Skeleton Coast

“Here’s where he’s playing into media fears in a big way. The crude that’s pumped from the waters near the Congo River has the highest percentage of benzene in the world. Alaska crude runs roughly one part per thousand. Oil from some of the newest fields off Angola and the Congo is a hundred times that and higher. The crude is also contaminated with arsenic. This is removed at refineries, but when it comes out of the ground it’s a fairly caustic blend of oil and something called benzene arsonic acid, a known and tightly controlled carcinogen.”

“He wants to sicken a bunch of West Africans?” Linc asked, disgusted by the idea.

“Not exactly, although there will be some injuries here. No, what he’s after is to get the slick to disperse long enough so some of the oil evaporates.”

“And once it becomes airborne,” Juan concluded, “the westerly winds will carry the toxic vapors across the ocean to the Eastern Seaboard.”

“The levels won’t be high enough to sicken people in the United States,” Linda said. “But Singer’s banking on the panic caused by a toxic hurricane bearing down on the coast to get his point across.”

“Say he succeeds in dumping a lot of oil,” Mike interjected. “Can’t it just get cleaned up before it becomes a hazard?”

“Two things would make that difficult,” Juan said. “Number one is that regulations concerning oil spills are pretty lax in this part of the world. They wouldn’t have enough oil skimmer ships or containment boom. The second thing, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that Singer plans on causing enough damage to enough rigs that even with sufficient equipment, cleanup crews would simply be overwhelmed.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Linda agreed. “Local workers can contain an accidental spill from a tanker being improperly loaded and maybe even if a ship was holed, but with Singer’s army there preventing them from getting to work and oil continually flowing from damaged rigs and pipelines there’s nothing they could do.”

“How long after the oil is spilled would it take for the vapors to enter the atmosphere?” Max asked.

“Immediately,” Linda said. “But it would be a week or so before it could potentially get carried across the Atlantic. It’s Singer’s mercenaries’ job to hold those rigs for as long as they can. If they can hold out for a couple of days we’re talking a spill a hundred times the size of theExxon Valdez disaster.”

Juan’s eyes scanned the faces around him and said, “So then it’s going to be our job to prevent them from storming the rigs, and if we’re too late then we’re going to take the damn things back again.”

“There might be a problem with that,” Eddie said. He folded his hands on the table. “Linda, you told Max that Singer has hired Samuel Makambo to storm the oil facilities?”

“Susan Donleavy mentioned him by name as well as his Congolese Army of Revolution. It’s a straight pay-to-fight deal. Makambo has no political stake in any of this. For few million of Singer’s dollars Makambo’s willing to send in some cannon fodder.”

“Nice guy,” Linc said sarcastically. “His men follow him because of their political beliefs and he hires them out to die for someone else’s. I hate Africa.”

“I don’t blame you,” Eddie agreed. “But can you see our problem? We supplied him with enough AK-47s, RPGs, and ammunition to outfit a couple hundred men.”

Juan understood immediately. “TheOregon has the firepower to take on half the navies in the world, but it won’t do us much good against individual terrorists aboard oil rigs who are using workers as shields.”

“Precisely.” Eddie leaned forward. “Retaking the production platforms is going to require individual combat. Everyone on this crew is a capable fighter, but if Makambo takes over just five rigs and puts a hundred men on each we’re not going to take them back without losing at least two thirds to three quarters of our own people.

“And don’t think Angola’s army or police force is going to be much help,” he added. “It’ll take them a couple of days just to get organized. By that time Singer will have turned the entire Congo Delta into a stinking oil slick and sabotaged the rigs so the flow may never be shut off. If we can’t prevent him from storming the platforms then we have a day at most to take them back.”

Eddie’s sober assessment hung in the air because no one in the boardroom could refute it.

There came a quiet knock on the open boardroom door. Juan turned and was delighted to see Sloane Macintyre standing at the entrance. She wore a pair of baggy shorts and a plain white T-shirt. Her arm was in a sling across her abdomen. Her coppery hair fell in waves past her shoulders. It was the first time he had seen her wearing makeup. The mascara and shadow brought out the depths of her gray eyes and the artful strokes of blush hid the pallor of her still-recovering body. Her lips were full and shining.

“Hope I’m not interrupting,” she said with a smile that said she knew she was.

Juan got to his feet. “No, not at all. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thanks. Doctor Huxley says I’ll be good as new in a couple of weeks if I stick to the physical therapy regimen she laid out. The whole crew’s talking about the rescue you pulled off and how you not only saved your men and rescued Geoffrey Merrick but also freed some leader from Zimbabwe.”

“Believe me, it was a team effort.”

“I just heard voices and wanted to say hello.” She gave Juan a look. “You still owe me an explanation about what it is you all do and where you got this incredible ship.”

“And I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

“You’d better.” She glanced over at Linda. “I’ll see you back in your cabin.”

“See you, Sloane.”

“So what the hell are we going to do?” Max asked bluntly to get the conversation back on track.

“Obviously, we can contact Langston,” Linda said. “If he can’t clear the way for a rapid reaction force to be sent here, at least he can warn the governments of Angola and the Congo about a credible terrorist threat.”

“What are our relations like with those countries?” Linc asked.

“No idea.”

“What about getting in touch with some of our people who’ve left the Corporation, like Dick Truitt, Carl Gannon, and Bob Meadows,” Mike suggested. “I know Tom Reyes runs a bodyguard service in California.”

“Do the oil companies have their own security forces?” Max asked. “I assume they do. Juan?”

“Huh?”

“Are we boring you?”

“No.” Cabrillo got to his feet. “I’ll be right back.”

He was out the door before anyone could ask him where he was going. He stalked down the hallway, his broad shoulders bowed and his head down. Decisions had always come easy to him and this one was no different but he had to ask a question before he committed himself. He caught up to Sloane as she reached Linda Ross’s cabin.

“Juan,” she said, startled by his sudden appearance and his deadly serious look.

“How sure are you about the diamonds being aboard theRove ?” he asked brusquely. For what he intended even the considerable financial resources of the Corporation weren’t enough, and he doubted he could get the CIA to fund his plan appropriately.

“I’m sorry?”

“TheRove . How sure are you that the diamonds are aboard her?”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“If you were placing a bet what would be the odds? A hundred to one? A thousand to one? What?”

She composed herself for a second. “H. A. Ryder was the best guide in Africa at the time and he knew the desert better than anyone. I know as sure as I’m standing here that he got those men across the Kalahari. They had the stones when they reached the coast.”

“So they are on theRove , then.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Positive.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He turned to go but Sloane placed a hand on his arm to stop him. “What’s this all about? Why are you asking about the diamonds?”

“Because I’m going to promise them to someone if he helps me out.”

“You don’t know where theRove is. It might take years to find her.”

Juan gave her a wolfish grin. “I’ve got someone who owes me a favor who’s going to find her for me.”

“Who are you giving the diamonds to and why?” Caught up by Juan’s determination Sloane had forgotten for a moment who she worked for and what had brought her to Namibia in the first place.

“Wait just a second. Those stones don’t belong to you. They belong to my company.”

“According to maritime law they belong to whoever finds them. As for why I want them, come with me.”

Juan stopped first at his cabin to get an item out of his safe. When they reached the guest suite, Juan knocked and entered. Moses Ndebele was sitting on the floor in the living room talking with four of his men. All of them were heavily bandaged. Canes and crutches littered the floor like a giant version of a children’s game of pickup sticks. But none of it mattered. They were all smiling that their leader was back.

Moses made to get to his feet but Juan waved him down. “Your Doctor Huxley tells me that there is no need for me to be shopping for a new leg,” Ndebele said.

“I’m glad to hear it. I can function with one but I sure as hell wish I still had ’em both.” Juan said as they shook hands. “May I speak to you in private?”

“Of course, Captain.” He said a few words to his followers and they slowly got up from the floor and hobbled to the bedroom.

Juan waited until the door was closed before speaking.

“What are the chances of you ever overthrowing your government and returning prosperity to Zimbabwe?”

“You are a man, so we will speak as men. I have eager fighters but few weapons, and if the people rise up to support a poorly armed revolt they will be gunned down. My government is ruthless. Its leaders are willing to commit any atrocity to remain in power.”

“What would it take to topple them?”

“It is the same for any problem. Money and time.”

“I can’t do anything about the time, but what if I could fund your movement?”

“Captain, I know you are a brave and honorable man but you are talking about tens of millions of dollars.”

“Mr. Ndebele, I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, actually.” Juan paused a beat to let that sink in, and then added, “And it’s yours but I’m going to need something from you in return.”

“For now I will not ask about the money,” Moses said. “Friends do not discuss such matters. What is the favor you seek?”

“I need a hundred of your best fighters,” Cabrillo told him. He then explained the situation. Ndebele listened wordlessly, although Sloane gasped when he described a hurricane laden with poison bearing down on the United States, most likely gunning for her native Florida.

“My people are willing to sacrifice themselves for their children and the future of our country,” Ndebele said when Juan had finished. “You are asking me to send them into a battle for which they reap nothing and risk all. For what you have done for me I would fight by your side anywhere you asked. But I cannot ask my men to do this thing.”

“But they are fighting for their country,” Juan countered. “By doing this you will secure the financial resources to oust your government and return Zimbabwe to the democracy you all fought for when you first gained independence. I’m not going to lie to you and say that all of them will be coming back.

Because they won’t. But their sacrifice will be the rally cry for your followers. Explain to them what they will achieve and they will do it for you, for your country, and, most important, for themselves.”

Ndebele said nothing for a few moments as he looked into Cabrillo’s eyes.

“I will take this to anindaba , a council of my men.” He waved at the closed bedroom door. “And I will let them decide.”

“I can ask for nothing more,” Juan said and shook Ndebele’s hand again. He withdrew a pouch from his pocket and turned Ndebele’s hand flat. Onto his open palm he poured the rough diamonds they had received in exchange for the weapons. “Consider this a good-faith gesture. They’re yours no matter the decision. There’s an intercom on the desk. The communications officer who answers will be able to find me.”

Out in the hall Sloane grabbed Juan’s hand. “Is that all true? And where did you get those diamonds.”

“Unfortunately, it is. Daniel Singer has had years to plan this and we only have a couple of days to stop it. As to where those diamonds come from, it’s a rather long story that brings this whole mess full circle.”

“I guess I’ll have to wait to hear that one, too.”

“Sorry, yes. I have to get back to the meeting. There’s a lot we have to go over.”

Sloane released his hand. “I want you to know that I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“Good, because once we find theRove you’re going to help me blackmail your bosses into buying those diamonds.”

“That,” she said with a grin, “will be my pleasure.”

Before returning to the boardroom Cabrillo went back to his cabin to place a ship-to-shore call. It was early morning on the East Coast, but he suspected the man he wanted to reach would be in his office.

Juan had the direct number and when the phone was picked up he said without preamble, “You owe me a leg but I’ll call us even if you lend me a hand.”

“It’s been awhile, Chairman Cabrillo,” Dirk Pitt replied from his office high atop the NUMA building overlooking Washington, D.C. “What can I do for you?”

25

THEOregoncoursed northward like a greyhound, driven by her phenomenal engines and the impatience of her crew. There was activity in nearly every section of the ship. There were five men in the armory unpacking the weapons that would be carried by Moses Ndebele’s men, cleaning them of Cosmoline and loading hundreds of magazines. Other armorers were checking over the vessel’s defensive systems, making certain that ammunition bins were fully stocked and that the salt air hadn’t corroded the machine guns, Gatlings, and autocannons.

