctor, I mean, Geoff.”

“It was an interesting idea when it was presented, though I have absolutely no idea what it could be used for,” Merrick commented, handing back the beaker. “But I guess that’s what we do here. We chase down our whims and see where they take us. How’s the project coming?”

“I think okay,” Susan said, anxious because no matter how nice he was, Merrick intimidated her.

Though, if she were truthful with herself, most people intimidated her, from her boss down to the older women she rented her apartment from and the counterman at the café where she bought her morning coffee. “I was about to try an unscientific experiment.”

“Good, we’ll watch it together. Please proceed.”

Susan’s hands were beginning to tremble so she placed the beaker on a stand. She retrieved the first slide, the one containing her engineered phytoplankton, and sucked up the sample with a fresh dropper.

She then carefully injected its contents into the beaker.

“I forget the particulars of what you’re doing,” Merrick said, standing over her shoulder. “What should we be seeing here?”

Susan shifted to hide the fact his proximity made her uncomfortable. “As you know, diatoms like this phytoplankton have a cell wall made of silica. What I’ve done is, well, what I’m trying to do, is find a way to melt that wall and ramp up the density of the cell sap within the vacuole. My engineered specimens should attack the unaltered diatoms in the water and go into a frenzy of replication and if things work out right…” Her voice trailed off as she reached for the beaker once again. She slid a hand into an insulated glove so she could touch the glass container. She tilted it onto its side but rather than spilling quickly, the water sloshed up the side with the viscosity of cooking oil. She righted the beaker before any dripped onto the lab table.

Merrick clapped, delighted as a child for whom she’d just performed a magic trick. “You’ve turned the water sort of gooey.”

“Kind of, I guess. The diatoms have actually bound themselves in such a way that they capture the water within a matrix of their sap. The water’s still there, it’s just held in suspension.”

“I’ll be damned. Well done, Susan, well done.”

“It’s not a total success,” Donleavy admitted. “The reaction is exothermic. It generates heat. Around a hundred and forty degrees in the right conditions. That’s why I need this thick glove. The gel breaks down after only twenty-four hours as the engineered diatoms die off. I can’t figure out the process behind the reaction. I know it’s chemical, obviously, but I don’t know how to stop it.”

“I still think you’re off to a tremendous start. Tell me, you must have some idea what we could do with such an invention. The idea of wanting to turn water into goop isn’t something that struck you out of the blue. When Dan Singer and I started working on organic ways to trap sulfur we thought it might have applications in power plants to reduce emissions. There must be something behind your project.”

Susan blinked, but should have known Geoffrey Merrick didn’t get where he was without a keen sense of perception. “You’re right,” she admitted. “I thought maybe it could be used for settling ponds at mines and water-treatment plants and maybe even a way to stop oil spills from spreading.”

“That’s right. I remember from your personnel file, you’re from Alaska.”

“Seward, Alaska, yes.”

“You must have been in your early teens when theExxon Valdez hit that reef and dumped all that oil in Prince William Sound. That must have had quite an impact on you and your family. It must have been rough.”

Susan shrugged. “Not really. My parents ran a small hotel and with all the people on the cleanup crews they did okay. But I had a lot of friends whose parents lost everything. My best friend’s parents even divorced as a result of the spill because her dad lost his job at a cannery.”

“Then this research is personal for you.”

Susan bristled at his slightly condescending tone. “I think it’s personal for anyone who cares about the environment.”

He smiled. “You know what I mean. You’re like the cancer researcher who lost a parent to leukemia, or the guy who becomes a fireman because his house burned down when he was a kid. You’re fighting a demon out of your childhood.” When she didn’t reply Merrick took it to mean he was right. “There’s nothing wrong with revenge as a motivation, Susan. Revenge against cancer, or a fire, or an ecological nightmare. It keeps you far more focused on your work than doing it just to get a paycheck. I applaud you and by the looks of what I’ve seen tonight, I think that you’re on the right path.”

“Thank you,” Susan said shyly. “There’s still a lot more work to go. Years, maybe. I don’t know. A tiny sample in a test tube is a long way off from containing an oil spill.”

“Run your ideas to ground, is all I can say. Go wherever they take you, and for as long as you need.”

From someone other than Geoffrey Merrick that would have sounded trite but he spoke it with sincerity and conviction.

Susan met his eye for the first time since he’d entered the laboratory. “Thank you…Geoff. That means a lot.”

“And who knows. After we patented our sulpher scrubbers, I became a pariah to the environmental movement because they claimed my invention didn’t do enough to stop pollution. Maybe you can finally salvage my reputation.” He left with a smile.

After he’d gone Susan returned to her beakers and test tubes. Wearing protective gloves she took the one filled with her genetically modified diatoms and slowly tilted it to the side again. Ten minutes had elapsed since she’d last handled it and this time the water sample at its bottom clung to the glass as though it were glue; and only after inverting the hot beaker completely did it start to ooze downward, as slowly as chilled molasses.

Susan thought about the dying otters and seabirds she’d seen as a child and redoubled her work.

3

THE CONGO RIVER

SOUTH OF MATADI

THEjungle would eventually swallow the abandoned plantation and the three-hundred-foot wooden pier built along the river. The main house a mile inland had already succumbed to the effects of rot and encroaching vegetation, and it was only a matter of time before the dock was swept away and the metal warehouse nearby collapsed. Its roof sagged like a swaybacked horse, and its corrugated skin was scaled with rust and flecked paint. It was a haunted, forlorn place that even the soft milky glow of a three-quarter moon couldn’t liven.

A large freighter was nudging closer to the pier, dwarfing even the massive warehouse. With her bow pointed downstream and her engines in reverse, the water under her fantail frothed as she fought the current to stay on station. It was a delicate balance to maintain her position, especially considering the Congo’s notorious back-currents and eddies.

With a walkie-talkie held to his lips, and his other arm flailing theatrically, the captain paced the starboard wing bridge and yelled at the helmsman and engineer to make corrections. The throttles were moved in fractional increments to keep the 560-foot vessel exactly where he wanted.

A group of men wearing dark fatigues waited on the dock and watched the operation. All but one carried an assault rifle. The man without an AK-47 had a huge holster strapped to his hip. He tapped the side of his leg with a leather riding crop and despite the darkness sported mirrored aviator shades.

The captain was a large black man wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap atop his shaved head. The muscles of his chest and arms strained against his white uniform blouse. Another man was with him on the bridge wing: slightly shorter and not as muscled, he was somehow a more commanding presence than the captain. He exuded authority from his watchful eyes and the loose, casual way he carried himself. With the wing bridge lofting three stories above the quay there was no chance of their conversation being overheard. The captain nudged his companion, who’d been studying the armed troops rather than paying attention to the tricky maneuvering.

“Seems our rebel leader stepped straight out of central casting, eh, Chairman?”

“Right down to the riding whip and shades,” the chairman agreed. “Of course, we’re not beyond giving people what they expect to see, either,Captain Lincoln. That was a nice little performance with the walkie-talkie.”

Linc looked at the walkie-talkie in his big hand. The small device didn’t even have batteries in it. He chuckled softly. As the most senior African-American member of the crew, Lincoln had been tapped by the ship’s real captain, Juan Cabrillo, to act the part for the current operation. Cabrillo knew that the representative sent by Samuel Makambo, the leader of the Congolese Army of Revolution, would be more comfortable dealing with a man who shared the same skin color.

Linc looked over the rail once again, satisfied that the big freighter was holding steady. “All right,” he bellowed into the night. “Let go fore and aft lines.”

Deckhands at the stern and bow lowered thick ropes through the hawseholes. With a nod from their commander, two of the rebels slung their weapons over their shoulders and looped the lines over the rust-coated bollards. Windlasses took up the slack and the big freighter gently kissed the old truck tires slung along the length of the pier that acted as fenders. Water continued to foam at the ship’s stern as reverse thrust was maintained to fight the current. Without it, the ship would have ripped the bollards from the decaying wooden dock and drifted downstream.

Cabrillo took just a moment to check the freighter’s stations, keeping position, gauging current, windage, rudder, and power with one sweep of the eye. Satisfied, he nodded to Linc. “Let’s make a deal.”

The two stepped into the ship’s main bridge. The room was illuminated by a pair of red night-lights, giving it a hellish appearance that made its dilapidated state all the more obvious. The floors were unwashed linoleum that was cracked and peeling in the corners. The windows were dusty on the inside while the outsides were rimmed with salt crust. The sills were the graveyards of all manner of dead insects. One needle on the tarnished brass engine telegraph had broken off long ago, and the ship’s wheel was missing several spokes. The vessel carried few modern navigational aids and the radio in the shack behind the bridge could barely transmit a dozen miles.

Cabrillo nodded at the helmsman, an intense Chinese man in his early forties, who shot the Chairman a wry smile. Cabrillo and Franklin Lincoln descended a series of companionways lit only occasionally by low-watt bulbs in metal cages. They soon reached the main deck where another member of the crew waited.

“Ready to play jungle jeweler, Max?” Juan greeted.

At sixty-four Max Hanley was the second oldest member of the crew, and was only just showing the signs of age. His hair had retreated to a ginger fringe around his skull and his belt line had thickened a bit.

But he could more than handle himself in a fight and had been at Cabrillo’s side since the day Juan had started the Corporation, the company that owned and operated the tramp freighter. Theirs was an easy friendship of mutual respect borne of countless dangers faced and bested.

Hanley hoisted an attaché case from the pitted deck. “You know what they say—‘diamonds are a mercenary’s best friend.’ ”

“I’ve never heard them say that,” Linc said.

“Well, they do.”

The deal had been a month in the making, through countless cutouts and several clandestine meetings. It was pretty straightforward. In exchange for a quarter pound of rough diamonds, the Corporation was giving Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution five hundred AK-47 assault rifles, two hundred rocket-propelled grenades, fifty RPG launchers, and fifty thousand rounds of Warsaw Pact 7.62

mm ammunition. Makambo hadn’t asked where the crew of a tramp freighter got their hands on so much military hardware, and Cabrillo didn’t want to know how the rebel leader obtained so many diamonds.

Though coming from this part of the world, he was sure they were blood diamonds, mined by slaves in order to finance the revolution.

Able to recruit boys as young as thirteen for his army, Makambo needed weapons more than soldiers, so this shipment of arms would ensure that his attempt to overthrow the shaky government now stood a pretty good chance.

A crewman lowered the gangplank down to the dock and Linc led Cabrillo and Hanley onto the quay.

The lone rebel officer detached himself from his Praetorian guards and approached Franklin Lincoln. He snapped Linc a crisp military salute, which Linc returned with a casual touch to the bill of his fisherman’s cap.

“Captain Lincoln, I am Colonel Raif Abala of the Congolese Army of Revolution.” Abala spoke English with a mixture of French and native accents. His voice was flat, without any trace of inflection or humanity. He didn’t remove his sunglasses and continued to tap the riding crop against the seam of his camouflage pants.

“Colonel,” Linc said, holding up his arms while a pock-faced aide de camp frisked him for weapons.

“Our supreme leader, General Samuel Makambo, sends his regards and regrets that he could not meet you in person.”

Makambo had been waging his year-long insurrection from a secret base somewhere deep in the jungle.

He hadn’t been seen since taking up arms, and had managed to foil all government attempts to infiltrate his headquarters, murdering ten handpicked soldiers who’d tried to join the CAR with orders to assassinate him. Like bin Laden or Abimael Guzman, the former leader of Peru’s Shining Path, Makambo’s air of invincibility only added to his appeal, even with the blood of thousands blamed on his coup attempt.

“You have brought the weapons.” It was more statement than question.

“And you will see them as soon as my associate here inspects the stones.” Lincoln made a casual wave toward Max.

“As we agreed,” Abala said. “Come.”

A table had been set up on the dock with a light powered by a portable generator. Abala threw a leg over one of the chairs and sat, setting his whip on the tabletop. In front of him was a brown burlap bag with the name of a feed company inked in French on its side. Max sat opposite the African rebel and busied himself with the contents of his case. He took out an electronic scale, some weights to calibrate it, and a bunch of plastic graduated cylinders with a clear liquid inside. He also had notebooks, pencils, and a small calculator. Guards stood behind Abala and more were behind Max Hanley. Another pair stood close enough to Cabrillo and Linc to cut them down at the slightest indication from the rebel colonel. The prospect of violence hung low over the group and the humid night air was charged with nervous tension.

Abala rested one hand on the bag. He looked up at Linc. “Captain, I think now would be the time to show some good faith. I would like to see the container carrying my weapons.”

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” Linc said, letting just a hint of concern into his voice. Abala’s aide snickered.

“Like I said,” Abala continued, his tone full of menace, “it is a show of faith. A goodwill gesture on your part.” He took his hand off the bag and raised a finger. Twenty more soldiers emerged from the darkness. Abala waved them off again and just as quickly as they’d appeared they had vanished back into the gloom. “They could kill your crew and simply take the guns. That is a show of my goodwill.”

Without a choice, Linc turned to face the ship. A crewman stood at the railing. Linc twirled his hand over his head. The deckhand waved, and a moment later a small diesel engine bellowed to life. The center of the three derricks on the big freighter’s bow section creaked to life, heavy cables sliding through rusty pullies as a great weight was lifted from a cargo hold. It was a standard forty-foot shipping container, as innocuous as any of the hundreds of thousands used every day in maritime commerce. The crane lifted it clear of the hatch and swung it to the railing, where it was lowered to the deck. Two more crewmen opened the doors and stepped inside the container. With a shout they called to the hoistman, and the container was lifted once again, rising up over the railing as the box was moved over the side of the ship. It was lowered to within eight feet of the dock but came no lower.