Down in the moon pool technicians were inspecting theOregon ’s two submersibles. Gear was being stripped out of both and extra CO2scrubbers installed to increase the number of people each could carry. They also touched up the anechoic coating that made the two craft almost undetectable when submerged. Over the sound of their work roared an air compressor filling dozens of scuba tanks in case they were needed.

In the kitchen every chef and assistant was on duty preparing combat rations while the dining staff sealed the food in airtight packages as soon as it came out of the galley. In medical, Julia Huxley and her staff were setting up the OR for an influx of casualties.

Juan Cabrillo was in his customary seat in the op center while around him his staff worked at a dizzying pace prepping the vessel, and themselves, for the upcoming battle. He read over every report as it came in concerning the vessel’s status; no detail was too trivial to overlook.

“Max,” he called without looking up from his computer monitor, “I’ve got something here that says the pressure in the fire suppression system is down by fifteen pounds.”

“I ordered a test trip in the hold. The system should be back up to full pressure in about an hour.”

“Okay. Hali, what’s George’s ETA?”

Hali Kasim pulled down one side of his headphones. “He just took off from Cabinda, Angola, with Eric and Murph. We should be able to rendezvous in about two and a half hours. He’ll call ten minutes out so we can slow the ship and prep the hangar.”

“And Tiny? Where’s he?”

“Thirty thousand feet over Zambia.”

Juan was relieved. The plan, like so many recently, had been hastily put together. One of the biggest obstacles was getting a hundred of Moses’ best men out of their refugee camp near the industrial town of Francistown, Botswana. Unlike a lot of sub-Saharan Africa, there was very little corruption in Botswana, so getting the men onto a plane without passports had been more expensive than Cabrillo would have liked. Tiny’s bush pilot friend had cleared the way for them on the other end, and ensured that they would have no difficulty landing in Cabinda. TheOregon would tie up to the city’s main pier about five hours after they landed and would stay just long enough to get them aboard.

From there they would proceed north to the oil fields off the coast where Murph and Eric had detected three of the ten AK-47s with the Corporation’s radio tags. The weapons were grouped in a swamp less than five miles from a massive new tanker terminal and within a ten-minute boat ride of a dozen offshore oil rigs.

Juan had contacted Langston Overholt as soon as Murph had reported in. Lang had then alerted the State Department so they could issue a warning to Angola’s government. However, the wheels of diplomacy turn slowly and so far Juan’s information was languishing in Foggy Bottom while the policy wonks hashed out a statement.

Because of the low-grade civil war being waged all across Cabinda Province, the petroleum companies who leased the oil fields had their own security apparatus in place. The tanker terminal and workers’

compounds were fenced off and patrolled by armed guards. Cabrillo had considered calling the companies directly but knew he would be ignored. He also knew that whatever force they had in place was a deterrent for theft and trespassing and wasn’t capable of holding off an army. Any warning he did issue would likely only get more of their guards killed.

Also, he had learned from Murph’s aerial reconnaissance that there were hundreds of people living in shantytowns around the oil concessions. There would be far fewer civilian casualties if the fighting took place well inside the facilities.

Linda Ross entered the op center with Sloane Macintyre in tow. Sloane stopped as soon as she stepped through the door. Her mouth hung a little loose as she looked around the futuristic command center. The main view screen on the forward bulkhead was split into dozens of camera angles showing activity all around the ship as well as a clear shot of theOregon ’s bow as she powered through the sea.

“Linda said I’d get a better idea of what you all do if I came with her,” Sloane finally said as she approached Juan. “I think I’m more confused now than I was five seconds ago. What is all this?”

“The heart and soul of theOregon ,” Juan said. “From here we can control the helm, the engines, communications, safety teams as well as the ship’s integrated weapons systems.”

“So you are with the CIA or something?”

“Like I told you before, I used to be. We’re private citizens running a for-profit company that does freelance security work. Though I will admit the CIA has thrown us a lot of business over the years, usually with missions best left off their blackest books.

“Originally, our contract was to sell some arms to a group of African revolutionaries. The arms had been modified so the rebels could be tracked. Unfortunately we were double-crossed but we only learned about it after committing ourselves to rescue Geoffrey Merrick. So now we’re back to get the weapons, only it turns out Merrick’s ex-partner has other plans for them.”

“Who paid you to supply the guns in the first place?”

“It was a deal worked out between our government and the Congo’s. Most of the money came from the CIA; the rest was going to come from selling the blood diamonds we were given in exchange for the arms.”

“The diamonds you gave to Moses Ndebele for his help?”

“You got it. Hey, I guess the story wasn’t so long after all,” Juan quipped.

“And you make a living doing this?” she asked and then answered her own question. “Of course you do.

I saw the clothes in Linda’s closet. It’s like Rodeo Drive in there.”

“Chairman, can I talk to you privately?” Linda asked.

Juan didn’t like the tone in her voice. He got up from his chair and offered it to Sloane with a flourish.

“The ship’s yours.” He guided Linda to the far corner of the op center. “What’s up?”

“I was going over my interrogation notes and, while I’m not positive, I think Susan Donleavy withheld something.”

“Something?”

“Not about what Singer’s attempting here. I got everything out of her about this that I could. It’s something else. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“It’s about the timing of this whole operation,” Juan stated.

“It could be. I don’t know. Why would you say that?”

“It kept me up for most of the night,” he admitted. He laid out his concern. “Singer’s had this in motion for years, with the generators and the heaters, and suddenly he’s striking at an oil facility in order to release a couple million tons of toxic sludge. Why? Why now? He’s expecting hurricanes to carry the vapors across the Atlantic but he can’t predict when and where a storm will form.”

“Do you think maybe he can?”

“What I think is thathe thinks he can.”

“But that’s impossible. At least with any degree of accuracy. Hurricanes grow randomly. Some never get stronger than a tropical depression and simply blow themselves out at sea.”

“Exactly, and that wouldn’t work for his grand demonstration.”

“You think he knows there’s a major storm coming and that it will carry the oil vapors across the ocean?”

“I’ll do you one better,” Juan said. “I think he knows the storm’s track will slam it into the United States.”

“How could he know that?”

Juan brushed a hand through his crew cut. It was the only outward sign of his frustration. “That’s what kept me awake. I know it’s not possible for him to predict a hurricane, much less its path, but Singer’s actions can only lead us to that conclusion. Even without us here Makambo’s men will eventually be overrun and the oil shut off. So Singer can’t guarantee the fumes would drift far enough and remain airborne long enough to be sucked into a forming hurricane, or that if they do that the storm wouldn’t dissipate on its own. Not unless there’s another element to all this we don’t know about.”

“I can try again with Susan,” Linda offered. “I ended the interrogation after I learned what I needed to know about the attack on the oil terminal.”

Juan regarded her with pride. She was giving up even more of her soul. And as much as he wanted to protect her from the toll questioning Susan Donleavy had on her, he knew that she would have to do it again.

“There’s something there,” he said. “And I know you can find it.”

“I’ll do my best.” Linda turned to go.

“Keep me posted.”

TEN miles north of where Tiny Gunderson sat in his plane at the Cabinda airport with a hundred eager soldiers, Daniel Singer was talking with General Samuel Makambo of the Congolese Army of Revolution. Dawn was two hours away and the jungle was finally quieting as the nocturnal insects and animals bedded down for the day. Though, with the glare of so many oil rigs burning off natural gas both offshore and along the coastline, it was a wonder how the creatures maintained their circadian rhythms.

Around them in the lean-to were the most senior soldiers Makambo was willing to sacrifice for this mission. Leading the four-hundred-man expeditionary force was Colonel Raif Abala. He was here for two reasons: punishment for the debacle on the Congo River when he let the arms merchants get away with the diamonds, and because Makambo suspected the colonel was skimming stones from their blood diamond trade. He wouldn’t be too put out if Abala didn’t return.

The rebels had been hiding in plain sight near the squatters’ camps that had sprung up around the facility belonging to the oil giant Petromax. They wore regular, albeit ragged, clothing and acted as though they were here seeking employment. Their weapons and outboard boats had been easily concealed in the mangroves, with guards posted nearby to dissuade fishermen or people looking for bush meat to stray too close.

“Colonel,” Makambo said, “you know your duty.”

With his sheer size, Samuel Makambo was a commanding presence. And while what had once been battle-hardened muscle was slowly jelling into fat, he still possessed incredible strength. He favored mirrored sunglasses like his mentor, Idi Amin, and carried a swagger stick called asjambok made of plaited hippo hide. The pistols in his twin holsters were custom-made by Beretta; their gold inlays alone were worth a small fortune.

“Yes, sir,” Abala replied at once. “A hundred men will use the boats to launch attacks on the offshore loading terminal and the rigs themselves while the bulk of my force will concentrate on securing the compound.”

“It’s essential that you take control of the generating station as well as the pump control rooms,” Dan Singer, the architect of the attack, said. “And they must not be damaged.”

“The attack on those two parts of the terminal will be carried out by my best men. They will take them as soon as we break through the perimeter fences.”

“And your men are clear on how to work the controls?” Singer demanded.

“Many of them were employed at this very facility until our government forbade members of our tribe from working in Congo’s oil industry,” Abala said. “As soon as the tanker that’s currently loading has been decoupled from the terminal they know to turn the pumps on full force and dump the oil into the sea.”

“And on the rigs?”

“They will destroy the undersea pipes that send crude to the storage tanks onshore.”

Singer wished they could blow out the sides of the massive storage tanks, but they were situated in an earthen redoubt that would keep the oil contained. For the oil to properly evaporate he needed it spread over as large an area as possible. He turned to Makambo. “For every hour they hold the terminal and oil’s pouring into the sea, one million dollars will be automatically transferred into your Swiss bank account.”

“That money will go a long way to funding my revolution and improving the quality of life of our people,”

the guerilla leader said with a straight face. Singer knew the lion’s share of the cash would remain in Makambo’s account. “I made this bargain and call upon our soldiers to fight for the greater good of us all.”

When searching for his mercenary force Singer had thoroughly investigated Makambo and his Congolese Army of Revolution. They were nothing more than savage butchers who used torture and the intimidation of defenseless civilians to keep themselves supplied. While there was a tribal element to the conflict, human rights groups estimated that the CAR had killed more of their own people than the government they opposed. Makambo was just another example of the despotic nature of African politics.

“Very well,” Singer said. “Then it’s time for me to leave.”

He had planned on leaving Cabinda a day before the attack, but he’d remained as long as he dared, hoping against hope that he’d get word from Nina Visser. She and the others hadn’t been at the rendezvous site when the plane arrived, although tire tracks next to the runway indicated someone had been there recently. The pilot managed to follow them from the air, but only for only a couple of miles.

The relentless wind had scoured the desert floor. He’d circled the area until he had just enough fuel to return to Windhoek, failing to find any sign of them.

Singer had ordered him back to Cabinda so they could fly to the port city of Nouakchott, Mauritania, where the aged hundred-thousand-ton tanker he’d secretly purchased from a Libyan company waited.

She was named theGulf of Sidra and had spent her career plying the Mediterranean, ferrying Libyan oil to Yugoslavia and Albania.