The men in the box used flashlights to illuminate the container’s contents. Racks of AK-47s lined the walls, oily black in the dim light. The beams also revealed dark green crates. One was opened, and a crewman slung an empty RPG tube to his shoulder, showing off the weapon like a model at a trade show. A couple of the youngest rebel soldiers cheered. Even Raif Abala couldn’t keep his mouth from twitching upward at the corners.

“That’s the extent of my good faith,” Lincoln said after the two crewmen had leapt to the ground and returned to the ship.

Without a word Abala spilled the contents of the bag across the table. Cut and polished, diamonds are the greatest natural refractor in the world, able to split white light into a rainbow spectrum with such dazzle and flash that the stones have been coveted since time immemorial. But in their raw state there is little to distinguish the gems. The pile of stones showed no sparkle. They sat dully on the table, misshapen lumps of crystal, most fashioned like a pair of four-sided pyramids fused at the base, while others were just random pebbles with no discernible shape at all. They ranged in hue from pure white to the dingiest yellow; and while some appeared clear, many were cleaved and fractured. But Max and Juan noticed instantly that none was smaller than a carat. Their value in the diamond districts of New York, Tel Aviv, or Amsterdam was far beyond that of the contents of the container, but such was the nature of commerce. Abala could always get more diamonds. It was the weapons that were hard to procure.

Max instinctively grabbed the largest stone, a crystal of at least ten carats. Cut and polished to a four-or five-carat stone, it would fetch about forty thousand dollars depending on its color grade and clarity. He studied it through a jeweler’s loupe, twisting it against the light, his mouth pursed in a sour expression. He set it aside without comment and peered at another stone, and then another. He tsked a couple of times as if disappointed by what he was seeing, then pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket.

When he had them perched on his nose, he shot Abala a disappointed look over them and opened one of his notebooks, scratching in a couple of lines with a mechanical pencil.

“What are you writing?” Abala said, suddenly unsure of himself in Max’s learned presence.

“That these stones make better gravel than gems.” Max said, making his voice shrill and adding an atrocious Dutch accent. Abala almost leapt to his feet at the insult, but Max waved him down. “But on preliminary review I judge them satisfactory for our transaction.”

He pulled a flat piece of topaz from his pants pocket, its surfaces deeply scratched. “As you know,” he said in a lecturing tone, “diamond is the hardest substance on earth. Ten on the Mohs’ scale, to be exact.

Quartz, which is number seven, is often used to fool the uninitiated into thinking they are getting the deal of a lifetime.”

From the same pocket he plucked an octagonal shaft of crystal. Bearing down with considerable force he raked the quartz across the flat chunk of topaz. The edge slid off without making a mark. “As you can see, topaz is harder than quartz and hence can’t be scratched. It is eight on the Mohs’ scale, in fact.” He then took one of the smaller diamonds and ran it across the topaz. With a spine-shivering squeal the edge of the gem dug a deep scratch into the blue semiprecious stone. “So what we have here is a stone harder than eight on the Mohs’ scale.”

“Diamond,” Abala said smugly.

Max sighed as if a recalcitrant student had made a gaff. He was enjoying playing at gemologist. “Or corundum, which is nine on the Mohs’ scale. The only way to be certain this is a diamond is to test its specific gravity.”

Although Abala had dealt with diamonds many times before he knew little of their properties other than their value. Without realizing it, Hanley had piqued his interest and lowered his guard. “What is specific gravity?” he asked.

“The ratio of a stone’s weight verses the volume of water it displaces. For diamond it is exactly three point five two.” Max fiddled with his scale for a moment, calibrating it with a set of brass weights carried in a velvet-lined case. Once the scale had been zeroed he set the largest stone on the pan. “Point two two five grams. Eleven and a half carats.” He opened one of the plastic graduated cylinders and dropped the stone inside, noting how much water the gem displaced in his notebook. He then tapped the numbers into the calculator. When he saw the resulting number he glared at Raif Abala.

Abala’s eyes went wide with indignant anger. His troopers tightened their cordon. A gun was pressed against Juan’s back.

Unperturbed by the sudden show of aggression, Max let his expression go neutral and then allowed a smile to creep across his face. “Three point five two. This, gentlemen, is a real diamond.”

Colonel Abala slowly lowered himself into his seat and fingers that had been ounces away from squeezing triggers were relaxed. Juan could have killed Hanley for playing his role a little too well.

Max tested eight more random stones and each time the results were the same.

“I have held up my end of the bargain,” Abala said. “A quarter pound of diamonds for the weapons.”

While Hanley tested more stones, Linc led Abala to the open container, signaling to a crewman on the freighter to lower it to the quay. The wooden piers holding up the jetty creaked under the weight. Five rebel soldiers went with them. By the glare of a flashlight, Abala and his men grabbed ten AK-47s from different racks and about a hundred rounds of ammunition, using a machete to cut open the wax-coated paper blocks of bullets.

Making sure he stood close by Abala in case the troops tried something, Linc watched as the men laboriously loaded the shiny brass cartridges into the AK’s distinctive banana magazines. Juan, who was wearing a lightweight flak jacket under his bulky sweatshirt, stuck to Max for the very same reason. Each assault rifle was fired ten times, two three-round bursts and four single shots aimed carefully at a target stapled to the side of the disused warehouse. The gunfire echoed across the broad reach of the river and sent dozens of birds winging into the night. A soldier ran to the warehouse to inspect the damage, shouting an encouragement. Abala grunted at Linc, “Good. Very good.”

Back at the table Hanley carried on his inspection, setting the empty sack on the scale and noting its weight in his notebook. Then, under the watchful eye of one of Abala’s officers, he used a long-handled spoon to coax the rough stones back into the bag. Once he had them all, he weighed the bag again. On the calculator he subtracted the bag’s weight from the total. He looked over his shoulder at Cabrillo and whispered, “We are eight carats short.”

Depending on the stones, those eight carats could translate into tens of thousands of dollars. Juan shrugged. “I’ll just be happy to get out of here alive. Let it go.” Cabrillo called over to Linc, who was going over one of the RPGs with Abala and a rebel who had the professional look of a sergeant,

“Captain Lincoln, the port authorities won’t hold our berth in Boma. We should get going.”

Linc turned to him. “Of course, Mr. Cabrillo. Thank you.” He looked back to Abala. “I wish I had more weapons to offer you, Colonel, but coming across this shipment was a surprise to me and my crew.”

“If you, ah, ever get such a surprise again, you know how to contact us.”

They had reached the table. Linc asked Max, “Everything all set?”

“Yes, Captain, everything’s in order.”

Abala’s smile took on an even oilier sheen. He’d intentionally shorted them on the deal, knowing that his overwhelming number of armed men would intimidate them into accepting fewer stones than agreed. The missing diamonds were in his uniform blouse pocket and would go a long way in fattening his Swiss bank account.

“Let’s go then, gentlemen.” Linc took the bag of diamonds from Max and strode toward the gangplank, Cabrillo and Hanley hurrying to match his long strides. The moment before they reached the gangway Abala’s men swung into action. The two closest to the ramp stepped forward to block it while dozens of rebels rushed out of the jungle firing into the air and screaming like banshees. At least a dozen men swarmed the container, trying to unhook the cargo derrick.

The effect would have been overwhelming had the Corporation team not expected a double-cross.

A second before Abala shouted his order to attack, Cabrillo and Linc had started running. They were on the two rebels at the base of the gangplank before either had time to bring their weapons to bear. Linc bodily tossed one young soldier into the space between the freighter and the quay as Juan jammed his fingers into the other’s throat just hard enough to make him retch. As the rebel coughed, Juan ripped the AK-47 out of his hands and sank the butt into the soldier’s stomach. He fell into a fetal ball.

Cabrillo swung around and laid down a wall of cover fire as Max and Linc mounted the gangway. Juan stepped onto the sloping ramp and pressed a button under the railing. The five feet of the gangway’s leading edge snapped sharply upward. With its solid sides, and now with the tip elevated ninety degrees, the three men were shielded by the withering return fire from Abala’s men. Bullets whizzed over their heads, smacking into the side of the freighter and ricocheting off the metal skin of the gangway as the trio huddled safely in their armored cocoon.

“Like we wouldn’t see this coming,” Max said casually over the riotous din.

An operator inside the ship worked the controls of the gangplank and it lifted off the dock, allowing the men to dash into the ship’s superstructure. All pretenses aside, Juan took immediate control. He slapped the button on a wall-mounted intercom. “Sit rep, Mr. Murphy.”

Deep inside the freighter, Mark Murphy, chief weapons operator, was watching a monitor showing video from a camera mounted on one of the ship’s five cranes.

“With the gangway up, only a couple of guys are still firing. I think Abala is trying to organize an assault.

He’s rallied about a hundred of them and is giving them their orders.”

“What about the container?”

“The men almost have the lines off it. Hold it. Yeah, they got it. We’re free of it.”

“Tell Mr. Stone to prepare to get us out of here.”

“Ah, Chairman?” Murphy said hesitantly. “We’re still tied to the dock bollards.”

Cabrillo fingered a trickle of blood from where a fleck of paint kicked free by a bullet had nicked his ear. “Tear ’em out. I’m on my way.”

While their ship looked right at home up against the disintegrating dock, she hid a secret of which only a few outside the crew was aware. Her rust-streaked hull with its mismatched paint, dilapidated derricks, stained deck, and generally grimy appearance was nothing but stage dressing to disguise the vessel’s true capabilities. She was a privately funded spy ship owned by the Corporation and headed by Juan Cabrillo. TheOregon was his brainchild and his one true love.

Under her scabrous hide she bristled with some of the most advanced weapon systems on the planet—cruise missiles and torpedoes bought from a crooked Russian admiral, 30 mm Gatling guns, and a 120 mm cannon that employed the same targeting technology as an M1A2 Abrams tank, as well as servo-controlled .30-caliber machine guns to fend off boarders. All the weapons were mounted behind deck plates along the hull or disguised as junk littering her deck. The remotely operated .30 calibers were hidden in rusted barrels placed strategically along the ship’s rail. On command the lids lifted off and the weapons emerged, aided by low-light and infrared cameras.

Several decks below the ship’s bridge, where Cabrillo and Lincoln had stood when theOregon docked, was the operations center, the brain of the vessel. From there, her crew of retired U.S. military and CIA operatives ran the entire ship, from her engines and dynamic positioning system to all her weapons. They also possessed a suite of radar and sonar gear that was among the best a considerable amount of money could buy.

It was from the op center that theOregon ’s preeminent helmsman, Eric Stone, had actually docked the vessel, using athwartship bow and stern thrusters and input from the global positioning system, all linked to a supercomputer that gauged wind speed, currents, and a dozen other factors. It was this computer that employed the exact amount of reverse thrust required to keep theOregon in position against the flow of the Congo River.

Cabrillo and Max stepped into a utility closet that reeked of turpentine while Linc headed off to meet with Eddie Seng and the rest of the shore operations specialists in case they were needed to keep the rebels from gaining the deck. Juan spun the handles for the slop sink like the dials of a safe and the closet’s back wall opened to reveal a hallway beyond.

Unlike the cheap linoleum and peeling paint of the bridge and other sections of the superstructure, this secret interior passage was well lit, with rich mahogany paneling and plush carpets. An original Winslow painting of a whaling ship hung from a wall and a glass-encased sixteenth-century suit of armor complete with sword and mace stood at the end of the hallway.

They strode past countless cabin doors until reaching the operations center at the heart of the freighter. It was as high-tech as NASA’s mission control, with computer work stations and a wall dominated by an enormous flat panel display currently showing the chaotic scene along the pier. Mark Murphy and Eric Stone sat at the forward work stations directly below the wall monitor while Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications specialist, was to the right. Along the back wall stood a pair of damage controllers monitoring the ship’s integrated safety systems and a bank of computers where Max Hanley could watch over theOregon ’s revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines.

It was no mistake that the op center had the feel of the bridge of television’s starshipEnterprise , right down to the large seat set in the middle of the room. Juan sat in what the crew called “The Kirk Chair,”

looped a pin microphone over his ear, and adjusted his own small computer display.

“I’ve got a pair of inbounds,” Hali said, his dark features made a ghastly green by his radar scope. “They must have been flying nap of the earth, suggesting choppers. ETA four minutes.”

“There are no known reports that Makambo has helicopters,” Mark Murphy said, turning to the chairman. “But Hali just got a bulletin about a pair of choppers stolen from an oil exploration company.

Details are sketchy but it reads like the company’s pilots were hijacked.”

Juan nodded, not sure what to make of this development.

“I’ve got movement behind us,” Eric Stone called out. He’d switched his personal view screen to show the view from a stern-mounted camera.

A pair of patrol boats had rounded a bend in the river. Lights atop their pilothouses made it difficult to tell how they were armed, but Mark Murphy at the weapons station called up a database of Congolese military craft.

“They’re American-built Swift boats.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Max said. He’d served aboard Swift boats for two tours in Vietnam.

Murph continued as if Hanley hadn’t spoken. “Displaces twelve tons, has a crew of twelve, and comes armed with six fifty-caliber machine guns. Top speed is twenty-five knots. Note here says that Congo’s riverine forces have also added mortars and they might be carrying shoulder-fired missiles.”