When he’d toured her with Susan Donleavy she said the vessel’s tanks would make perfect incubators for her organic flocculent. The marine engineering firm Singer hired to inspect the ship signed off on her hull being able to withstand a sustained thermal load of a hundred and forty degrees, although they said in their report they were unaware of any oil terminals in the world where crude retained that much of the earth’s heat. Singer had closed the deal, obtained a Liberian registration for the ship, by far the easiest to get in the world, and hadn’t bothered to change her name.

Susan had then overseen the initial seeding of her heat-generating goo and had checked in on it from time to time before her “abduction.” Her reports showed that everything was working perfectly, so Singer knew she didn’t need to be there when he released it. Still, something could come up that might require her expertise. The loss of Nina and her group was of little concern, he just wished Susan was with him. The flocculent had been her brainchild and when she’d contacted him about her discovery and its potential application she had wanted to be a part of the final act.

And then there was Merrick. Singer had so wanted to see his smug face collapse when he witnessed the creation of the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the United States and realized he and polluters like him were at fault. Singer had told Merrick of his plan, so he was left with the hope his former partner was still alive and would know the truth about what was transpiring.

Because of the specialized nature of running a supertanker, he couldn’t rely on a bunch of long-haired environmentalists, so he’d been forced to hire a professional crew, men whose silence could be bought.

The captain was a Greek alcoholic who’d lost his master’s license after running a tanker aground in the Persian Gulf. The chief engineer was another Greek who couldn’t stay away from the bottle. He hadn’t worked since a steam pipe explosion in an engine room had killed four of his assistants. A board of inquiry cleared him, but rumors of negligence ruined his career.

Those two made the rest of the crew look like saints.

“You’ll make your attack at dawn?” Singer asked.

“Yes. You have more than enough time to get to your plane,” Makambo said with a hint of derision. Not that he was going to be here for the fight. He had a fast boat waiting to whisk him down the coast and back up the Congo River.

Singer let his tone pass. He stood. “Remember, every hour is a million dollars. If your men can hold off the security forces and Angola’s police when they get organized for forty-eight hours I’ll throw in a five-million-dollar bonus.” He was looking at Abala. “And another five for you, colonel.”

“Then, cry havoc,” Makambo said using his favorite quote, “and let slip the dogs of war.”

26

JUANstood on the bridge wing and watched the old school buses crawl across the causeway that led to Cabinda’s only pier, each painted in garish colors and belching oily exhaust as their old engines labored.

They threaded their way around a string of shipping containers and some donated farm equipment that had just been unloaded from a Russian freighter berthed ahead of theOregon .

Because his ship was pumped dry of ballast in order to reach the relatively shallow anchorage, he had a good view of the city and the hills beyond. With dawn just breaking he noted that little of Angola’s oil wealth had been spent in the city nearest the fields.

Down on the quay Max Hanley and Franklin Lincoln waited with a Customs official. Both were dressed like a couple of wharf rats in keeping with theOregon ’s decrepit appearance. Tiny Gunderson’s bush pilot friend was with them, too, to make sure everything went smoothly, as well as Mafana, Ndebele’s old sergeant. The Customs man had already given a briefcase to his wife, who’d come down to the docks for the specific reason of taking the bribe money back home with her.

The elevator from the op center suddenly rose up from the bridge floor. Linda Ross didn’t wait until it had come even with the deck before jumping off and rushing toward Cabrillo.

“Juan, you don’t have your phone on,” she said hotly. “The attack’s started. Hali’s intercepting calls from the Petromax facility to their headquarters in Delaware. They estimate at least four hundred armed men have stormed the gates. And the platforms are reporting a large number of small boats are heading their way. Security is being completely overrun.”

He had hoped and prayed that they’d have a day at least to work with Moses Ndebele’s troops, but somehow he’d known he wasn’t going to get it. He would have to trust that time hadn’t dulled the skills they’d honed in their bitter civil war nearly three decades ago.

Cabrillo cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted Max’s name. When Hanley glanced up Juan made a motion with his arm to hurry things along. Max said something to Mafana just as the first of the buses screeched to a halt at the foot of the gangplank. The side door opened and a string of men emerged. The first went to give Mafana a congratulatory hug for rescuing Moses Ndebele, but the African rebel must have told him to get aboard quickly. The men started up to the main deck as the other buses pulled alongside the ship.

Juan activated his phone and dialed down to the hangar where he knew George “Gomez” Adams would be with his chopper. The pilot answered on the second ring.

“Fly By Night Airlines.”

“George, Juan.”

“What’s up, Chairman?”

“Singer’s men have launched their attack. As soon as we clear the harbor I want to send up one of our UAVs.” The unmanned aerial vehicles were essentially commercial model airplanes outfitted with miniature cameras and infrared detectors.

“I’ll get it prepped,” Adams said. “But I can’t fly both if you need the chopper.”

“Tiny’s coming aboard with Ndebele’s men. He’ll fly it. I just want you to get it ready.”

“I’m on it.”

Cabrillo glanced over the rail again. Two lines of men were marching up the gangway. None of them were overweight, which didn’t surprise him since they lived in a refugee camp, but there were a few giants among them. He saw more gray hair than he had hoped, but the former freedom fighters looked capable. These weren’t bowed old men, but lean, hungry soldiers who knew their duty.

He called Eddie Seng to tell him to meet the new arrivals, but his Shore Operations Director was already at the head of the gangway directing the soldiers to one of the ship’s holds where Moses Ndebele was waiting to address them. It was there that they would be outfitted with assault rifles, ammunition, and other gear.

Pressed by the urgency of the attack being under way, Juan’s people seemed to have found new heights of efficiency. He expected no less.

Eric Stone had been watching the procession over the closed circuit television system from the op center; as soon as Max and Linc followed the last soldier up the gangplank it immediately began to rise.

Juan looked up to see a dense cloud of smoke boil from theOregon ’s funnel. The busted looking intercom mounted just inside the bridge wing door chimed.

“We’re ready,” Eric said when Juan answered. He looked down the length of the ship where a stevedore was waiting by the aft line. He threw the man a signal and he heaved the heavy rope off the bollard and let it slide into the water. A capstan immediately started reeling it into the ship. Juan repeated the motion to the longshoremen waiting near the bows. Before he could tell Stone they were free he saw water boil between theOregon and the dock as the athwartship thrusters came online. When they cleared the stern of the Russian freighter Eric powered up the magnetohydrodynamics, keeping the speed down so her forward momentum wouldn’t cause the hull to squat, or settle deeper in the water. It was only when they were a mile from the shallow harbor that he started pouring on the power.

Juan waited on the flying bridge for another couple of moments, knowing it would be his last seconds of peace until the mission was over. The slide of dread he’d felt when Linda told him the attack had begun was giving way to a new sensation, one he knew too well. It was the first feeling of adrenaline being pumped into his body. It was almost as though he could detect each time his adrenal glands secreted a dose into his bloodstream.

His stump was still sore, but he no longer felt it. His back still ached, but it no longer bothered him. He no longer missed the sleep he hadn’t gotten. His mind became focused on the task at hand and his body responded, willing to do whatever he asked of it.

He turned to Linda. “Ready?”

“Aye.”

On the elevator down to the op center he asked her about Susan Donleavy.

“I had planned on talking to her today, but, well…”

“No problem,” Juan said. The elevator doors whisked open. “Hali? What’s the latest?”

“Petromax is trying to reach the provisional authorities to tell them about the attack, but so far the government hasn’t responded. Nothing’s happening in the workers’ compound. The assault is focused solely on the terminal and the offshore rigs. It seems two platforms are under terrorist control while two more are trying to defend themselves using firefighting water cannons. One of the rig’s tool pushers radioed that he’s lost a couple of men to small arms fire and that he doesn’t think they can hold out much longer.”

“Eric, what’s our ETA?”

“An hour.”

“Murph, weapons status?”

Mark Murphy craned around to look at Juan. “We’re loaded for bear, Chairman.”

“Okay, good. Oh, and guys, nice job finding the radio tagged guns. God knows how much worse things would get if we’d been floundering around the Congo River.”

Cabrillo turned to head for his cabin and noted Chuck “Tiny” Gunderson seated at a work station at the back of the room. In front of him was a computer monitor. On-screen was an image of George Adams cleaning the lens of the camera mounted in the nose of the aerial drone.

“Looks good,” Tiny said into his mike. He moved his hands over the computer keyboard. “Step back; I’m firing the engine now.”

The camera began to vibrate as the plane’s little motor caught.

“Okay, green across the board. Up, up, and away.”

The image began to move as the plane sped down a launch ramp, past theOregon ’s forward derricks and then over the railing. Tiny brought its nose down with a joystick, exchanging altitude for speed and then eased back on the stick to send it into the sky.

Juan went to his cabin to get ready. Before changing into his newly refurbished combat leg and dark fatigues, he turned on his computer to get the live feed from the UAV’s cameras. He kept one eye on the monitor as he readied his arsenal of weapons.

The four-foot-long airplane was at about a thousand feet and flying over the large peninsula that the Oregon had to go around in order to reach the Petromax oil terminal. A more powerful transmitter aboard had allowed them to expand the drone’s range from fifteen miles up to forty so it no longer had to stay so close to the ship. It flashed over farmland and jungle and finally the area of mangrove swamps that effectively cut off the port from the rest of Cabinda save for a single road.

Tiny dropped the plane down so it was five hundred feet off the haul road. A few miles from the entrance to the terminal a line of trucks sat idle. Juan guessed why, and in a moment the camera revealed the road had been blocked by felled trees. Because the ground just off the road was so soft the big tanker trucks couldn’t turn around. It would take giant earthmovers or a week of chain-sawing to remove the obstacle. If the Angolan government did send troops they would have to abandon any fighting vehicles well short of their target.

Having studied satellite pictures of the remote port, Cabrillo had anticipated this move because it was exactly what he would have done had he been in charge of the assault.

He watched as Tiny made the model plane gain altitude again as it neared the terminal. From a thousand feet everything looked normal at first. The two-hundred-acre facility sprawled along the coast, with a massive tank farm at its southernmost point and a separate compound for workers’ dormitories and recreational facilities to the north. Between them were miles of pipes in a hundred different sizes twisting and bending together in a maze only its designers could understand. There were warehouses as large as anything Cabrillo had ever seen, as well as a harbor for the tenders and workboats that took personnel to and from the offshore rigs. Shooting off from the facility was a mile-long causeway that led to the loading berths for the supertankers that took the crude to markets all over the globe. A thousand-foot tanker was tied to one, her tanks empty if Juan were to judge by the amount of red antifouling paint he could see above her waterline.

He spotted a large building constructed on an specially hardened pad near one of the terminal’s tallest vent towers. Juan knew from the research his people had done there were three General Electric jet engines inside the structure that provided electricity to the whole instillation. High-tension power lines ran from it to every corner of the port.

Three miles off the coast sat a string of dozens of oil rigs running northward like a man-made archipelago, each connected back to the port by undersea pipelines. Though not as large as rigs Juan had seen in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, each was at least two hundred feet tall, their superstructures held above the waves on massive support piers.

It all appeared normal except when he started looking more carefully. Some of the flames he saw weren’t from natural gas being intentionally burned off. Several trucks had been set ablaze, and more than one building was wreathed in sooty smoke. The tiny stick figures lying randomly around the yard were the corpses of workers and members of the security force who’d been gunned down by Makambo’s soldiers. What Juan first took to be shadows around them were actually pools of blood.

Tiny Gunderson then swept the drone over the shoreline and out along the causeway. The pipes that fed the floating dock looked as big around as railcars. Juan cursed when he saw the men swarming around the loading gantries. They had removed them from the tanker and now crude oil was being dumped into the sea in four thick streams. The spill already surrounded the pier and was spreading by the second.