With the situation worsening by the second, Cabrillo made his decisions. “Hali, get me Benjamin Isaka.”

Isaka was their contact in the government. “Tell him that elements of his military might have found out about our mission and don’t realize we’re on their side. Or that two of his Swift boats have been taken by Makambo’s men. Eric, get us the hell out of here. Murph, keep an eye on, well, everything, but do not fire without my say-so. If we give away our capabilities, Abala’s going to know he’s being set up and will leave the guns where they are. Speaking of that. Hali?”

Hali Kasim pushed a shock of curly black hair off his forehead and typed some keystrokes into his computer. “RDF tags are activated and broadcasting five-by-five.”

“Excellent.” Cabrillo spun in his chair to look at Max Hanley. “How about it, old boy?”

“You know we’re only on battery backup,” Max Hanley told him. “I can’t give you more than twenty knots.”

TheOregon had the most sophisticated marine propulsion system ever built. Her magnetohydrodynamic engines used superconductive coils cooled by liquid helium to strip free electrons from seawater. The electricity was then used to power four massive pump jets through two vector nozzles at the ship’s stern.

The engines could move the eleven-thousand-ton ship at speeds approaching that of an offshore race boat, and since she used seawater for fuel she possessed an infinite range. Because of a fire two years earlier on a cruise ship powered by magnetohydrodynamics, most of the world’s maritime safety boards had banned their use until they could be further tested, which was why theOregon flew the flag of Iran on her jack staff, a nation with a decidedly cavalier attitude toward maritime law.

Tied to a dock eighty miles up the Congo River from the Atlantic Ocean, theOregon was surrounded by freshwater and thus couldn’t power up her engines. She had to rely on energy stored in ranks of silver-zinc deep cycle batteries to force water through her pump jets.

Having worked so closely with the navel architects and engineers when the ship was converted from a conventional lumber carrier, Cabrillo knew that even with the current running in their favor the batteries wouldn’t last more than sixty miles at full speed, twenty miles short of where the river discharged into the sea.

“Mr. Stone, what are the tidal conditions going to be in about three hours?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.

“Mean high tide is in two hours thirty minutes,” Eric Stone replied without having to access the database.

As part of his job he kept track of tidal charts and weather forecasts five days out with the diligence of an accountant chasing a penny across a spreadsheet.

“This is going to be close,” Juan said to no one in particular. “Okay, Eric let’s get out of here before Abala’s men launch their assault.”

“Aye, Chairman.”

With a deft hand, Eric Stone ramped up the pulse jets. Without the whine of the cryopumps and ancillary equipment for the magnetohydrodynamic engines, the sound of water being forced through the tubes was a deep rumble that reverberated through the entire vessel. He dialed up the bow and stern thrusters and the massive ship moved laterally away from the dock at the same time she started straining against her mooring hawsers.

Sensing their quarry was about to escape, the rebels lining the quay opened fire with long sustained bursts from their automatic weapons. Bullets raked the ship from stem to stern. Windows lining the bridge exploded under the onslaught and portholes winked out in cascades of glass. Sparks flew from the Oregon ’s hull as hundreds of rounds were deflected by her armored belts. While it was a spectacular sight, the rebels did nothing but mar paint and destroy a few pieces of easily replaceable glass.

From astern, the approaching patrol boats added the pounding rhythm of their fifty calibers. In order to reach the rendezvous, theOregon rode high in the water, the special ballast tanks running along her flanks used to simulate her carrying a load of goods pumped dry. This afforded the gunners racing down the river a clear view of her rudder. They concentrated their fire on the rudder post, hoping to dislodge it from the steering gear and render the big ship helpless to the whims of the current. On a normal vessel their strategy was sound; theOregon ’s rudder could turn the ship when necessary, like in a port under the watchful eye of harbor officials, but she got most of her maneuverability from the vectored nuzzles of her drive tubes, which were well protected below the waterline.

Eric Stone ignored the distraction of the assault, instead watching the iron bollards bolted to the dock through his closed-circuit television. The hawsers pulled taut as the ship edged further from the dock. A pair of enterprising terrorists rushed for the stern line and started scrambling up like rats, weapons slung over their shoulders. Stone gunned the stern thruster. With the sound of tearing rotted wood, the mushroom-shaped bollard was yanked out of the dock like a festering tooth. Its tremendous weight made it pendulum against theOregon ’s side with a clang like an enormous bell.

One rebel fell immediately, and was sucked into the blades of the stern thruster when Eric reversed power to correct the ship’s course. All that emerged from the other side of the ship was a dark stain that tinged the waters red before fading in the current. The other gunman managed to cling to the rope as automatic capstans reeled it up. When he reached the hawsehole he tried to scramble on board the ship only to be greeted by Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln, who’d watched his boarding attempt from tactical view screens attached to their combat vests.

Eddie had come to the Corporation after premature retirement from the CIA, and while he didn’t have the combat experience of Linc’s SEAL career, he more than made up for it in single-minded determination. This was why Juan had made him chief of shore operations, the head of the gun dogs, as Max called their cadre of ex-SEALs, Force Recon, and Special Forces operators.

The rebel’s eyes went wide when he tried to heave himself to the deck. Linc regarded him over the sites of a Franchi SPAS-12 combat shotgun while Eddie jammed the barrel of a Glock to the soldier’s temple.

“Choice is yours, my friend,” Eddie said mildly.

The terrorist let his fingers go lax and plummeted into the frothing water below.

Back in the op center, Eric watched the second bollard. Despite the tons of force, it refused to pull free from the dock. Instead, large tears appeared in the wood as the underlining timbers were wrenched from their positions. A fifteen-foot section of the quay was torn away, tossing three more soldiers into the water and causing a much larger section of the dock to sway precariously.

“We’re free,” he announced.

“Very good,” Juan replied, checking his tactical display. The choppers were two minutes away and closing at over a hundred miles per hour. He imagined that the stolen oil company helicopters would be large and state of the art. With the weapons arrays secreted around his ship, Cabrillo knew they could gun down every soldier still on the dock, knock both helos out of the sky, and turn the pursuing patrol boats into so much flotsam—but that wasn’t the point of the mission they’d been hired to perform. “Bring us up to twenty knots.”

“Twenty knots, aye.”

The big freighter accelerated smoothly, the extra drag of the water finally tearing away the section of dock still attached to the bollard. Soon the autofire from shore stopped, but the two patrol boats continued to pound theOregon with steady streams of fifty-caliber rounds.

“RPG launch,” Mark Murphy called out sharply.

Abala’s men must have had vehicles hidden in the jungle, which were now pacing theOregon as she fled down the Congo. The small missile arched out of the underbrush, raced across the water, and slammed into the bow. The ship’s armor protected the interior spaces but the explosion was deafening as the fireball rolled across the deck. Almost immediately another RPG came out of a tube held by a gunner on one of the Swift boats. This missile came on from a low angle, passing close enough to the stern rail to scorch paint and hit the ship’s funnel square on. Armored to protect theOregon ’s sophisticated radar dome hidden inside, the grenade still detonated with enough force to knock out the system.

“I’m on it,” Hali shouted as soon as his screen went blank. He ran from the op center as fire control teams and electronics specialists were automatically dispatched by the onboard computer.

Linda Ross, an elfin woman with freckles and a high, almost girlish voice took over his work station seamlessly. “Choppers are a minute out, Chairman, and the last image from the radar showed traffic ahead coming upriver.”

Juan called up higher resolution on the forward-facing cameras. The river was as black as oil, hemmed in with hills made silver by the moonlight. Just emerging from around a bend was a big river ferry. She had three decks and a blunt bow, but what caught the crew’s attention was the image from the infrared cameras. Her topmost deck was a sea of humanity, and it looked like every other deck was equally full of passengers headed inland toward the port of Matadi.

“God, there must be five hundred people on her,” Eric said.

“And I bet she’s rated for no more than two hundred,” Cabrillo replied. “Take her down our port side. I want theOregon between the RPGs and that tub.”

Stone edged his controls and took note of the fathometer. The riverbed was rising rapidly. “Chairman, we’ve got less than twenty feet under our keel. Eighteen. Fifteen. Ten feet, sir.”

“Hold us steady,” Juan said as a hail of fresh gunfire erupted from the jungle, AK-47s and a string of RPGs launched as fast as a Roman candle.

Explosions rocked the freighter as she raced toward the lumbering ferry, the sky lighting up with each hit.

One of the missiles went errant and for a horrified moment looked like it was going to hit the ferry broadside, but at the last second its motor kicked out and it detonated just shy of her hull, drenching the passengers who were frantically rushing around in a hopeless bid to stay out of the line of fire.

“Max, give me everything you’ve got,” Juan said angrily, sickened by the callousness of Abala’s troops.

“We’ve got to protect those people.”

Max Hanley released the safeties from the battery circuits and eked a few more amps out of them and into the pump jets. TheOregon gained another three knots but it would cost them more miles of range, miles they couldn’t afford to lose.

The ferry veered toward the middle of the river, giving theOregon just enough room to pass without grounding. Moments later, the Swift boats split around the oncoming vessel, cutting frothing arcs of water across the river. A motorized skiff that had been riding in the ferry’s wake emerged in the confusion, and one of the Swift boats rammed it under the waves, crushing its wooden hull and two occupants without a check in speed.

Juan watched Eric at the controls. Maneuvering such a large vessel in the tight confines of the river was bad enough, but dodging traffic while being shot at was something young Stone had never faced before.

Juan had full confidence in his helmsman but in the back of his mind he knew he could override Eric’s work station and take the helm himself.

A voice sounded over Cabrillo’s headset. “Chairman, it’s Eddie. I have visual on those two choppers.

Can’t tell the make but they look big enough to carry at least ten men. Now might be the time to splash them.”

“Negative. The pilots are civilians for one thing, kidnapped by Makambo’s rebels and forced to fly for them. And secondly, we can’t let them know our capabilities. We went over this before coming upriver.

We’ll take a pounding, but the old girl will get us home. Just be prepared if they try to drop men onto the deck.”

“We’re ready.”

“Then God help ’em.”

For an hour they raced down the Congo, dogged by the Swift boats and taking occasional fire from shore where the road came close enough to the river for the rebels to set up an ambush. The choppers continued to hover over theOregon without attempting to land or off-load troops. Juan assumed they wanted to board the ship once she’d been forced aground by the RPGs.

They cruised under the Inga Dam, a massive concrete abutment holding back a tributary of the Congo River. The dam and its twin were the main sources of electricity in this part of Africa. The ship encountered rough water where the two flows met, forcing Eric to reverse thrust on the pulse jets to keep theOregon from turning broadside to the current.

“Chairman, I have Benjamin Isaka on the line,” Linda Ross said. “Transferring him to your station.”

“Deputy Minister Isaka, Captain Cabrillo here. I assume you’ve been apprised of our situation?”

“Yes, Captain. Colonel Abala wants his diamonds back.” The deputy defense minister’s accent was almost too thick for Juan to understand. “And he has stolen two of our river patrol boats. I have a report that ten of our men are dead on the dock in Matadi where the boats were stationed.”

“He also has two helicopters from an oil company.”

“I see,” Isaka said noncommittally.

“We could use a little help.”

“Our mutual friend at Langley who recommended you said you are more than capable of taking care of yourselves.”

Juan wanted to scream at the government official. “Mr. Isaka, if I take out Abala’s forces he’s going to be very suspicious about the weapons he just bought. The radio direction tags embedded in them are well hidden but not undetectable. The whole plan was for him to take the guns back to Makambo’s jungle headquarters, giving your military its location once and for all. You can end the insurrection in a couple of days, but not if Abala leaves the weapons on the dock back at the plantation.” It was the third or fourth time he’d outlined his logic to Isaka since Langston Overholt at the CIA okayed Juan to undertake the mission.

The first part of Isaka’s reply was muffled by the sound of mortar fire coming from the Swift boats. They hit close enough to throw a wall of water against theOregon ’s side. “…they leave Boma now they will reach you in an hour.”

“Could you repeat that please, Minister?”

The entire crew in the op center was thrown forward as theOregon ’s keel slammed into the river bottom, the instant deceleration sending expensive china cascading in the mess and shattering a portable X-ray machine in the medical bay that Dr. Julia Huxley had forgotten to secure.

Juan was among the first to his feet. “Eric, what the hell happened?”

“The bottom shoaled suddenly, I never saw it coming.”

“Max, how’re the engines?”

As a safety precaution the computer automatically took the engines offline the instant the huge ship grounded. Max studied his computer screen, his frown deepening by the second. He worked the keyboard a moment longer.

“Max?” Juan said, drawing out his old friend’s name.

“Port tube is jammed solid with mud. I can get twenty percent through the starboard, but only in reverse.

We try to go forward and we’ll block up that one, too.”

“Eric,” Juan said, “I have the helm.”

“Chairman has the helm, aye.”

The pulse jet tubes were milled as smooth as rifle barrels from an exotic alloy to exacting standards, eliminating the possibility of cavitation, the formation of microscopic bubbles that induce drag. Juan knew that the mud and silt had likely pitted the tubes already and to force any more muck through them might make them inoperable. He would take the responsibility for further damaging his ship himself.

He set the port tube on standby and slowly fed reverse power to the starboard jet, his eyes darting between the outside cameras showing water boiling under the ship’s bow and the indicators monitoring the jet’s status. He edged the controls higher, up to twenty-five percent, knowing he was scouring the tubes as surely as if he’d gone into them himself with an impact wrench.

TheOregon refused to move, held tight by the grip of the mud and her own tremendous weight.

“Juan,” Max said in a cautionary tone.

Cabrillo was already shutting down the pumps. At his command were cutting-edge recourses, but few viable alternatives. He had maybe fifteen seconds to come up with a plan before the choppers swooped in to disgorge the rebels they carried. A pair of five-second bursts from the 20 mm Gatling gun would blow the helicopters from the sky, but would also kill the civilian pilots and expose the deadly potential of his ship. Then they would still have to deal with the Swift boats plus any number of other vessels Abala commandeered when he realized theOregon was aground. The idea of surrendering the stones or jeopardizing the mission never entered his mind.

“Max, the wind’s at our back, lay down a smoke screen thick enough to hide the ship, then activate the fire suppression cannons.” There were four water cannons mounted on the corners of the superstructure and each was rated for a thousand gallons per minute, the pumps powered by their own dedicated diesel engine. “They can throw water more than two hundred feet. That ought to keep the choppers from landing.” He keyed his microphone. “Eddie, I’m hitting the water guns, so be prepared. If that doesn’t hold off the helos your boys have permission to use shotguns and pistols only. That would be a believable arsenal on a ship in these waters.”

“Roger.”

“And, Eddie, I want you and Linc to meet me in the boat garage. I have a mission for you. Full kit to be on the safe side.”

Cabrillo was out of his chair and halfway to the elevator that would take him down two decks to the boat garage located along theOregon ’s waterline when Hanley stopped him with a gesture. “I can understand the smoke and using the water cannons is a master stroke, but what the hell do you have planned for Linc and Eddie?”

“I’m going to have this old girl refloated in about thirty minutes.”

Max had learned over their years together to never doubt the chairman when he made such proclamations; he just didn’t know how Juan was going to pull off the impossible. “You have a plan to lighten us by a couple thousand tons?”

“I’ll do you one better. I’m going to raise the river by ten feet.”

4

SOUTH OF WALVIS BAY

NAMIBIA

THEsand floating across the road was as fine as dust and swirled in eddies that formed whenever the cooling desert air met the still-warm asphalt. It looked like wisps of smoke or drifting snow. The sun had long since set, so the inland dunes showed pale white in the glow of the moon.

The solitary vehicle on the road was the only thing moving save the wind and the gentle surf lapping at the beach. The four-by-four pickup was only about twenty miles south of Swakopmund and its adjoining harbor town of Walvis Bay, but it was as if this was the last car on earth.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, Sloane Macintyre shivered.

“Could you grab the wheel?” she asked her companion. He did, and she shrugged into a hooded sweatshirt, needing both hands to pull her long hair from under the collar and settle it over her shoulders.

It was as coppery red as the dunes at dusk and set off her luminous gray eyes.

“I still say we should have waited until morning and gotten a permit to enter Sandwich Bay,” complained Tony Reardon for the third time since leaving their hotel. “You know how touchy the local authorities are about tourists entering secured areas.”

“We’re headed to a bird sanctuary, Tony, not one of the mining concessions leased by the diamond companies,” Sloane retorted.

“It’s still against the law.”

“Besides, I don’t like the way Luka tried to warn us off from looking for Papa Heinrick. It was almost as if he has something to hide.”

“Who, Papa Heinrick?”

“No, our illustrious guide, Tuamanguluka.”

“Why would you say that? Luka’s been nothing but helpful since we got here.”

Sloane shot him a sideways glance. In the glow of the dash lights, the Englishman looked like a petulant boy acting stubborn for stubbornness’ sake. “You don’t have the feeling that he’s been a bit too helpful?

What are the odds of a guide finding us at our hotel who happens to know every local fisherman in Walvis Bayand can get us a deal from one of the helicopter tour companies?”

“We just got lucky.”

“I don’t believe in luck.” Sloane turned her attention back to the road. “When we told Luka about the old fisherman mentioning Papa Heinrick he did everything in his power to dissuade us from looking for him. Luka first said Heinrick was just a beach fisherman and didn’t know anything about the waters more than a mile from shore. Then he told us he wasn’t right in the head. When that didn’t work he says that Heinrick is dangerous, and was rumored to have killed a man.

“Was that the impression of Papa Heinrick we got from the fisherman who first told us about him?”

Sloane went on. “No. He said that Papa Heinrick had forgotten more about the waters off the Skeleton Coast than any man had ever learned. His exact words more or less. That sounds like the perfect person to interview for this project and our oh-so-helpful guide doesn’t want us talking to him. Tony, that stinks and you know it.”

“We could have waited until morning.”

Sloane ignored his comment for a moment before saying, “You know every minute counts. Someone is going to figure out what we’re looking for eventually. When that happens this coastline is going to be crawling with people. The government would probably declare the shore off limits, close down the fisheries, and impose martial law. You’ve never been on an expedition like this. I have.”

“And did you find anything?” Tony asked testily, knowing the answer.

“No,” Sloane admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Unlike most of Africa, the roads in Namibia are well maintained and free of potholes. The four-wheel-drive Toyota glided through the night until they reached a turnoff that was layered in sand drifts as high as the vehicle’s tires. Sloane set the transmission in low range and started down the road, plowing through hillocks of sand that would have bogged any two-wheeled drive car. After twenty minutes they reached a parking area with a large cyclone fence. Signs hanging from the fence announced that vehicles were restricted beyond this point.

They’d arrived at Sandwich Bay, an extensive wetland lagoon fed freshwater by subterranean aquifers that hosted up to fifty thousand migratory birds a year. Sloane put the truck in park but left the engine idling. Without waiting for Tony, she hopped from her seat, her boots sinking into the soft sand, and made her way to the back of the Toyota. In the open bed was an inflatable raft and an electric pump that could run off the vehicle’s twelve-volt system.

She quickly had the raft inflated and her gear ready, making certain of the strength of the batteries in their flashlights. They piled their backpacks and oars into the raft and carried it down to the water. Sheltered from the open sea, the lagoon was as still as a mill pond.

“The fisherman said Papa Heinrick lives at the most southern reach of the lagoon,” Sloane said when they had settled in the raft and poled it off the beach with their oars. She took a compass bearing off the night sky and dug her paddle into the smooth water.

Despite what she’d said to Tony, she knew this could either be the jackpot or a complete waste of time, with the latter being the most likely. Chasing rumors, half-truths, and innuendo led to more dead ends than anything else but that was the nature of her job. It was about steady monotony leading to that one eureka moment, a moment she had yet to enjoy, but that acted like a lure to keep her plodding on, enduring loneliness, fatigue, stress, and pessimistic jerks like Tony Reardon.

A few fish splashed in the dark lagoon as they paddled southward and an occasional bird ruffled its feathers amid the reeds. It took an hour and a half to reach the extreme southern end of the bay and it looked as unremarkable as all the rest, a wall of reeds capable of surviving in the brackish water. Sloane played the beam of her light along the shoreline as they searched the area. After twenty minutes in which her anxiety mounted she spied a small cut in the tall grasses where a stream trickled into the lagoon.

She pointed silently and she and Tony maneuvered their little inflatable into the gap.

The reeds grew over their heads and joined above them, forming a living tunnel that blocked out the silvery moon. The current from the small stream was negligible and they made good progress, cutting a hundred yards into the wetlands before coming to a little pond inside the reed forest with a small island at its center that would just barely stay free of water when the tide was at its highest. The light from the moon revealed a crude hut that had been fashioned from driftwood and bits of packing crates. The door was a blanket nailed to the lintel and just outside it sat a fire pit, embers still smoldering beneath a layer of ash. Off to the right was a fish-drying rack, rusty barrels for storing fresh water, and a wooden-hulled skiff tied to a stump with a single line. Its sail was furled tightly to the mast and the rudder and centerboards were lashed inside. The flat-bottomed boat wasn’t exactly ideal for fishing the open waters, leading Sloane to consider that Luka had been right about Papa Heinrick sticking close to shore.

The camp was rough but a seasoned outdoorsman could live here indefinitely.

“What do we do?” Tony whispered when they beached the inflatable.

Sloane approached the door, confirmed the sound she heard was snoring of a single person and not the wind or surf and backed off again. She settled her backside onto the sandy beach, pulled her laptop from her bag, and started typing softly, her lower lip lightly clenched between her teeth.

“Sloane?” Tony whispered a bit more stridently.

“We wait until he wakes up,” she replied.

“But what if this isn’t Papa Heinrick’s? What if someone else lives here? Pirates or bandits or something?”

“I told you I don’t believe in luck. I also don’t believe in coincidences. Us finding a cabin exactly where we were told Papa Heinrick lives means that we’ve found Papa Heinrick. I’d rather talk to him in the morning than scare the old codger in the middle of the night.”

The gentle snoring from inside the cabin didn’t change in timbre or volume but suddenly a wizened African wearing nothing but an athletic supporter pushed aside the blanket. He stood on bandy legs and was so thin that every rib showed across his chest and there were hollows above and below his collarbones. He had a broad flat nose and large jug ears pierced through with some sort of horn earrings.

His hair was pure white and his eyes shone yellow.

He continued to snore and for a moment Sloane thought he might be sleepwalking, but then he scratched at himself rudely and spat into the fire pit.

Sloane got to her feet. She was easily a foot taller than the Namibian and she realized he must have some Bushmen blood to possess such a tiny stature. “Papa Heinrick, we have come a great distance to meet with you. The other fishermen at Walvis Bay say you are the wisest among them.”

Sloane had been ensured that Papa Heinrick spoke English, but the gnomelike man gave no recognition that he understood. She had to take the fact that he’d stopped pretending to snore as an encouraging sign and plowed on. “We want to ask you some questions about where you fish, places that are difficult, where you lose lines and nets. Would you answer such questions?”

Heinrick turned back into his cabin, letting the blanket flow back to drape over the entranceway. He emerged a moment later with a padded blanket over his shoulders. It was made of loosely sewn sheets and feathers escaped the seams with each movement. He went a short distance off and urinated loudly into the water, scratching his belly languidly.

He squatted down next to his fire pit, his back to Tony and Sloane. The bones of his spine looked like a string of black pearls. He blew the coals into life, feeding scraps of driftwood into the embers until he had produced a small flame. “There are many difficult places to fish these waters,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice for such a small frame. He hadn’t turned. “I have fished them all and dare any man to follow where Papa Heinrick goes. I have lost enough fishing line to stretch from here to Cape Cross Bay.” That was more than eighty miles north. “And back,” he added as if challenging them to deny his boast. “I have lost enough net to cover all the Namib Desert. I have battled seas that make other men wail and turn their bowels to water. And I have caught fish bigger than the biggest ship and I have seen things that would drive other men mad.”

He turned finally. In the wavering light of his fire his eyes had taken on a demonic cast. He smiled, revealing three teeth that meshed together like gears. His smile turned into a chuckle, then a barking laugh that was cut short by a coughing fit. When he’d recovered he spat into the fire again. “Papa Heinrick does not reveal his secrets. I know things you wish to know, but you will never know them because I wish you not to know them.”

“Why would you wish that?” Sloane said after she analyzed his grammar in her head to make sure she’d heard right. She squatted next to him.

“Papa Heinrick is the greatest fisherman that has ever lived. Why would I tell you and make you my rival?”

“I do not want to fish these waters. I am looking for a ship that sank a long time ago. My friend and I”—she waved at Tony, who’d stepped back after getting a whiff of Papa Heinrick’s body—“want to find this ship because…” Sloane paused and made up a story. “Because we were hired to recover something from it belonging to a rich man who lost it when it sank. We think that you can help us.”

“Does this rich man pay?” Heinrick asked slyly.

“A little, yes.”

The fisherman waved a hand like a bat fluttering through the night. “Papa Heinrick has no use for money.”

“What would it take for you to help us?” Tony asked suddenly. Sloane had a bad feeling about what the old man might want and shot him a scathing look.

“I will not help you,” Heinrick said to Tony and looked at Sloane. “You I will help. You are a woman and do not fish so you will never be my rival.”

Sloane wasn’t about to tell him that she’d grown up in Fort Lauderdale and had spent her summers crewing her father’s charter fishing boat and then took it out herself when he was struck by Alzheimer’s at age fifty. “Thank you, Papa Heinrick.” Sloane pulled a large map from her pack and spread it next to the fire. Tony edged in and added illumination with his flashlight. The map was of Namibia’s coastline.

There were dozens of stars penciled in just off shore. Most were clustered around Walvis Bay but others were scattered up and down the coast.

“We have spoken to many other fishermen, asking them where they lose lines and nets. We think one of these places might be a sunken ship. Can you look at this and tell me if there are any they missed?”

Heinrick studied the chart intently, his eyes darting from one spot to the next, his fingers tracing the outline of the coast. He finally looked up at Sloane. She could see there was a kernel of madness behind them, as if his reality wasn’t quite her own. “I do not know this place.”

Confused Sloane placed her finger on Walvis Bay and said its name. Then she drew it southward and said, “Here we are at Sandwich Bay. She tapped her finger toward the top of the map. “And here’s Cape Cross.”

“I do not understand. Cape Cross is there.” Heinrick pointed emphatically northward. “It can not be here.” He touched the spot on the map.

Sloane realized that despite a lifetime at sea, Papa Heinrick had never seen a nautical chart. She groaned inwardly.