One of the men must have seen the drone because suddenly several of them looked up. Some pointed with their arms while others opened fire at the little plane.

The chance of hitting the UAV was remote, but Tiny juked the aircraft and headed for the nearest offshore platform. From a half mile away Juan could see it was ringed with oil. The crude weighed enough to crush the waves that tried to pass under it. All the ocean could do was to make the slick undulate like a lazy ripple of black silk. The prevailing current was already stretching the spill northward even as the slick grew in size from the oil gushing off the rig in a black rain. When the drone approached the second platform under the terrorists’ control, Cabrillo saw that this slick was even larger than the first.

Although it was impossible, Juan felt like he could smell the sharp chemical stench of the crude as it poured into the sea. It scalded the back of his throat and made his eyes water. Then he realized that what he was sensing was his own revulsion to the willful act of environmental destruction and the mindless waste of human life. Singer’s demonstration was the greatest act of ecoterrorism in history, and as much as he professed wanting to save the planet his actions would see the earth pay in a heavy coin.

And if the Corporation failed, the effects could spread half a world away.

He gathered up his gear and headed for the hold. When he arrived, he saw that the room was crowded with more than a hundred men, a few of them his own, the rest belonging to Moses Ndebele. The Africans had already been issued weapons and ammunition as well as clothing to make up for anything they lacked, sturdy boots mostly. They all sat on the floor and listened raptly as their leader addressed them from a dais made of pallets. His foot was swathed in surgical gauze and a pair of crutches rested against the bulkhead behind him. Juan didn’t enter the hold, but rather leaned on the doorjamb and listened. He couldn’t understand the language but it didn’t matter. He could feel the passion in Ndebele’s words and how they affected his followers. It was palpable. He spoke clearly, his eyes sweeping the room, giving each man a moment’s attention before moving on. When they settled on Juan, he felt a tug in his chest as if Ndebele had touched his heart. Juan nodded and Moses returned the gesture.

When he finished his speech the men gave him a thunderous applause that made the hold echo. A full two minutes passed before the cheering started to subside.

“Captain Cabrillo,” Moses called over the din. The men quieted instantly. “I told my people that to fight at your side is to fight at mine. That you and I are now brothers because of what you did for me. I told them you have the strength of a bull elephant, the cunning of a leopard, and the fierceness of a lion. I said that even though today we fight in a different land, this is the day we start to take back our country.”

“I couldn’t have said it any better,” Juan replied. He wondered if he should address the men but he could see in their eyes, in the way they held themselves, that nothing he could say would inspire them more than Moses’ words. He said simply, “I just want to thank you all for making my fight yours. You honor me and you honor your homeland.”

He caught Eddie Seng’s attention to get him to come over. “Do you have the duty roster figured out?”

“I have it here.” He tapped an electronic clipboard. “Mafana helped me sort through the men before their arrival so I have a pretty good idea of their skills. I also have seat assignments for all the vessels involved in the assault.”

“Any last refinements to the plan we came up with?”

“Nothing, Chairman.”

“Okay, then. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Juan would be leading the assault on one of the oil platforms that had already been taken over and Eddie would head up the other, so both men gathered up the handful of Zimbabweans coming with them and left the hold for the moon pool. Others would be using the ship’s lifeboat and her fleet of other watercraft to hit the loading pier and the facility itself in a coordinated attack with theOregon , under Max’s command, acting as fire support.

On their way down Max called from the op center. “Just want you to know we’ll be in position to launch the submersibles in another ten minutes.”

Juan checked his watch. Eric had gotten them here quicker than promised. “Once we clear the doors it’ll take us another twenty to get to the rigs, so don’t approach the coast until we call.”

“I was paying attention at last night’s briefing,” Max said archly. “Just before you launch your counterattack we’ll make a dash for the terminal and send out the lifeboat. We’ll take out any of the terrorists hitting the other two rigs, then move into position off the dock. When we’re close enough and can cover for them, Ski and Linc will head out in the SEAL assault boat to cover the retaking of the loading pier.”

“Let’s just hope that Linda’s right and Makambo’s men aren’t willing to die to hold the terminal.

Hopefully if we hit them hard enough and fast enough they will surrender quickly.”

“And if she’s wrong and these guys really believe in their mission?”

“Then this is going to be a long, bloody day.”

With the ship still under way, the hull doors under the moon pool remained closed, but the metal grating over the hole had been removed and the larger of theOregon ’s two submersibles, the sixty-five-foot Nomad 1000, was hanging above the opening on its lifting cradle. Capable of diving to more than a thousand feet, the Nomad sported a cluster of lights around its blunt nose and a manipulator arm as flexible and delicate as a human’s but capable of ripping steel. The smaller Discovery 1000 was suspended above the Nomad and would be launched as soon as its big sister was away.

Linda would accompany Juan while Jerry Pulaski was ready to mount up with Eddie. The shore attack would be commanded by Franklin Lincoln and Mike Trono, who were already getting their forces together in the lifeboat as well as in the amidships boat garage. Technicians had gone over the submersibles, so there was nothing for Juan to do but give the hull a slap for luck and mount the ladder a crewman held steady. The sub swayed slightly as he reached the top. He threw Eddie a quick salute and dropped through the hatch.

Juan climbed down into the sub and made his way to the cockpit, a claustrophobic pair of reclined seats surrounded by dozens of computer screens, control panels, and a trio of small portholes. Though she was bigger than the Discovery, the interior of the Nomad was actually smaller because of her hull thickness, the massive batteries she carried to give her a sixty-hour range, and the fact she was outfitted with a saturation dive chamber. Juan’s crew had stripped out enough gear to increase her passenger load from six to eight, the same number as the Disco could carry. It would be a small force to attack the rigs and only the cream of Ndebele’s fighters would accompany the two subs.

Linda crawled in after him, but didn’t take her seat. She showed the men how to strap themselves in while Juan went through the predive checklist.

Cabrillo jacked a pair of lightweight headphones into the communications panel. “Nomad toOregon .

This is a comm test. How do you read?”

“Five by five, Nomad,” Hali answered immediately. “We’re nearly finished decelerating, Juan. Moon pool doors can be opened in about a minute.”

“Roger.”

He looked over his shoulder as Linda crawled into her seat, setting her silenced machine pistol next to Juan’s. “Everybody set back there?” A couple of the men didn’t look too keen on being confined, especially when the hatch was dogged tight, but they all managed to mirror his thumbs-up. “Mafana? You okay?”

Though injured slightly during Moses’ rescue, the former sergeant had insisted on accompanying Cabrillo. “I now have a better understanding of the Bible.” Juan’s face showed his confusion so Mafana added, “Jonah and the whale.”

“It’ll be a short ride and we won’t be more than fifty or so feet underwater.”

A series of strobe lights mounted throughout the three-deck-high room began to flash and a horn would be sounding, although Juan couldn’t hear it from inside the minisub. He looked down through the porthole as the large doors at the very keel of the ship began to open. Water sluiced across the metal as the sea was carefully allowed to enter the ship, quickly filling the moon pool to theOregon ’s waterline.

With a mechanical clank, the cradle supporting the submarine began to lower it into the sea. The water climbed over the portholes and the Nomad’s interior grew noticeably darker, lit now only by the computer screens and a low-voltage system in the crew’s area. Once the sub was floating free the cradle decoupled.

“You’re free,” a crewman called over Juan’s headset.

“Affirmative.” Juan hit the ballast controls to flood the tanks and in seconds the minisub submerged down through the moon pool and out into open ocean. “Nomad’s away. You can launch the Disco.”

He powered up the motors, listening to the mechanical whine as the props bit in, and set the computer to level them out at fifty feet, deep enough that an observer on the surface wouldn’t see the matte-black hull cruising by. TheOregon ’s master computer had already calculated the course and downloaded it to the minisub, so there was nothing for Juan to do but enjoy the ride.

Five minutes later Eddie announced they had successfully launched the Discovery and they were en route to the second oil rig.

Capable of only ten knots, the ride toward the coast seemed to take forever, though Juan knew what was frustrating him was that every minute that elapsed meant more oil was being pumped into the sea. If he thought it would make a difference he would have gotten out and pushed.

“Oregon, this is the Disco,” Eddie called over the acoustical link. “We’ve arrived at the rig and are hovering just below the surface. The oil slick must be three miles across by now.”

“Disco, this is the Nomad,” Juan said. “Computer puts us under our platform in three minutes.” He knew by how dark the ocean had become that his minisub was traveling under an identical oil slick and had been for some time.

The Nomad’s GPS system guided the sub between two of the oil rig’s tall support legs and brought the craft to a halt mere feet from a third column, one they’d identified from the UAV overflight as having a ladder that went up to the top of the platform.

“Houston, the Nomad has landed.”

“Roger that, Nomad,” Hali replied. “Give us one minute so Tiny can double-check that you don’t have company down there and you’re free to surface and pop the hatches.”

Juan connected his headset back to his personal radio, levered himself out of the padded seat, and stepped carefully to the hatch, his MP-5 slung over his shoulder. Mafana and his men undid their lap belts.

“Juan,” Linda called down the length of the vessel. “Hali says we’re clear. There isn’t anyone down here, but Tiny estimates there are at least thirty terrorists milling around the platform.”

“Not for long,” he muttered, then ordered Linda to gently blow the ballast tanks.

Like a creature from a horror movie, the Nomad’s broad back slowly emerged through the reeking mat of crude pooled under the oil platform. It oozed off the hull as more of the sub broached the surface, but was sticky enough to cling to anything protruding off the craft. Clots of oil stuck to the hatch coaming and rudder.

“Masks,” Juan said and fitted a surgical mask over his nose and mouth. Julia had researched the toxic crude and its effects on the human body, and as long as they kept their exposure down to a couple of hours and remained in well-ventilated areas there was no need to wear more cumbersome gas masks.

He hit the button to open the hatch and recoiled at the harsh chemical smell that assaulted his senses.

Being this close to the slick made his eyes water.

He climbed out of the minisub and clipped a line to the eyehole welded to the hull. There was a barnacle-encrusted platform ringing the nearby support leg and he leapt over to it, tying off the line to the integrated ladder. Set equidistant between the four towering legs, the riser pipe dropped down off the platform and into the ocean. Inside it would be the drill string for when the rig was exploring for oil and pipes to allow oil to flow back up to be pumped to shore. Unlike some other fields, the crude was under enough pressure that it didn’t need to be coaxed out of the earth. It gushed freely. And now that the terrorists had either destroyed pipeworks on the platform or opened some valves, it came tumbling back down in a waterfall of shimmering obsidian that twisted and scintillated in the clear morning sunlight. The sound of it striking the slick was like thunder.

Juan tore his eyes away from the mesmerizing sight and glanced out to sea as the men started emerging from the Nomad. TheOregon was driving toward the coastline. Though she was an ugly industrial ship, more function than form, with a deck resembling a denuded forest of cranes and her hull a patchwork of mismatched paint, she had never looked better to him. Max was headed for the third platform, where Petromax employees were still holding off the terrorists but were reporting that they were getting ready to abandon the rig in her lifeboats. The men defending the fourth platform were calling over the airwaves that they would never give up.

After sealing the minisub’s hatch, Linda was the last to jump from the Nomad to the platform. “Let’s go,” she shouted over the tumbling oil. “The air down here is going to play havoc with my skin. I can already feel oil clogging my pores.” She then added with a saucy grin, “You can best believe the Corporation is going to pay for whatever spa I go to.”

27

WHENtheOregon emerged over the horizon none of the rebels in the swift outboard boats dancing around the legs of the third platform paid it any attention. Their sole focus was clambering up the ladder to take over the rig. So far their efforts had been thwarted by the workers above training water cannons down the column and blowing the terrorists back into the sea. But it wasn’t so one-sided. The men in the boats poured a constant stream of fire up the forty-foot leg; occasionally they hit their marks and a Petromax employee would go down. Sometimes they merely fell to the deck but occasionally one would tumble off the platform and slam into the water. The attackers would cheer. It was a war of attrition between squirt guns and automatic rifles with an outcome that was inevitable.

Seated at the weapons station in the op center, Mark Murphy simultaneously watched a half dozen camera feeds as well as the status boards for theOregon ’s integrated arsenal. Eric Stone sat in the next station over, one hand on the joystick that controlled the rudder and directional pump jets, the other resting lightly on the throttles.

“Mr. Stone, lay us in five hundred yards off the platform,” Max said from the master’s chair. “And clear the bow to bring the Gatling to bear. Wepps, open the hull plates covering the Gatling’s redoubt and prepare to fire on my order.”

Tiny Gunderson flew the UAV in a loose circle around the rig so Mark could pick his targets. Murph designated the four boats swarming under the rig as Tangos One through Four and once they were entered into the computer the ship’s electronic brain kept them under constant surveillance. High in the bow, the six-barreled GE M61A1 spun up, its rotating barrels dipping and turning as the computer compensated for theOregon ’s motion through the water, the waves that gently shook her hull, and the speed of the distant outboard.

“Nomad toOregon , we’ve reached the platform.” Juan’s voice filled the room from hidden speakers.

“About time, Nomad,” Max teased. “Discovery’s been waiting for two minutes.”

“We stopped for coffee and Danish on the way up. Are you in position?”

“Just waiting for your word and we’ll launch the lifeboat. Then it’s go time.”

“We’re ready.”

Max changed channels on his communication console. “Op center to lifeboat. Mike, you there?”

“We’re ready,” Trono replied. His voice had the emotionless timbre of total concentration.

“Lifeboat away and good luck.”

Out on deck and hidden from the oil platform by the ship’s hull, the lifeboat carrying sixty freedom fighters practically sitting on one another’s laps was lifted off its cradle and swung over the rail. The davits slowly lowered the boat to the sea and as soon as it had settled Mike had the lines released and the engine spooled up.

When Trono had left the Air Force after six years as a para-rescue jumper, with five successful downed pilot rescues to his credit, he’d done a stint as a professional power boat racer. The thrill of flying across the water at more than a hundred miles an hour had tempered some of his adrenaline addiction, but he had jumped at the chance to join the Corporation, bringing with him the experience of being one of the elite boat drivers in the world.

He had the lifeboat on plane in no time. Then he extended the foils and poured on the power. The ugly looking craft skimmed across the water like a flying fish, keeping well out of any terrorist’s range as he waited for the order to turn east and make landfall near the Petromax terminal’s tank farm. From there he’d lead the counterattack to wrest control back from Makambo’s men.

There was an unexpected explosion on the rig theOregon had targeted. Tiny zoomed in with the camera to show a pair of rebels in one of the aluminum outboards reloading a rocket launcher. Flames and dense smoke coiled from a catwalk where moments before two oil employees had been shooting hundreds of gallons of seawater at the attackers. The men were gone and the water cannon was a twisted ruin.

“I’m getting another call from the rig to Petromax headquarters in Delaware,” Hali said, holding up a finger as he listened. “They’re abandoning the platform.”

“No they’re not,” Max said savagely. “Wepps?”

“I got ’em.”

Mark loosened the safeties on the Gatling and gave the computer permission to fire. Capable of throwing a stream of 20-mm depleted uranium slugs at six thousand rounds per minute, Murph had dialed back the barrels’ rotation speed, so in the two seconds that ammunition blurred through the loading feeds, only eighty rounds erupted from the weapon with a sound like an industrial buzz saw.

Under the platform the cheering terrorists never knew what hit them. One moment the four boats jinked and juked and the next two of them had vanished in a pall of shredded aluminum and vaporized flesh.

The Gatling had destroyed Tangos Two and Four. The driver of Tango One must have seen where the fire had originated because he shot his boat around the far side of one of the columns and didn’t reemerge into theOregon ’s sights. The computer waited for the boat a moment longer than Murph would have liked, so as he flipped a toggle to override the Gatling’s automatic fire controls he made a mental note to check the system’s programming.

On his main flat panel display a reticle appeared where the barrel was currently aiming, the curved gray side of the support leg. He tracked back the camera’s zoom and found the fourth outboard speeding off for the next oil rig. A tiny movement of a joystick centered the sight on the fleeing craft and a second’s long touch of the trigger blew it to oblivion.

He reset the weapon to automatic and the multibarrel gun pivoted back to the platform for the last boat.

A sliver of the outboard’s stern appeared from around the column, a target that was less than a square foot. Even at five hundred yards from an unstable ship it was more than enough. The Gatling shrieked again. The outboard’s motor exploded, blowing the boat out of the water, sending its eight occupants flying in every direction. Some were launched into the sea, others were slammed into the column, and two of them seemed to have simply vanished in the blast.

“Platform three secure,” Mark said, exhaling a long breath.

“Helm, get us to the last rig under attack,” Max grunted, knowing the two submersible teams wouldn’t have it so easy.

CABRILLO was thinking the exact same thing as he crouched on an exposed stairwell hanging over the side of the platform. Below him the oil slick pulsed like a living thing even as it killed the surrounding ocean. It had stretched in an inky bloom as far as he could see and had probably already reached the concrete breakwater running along the front of the Petromax terminal. With a freshening wind out of the south the smell wasn’t as bad as it had been down below, but the petrochemical taint still hung in the air.

Unlike the mammoth oil rigs of the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico that could house hundreds of workers for months at a time and stood taller than many skyscrapers, this platform was no more than four hundred feet square, dominated by the spidery drill tower and a brightly painted mobile crane used to raise and lower supplies from tenders.

There were several metal-sided buildings clinging to the deck and cantilevered over the edges of the structure. One would be a control center; the others housed machinery to regulate the flow of crude from the well head on the sea floor. The deck was also crisscrossed with a maze of pipes and littered with equipment—broken auger bits, lengths of drill string, and a couple of small cargo containers for storage.

Though only a few years old, the platform was streaked with grime and showed signs of neglect. He thought it was a good sign that he didn’t see any bodies of dead workers.

At the base of the drill tower was an ever-erupting volcano of oil gushing from deep within the earth. The ebony fountain reached a height of fifteen feet before collapsing under its own weight, only to be replenished with fresh crude. The flow poured through openings around the rotary table and drained into the Atlantic. With that much oil bursting up the riser it was impossible to tell if the pipes had been permanently sabotaged or if the safety valves had been cracked open.

Cabrillo was ever mindful that a stray spark could ignite the oil. The resulting explosion would probably level trees along the coast.

When he and his team had first arrived at the top of the platform the terrorists had been milling around.

A few peered disinterestedly over the sides of the structure just to make sure no one was approaching, but on the whole they seemed certain they had the situation well in hand.

It wasn’t until theOregon approached the third rig and blew away their comrades like so much chaff that they found their discipline once again. The leader of the thirty-man contingent organized lookouts to watch for any approaching ships and had others prep their RPGs in case the freighter came within range.

Juan had hidden himself and his people in a chain locker when a four-man patrol circled the catwalk ringing the lower of the platform’s two decks.

Now that theOregon was moving farther down the string of offshore rigs, the terrorists seemed to be losing their vigilance somewhat. The lookouts’ attention wandered and men lined the far rail, watching to see what effects the ship would have on their compatriots attacking the final platform. Juan had recalled that many of Makambo’s forces were little more than teenagers, and he doubted the rebel general would supply Daniel Singer with his best troops no matter what he was being paid. He wouldn’t let himself dwell on how poverty and hopelessness had brought these men here, only that they were now perpetrating a terrorist act and had to be stopped.

He tapped Mafana to take his position at the top of the stair and retreated downward to confer with Linda Ross. “This was the first rig attacked so I think they probably took it without meeting any resistance,” he whispered, though his voice couldn’t carry over the sound of the spilling oil. “It was when they hit the second rig that the crew put up a fight.”

“You think they rounded them up and locked them away?”

“I know these guys are ruthless, but it would be more practical than executing a hundred workers.”

“Want me to go find them?”

Juan nodded. “Once we take over the rig we’re going to need them to shut off the oil, and if there are no survivors on Eddie’s platform we’ll need to transport them over to work on that one, too. Take three men and scout out the interior spaces. There has to be a rec room or dining hall, something big enough to hold the entire crew.”

“I’m on it.”

Cabrillo had to smile at the sight of Linda leading three men more than twice her size through a doorway into the rig. It reminded him of Goldilocks with the three bears in tow, only Baby Bear tipped the scales at one eighty. He climbed back up the steps and lay next to Mafana. He scanned the scene once again, calculating firing angles, cover positions, and areas they could fall back to if necessary. He could feel Mafana’s eyes on him.

“You just want to charge them, don’t you?” Cabrillo asked.

“It is the best plan I have,” he admitted with a wide grin. “And it has always worked for me before.”

Juan shook his head and gave Mafana his orders. The sergeant relayed them to his men. Wordlessly, the Africans crested the stairs; Cabrillo had designated the ambush sites with the finesse of a chess master moving his pieces for the final gambit.

Though used to jungle fighting, the men moved well in the unfamiliar environs, stalking across the deck with the patience of seasoned hunters—hunters who had spent their youth chasing the most dangerous prey of all: other men. It took ten minutes for them to deploy, and Juan studied the deck again, making sure everyone was where he intended them to be. The last thing he wanted on his conscience was a friendly fire incident.

Satisfied, he launched himself up the last couple of steps and raced to the corner of a nearby container, pressing himself flat against the wall and triple-checking that his assault rifle’s safety was off. The terrorist commander was a hundred yards away and talking on a large radio, presumably with the overall leader of the attack, who was probably still onshore. Juan hefted the MP-5 to his shoulder and put the laser sight on the man’s chest, just left of center.

An instant later, the laser’s red dot was replaced with a dime-sized bullet hole. The man simply collapsed as though his bones had vanished. The silencer prevented anyone from hearing the shot, but a handful of men had seen their leader go down. It was as if the rebels were a single entity with a single mind because it seemed that everyone came alert at once. Guns were gripped tighter as men sought cover.

When one of Cabrillo’s soldiers opened up with the unsilenced AK-47 he’d been issued from the ship’s stores, thirty guns replied. Swarms of rounds crisscrossed the deck in every direction but one. Cabrillo had made sure that none of his people were close enough to the drilling derrick to cause the rebels to fire anywhere near the volatile upsurge of oil.

Six rebels were felled in the opening seconds of the attack, and Juan took out two more with a hip shot on automatic as they appeared around the container, but if anything the ferocity and intensity of the battle increased. One of his men dashed for his secondary cover position and took a bullet to the leg. He rolled flat on the hard deck ten feet from Cabrillo. Without giving it a moment’s thought, Juan laid down a wall of suppression fire, dashed into the open, and dragged the man to cover by his collar.