For the next two hours Sloane laboriously talked the old fisherman through the places where he had lost nets or had lines tangled. Because the desert continued under the ocean for hundreds of miles from the coast, anything that tore lines or ripped nets was either a rock outcropping or a shipwreck. Papa Heinrick would tell her that two days sailing southwest from Sandwich Bay was such a place, or five days northwest was another. Each one he described corresponded with the map she’d made over the past days talking to the commercial fishermen and day excursion captains at Walvis.

But there was one spot that only Papa Heinrick mentioned. It was nearly seventy miles out by Sloane’s estimation, well away from any other. In fact, none of the other captains had even mentioned fishing in the area. Papa Heinrick said that there was little out there to attract marine life and he’d only been there himself because a freak wind had pushed him off course.

Sloane circled the spot on her chart, noting the water depth was over a hundred and fifty feet, at the limit of her scuba abilities but still doable. However, it was too deep for even the clearest water to reveal the outline of a ship against the sandy bottom—even from the helicopter they planned to rent to investigate the other sites.

“You must not go there,” Papa Heinrick warned when he saw the far-off look in Sloane’s eyes.

His comment refocused her attention. “Why not?”

“The seas are alive with great metal snakes. It is bad magic, I think.”

“Metal snakes?” Tony scoffed.

The old man lunged to his feet, his expression fierce. “You doubt Papa Heinrick?” he thundered, spraying Reardon with clots of saliva. “There are dozens of them, a hundred feet long or more, twisting and thrashing on the water. One nearly sank my boat when it tried to eat me. Only I could have escaped its evil mouth, for I am the greatest sailor who has ever lived. You would have pissed yourself in fear and died crying like an infant.” He looked back at Sloane, the edge of madness in his eyes a bit more keen.

“Papa Heinrick has warned you. Go there and you will surely be eaten alive. Now leave me.” He settled back at his little smoke fire, rocking on his heels and muttering in a language Sloane didn’t know.

She thanked him for his help but he didn’t acknowledge her. She and Tony returned to their inflatable and slowly paddled out of Papa Heinrick’s isolated camp. When they emerged from the secret cleft in the reeds Tony exhaled a long breath. “That man’s utterly daft. Metal snakes?Pleeease .”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a line fromHamlet that means that the world is stranger than we can possibly imagine.”

“You don’t believe him, do you?”

“About giant metal snakes? No, but he saw something out there that scared him.”

“I bet it was a surfacing submarine. The South African Navy must have some that patrol these waters.”

“That could be it,” Sloane conceded. “And we have more than enough sites to investigate without looking for sea serpents or submarines. We’ll meet up with Luka this afternoon and figure out how we want to proceed.”

They were back in their rooms at the swanky Swakopmund Hotel just as the sun began to rise. Sloane took a long shower, washing sand and the clinging feel of salt from her skin. As much as she needed to shave her legs, she put off the chore and stood under the pounding spray, letting the hot water work at the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back.

After toweling off she slipped nude between the sheets of her bed. Her dreams were filled with the images of monstrous snakes fighting each other on the open ocean.

5

ASJuan Cabrillo jogged to the boat garage located just aft of the superstructure he listened to damage reports on his comm unit. The bilges were dry, which wasn’t a surprise. The riverbed was silty mud, nothing that could breach the hull. What he was worried about were the keel doors. At the bottom of the Oregon were two large doors that opened outward, creating a moon pool. From here the pair of submersibles the ship carried could be launched directly into the sea. Used mostly for covert insertions and extractions, one of the minisubs had a diving capability of a thousand feet and a manipulator arm, while the smaller minisub, a Discovery 1000, was limited to shallower water.

To his immense relief, a tech on duty at the moon pool reported the two doors hadn’t been damaged and the subs were safely stowed in their cradles.

Juan reached the boat garage at the ship’s waterline. The large space was lit by red battle lamps, giving it a ruddy cast, and it smelled of salt water and gasoline. The large door that opened along theOregon ’s flank was tightly sealed as crewmen prepared a black Zodiac inflatable. The big outboard on its transom could push the craft well past forty knots, though it also had a small electric motor for silent operations.

The garage also housed a deep-hulled SEAL assault boat capable of even greater speed and with the capacity to carry ten armed men.

Eddie and Linc reported in a moment later. It had been Eddie Seng who’d played the part of helmsmen when Linc was acting as captain. The two couldn’t have been more physically different. Linc’s body bulged with muscles hewn from hours of pumping iron in the ship’s weight room while Eddie was rapier lean, his physique the result of a lifetime of martial arts training.

They wore black combat fatigues, matching belts festooned with ammo pouches, knives, and various other gear. Each carried M-4A1 assault carbines, the Special Forces version of the M-16.

“What’s the op, boss?” Eddie asked.

“As you know, we’re grounded and we don’t have time to wait for the spring rains. You remember that dam we passed a couple miles back?”

“You want us to blow it?” Linc asked incredulously.

“No, no. Just get inside and open the floodgates. I doubt they have guards, but if they do, go nonlethal if you can.” Both men nodded. “You probably won’t be able to catch up with us once the water hits us so we’ll link up in Boma on the coast.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Linc breezed, fully confident in their ability to execute the mission.

Juan hit a wall mike. “Eric, I need to know when it’s clear to open the garage and launch a Zodiac.

Where are those patrol boats?”

“One’s standing off. I think to start in with the mortars again. The other just passed behind our stern and is coming up the port side.”

“Anything from the shore?”

“Infrared shows it’s clean, but you and I both know Abala won’t waste any time getting here.”

“Okay, thanks.” Juan nodded to a crewman to open the outer door. The stench and heat of the jungle rushed into the garage as the door slid upward. The air was so humid you could almost drink it. It was also tinged with the chemical stink of the smoke screen Max had laid over the ship. The river’s edge was dark and overhung with dense vegetation. Despite Eric’s assurance that the shore was clear, Juan could feel eyes on them.

Because theOregon rode so high in the water, the launch ramp was five feet above the river. Linc and Eddie shoved the boat down the slick ramp and dove after it when it hit the water. They emerged from the river and rolled over the craft’s soft side. Eddie secured their weapons while Linc engaged the electric motor. At slow speed and under the cover of darkness the Zodiac was all but invisible.

As they pulled away from theOregon , Linc had to zigzag around arcing jets of water from the fire cannons that were keeping the two helicopters from getting close. The choppers dove and buzzed but never got nearear than a hundred feet before one of the cannons fired a blasting stream of water that forced the pilots to bank away sharply.

Eddie could imagine the scene inside each of the helos as the rebels threatened the oil company pilots while at the same time knowing a direct hit from one of the fire hoses would drown the helicopter’s turbines and send it plummeting into the river.

They emerged from the smoke screen and saw that the two patrol boats were far enough away for Linc to switch to the Zodiac’s outboard. The big four-stroke was well muffled, but it still sounded a deep bass tone that rumbled across the water as he brought the nimble craft onto plane.

It was impossible to speak at forty knots, so they drove back upriver with their thoughts, both men keyed up on adrenaline and ready for anything. They didn’t hear the high keening of an approaching boat until it shot around a small island hugging the near shore.

Link whipped the Zodiac hard to starboard as the two boats nearly collided. He recognized the scared face of Colonel Abala’s aide at the same instant the rebel officer recognized him. Link twisted the throttle harder against its stop as the aide-de-camp whipped the boat around and started to chase them. The boat was sleek, with two outboards and a low hull designed to ride atop the water. There were four other men with him, all carrying AKs.

“You know him?” Eddie shouted.

“Yeah, he’s Abala’s right-hand man.”

The rebel boat began to gain on the Zodiac, a rooster tail of water jetting from its stern.

“Linc, if he’s got a radio, the jig’s going to be up.”

“Damn. I hadn’t thought about that. Any ideas?”

“Let him catch up,” Eddie said, and passed one of the M-4s to Lincoln.

“And don’t fire until I see the whites of their eyes?”

“Screw that. Take ’em the second they’re in range.”

“Okay, hold on.” Linc killed the throttles and as the Zodiac settled into the water he whipped it into a tight turn, its flat bottom skipping across the river like a stone. It came to a sudden stop, bobbing on waves of its own creation, but it was more than stable enough for Linc and Eddie.

They brought their weapons to their shoulders as the rebel’s boat bore down on them at fifty miles per hour. At two hundred yards they opened fire; AKs immediately winked back at them, but the rebels’ aim was off because the boat was going so fast. Tiny fountains of water shot into the air well ahead and to the left of the stationary Zodiac. The Corporation men had no such difficulty, and every second brought the boat closer and increased their accuracy.

Linc fired three round bursts that stitched the small windscreen and tore chunks of fiberglass from the boat’s bow. Eddie concentrated on the driver, calmly firing single shots until the man suddenly slumped.

The boat veered for a moment before another rebel got hold of the wheel while the other three continued to rip through magazine after magazine. One burst came close enough to singe the air around Eddie and Linc, but neither man ducked or even blinked. They methodically fired at the oncoming boat until only one rebel remained crouched behind the wheel, covered by the long bow.

Working in coordination, Eddie kept up a steady stream of fire as Linc moved back to the idling engine.

The rebel boat was no more than fifty yards away, charging straight at them like a shark coming in for the kill. It was obvious that its driver intended to ram them. Linc let him come.

When the speedboat was no more than twenty feet away he goosed the throttle and the Zodiac dashed under its high bows. Eddie already had a grenade in his hand, the pin pulled and the spoon long gone. He flipped it into the speedboat’s cockpit as it screamed by them, holding up five fingers then dropping them as the seconds ticked by. His last finger went down and the speedboat went up, the crump of the grenade followed almost immediately by the spectacular explosion of the boat’s fuel tanks. The hull cartwheeled across the water, chunks of fiberglass and the remains of its crew flying free amid the blazing rain of burning gasoline.

“Strike one right-hand man,” Linc said with satisfaction.

Five minutes later, the Zodiac coasted to a wooden jetty near the base of the Inga Dam. The massive structure loomed over them, a sculpted wall of ferro-concrete and steel holding back a huge reservoir above the Congo River. Because nearly all the electricity generated by the hydro-dam was used during the day in the mines of Shaba, formerly Katanga Province, there was just a trickle of water coming down the spillway. They dragged the boat well out of the river and secured it to a tree, not knowing how high the water would reach. They hefted their weapons for the long climb up a set of stairs built into the face of the dam.

Halfway up the stairs the quiet of the night was shattered by gunfire erupting from below them. Shrapnel, bits of concrete, and bullets whizzed all around them as they stood exposed on the steps. Both men dropped flat and immediately returned fire. Down below two native boats had pulled up to the jetty.

While rebels fired from the dock more began racing up the stairs.

“I guess Abala’s guy had a radio after all.” Eddie said, dropping his spent M-4 and drawing his Glock.

He fired rapidly as Linc hosed the dock with 5.56 mm rounds from his assault rifle.

The three rebels charging the stairs went down with double taps from Eddie’s pistol, their bodies tumbling off the steps in a tangle of limbs and blood. By the time he’d changed out magazines for his M-4, the fire from the dock had withered to a single AK-47 and Linc silenced this gun with a sustained burst that blew the rebel off the dock. The current took him almost immediately and he vanished down the river.

Above them an alarm horn had begun to sound.

“Let’s go,” Linc said, and the two men raced up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.

They reached the top of the dam. Beyond it was the large reservoir and at the far end of the structure was a squat building with light spilling from its windows.

“Control room?” Linc whispered.

“Has to be.” Eddie pulled his throat mike into position. “Chairman, its Eddie. Linc and I are on the dam and about to approach the control center.” There was no need to tell him their presence had already been detected.

“Copy that. Advise when you’re in position to open the gates.”

“Roger.”

Keeping low so they didn’t silhouette themselves against the starry sky, they raced silently across the top of the dam. To their left spread the reservoir, a calm lake bisected by a white slash of reflected moonlight. To their right was a hundred-foot drop to a jumble of boulders littering the base of the dam.

When they reached the blockhouse, a boxy one-story concrete building with a single door and a pair of windows, they could see that beyond it were the sluice gates and penstock that diverted water to the facility’s turbines that were housed in a long building at the bottom of the dam. There was only enough water passing through the channel to provide electricity to the town of Mabati.

With Linc on the other side, Eddie reached out and tried to open the blockhouse door. It was securely locked. Eddie motioned to the keyhole as if he had the key and cocked an eyebrow at Linc. Franklin Lincoln was the Corporation’s expert at lock picking and was rumored to have even broken into Juan’s gun safe on a bet from Linda Ross, but all he could do was shrug at his partner and pat his pockets. He’d forgotten to bring his picks.

Eddie rolled his eyes and reached into one of the pouches hanging from his belt. He molded a small amount of Semtex plastic explosives around the handle and inserted an electronic detonator. He and Linc moved a short way off.

Just before he keyed the detonator, a guard emerged from around the blockhouse. He wore a dark uniform and carried a flashlight and a pistol. Linc aimed instinctively and was an instant from firing before adjusting his site picture. He shot the pistol out of the guard’s hand. The man went down, screaming and clutching his arm to his chest. Linc ran over to him, pulling a pair of flex cuffs from his combat harness.

He checked the wound quickly, relieved that it was superficial, and bound the guard’s hands and feet.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said and rejoined Eddie.

Eddie fired off the charge. The explosion blew the handle apart and Linc threw open the door, Eddie covering him with his M-4.