“Ngeyabongo,”he gasped, clutching his bloody thigh.

“You’re welcome,” Juan said, understanding the sentiment if not the word. An instant later his world turned upside down as an RPG exploded on the far side of the container.

LINDA wished the lights inside the platform were off so she could switch on her night vision goggles to give her an edge, but the utilitarian corridors were brightly lit.

The rig’s lower level was mostly machinery housed in four large rooms, but when they climbed to the upper deck they found themselves in a maze of passageways and interconnected rooms. They found several small dormitories for men who spent more than their shift on the platform as well as a suite of offices for the administrative staff.

It was slow going checking each room, but there was no other way. She could feel the press of time.

The longer it took, the longer the Chairman was fighting without almost half his force. She didn’t disagree with his tactics, but she wanted to be more involved in the fight.

She peered around another corner and saw two rebels leaning on either side of a door, their AKs slung from their shoulders. She withdrew her head quickly, her unexpected motion drawing her men’s attention. Linda pointed at her eyes, made a gesture of around the bend and held up two fingers. The sign language was nearly universal to anyone who’d fought in a war and her men nodded. She pointed at one of them and made a motion for him to get down on the floor. He shook his head, pointed at a comrade, made a gesture like firing a gun, and flashed a thumbs-up. No, he was saying, this man is a better shot.

Linda acknowledged the sniper and he got into position.

Her H&K’s laser sight cut random patterns across the ceiling as she inched closer to the corner. She carefully drew down on the weapon as she peeked around the wall again. She double-tapped the farthest guard in the chest at the same time the sniper put a single round into the closer one, the crack of his AK

masking the whisper of her silenced machine pistol.

Her entire team rushed around the corner and ran for the door. A third guard appeared around a far bend and all four of them opened up, the kinetic impact of so many bullets tossing the corpse against a bulkhead. When the firing stopped Linda could hear autofire coming from beyond the door and the screams of men in panic and pain.

She was the first to reach the door and blew off the handle with a three-round burst. She hit the door without slowing, exploding into the room, her lithe body sailing a few yards before she landed on her shoulder, letting her momentum carry her back onto her knees, the MP-5 pulled tight to her shoulder.

Alerted by the gunfire outside the mess hall two rebels were firing indiscriminatingly into the throng of terrified oilmen.

The scene was utter chaos, with men running and screaming, falling over one another in their rush to get away from the onslaught, while others went down with horrifying wounds. Linda was jostled by a pair of men making a break for the door the instant she pulled the trigger and her three rounds passed through the opening leading to the kitchen and punched a tight group of holes in a stainless-steel vent duct.

Another two workers were gunned down before she could adjust her aim and kill the first rebel with a head shot.

Her three men had pushed their way into the dining room shouting for the workers to get down as they sought the second terrorist. He had stopped firing as soon as Linda had killed his comrade and was trying to blend in with the workers as they rushed for the exit.

“No one leaves,” she shouted, her high-pitched voice almost lost in the tumult. But the sniper had heard her. He and the others moved back to block the door and no matter how the workers tried to force their way through they held fast.

Linda got to her feet, scanning faces. She’d caught the barest glimpse of the second rebel but didn’t see him now. Then there was movement to her left. The kitchen door had moved slightly on its two-way hinges. She rushed across the room, the men moving out of her way because of the gun in her hands and the murderous look in her eye.

When she reached the solid door she rammed it inward with her foot. It slammed against something solid after opening halfway then recoiled back. When there was no reaction from inside the kitchen she hunkered low and slowly eased her way inside. She could see a dishwashing station to her left and a hallway that seemed to lead to either a storage area or maybe out of the kitchen entirely, but her view of the rest of the kitchen was blocked by the door.

Just as she turned to check to the right of the door a strong hand clutched the back of her neck. She was pulled to her feet, the hot barrel of an assault rifle pressed into her kidney. The rebel spoke in his native language, panting out the words that Linda couldn’t understand but knew nevertheless. She was now his prisoner and if anyone tried to attack him he’d blow her spine out of her body before he went down.

IT had taken less than ten minutes for theOregon to reach the fourth platform and sweep the seas of the rebel boats. Only one had remained at the rig following the destruction of the first set of outboards, but Tiny Gunderson’s eye in the sky found three of them fleeing toward the tanker loading pier. Rather than let them reinforce the land-based attack, Max Hanley had ordered Murph to take them out. The range was growing extreme by the time Murph targeted the last boat so it took a five-second burst before eight of the Gatling’s rounds found their mark amid the explosions of water from shells impacting around the craft. The final outboard pinwheeled atop the waves after it had been cut nearly in two.

In a maneuver that made the hull plates moan in protest Eric had theOregon torqued around using her thrusters and drive tubes and was accelerating for the dock by the time the little boat sank.

“OregontoLiberty ,” Max radioed. Though never given official names,Liberty was what they called the primary lifeboat. The one Juan had had blown out from under him off the coast of Namibia had been nicknamedOr Death .

“This isLiberty ,” Mike Trono replied.

“We’ve secured the fourth rig and are now getting into position to cover your assault.” Approaching a well-defended dock in the unarmed lifeboat was suicide, but under the protection of theOregon ’s weapons, Cabrillo and the senior staff who’d come up with the plan were more than confident they’d land safely.

“Roger that,Oregon . I have you in sight. Looks like you need five more minutes before we can turn for shore.”

“Don’t wait for me,” Eric said from the helm, bumping the throttles even more. “I’ll be on station before you’re a mile from the beach.”

Max flicked his monitor to show the status of his beloved engines and saw Stone had them wavering just below redline. Any misgivings he’d had about damaging them when they had grounded in the Congo River faded. The old girl was giving them everything she had and more.

“We’re headed in.”

Mike had kept the hydrofoil two miles from shore, carving lazy circles until it was time to strike. He cranked the wheel eastward, aiming for the collection of huge storage tanks at the terminal’s southern edge. The UAV’s overflight had shown this to be the area of least rebel activity, but they were bound to be spotted as they approached, and men would certainly be shifted to repel the attack.

He had to steer around the oil slicks that were slowly coalescing into one massive spill. He had no way of estimating its size, but from what he could see it already looked frighteningly like Prince William Sound after theExxon Valdez holed herself on Bligh Reef.

He was standing in the rear cockpit to give himself 360-degree vision and didn’t hear the approaching UAV over the hydrofoil’s engine. Tiny buzzed him at no more than twenty feet, waggling the drone’s wings as he arrowed it in toward the seawall.

“Crazy SOB,” he muttered with a smirk and glanced at the flatscreen display that had been hastily installed the night before.

Everything looked the same as it had when the model plane made its first pass over the facility. There were no rebel soldiers around the tank farm or the power plant. It was only when Tiny guided the UAV

northward that he could see any insurgents. Some were guarding the entrance gates while others were draining a fleet of eighteen-wheeler tanker trucks. Thick ropes of oil snaked from the rear of each trailer and slithered over the seawall. Another contingent was on the floating pier getting the second set of loading gantries ready to begin pumping crude into the sea. Linc would be leading the attack there once Mike and his men were in position to back them.

Then, when they were a mile from the quay closest to the tank farm, he saw from the digital uplink that he had been spotted. Men were racing off the causeway and getting into Petromax vehicles in order to rush across the facility. They came in trucks, forklifts, even a large crane, anything their commander could get running. Others came on foot, swarming across the terminal like berserkers.

“Oregon, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“We see it,” Max replied.

Mark Murphy retracted the hull plates shielding the ship’s 40 mm Bofors automatic cannon and activated the hydraulics that moved the weapon into firing position. His computer screen automatically split into two halves, one showing the targeting camera for the Gatling, the second for the pom-pom gun.

He started designating targets as fast as he could, moving the reticle around the screen with a pair of joysticks and designating vehicles in the sight as soon as the computer told him he had a lock. The Bofors began to pound out high explosive shells and the Gatling spit a tongue of fire fifteen feet from theOregon

’s side. The weapons were seeking new targets before the first salvos struck home.

The Gatling rounds raked the side of a dump truck, the near hypervelocity slugs tearing the engine off its mount, shredding everything in the cab, and punching fist-sized holes through the inch-thick dump bed.

The force of the impacts sent the twelve-ton vehicle careening onto its right-side wheels for an instant before it tipped completely.

A pair of 40-mm rounds blew twin craters in the asphalt in front of an SUV with armed men standing on the running boards and hanging on the doors. The driver veered sharply but the left front tire dropped into one of the smoking gouges just as a third round impacted behind the right front wheel. The blast tossed the truck through the air, rebels flying from its hurtling carcass like dolls thrown by a spoiled child.

“Eric,” Murph said without looking up from his computer, “turn us side on. We’re in range to deploy the deck .30 calibers.”

Controlled from other weapons stations, each of the .30-caliber M-60s could be individually targeted.

While they were used primarily for defense against boarders the six heavy machine guns were more than capable of engaging individuals onshore. They were disguised in oil drums on deck, and on a command from Murph the lids swung free and the guns popped up, their barrels swinging down to horizontal and pivoting outward. Each gun emplacement had its own camera with low light and infrared capabilities.

Once they were deployed, Mark turned his attention back to his own weapons systems and let his gunners do their job. In moments the machine guns added their chattering tones to the symphony he was conducting.

It took another five minutes to check the headlong rush of men to the tank farm pier where Mike was bringing the hydrofoil off plane in preparation to dock. Yet rebels still managed to cross the yard in twos and threes, leaping from cover to cover when the M-60s were engaged elsewhere, and a vanload of gunmen had circled along the outer perimeter fence, using the entire terminal to hide their advance.

Murph had done his job of clearing most of Mike’s LZ, but they were still in for a fight. And until Trono and his African troops had swept the yard of rebels, Linc and Ski couldn’t attack the tanker pier and prevent the insurgents from continuing to dump four hundred tons of toxic crude per minute into the sea.

28

EDDIESeng looked at the oil gushing up from the well drilled deep below the platform and wanted to shoot the fifteen rebels who’d surrendered five minutes into the gun battle. The Petromax workers trying to staunch the flow looked puny and ineffective compared to this awesome demonstration of man’s attempt to tame nature.

He glanced again at the kneeling terrorists lined against the edge of the platform, their arms bound behind them with the flex cuffs he’d brought and electrical wire the workers had provided. None were older than twenty-five, and as his eyes swept the line none of them could meet his cold stare. The bullet-ridden bodies of the six fighters taken out in Eddie’s lightning attack had been laid together and covered with an old piece of tarp.

Only one of Eddie’s men had been injured during the minute-long assault and that was just a flesh wound in the leg from a ricochet. As soon as the remaining rebels realized the ferocity of the attack they dropped their weapons and threw up their hands. A few of them had even begun to cry. Eddie had gone below and found the rig’s crew unguarded in the mess hall and learned eight of their coworkers had been gunned down when the platform was first assaulted.

The rig’s tool pusher had been killed when the rebels swarmed the platform, so it was his second in command who was in charge of shutting off the flow. He detached himself from the men gathered around the well head and approached Eddie. His coveralls and gloves were black with oil and his ebony face was streaked with the grease.

“We can fix it,” he said in accented English. “They replaced the topside Christmas tree with a twelve-inch shunt valve. They opened that valve to let the oil come out and broke off the handle. I think they dropped the Christmas tree over the side.”

Eddie imagined a Christmas tree was what the oilman called the well cap that diverted oil to pipelines connected to shore. “How long?”