The control room was brightly lit, an open space with banks of dials and levers along the walls and counters mounted with outdated computers. The three night operators immediately thrust their hands in the air when Linc and Eddie rushed into the room shouting for everyone to get down. They gestured with their rifles and the men sank to the concrete floor, their eyes wide with fear.

“Do as we say and no one gets hurt,” Eddie said, knowing how trite it sounded to the terrified workers.

Linc did a quick recon of the building, finding an empty conference room behind the control space and a closet-sized lavatory that was also empty except for a cockroach the size of his middle finger.

“Do any of you speak English?” Eddie asked as he cuffed the three Africans.

“I do,” one said, the tag on his blue jumpsuit showing his name was Kofi Baako.

“Okay, Kofi, like I said we’re not going to hurt you, but I want you to tell me how to open the emergency floodgates.”

“You will drain the reservoir!”

Eddie pointed at a multiline telephone; four of its five lights were blinking. “You’ve already contacted your superiors and I’m sure they’re sending additional people. The gates won’t be open for more than an hour. Now show me how to open them.”

Kofi Baako hesitated for another second, so Eddie yanked his pistol from its holster, making sure it was never pointed at the three men. His voice went from reasonable to savage. “You’ve got five seconds.”

“That panel there.” Baako nodded at the far wall. “The top five switches disengage the safety protocols.

The next five close the circuits to the gate motors and the bottom five open the gates themselves.”

“Can the gates be closed manually?”

“Yes, there is a room inside the dam with big hand cranks. They need two men to turn them.”

With Linc still at the front door watching for any more guards, Eddie flipped the switches in turn, watching the jeweled lights that were built into the control panel switch from red to green with each toggle thrown. Before he started on the last row he rested his throat mike against his neck. “Chairman, it’s me.

Be ready for it. I’m opening the gates now.”

“Not a minute too soon. Abala transferred the mortars from the Swift boats and has set them up on shore. A couple more rounds and they have us ranged.”

“Stand by for the big flush,” Eddie said and threw the last set of switches. With the last toggle in position a noise began to rise, low at first, but building to a rumble that shook the building. The gates were coming up and water was thundering down the face of the dam in a solid wall. It hit the bottom and exploded in a roiling cauldron that grew into a solid wave eight feet high that swept down the river, inundating the shoreline and ripping out trees and shrubs as it accelerated.

“That ought to do the trick,” Eddie said and emptied his clip into the control panel. The rounds punctured the thin metal and shredded the old electronics in a blaze of smoke and sparks.

“And that ought to buy us some time,” Linc added.

They left the technicians cuffed to a table and made their way back down the staircase. The sound and fury of the water pouring over the dam’s face was a palpable sensation while spray soaked their partially dry clothing.

By the time they reached the bottom and dragged the Zodiac to the river’s edge, the water had settled enough for them to launch the inflatable and start heading downstream for their rendezvous in Boma.

Back aboard theOregon , Juan was getting concerned. Abala had realized the Swift boats were too unstable for the mortars so he’d unloaded them and now his men were dialing in the range. The last explosive had hit less than twenty feet from the starboard rail.

To add to his problems, more and more native boats were arriving from upstream, loaded to the gunwales with rebels. While the water cannons were performing flawlessly, there were only four of them—and two were needed at all times to prevent the buzzing helicopters from getting close enough for the men aboard to jump down onto the freighter. Juan had called Hali Kasim back from the radar dome to coordinate communications so Linda Ross could lead Eddie’s shore operations fighters. Using only shotguns and pistols, they rushed to the side of the ship where Mark Murphy said a boat was getting too close. They fired down on the rebels while ducking blistering fire from both the shore and the pirogues.

“All right,” Hali exclaimed from the comm station. “My techs have the radar back.”

“Will you be able to see the wave?” Juan asked him.

“Sorry, Chairman, but with the bends in the river I won’t see it until it’s almost on top of us.”

“Anything’s better than nothing.”

Another mortar dropped near the ship, this time missing the port rail by inches. The rebels had them bracketed. The next rounds would fall with impunity all over theOregon and her decks were not nearly as heavily armored as her flanks.

“Damage control teams, get ready,” Juan said over the shipboard net. “We’re going to take some hits.”

“Holy God,” Hali shouted.

“What?”

“Brace yourselves!”

Juan hit the collision alarm as he saw the wave on both the radar screen in the corner of the big monitor as well as the feed from the stern cameras. The surge stretched from bank to bank. Rearing up more than ten feet and easily traveling at twenty knots, the roiling wall of water bore down on them relentlessly. One of the Swift boats tried to twist away and race ahead of the swell, but was caught midway through its turn. The wave hit the vessel broadside. The patrol craft flipped instantly, tossing men into the maelstrom where they were crushed by the rolling hull of their boat.

Pirogues simply vanished with nothing to mark their passing, and the rebels lining the shore taking potshots at theOregon fled for high ground as water washed away everything in its path.

Juan took his hands away from the controls a moment before the wave slammed into theOregon , flexed his fingers like a pianist about to perform an impossible overture, and lightly rested them back on the keys and joystick that would maneuver his ship.

He brought the unclogged drive tube up to twenty percent just as the swell lifted the stern of theOregon out of the mud. Like being caught in a tsunami the vessel lurched from a dead stop to twenty knots in an instant as a pair of mortar shells exploded in her wake, shots that would have blown through her rear cargo hatches and destroyed the Robinson R44 helicopter stored on a retractable elevator.

Juan scanned engine readouts, pump temperatures, speed over the bottom, speed through the water, and his position and course, his gaze darting from one screen to the next in an unending cycle. The ship was actually making only three knots through the water but was racing down the river at closer to twenty-five, borne onward by the tremendous pressure of water escaping over the Inga Dam.

“Max, tell me the instant that second tube clears,” he called out. “I don’t have enough steerage speed.”

He edged the throttle higher, fighting the current as it tried to slam theOregon into an island that had reared up in the middle of the channel. His fingers danced over his keyboard. He called up the bow and stern thrusters as needed to keep the ship straight and more or less centered as the dark jungle blurred passed.

They careened around a tight bend in the river, the flow pushing them hard for the opposite shore, where a small cargo ship that had been headed upriver had been pushed into the riverbank, its stern thrust far out into the Congo. Juan slammed on full power to the thrusters, laterally shoving theOregon as far to starboard as he could. The hull scraped against the coastal freighter with an ear-splitting shriek and then they were clear.

“That’s going to leave a mark,” Eric quipped even though he was awed by Juan’s handling of the vessel.

He knew he wouldn’t have made the turn and avoided the ship.

With the river boiling all around them they were swept further downstream, carried along like a leaf in a gutter, barely able to control their course until Juan could eke more power out of her engines. Time and again he had to fight the river to keep theOregon from grounding or plowing into the riverbank, each escape seemingly closer than the last. They did hit a shoal at one point, the ship decelerating hard as it gouged a furrow through the muddy riverbed. For a moment, Juan feared the freighter would grind to a halt again because the computer had shut off the pulse jet, but the current was strong enough to drag them over, and as soon as the bottom was free the ship picked up speed like a sprinter out of the blocks.

Despite the danger, or maybe because of it, Cabrillo found he was enjoying the challenge. It was a test of his skills and the capabilities of his ship against the vagaries of the raging flood—the epic struggle of man versus nature. He was the type of man who never backed away from anything because he knew his limitations and had yet to meet a situation he didn’t think he could handle. In others this trait would come off as cockiness. In Juan Cabrillo it was simply supreme confidence.

“Scouring action has cleared the second tube,” Max announced. “Just be gentle on her until I get a team into it to check for damage.”

Juan dialed up the second tube and immediately felt his ship respond. She was no longer sluggish coming about and he had to use the thrusters less and less. He checked their speed—twenty-eight knots over the bottom and eight through the water. He had more than enough speed to control the freighter, and now that they’d covered several miles the once-turbulent flow had started to even out. Colonel Abala’s forces were either dead on the river or left far behind and the two choppers he’d stolen had peeled off soon after the wave hit.

“Eric, I think you can take her from here on down to Boma.”

“Aye, Chairman,” Stone replied. “I have the helm.”

Juan sat back in his chair. Max Hanley placed a hand on his shoulder. “Hell of a piece of driving if I say so myself.”

“Thanks. Don’t think I want to do that again anytime soon.”

“I’d love to say we’re out of the woods, but we aren’t. Battery charge is down to thirty percent. Even with the current at our backs we’re going to run out of juice a good ten miles from the sea.”

“Do you have any faith in me at all?” Juan asked, pained. “Weren’t you here when Eric said mean high tide is in…” Juan checked his watch. “An hour and a half? Ocean’s going to run fifteen or twenty miles inland and turn the Congo brackish. Might be like running regular gasoline in a race car engine but there’s enough salinity to spool up the magnetohydrodynamics.”

Max cursed. “Why didn’t I think about that?”

“For the same reason I get paid more than you. I’m smarter, more clever by half, and much better looking.”

“And you wear your humility like a well-tailored suit.” Max then turned serious. “Soon as we get to Boma I’ll get some of my engineers into the tubes, but from what I could tell from the computer I think they’re okay. May not be at hundred percent, but my gut tells me they don’t need to be relined.”

Though he carried the title of president within the Corporation and was tasked with a lot of the day-to-day affairs of running a successful company, Max most enjoyed his role as theOregon ’s chief engineer, and her state-of-the-art engines were his pride and joy.

“Thank God.” Replacing the lining of the drive tubes was a multimillion-dollar job. “But I don’t want to be in Boma any longer than necessary. Once we pick up Linc and Eddie I want us in international waters just in case Minister Isaka can’t keep the heat off us for opening their dam,” Juan said.

“Good thinking. We can check the tubes in the open ocean about as easily as tied to a dock.”

“Anything else from the damage reports you’ve gotten?”

“Other than a broken X-ray machine down in medical and Maurice squawking about a whole lot of broken dishes and glassware, we came through okay.” Maurice was theOregon ’s chief steward, the only member of the crew older than Max. Better suited to the Victorian age, Maurice was also the only non-American aboard. He’d served in the British Navy, overseeing the mess on a number of flagships before being cashiered out because of his age. In his year with the Corporation he’d quickly become a crew favorite, throwing the perfect parties for everyone’s birthdays and knowing which delicacies they preferred from the ship’s highly trained cooking staff.

“Tell him to go easy on what he orders this time. When we lost all those dishes racing to save Eddie a few months back Maurice replaced them with Royal Doulton to the tune of six hundred dollars a place setting.”

Max arched an eyebrow. “Quibbling over a few pennies?”

“We lost forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of finger bowls and sorbet cups.”

“Okay, a couple of dimes, then. You forget that I’ve seen our latest balance sheets—we can afford it.”

Which was true. The Corporation had never been in better financial shape. Juan’s gamble at forming his own private security and surveillance outfit had surpassed even his most optimistic estimates, but that also meant there was a downside. The need for such organizations in the post–Cold War world was a sobering fact of life in the twenty-first century. He’d known that without the polarizing effects of two dominant superpowers, regional flare-ups and terrorism would proliferate all over the globe. Being in a position to make a profit from conflicts, provided they had a say in which side they chose to help, was both a blessing and a curse that wracked Cabrillo in the sleepless hours of the night.

“Blame my grandmother,” Juan said. “She could stretch a dollar for a mile and have change left over. I used to hate going to her house because she always bought stale bread to save a couple of cents. She’d toast it, but you could tell, and toasted bologna sandwiches are about as disgusting as you can get.”

“Okay, to honor your grandmother, I’ll tell Maurice to stick with Limoges this time,” Max said, and sauntered back to his station.

Hali Kasim approached Juan carrying a flatscreen clipboard. A frown turned down the corners of his mouth and made his gunslinger mustache droop.

“Chairman, the Sniffer caught this a couple minutes ago.” The Sniffer was their name for the dedicated surveillance array that swept the electronic spectrum for miles around the ship. It was able to siphon in everything from regular radio broadcasts to encrypted cell phones. The ship’s supercomputer sifted through the minutia every half second, trying to detect a grain of intelligence wheat in all that chaff.

“Computer just broke the code. I’d call it high-end civilian or mid-level military encryption.”

“What’s the source?” Juan asked, taking the glowing clipboard from his communications expert.

“Satellite phone broadcasting from forty thousand feet.”

“That means either a military aircraft or an executive plane,” Juan said. “Commercial jetliners rarely fly above thirty-eight thousand.”

“That’s what I think, too. Sorry, we caught just the beginning of the conversation. Sniffer went down the same time as the radar and by the time it was back up the plane was out of range.”

Juan read the single line aloud. “…not quite so soon. We’ll have Merrick at the Devil’s Oasis by fourA.M. ” He read it again silently and looked at Hali, his face a mask. “Doesn’t mean much to me.”

“I don’t know what the Devil’s Oasis is, but when you were on the dock unloading the weapons Sky News broke the story that Geoffrey Merrick was kidnapped along with an associate from his company’s headquarters in Geneva. Working backward given the information provided by the wire services, a fast executive jet would put Merrick and his kidnappers right over our heads at the time we intercepted this call.”

“I assume we’re talking about the same Geoffrey Merrick who runs Merrick/Singer?” Cabrillo asked.

“The billionaire whose inventions in the field of clean coal have opened up a world of possibilities for the industry and made him one of the most hated men on the planet by environmental groups because they still think coal’s too dirty.”

“Any ransom demands yet?”

“Nothing on the news.”