“We have another tree in the stores. It’s not as strong as the one we lost, but it will take the pressure.

Maybe three hours.”

“Then don’t waste time talking to me.”

Though it was a mile away, and the crude belching out of the well made a sound like a train roaring past, Eddie could still hear the sustained gunfire from the Chairman’s rig and knew Juan was having a much harder time of it.

FOR a stunned moment Cabrillo had no idea where he was or even who he was. It was only when the constant bark of distant automatic weapons finally cut through the ringing in his head that he remembered what was happening. He opened his eyes and nearly cried out. He hung forty feet over the bubbling mass of oil lapping against the platform’s legs and would have been blown off the rig entirely if he hadn’t gotten tangled in the safety nets encircling the upper deck. The container he’d been hiding behind bobbed on the sea of crude but there was no sign of the wounded man who’d been next to him when the RPG

detonated.

He flipped onto his back and spider-crawled across the shaky net, keeping one eye on the deck perimeter to make sure none of the rebels saw his vulnerable position. When he reached the platform he cautiously peered over the edge. Terrorists still had control of the rig and return fire from his own men was diminished. He could tell only a couple were still in the fight, and by the way they fired only single shots he knew they were low on ammunition. The rebels didn’t seem to have such a shortage and blasted away indiscriminately.

When Juan was sure no one was looking in his direction he rolled off the net and under the crawler treads of the mobile crane. He checked over his weapon and changed out the half-depleted magazine.

He didn’t have a good enough view of the battle to start sniping the rebels without risking another blast from an RPG. He scooted around and wriggled to the back of the crane, cautiously looking around for better cover.

An insurgent suddenly sprang up from behind a crate and was about to toss a grenade across the deck at where a wounded Zimbabwean cowered behind a huge valve. Juan drilled the terrorist with a single shot and a moment later the grenade went off, lifting his corpse and the mangled body of a comrade on a column of smoky flame.

Before anyone could pinpoint where the shot had originated, Juan rushed out from under the crane, running doubled over across the deck, and threw himself behind a pile of six-inch-thick drill pipes. He edged around the pipes so he could look down their lengths. The effect was disorientating, like a rendition of a fly’s prismatic eyes, but he could see one of the rebels moving across the ironworks tower a few feet from where the oil fountained from the well head.

Juan thrust the barrel of his MP-5 into a pipe and triggered off a three-round burst. Two of the bullets struck the interior of the pipe and went wild, but one hit the terrorist low in the abdomen. He staggered back and was caught in the avalanche of oil. One second he seemed to be leaning against the surging mass and the next he’d been pulled in, like he’d been absorbed, and vanished in the cascade draining down to the ocean.

Cabrillo circled back around the pile of pipes when a half dozen rebels raked it with autofire, the impacts making the steel pipes sing. He was beginning to realize the attack might fail. If Linda didn’t finish up below and add her team as reinforcements, Juan had to seriously consider calling retreat. There was nothing theOregon could do to help, not without risking setting the rig ablaze.

With so many rebels still fighting he knew that the climb down to the minisub would be suicide. They’d be picked off before they were a quarter of the way down the ladder. Juan had to think of an alternative and considered taking the platform’s lifeboat, a reinforced fiberglass escape pod that could be automatically lowered. The only problem was the lifeboat’s davits were on an isolated spot on the far side of the deck, surrounded by open space—a killing field if Juan had ever seen one.

He tapped his radio to get Linda’s frequency as another fusillade slammed into the drill string. “Linda, its Cabrillo. Forget about the workers and get your butts up here double time.” When she didn’t respond Juan repeated her name. “Where in the hell is she?”

SHE’D spent five hours a week every week for two straight years. More than five hundred hours training on the mats Eddie Seng had brought into theOregon ’s fitness center dojo. He’d learned from a master who no longer bothered with rankings because there were few people on the planet capable enough to certify him.

Hearing Juan’s voice was enough to get Linda Ross over her moment of panic and into action. She stepped out and back so quickly that the killer didn’t realize the receiver of his gun was now against her hip. Slamming her elbow into his sternum sent a wave of rancid breath across her face. She then smashed her fist between his legs, recalling Eddie’s words at this point in the oft-practiced counterattack: “If you feel his weight on your back, toss him. If not, grab on until he goes down.”

But she felt the man deflate against her. She reached for his arm, cocked her hip, and threw him over her shoulder, holding on to him so their combined weight crushed him against the deck. Unable to get air into his deflated lungs the terrorist gasped like a fish. Linda chopped him at a pressure point on the side of his exposed throat and his eyes fluttered and rolled back into his head. He’d be out for hours.

She got to her feet to see the man she thought of as “the sniper” peering at her through the open counter to the dining hall. He was just lowering his AK for a shot he hadn’t dared to take. She gave him a little curtsy and was rewarded with a broad smile.

Linda threw a pair of flex cuffs around the nearby stove’s leg and secured the terrorist’s wrists as a precaution. Returning to the mess hall, she saw her other two men still guarding the door to make sure none of the workers left to face another slaughter on the deck.

Bodies littered the floor. A few of them were dead but most had just been wounded in the mindless melee. Some of their coworkers were already trying to help get them into more comfortable positions and pressing rags and wads of napkins into their wounds. One man in particular seemed to be leading the medical efforts. He was a white man with a fringe of sandy hair around his red scalp and the biggest hands she had ever seen. He was also one of the most ruggedly handsome men she’d ever seen. When he got up from examining a crewman leaning against an overturned table he noticed her and came across the room in five long strides.

“Little lady, I don’t know who you are or where in all get all you came from, but damn, darlin’, am I glad to see you.” He towered over her and his voice was pure west Texas. “I’m Jim Gibson, this here rig’s tool pusher.”

Linda knew that was the title given to the boss on an offshore platform. “Ross, my name is Linda Ross.

Hold on a second.” She resettled her radio earpiece, which had been dislodged during the fight. “Juan, it’s Linda.”

“Thank God. I need you and your men up herenow . We’re taking a pounding. Worry about the workers later.” The sound of a firefight raging in the background underscored his urgent words.

“They’re secure and I’m on my way.” She looked back up at the big Texan. “Mr. Gibson.”

“Jim.”

“Jim, I need you to keep your people here. There’s still terrorists topside. They’ve done something to the platform so oil’s pouring into the ocean. When we take care of the rebels, can you guys stop the crude?”

“Hell yeah we can. What’s going on?”

Linda put a fresh magazine into her machine pistol as she answered. “A group of rebels from the Congo were hired to take over several platforms and the main tanker terminal.”

“Is this some political thing?”

“Jim, I promise when this is over I’ll explain it all, but right now I’ve got to go.”

“You can tell me over dinner. I know a great Portuguese restaurant in Cabinda City.”

“I know a better one in Lisbon,” Linda called over her shoulder, “But you’re still buying.”

MIKE kept theLiberty driving straight for the seawall before cranking the wheel and chopping the throttles at the very last second. Though already off her foils, the boat settled deeper in the water as her side kissed the concrete so lightly that it didn’t disturb any of the mussels clinging to its side.

The forward hatch was open and men began streaming out of the boat and onto the quay, seeking whatever cover they could find. A smattering of small-arms fire came from the direction of the terminal, but between Mark Murphy’s efforts and Trono’s deft abilities with a boat, only a few of the rebels were yet in range.

Mike gathered up his gear and jumped for the wall. There was nothing to tie off the boat to so he unholstered a special gun from behind his back. Actuated by a .22-caliber cartridge, the gun fired a six-inch steel rod into the cement. He jacked the gun to reset it and fired a second bolt, then tied off a line dangling over theLiberty ’s side.

The freedom fighters hadn’t forgotten their hard-won lessons in the years since their civil war. They were properly fanned out with each man able to cover the soldier to either side. Their first objective was less than a hundred yards away. Mike glanced at the metallic patch of cloth on the inside of his left sleeve and cursed. The feed was down.

With no choice, he led the charge, leapfrogging from position to position, always with men firing from behind to keep the terrorists at bay. Though there were only a handful of rebels at the moment, each passing minute saw more arriving in the area, having evaded theOregon ’s sophisticated array of sensors.

The sixty-man contingent took their first casualty when a gunman suddenly emerged from behind a small utility shed and opened fire Hollywood-style, his AK held low at the hip and his finger never leaving the trigger as he sprayed bullets. It was a suicide attack and the counterfire obliged him, but four of Mike’s men were down, one of them obviously dead.

Undeterred they ran on, dashing and weaving, holding up where they had protection so they could cover the skirmish line’s advance. It was urban street fighting at its worse, with enemies able to pop up almost anywhere.

Mike’s radio crackled so he skidded behind a shot-up tow truck to listen. “Liberty, this is Eagle Eye, sorry about the delay but I’ve got you patched back in.” It was Tiny Gunderson flying the UAV.

Trono again glanced at the odd square embedded on the sleeve of his black battle jacket. The silvery material had morphed to reveal a picture of the tanker terminal beamed to the E-paper screen from the drone. The flexible monitor’s resolution was as clear as the big flat panel in theOregon ’s op center, though power constraints allowed for only snapshots to be sent from the UAV on ten-second intervals rather than a continuous feed. The technology was state of the art, and still prone to bugs, so it was still years away from deployment with the U.S. Army.

The image changed as Tiny zeroed in on Mike’s location. He saw there were three rebels on the far side of a warehouse who were about to outflank his men. Rather than explain how he knew, he leapt from behind the tow truck and dashed back so he could get a bead on the corner of the building where they huddled. A knob on the grenade launcher slung under his machine pistol constricted the barrel a fraction of a millimeter and thus slowed the projectile, allowing him to set any range he wanted. He estimated the corner of the building was forty yards away and dialed it in. The weapon made a funny, hollowbloop sound when it fired but the results were anything but comical. The grenade landed a foot from the edge of the building and detonated, shrapnel tearing through the thin corrugated metal and flesh.

The next time he looked at his sleeve the image showed him the three rebels prone in a cloud of explosive gas.

Now with their guardian angel looking out from above, their pace doubled since Mike was able to show his men where an ambush was coming long before the terrorists could spring it.

They reached the terminal’s power plant without losing another man. Despite its soundproofing, the building shook with the roar of the jet engines it used to produce electricity. Mike had already selected the five soldiers who’d accompany him and ordered the rest to keep crossing the yard so they could support Linc’s attack on the tanker pier.

He entered the power plant by shooting the lock off a side door. The sound of the jets intensified; without ear protection they’d only be able to remain inside for a few minutes. He raced in, his H&K’s laser sight sweeping the massive space. Lined up in a row on concrete and steel supports were the three General Electric jet engines, their intakes fed air through gleaming ducts, their exhaust vented out the back of the building through conduits blackened by the tremendous heat.

Only one of the engines was in operation. Max had explained during their briefing that a facility like this would alternate between two of the engines and have a third as backup for times of peak load. Rather than level the powerhouse with theOregon ’s 120 mm cannon, they decided to take just the one operational engine offline, knowing the men dealing with the cleanup would need electricity.

Mike ran for the control room near the front of the building, protected by his phalanx of men. They could see a pair of workers through the triple-layer sliding glass doors overlooking the power station with a trio of guards watching over them. The Petromax employees were studying a tall display board festooned with lights. The guards and workers stood too close together to risk a shot, so as Mike approached he fired over their heads, blowing out the glass in a hail of scintillating chips. The shock alone of the engine noise penetrating the insulated room was disorientating enough, but Mike also heaved a concussion grenade called a flash/bang through the ruined pane.