Juan made his decision quickly. “Get Murph and Linda Ross working on this.” With her background in Naval Intelligence, Ross was the perfect choice to spearhead the research and Murph was the best at finding obscure patterns in an avalanche of information. “Tell them I want to know exactly what’s going on. Who took Merrick? Who’s in charge of the investigation? What and where is the Devil’s Oasis? The works. Plus background on Merrick/Singer.”

“What’s our interest in him?”

“Altruism,” Cabrillo said with a piratical smirk.

“Nothing to do with the fact he’s a billionaire, huh?”

“I’m shocked you’d think that of me,” Juan said with convincing indignation. “His wealth never left my mind—I mean, entered it.”

6

JUANCabrillo sat behind his desk, his feet propped up on the inlaid wood, as he read Eddie’s and Linc’s after-action reports off his tablet PC. Despite what had to have been a hair-raising series of events, both men made the material dull, exhorting their partner’s contribution to the mission over their own and downplaying the dangers until it almost read like stereo instructions. He jotted a couple of notes using a light pen and sent the electronic reports to the computer’s archive.

He then checked the weather services. The ninth major Atlantic storm of the year was forming to their north and while it wasn’t a threat to theOregon , he was interested because so far three storms had become hurricanes and the season was only a month old. Forecasters were predicting that this year would rival or even top the number of named storms that slammed the United States in 2005, destroying New Orleans and severely damaging Texas’s Gulf Coast. The experts claimed that this was part of a normal cycle of hurricane severity and frequency; however, environmental groups were clamoring that the superstorms were the result of global warming. Juan put his stock with the forecasters, but the trend was troubling.

The weather along Africa’s southwestern coast looked clear for at least the next five days.

Unlike his disheveled appearance playing at a greedy officer aboard a tramp steamer the night before, the morning found Cabrillo freshly showered and wearing a pair of English-cut blue jeans, a Turnbull and Asser shirt open at the throat, and a pair of deck shoes without socks. Because people would see his ankles, he had donned a prosthetic right leg covered in flesh-toned rubber, rather than one of his more mechanical-looking limbs. He kept his hair short, just longer than a crew cut, and despite his Latino name and heritage, his hair was bleached almost white by a California upbringing spent mostly in the sun and surf.

The armored porthole covers had been lowered so his cabin was bathed in natural light. The teak wainscoting, floors, and coffered ceiling gleamed with a fresh coat of polish. From his desk he could see through to his bedroom, which was dominated by a massive hand-carved four-poster, and beyond to the head, with its Mexican tile shower stall and copper Jacuzzi tub and sink basin. The rooms had the masculine smell of Juan’s aftershave and the occasional La Troya Universales Cuban cigars he enjoyed.

The décor was simple and elegant, and showed Juan’s eclectic tastes. On one wall was a painting of the Oregon plowing through an angry sea while another had glass-fronted shelves for some of the curios he had picked up from his travels, a clay figurine of an Egyptianushabti , a stone bowl from the Aztec Empire, a prayer wheel from Tibet, a piece of scrimshaw, a Ghurka knife, a doll made of seal fur from Greenland, a piece of raw emerald from Columbia, and dozens of other items. The furniture was mostly dark and the lighting was discreet and recessed, while the throw rugs on the floor were silk Persians in bright colors.

The one telling thing in the room was the lack of photographs. Where most men at sea had pictures of their wives and children, there were no such snapshots in Juan’s cabin. He had been married, but her fatal drunk driving accident eleven years ago was a pain Juan had tucked deep inside and refused to acknowledge.

He took a sip of rich Kona coffee, noted the service set, and smiled.

Two of the things that enabled him to recruit and keep some of the best from America’s armed forces and intelligence services were he paid well and spared no expense on his crew, be it pricey china in the mess hall and Le Cordon Bleu–trained chefs in the galley or the decorating allowance he gave each new team member to redo their private cabins. Mark Murphy had used up most of his budget on a sound system that could shake barnacles off the hull. Linda Ross had engaged a New York City decorator in her cabin, while Linc’s was as Spartan as a Navy barracks—the money instead going toward the Harley-Davidson he kept in the hold.

TheOregon sported a large fitness facility with saunas, and when not on an assignment one of her ballast wants could be half filled and turned into an Olympic-length swimming pool. The men and women of the Corporation lived well, but as exemplified in this most recent mission, they also lived dangerously. Every member of the crew was a stockholder and while the officers enjoyed the lion’s share of the profits, Juan’s favorite task at the end of an operation was signing bonus checks for the technicians and auxiliary personnel. That would total some $500,000 for the job they’d just pulled off.

He was just about to start typing his report to Langston Overholt, his old friend at the CIA who brought the Corporation a great deal of business, when someone knocked on his door.

“Come.”

Linda Ross and Mark Murphy stepped into his cabin. Where Linda was perky and petite, Murph was gangly and awkward with shaggy dark hair, a goatee that a single swipe with a razor would erase, and a habit of wearing nothing but black. One of the few on the ship without a military background, Mark was a certified genius who had earned his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty. He’d gone into R&D for a defense contractor where he’d met Eric Stone, who was in the Navy then, but a short-timer with a contract to come and work for Juan. Eric had convinced Cabrillo that the young weapons expert would be a perfect fit for the Corporation, and in the three years since, and despite Murph’s taste for punk music and how he would turn the ship’s deck into a skateboard park, Juan couldn’t have agreed more.

Cabrillo glanced at the antique chronograph across from his desk. “Either you two completely struck out or you hit a home run to get back to me this quickly.”

“Let’s say we’re on third,” Murph said, adjusting the bundle of papers in his arms. “And for the record I don’t like sports metaphors because I don’t get them half the time.”

“So this was a slam dunk more than a Hail Mary.” Juan grinned.

“If you say so.”

They took seats opposite Juan who cleared a bunch of papers off his desk. “Okay, what do you have?”

“Where do you want to start?” Linda asked. “The kidnapping or the company?”

“Let’s start with the background first so I know who we’re dealing with.” Juan laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the ceiling while Linda began her report. It might have been rude not to look her in the eye but it was one of his quirks when concentrating.

“Geoffrey Merrick, age fifty-one. Divorced with two grown children, both of whom spend their time blowing through their father’s money by chasing paparazzi so they can end up in tabloids. The wife is an artist living in New Mexico and keeps a low profile.

“Merrick graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry from MIT exactly one day younger than Mark was when he received his, and partnered up with another alum, Daniel Singer, to form Merrick/Singer, a materials research company. The firm has applied for and received eighty patents in the past twenty-five-odd years and the company has grown from the two of them in a rented space outside Boston to a campus near Geneva, Switzerland, with a staff of a hundred and sixty.

“As you may know, their biggest patent is for an organic-based system to filter up to ninety percent of the sulfur out of the smoke emitted by coal-fired power plants. A year after it was issued Merrick/Singer went public and both men became billionaires. That isn’t to say there wasn’t a lot of controversy at the time, which still echoes today. Environmental groups say that even with the scrubbers, coal plants are too dirty and should be shut down. Numerous lawsuits are still pending and new ones are being filed every year.”

“Could ecoterrorists have abducted Merrick?” Juan interrupted.

“The Swiss police are looking into that possibility,” Linda said. “But it doesn’t seem likely. What would be the point? Getting back to the story: Ten years after they hit it big with their IPO, a rift developed between Merrick and his partner. Up until this time the two had been as close as brothers. They always appeared together at press conferences. Their families even vacationed together. Then, in the span of a couple of months, Singer seemed to have gone through a personality change. He started siding with the environmentalists in the suits brought against his own company and eventually forced Merrick to buy him out entirely. His shares were valued at two point four billion and Merrick had to scramble to come up with that kind of cash. To make it happen he had to personally buy back all the shares of Merrick/Singer.

It nearly bankrupted him.”

“Real Cain and Abel type stuff,” Mark Murphy interjected.

“At the time it was front-page news in all the financial papers.”

“What’s Singer been doing since?”

“After his wife left him he’s been living on the coast of Maine near where he grew up. Up until about five years ago he was using his wealth to support all kinds of environmental causes, some on the extreme side of things. Then he suddenly filed fraud claims against a number of environmental groups saying they had bilked him. Said the whole movement was just a way for the people in charge of the various charities to make money for themselves and that they did nothing to really help the planet. The suits are still pending, though Singer himself has pretty much dropped out of sight.”

“So he’s some kind of hermit now?”

“No. Just real low-key. While doing the research I got the sense that Merrick was the front man and Singer the brains, even though they shared the podium. Merrick glad-handed everyone and really knew his way around Capitol Hill and later in the halls of power in Bern when they moved the company to Switzerland. He wore the thousand-dollar suits while Singer sported jeans and a poorly knotted tie.

Merrick loved the limelight and Singer the shadows. I think since leaving the company he’s just reverted back to his introverted self.”

“Doesn’t sound like a criminal mastermind to me,” Juan said.

“I don’t think so, either. He’s just a scientist with a fat wallet.”

“Okay, so we’re stuck with a kidnapping for ransom—or is there anyone else out there gunning for Merrick?”

“Since the showdown with Singer, the company’s been running smoothly.”

“What exactly do they do?”

“Now that they’re privately held, it’s mostly pure research funded by Merrick. They still receive a few patents a year, nothing earth-shattering, just a better molecular glue for some esoteric application or a foam that can withstand a few tenths of a degree more than something else already on the market.”

“Anything someone would try to steal through industrial espionage?”

“Nothing we could find, but they could be working on something in secret.”

“Okay, we’ll keep that in mind. Tell me about the kidnapping itself.”

Mark straightened in his chair. “Merrick and a researcher named Susan Donleavy were seen by the security guard at the main building on their campus at seven last night chatting on their way out the door.

Merrick had a dinner date with reservations for eight o’clock. Donleavy lives alone and apparently didn’t have plans.

“They left Merrick/Singer in separate vehicles, Merrick in his Mercedes and Donleavy in a Volkswagen.

Their cars were found a half mile from the facility. By studying the tire marks the police were able to determine that a third vehicle—given the length of its wheel base most likely it was a van—forced both vehicles off the road at high speed. Airbags were deployed in the Mercedes but not in the Volkswagen.

Presumably, Merrick was hit first and Susan Donleavy was slowing when the van hit her. The driver’s side window on Merrick’s car was smashed inward so the door could be unlocked. The Volkswagen didn’t have automatic locks so she was simply pulled from the car.”

“How did they know this was a kidnapping and not some Good Samaritan rescuing them and taking them to a local hospital?” Cabrillo asked.

“Because they aren’t at any local hospitals, leading the police to conclude they were locked in the Good Samaritan’s basement.”

“Right.”

“So far there have been no ransom demands and a search for the van’s turned up nothing. Eventually they will find it at the airport because we know Merrick, and most likely Susan Donleavy as well, were taken out of the country by plane.”

“Have you checked charter flights out of Geneva for last night?”

“Eric’s on that now. There are more than fifty because an economic summit meeting just concluded and all the bigwigs were headed home.”

Juan rolled his eyes. “Figures.”

“Might not be bad luck on our part, but thorough planning on theirs,” Linda said.

“Good point.”

“So far the police don’t know what to make of the situation. They’re playing the wait-and-see game until the kidnappers make their demands.”

“Could this have been about Susan Donleavy and not Geoffrey Merrick?” Juan suggested.

Mark shook his head. “Doubt it. I checked her on the company database. She’s been with them for two years, a researcher in organic chemistry still working toward her doctorate. Like I said before, she lives alone. No husband or kids. Most employee bios give a little info about interests and hobbies. Hers only gave her professional credentials. Nothing personal at all.

“No one a kidnapper would go through the expense of hiring a private jet to grab.”

“Doesn’t wash no matter how you look at it,” Linda said. “Merrick was the target, and I bet Donleavy was nabbed because she was a witness.”

“What about this Devil’s Oasis that was mentioned?” Juan asked to get them back on track.

“We couldn’t find any mention of it on the Internet,” Linda replied. “It has to be a code name, so it could be anyplace. Backtracking from where we intercepted the call when they said they would reach it by four in the morning, it could be in a circle big enough to encompass the eastern tip of South America. Or they could have turned northward again and gone back to Europe.”

“That doesn’t sound likely. Let’s assume that they continued on the same straight-line course south from Switzerland that took them over our position last night. What’s the most likely landing site?

“Someplace in Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, or South Africa.”

“And with our luck what do you bet it’s Zimbabwe?” Mark muttered.

Years of corruption and poor economic planning had turned the once prosperous country into one of the poorest nations on the continent. Simmering anger against the repressive government was threatening to boil over. Reports of attacks against remote villages that spoke out against the regime were growing while malnutrition and the diseases it spawned were on the rise. All indicators pointed to a full-scale civil war erupting in months or maybe even weeks.

“Again, maybe not our bad luck, but their good planning,” Linda said. “The middle of a war zone would be the last place I’d look for a kidnapped industrialist. They could easily bribe the government to look the other way when they brought him in.”

“Okay, concentrate your search efforts on the Devil’s Oasis being in Zimbabwe, but don’t rule out anything. We’ll keep steaming southward and hopefully you’ll have something by the time we reach the Tropic of Capricorn. Meanwhile, I’m going to talk with Langston to see if the CIA has anything on this and maybe have him send out some feelers to the Swiss government as well as the board of Merrick/Singer. Let them know they might have options.”

“This isn’t our usual way of doing things, Chairman.”

“I know, Linda, but we might be in the right place at the right time to make this all work out.”

“Or the kidnappers are going to issue their demands today, Merrick/ Singer will pay the ransom, and good old Geoffrey boy will be home in time for dinner.”

“You’re forgetting one critical piece.” Juan didn’t match her light tone. “Flying him out of the country is a risk they didn’t need if this was about a cash ransom. If that’s all they wanted they would have stashed him someplace within Switzerland, issued their demands, and been done with it. If their planning is as meticulous as you suspect, there has to be another level to their plot we haven’t seen.”

Linda Ross nodded, sensing the gravity of the situation. “Like what?”

“Find the Devil’s Oasis and maybe we’ll know.”

7

THEheadphones clamped around Sloane’s ears made her so sweaty that her hair felt glued to her skin, but to take them off to cool herself meant she had to endure the pounding throb of the helicopter’s engine and rotor. It was a balance of discomforts that she’d endured for two fruitless days.

The back of her shirt was also sticky. Every time she shifted position it stuck to the vinyl seat. She’d learned early on to hold the shirt when she moved or it would tighten across her chest, gaining her a leering grin from Luka, who sat next to her on the rear bench seat. She would have preferred to sit in the front next to the pilot, but he said he needed Tony’s weight in the cockpit to keep the small chopper in proper trim.

They were returning to Swakopmund for the last time, for which Sloane was both grateful and frustrated.

Seven times they’d flown out over the ocean and searched the spots circled on her map and seven times they’d returned to refuel, having found nothing but natural rock formations. The portable metal detector they could dip into the water on a long tether failed to find any metal source large enough to be an anchor, let alone an entire ship.

Her body ached from so many hot hours in the cramped chopper and she thought she’d never get Luka’s body odor out of her nostrils. She had been so sure of her plan to use local fishermen’s knowledge of the waters off the coast that she hadn’t even considered failing. But now that they were returning to the little heliport in the dunes outside of Swakopmund, defeat scalded the back of her throat while the glare off the ocean below penetrated her sunglasses and made her head pound.

Tony turned in his seat to look at her and motioned for her to jack her headphones back into the helicopter’s internal communications net. She had unplugged it to give her pity party some privacy.

“The pilot says that the chopper doesn’t have the range to check that last spot on the map. The one we got from Papa Heinrick.”

“What’s this about Papa Heinrick?” Luka asked, blasting Sloane with a dose of halitosis.

Something had prevented Sloane from discussing their late-night raft trip down in Sandwich Bay to visit the crazy old fisherman, mostly because she grudgingly suspected that Luka had been right all along and just didn’t want to admit it to the guide.

Wishing Tony had kept his mouth shut, Sloane shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He was nuttier than a fruitcake. We’ve wasted more than two thousand dollars on fuel checking possibilities from reliable sources. I can’t see us wasting any more on Papa Heinrick and his giant snakes.”

“Giant what?” the pilot asked. He was South African with a thick Africaans accent.

“Giant snakes,” Sloane repeated, feeling foolish. “He claims he was attacked by giant metal snakes.”

“Most likely it was the DTs,” the pilot said. “Everyone around here knows that Papa Heinrick is the world’s biggest boozer. I’ve seen him drink a pair of Aussie backpackers under the table and both those lads were the size of elephants. Rugby players, I think they were. If it’s snakes he’s seeing you can bet your last Rand he was coming off a bender when he saw ’em.”

“Giant snakes.” Luka giggled. “Did I not tell you that Papa Heinrick is a crazy man? You waste your time talking to him. You trust Luka. I find the spot you’re looking for. You see. There are still places out here where it could be.”

“Not for me,” Tony said. “I have to be back home day after tomorrow and I just want to sit by the pool.”

“That is okay,” Luka said with a quick glance at where Sloane’s leg emerged from her shorts. “I take Miss Sloane alone in a boat with greater range than this helicopter.”

“I don’t think so,” Sloane said sharply enough to get Tony’s attention. She glared at him and it took him a moment to understand what their guide was really after.

“We’ll play it by ear. See how I feel in the morning, huh?” he said. “Maybe a boat trip wouldn’t be too bad.”

“You’re wasting your time,” the pilot muttered.

Sloane was sure he was right.

The chopper flared over the dusty heliport twenty minutes later. The rotor blast kicked up a cloud of grit that obscured the ground and turned the limp windsock into a rigid pink cone. The pilot gently set his helicopter on the ground and immediately cut the engines. The effect was instantaneous. The piercing whine of the moter faded and the blades began to slow. He opened his door before they stopped, exchanging the hot sweat-tainted air in the cabin with hot gritty air from outside. It was still a relief.

Sloane opened her door and stepped from the helo, ducking low instinctively as the rotor continued to whirl over her head. She grabbed her duffel bag and then walked around the chopper’s nose to give Tony a hand unhooking the metal detector and cable spool from the left skid. Together they lugged the hundred-pound piece of equipment to the back of the pickup they’d rented. Luka had made no offer to help and instead sucked furiously on his first cigarette in two hours.

Tony settled up with the pilot for his day’s service, depleting all but two of his traveler’s checks, which he’d already vowed to lose at the casino in their hotel. The pilot shook hands with both of them, thanking them for using his charter service, and left with one last piece of advice, “I’m sure you’ve figured Luka’s a rogue and a thief, but he’s right about Papa Heinrick. That old man isn’t right in the head. You two have had your bit of fun looking for a sunken ship. Enjoy the last day of your holiday. Go on a tour of the dunes or relax by the pool like Tony says.”

With Luka safely out of earshot, Sloane replied, “Piet, we’ve come halfway around the world. What’s another wasted day?”

The pilot chuckled. “That’s what I love about you Yanks. You never give up.”

They shook hands again and Luka scampered into the back of the four-wheel-drive pickup. They dropped him in front of a bar in his working-class neighborhood along Walvis Bay. They paid him his daily wage and, despite their protestations that they probably wouldn’t be needing him again, he promised to be at the hotel at nine the next morning.

“God, he’s insufferable,” Sloane said.

“I don’t understand your problem with him. Yeah, he could use a shower and a breath mint, but he really has been helpful.”

“Try being a woman around him and you’ll understand.”

Swakopmund was unlike any town in Africa. Because Namibia had been a German colony, the city’s architecture was pure Bavaria, with lots of gingerbread trim on the houses and solid Lutheran churches.

The palm-lined streets were wide and well maintained, although sand from the desert blew across everything. With access to a deep-water port at Walvis Bay, it was becoming a cruise destination for the adventurous set.

Sloane begged off Tony’s suggestion of dinner at the hotel’s buffet and a night at the casino. “I think I’m going to the restaurant out by the lighthouse and watch the sun go down.”

“Suit yourself,” Tony said, and headed off for his room.

After her shower, Sloane put on floral print sundress and flats and draped a sweater over her shoulders.

She let her copper hair flow free around her shoulders and used makeup to even out where the tops of her cheeks had been pinked by the sun. Although Tony had been a complete gentleman the entire trip, she had a premonition that tonight, after a couple hours of pretending to be James Bond in the casino, he would make a pass. Best to just not be around, was her attitude.

She strolled down Bahnhof Street, peering in shop windows at native carvings and painted ostrich eggs for sale to the tourists. The wind coming off the Atlantic freshened the city and scoured the air of dust.

When she reached the end of the street, Palm Beach was to her right and the Mole was straight ahead.

The Mole was a natural spit of land that sheltered Palm Beach and at its tip was a spindly lighthouse. She reached her destination a couple minutes later. Perched above the crashing surf, the restaurant had spectacular views; a number of tourists were there with the same idea as Sloane.

She ordered a German beer from the bar and took it to a vacant seat overlooking the sea.

Sloane Macintyre wasn’t used to failure, so she was especially annoyed the trip had been a bust. True, it had been a long shot from the beginning, but she still thought they had a good chance at finding the HMS

Rove .

But then what, she asked herself for the hundredth time, what were the chances that the rumor was true?

A thousand to one? A million? And what would she get for finding it? A pat on the back and a bonus.

She had to wonder if putting up with Tony’s petulance and Luka’s leers and Papa Heinrick’s insanity was worth it. She downed the last of her beer in three angry gulps and ordered another plus a fish dinner.

She ate as the sun sank into the sea, reflecting on her life. She had a sister with a husband, a career, and three kids, while she was in her London flat so infrequently she threw away all her real plants in favor of plastic ones because they always died of neglect. She thought about her last relationship and how it, too, had petered out because she was never around. But mostly she brooded on how a woman with a business degree from Columbia ends up spending her time traipsing around Third World countries questioning fishermen about where they lose their nets.

She decided as she finished her meal that when she got home she was going to take a serious look at her life and what she wanted out of it. She’d be forty in three years, and while that didn’t sound old to her now she remembered how ancient it seemed when she was twenty. She was nowhere near her career goals and felt that she wasn’t going to get much higher on the corporate ladder without some drastic action.

Which she’d thought she’d taken by coming to Namibia, but now this was turning out to be a bust, and her logic came full circle to being angry at herself for being so wrong.

The air grew a bit chilly with the wind coming off the cold water. She shrugged into her sweater and paid her tab, leaving a generous tip even though her guidebook said waiters didn’t expect one.

She started back to her hotel, taking a different route than before just to see more of the old town. The sidewalks were quiet except around a couple of restaurants and there was no traffic on the street. While wealthy by Africa’s standards, Namibia was still a poor country, and people tended to live with the rhythms of the day. Most were asleep by eight, so there were few lights in the homes.

Sloane became aware of the footsteps when the wind died suddenly. Without its gentle hiss the tap of shoes on concrete carried easily. She turned and saw a shadow duck around a corner. Had the person kept coming she would have considered the moment a figment of paranoia. But the person didn’t want her to know he was there, and Sloane realized she wasn’t all that familiar with this part of the city.

She knew her hotel was to her left, four, maybe five streets over. It dominated Bahnhof Street, so if she could reach that road she’d be fine. She took off running, lost a sandal after only a couple of steps and quickly kicked off the other as her pursuer gave a startled grunt at her reaction and started after her.

Sloane ran as hard as she could, her bare feet slapping against the sidewalk. Just before she turned a corner she chanced looking back. There were two of them! She thought they might have been a pair of the fishermen she and Tony had questioned, but she could tell both men were white and it looked like one of them had a pistol.

She careened around the corner and ran even harder. They would gain on her, she knew, but if she could just reach the hotel she was sure they’d back off. Her arms pumping, wishing she’d worn a sports bra rather than the lacy thing she’d chosen, Sloane dashed across a side street. The men were momentarily out of view, so when she saw an alley she dashed down it instinctively.

She was almost at the end where it opened onto another road when she kicked a metal can she hadn’t seen in the darkness. The pain of her stubbed toe was nothing compared to her fury at not seeing the can.

It clanged like a rung bell, and as she emerged from the alley she knew her pursuers had heard it, too.

She turned left once again and saw a car approaching. Sloane ran into the street waving her arms over her head frantically. The car slowed. She could see a man and a woman inside, children in the backseat.

The woman said something to her husband and he looked away guiltily as he accelerated past her.

Sloane cursed. She’d lost precious seconds hoping they would help. She ran again, her lungs beginning to burn.

The crack of the pistol shot and the spray of concrete dust exploding off the building next to her struck Sloane at the same instant. The gunman had missed her head by less than a foot. She fought the instinct to duck, which would have slowed her pace, and continued to sprint like a gazelle, weaving right and left with sharp movements to throw off their aim.

She saw a sign for Wasserfall Street and knew she was only half a block from her hotel. She put on a burst of speed she never thought she was capable of and emerged onto Bahnhof Street. Her hotel was almost directly ahead and a string of cars cruised down the wide lane. There were plenty of lights around the old converted train station. She danced through traffic, ignoring the honks, and finally reached the hotel’s entrance. She turned back. The two men lurked across the street, glaring at her. The shooter had hidden his pistol under his jacket. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “This was a warning!

Leave Namibia or the next time I won’t miss.”

A spark of defiance compelled Sloane to want to give him the finger, but all she could do was slump to the ground as tears welled in her eyes and her chest convulsed. A doorman approached her a moment later.

“Are you okay, miss?”

“I’m fine,” Sloane said, getting to her feet and dusting her backside. She knuckled the moisture from her eyes. The spot where the men had stood was deserted. Even though her lip still quivered and her legs felt like gel, Sloane squared her shoulders, deliberately raised her right arm, and then extended her middle finger.

8

THEthick stone walls could not absorb her screams. The walls soaked up the heat of the sun until the rock was too hot to touch, but they let Susan Donleavy’s tortured wailing echo almost as if she were in the next cell. At first Geoff Merrick had forced himself to listen, as if bearing witness to her pain could somehow give the young woman comfort. He had stoically endured her piercing shrieks for an hour, flinching each time she hit a note of agony so high it felt like his skull would shatter like a piece of crystal.

Now, as he sat on the earthen floor of his cell, he held his hands clamped over his ears and hummed to drown out her cries.

They’d taken her just after dawn, when the prison had yet to become stifling and the light through the room’s single glassless window high on the east wall still held promise. The cell block measured at least fifty feet square and at least thirty feet high. It was divided into numerous jail cells with stone walls on three sides and iron bars for the fourth and the ceiling. A second and third tier of cells ringed the room above him, accessible by wrought-iron circular stairways. Despite the apparent antiquity of the facility the iron bars were as secure as a modern super-max prison.