He ducked so the detonative force rolled over him and was in the room before anyone could get to their feet. He clipped one of the rebels with his weapon’s stock and his men covered the other two with their AKs. Mike tossed one of them a handful of flex cuffs and went to check on the engineers. One had been cut by flying glass, but it didn’t look too bad. The others were just dazed.

He looked the least shaken man in the eye and had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard over the banshee scream of the nearby jet. “Can you shut that down?” he asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

The man looked at him blankly. Mike pointed at the engine again and made a cutting motion across his throat. The universal gesture sank in. The engineer nodded and went to a control station. He used a mouse to scroll through a number of screens on a computer, clicking icons as he went. It seemed like nothing was working until suddenly the piercing whine began to fade past the point of pain to the merely uncomfortable. It continued to wind down as the compressor blades slowed until finally it fell silent, although Mike’s ears continued to ring.

He turned to the leader of his scout party. “Stay here and don’t let anyone refire that engine.” He’d already given him a walkie-talkie. “Call me if any rebels do show up.”

“Yes,Nkosi .” By his tone it was obvious he didn’t like being left out of the fight. “What about them?”

He waved the barrel of his assault rifle toward the bound rebels.

Mike started jogging for the exit. “If they give you any trouble, shoot them.”

“Yes,Nkosi .” The reply came with a bit more enthusiasm.

AS Linda led her men toward the platform’s main deck she was in communication with Juan, getting situational reports about the fluid gun battle. Rather then head to the nearest hatch leading out to the open, Cabrillo ordered her to thread her way through the lower floor so she would emerge on the rig’s far side, behind the greatest concentration of gunmen.

He had her pause just out of view as he made hand gestures to his remaining fighters, coordinating what he hoped would be a final push to either break the rebels’ will to fight or overwhelm them altogether.

With only two magazines left in his ammo pouches, this was his last gambit.

“Okay, Juan, we’re in position,” Linda said. “I can see four of them. They’re behind that big storage tank. There’s another one angling to get close to the crane.”

“Tell me when he’s a yard from the crawler tread. I’ll take him. You guys take the four you can see. I think a couple more are hanging off the side of the rig holding on to the safety net. I don’t know if they’ve given up or what, so keep an eye out for them.”

“Roger that. Your guy’s got ten more yards to go.”

Juan waited with his back pressed to the warm pipes. Through all the chaos and adrenaline, part of his mind remained focused on the problem of Daniel Singer’s timing. No matter how far-fetched the idea, he was convinced that Singer had found a way to make a hurricane do his bidding. Singer was an engineering genius after all. His invention had made him a millionaire a hundred times over while he was still in his twenties. As Max would say: The man might have a screw loose, but the machine was still humming.

“Five yards,” Linda radioed.

Whatever Singer had planned had to be on a large scale, but Juan didn’t know what it could be. He knew of nothing that could affect a hurricane’s formation, severity, or the path it takes. A new anger hit him. If Singer had developed such a technology, why use it like this? Hurricanes and their Pacific and Indian Ocean cousins, typhoons and tsunamis, caused billions of dollars in damage, killed untold thousands of people every year, and left untold numbers of ruined lives in their wake. If Singer wanted to save the planet, ending such misery would be a fantastic first step, in Juan’s opinion. It was the senseless waste that angered him. Like this attack here, like Samuel Makambo’s revolution of personal self-aggrandizement, like the corruption that plagued Moses Ndebele’s homeland. All of it sickened him.

“Two yards.”

God, how he was tired of the fight. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed his superiors at the CIA sat around and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. Juan had known the worst was yet to come as the world splintered on religious and tribal lines and the fighting emerged from the shadows.

He hated being right.

“Take him.”

Cabrillo’s concentration returned to the fighting without a moment’s hesitation. He burst over the top of the drill pipes and loosed a three-round burst that hit the crawling gunman across the side and back. A barrage of fire erupted off to his left as more rebels targeted him. They were cut down by Linda and her team. Juan sprinted from behind the pipes, intentionally drawing fire to get the attackers to show themselves. His remaining people were prepared for this and for the second time since the battle started autofire blazed across the platform as though the gates of hell had opened.

It was the most intense close-quarter combat he had ever experienced. Bullets filled the air, some passing close enough for him to feel their heat. He dove over an oil barrel that had been knocked flat and had it pushed into him by a stuttering burst from at least two AKs stitching its side.

Linda saw one of the men firing at Juan but her snap shot missed as he vanished around a knot of pipes.

She ran from her position and chased after him. It was like running into a forest of metal trees. The way the pipes crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves gave the gunman the advantage; no matter where she looked, down low or up high, her view was constantly blocked.

Realizing she could walk into a trap at any second, she started to retreat out of the maze, her eyes never lingering on a single spot for more than a second in case the gunman had outflanked her.

She rounded a vertical pipe as thick as a culvert and a hand reached out and yanked her machine pistol’s barrel, sending her sprawling. She wished something profound would pop into her head in the second she had remaining, but her last thought was how she’d gotten herself killed by a rookie mistake.

The gun sounded like a cannon. The rebel who’d been standing over her had his head stretched like a Halloween mask before it simply vanished. She looked up to see Jim Gibson standing a few feet away in his size 13 Tony Lama’s holding a huge revolver with its barrel pointing skyward and smoking.

“Strictly speaking, I’m not allowed to have my leg iron on the platform, but I always figured rules are for suckers.” He reached down a big hand and hauled Linda to her feet. “You okay, darling?”

“Saved by a real live cowboy. How much better can I be?”

Knowing every rivet, screw, and weld on the rig, Gibson led her unerringly out of the labyrinth. When they got close to where Linda had first entered she realized she could no longer hear any gunfire.

She looked out cautiously. Five of the terrorists were standing up, their arms thrust so high they might have been standing on tiptoe. Two more emerged from where they’d been hiding in the safety net.

“Juan, I think it’s over,” she said into her throat mike.

Juan slid around the barrel and got to his feet, his aim never wavering from the marauders. He ran to them, shouting, “Down! Get down! Everybody down!”

Linda raced over to help cover them as they dropped flat. The Zimbabweans began to check the injured and dead while Juan cuffed the survivors. When he was finished he called his ship.

“Nomad toOregon , target is secure. Repeat, target is secure.”

“Heard you the first time,” Max drawled. “I may be older than you but I’m not deaf.” Then he added,

“Good job. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.”

“Thanks. What’s the situation?”

“Mike’s shut down the power plant. Oil’s still flowing from the loading gantries but nowhere near as hard without the pumps. It’s just gravity forcing crude through the lines from the tank farm.”

“Is Linc ready?”

“Our cue to launch the SEAL boat was five minutes after Mikey took out the generators. He’s leaving now.”

LIKE a jet fighter being catapulted off an aircraft carrier, an actuator punched the semi-rigid black boat down a Teflon ramp from the boat garage and into the ocean. With a deep V hull for stability and an inflatable curtain for additional payload, the boat had been built by Zodiac’s military division in Vancouver, Canada. She could cut across almost any sized wave as nimbly as an otter and hit speeds in excess of forty knots thanks to a pair of 300 hp outboards.

Linc had the wheel while Jerry Pulaski stood at his side. Both men wore two flak jackets over their utility uniforms. Bulletproof shields had been screwed into place so the helm amidships was nearly invulnerable.

At their feet sat two long black cases containing Barrett M107 .50-caliber rifles. They had an effective range of a mile, making the thirty-two-pound guns perhaps the finest sniper rifles ever created.

With so much crude contaminating the waters around the loading terminal neither Juan nor Max were willing to risk theOregon ’s drive tubes becoming clogged with oil. And neither was willing to risk firing at the sensitive loading gantries if they couldn’t guarantee one hundred percent accuracy from her weapons systems. It would be up to Linc and Ski to form the backstop for Mike’s charge down the causeway.

They raced across the waves toward the bow of the supertanker lying at anchor and only slowed when the boat started cutting through the slick. The scum of oil was at least six inches thick and clung to the rubber pontoon ringing the hull. Fortunately, the props were below the toxic sludge; otherwise they’d barely make headway.

Behind them theOregon was in motion again, maneuvering to get an oblique firing angle on this critical part of the facility. Though they wouldn’t aim directly for the causeway or the acres-sized floating pier, Max had no qualms about tearing up the ocean all around them with the Gatlings.

Peering through a large pair of binoculars, Ski scanned the slab-sided tanker for any signs that the terrorists were using her as an observation platform. She looked clear. Just to be safe they would board her at the bow, more than a thousand feet from the superstructure, the most obvious place for a lookout.

They reached a string of buoys marking the hundred-yard off-limits zone surrounding the massive ship and there was still no fire from above.

“Dumb as we thought,” Linc remarked.

From up close the ship’s hull under its coat of red antifouling paint looked more like a steel wall rather than something designed to cruise the oceans, and with her tanks nearly empty, the deck rail loomed sixty feet over their heads.

As Linc worked the wheel and throttle to bring them up to the bow, Ski readied a grappling gun with rubber-coated tines. Just before the assault boat slid under the bow’s curve he fired the hook skyward, two strands of nanofiber line trailing behind it. It sailed over the rail and when he drew back on the line it caught hard. Linc tossed a painter attached to a powerful magnet against the tanker’s hull to secure the assault boat.

Though too thin to climb, the nanofiber was stronger than steel. Ski threaded the line through a winch bolted to the boat’s deck and made sure the foot stirrups were secured. When he was ready he saw that Linc had opened the padded cases that held the two sniper rifles. Each already had a ten-round magazine in the receiver and they carried ten more apiece.

“Your chariot awaits,” Ski said and stepped into the stirrup.

Linc did likewise and hit the button to start the winch. The nanofiber line started to slide through the pulley on the grappling. Ski’s stirrup tightened and he was lifted off the assault boat, holding the rifle in one hand and the line in the other. When he was eight feet off the assault boat, the line took Linc’s weight, and both men were lifted up the side of the tanker.

It took just seconds to reach the top. Ski kicked himself out of the stirrup and leapt over the rail. He landed softly and immediately brought the rifle at his shoulder and his eye to the scope, scanning the deck and superstructure for any movement. His stirrup jammed in the small pulley, arresting the nanofiber wire, and leaving Linc to climb the rail in order to reach the deck.

“Clear,” Ski said without looking at him.

They started for the stern, each man running fifty feet and finding cover while the other kept the superstructure in his sights. Although there was no sign of activity anywhere on the ship, they maintained the leapfrog technique as a precaution. It took three minutes to reach the wheelhouse and, for the first time, they went to the port side of the tanker to look down at the loading pier. The twin gantries were taller than the ship, but their fat hoses dangled negligently, so the oil spewing from them fell only twenty feet before splashing to the dock and eventually oozing into the sea.

A rough count showed at least a hundred insurgents prepared to defend the dock. They’d had time to build barricades and fortify their position. Trono and his men were in for a tough slog if Linc and Ski couldn’t disrupt the defense.

“What do you think?” Ski asked. “Is this good enough or do you want to get higher?”

“The height’s good but we’re too exposed if there is someone skulking around the ship. Let’s get to the roof of the superstructure.”

While they made their way into the ship and up a seemingly endless set of scissor stairs, Linc gave Max a situation report and learned that Mike and his men had fought their way across the terminal and were now in position.

A door opened near the top of the stairs. A man wearing a pair of black trousers and a white shirt with epaulettes emerged. Linc had his pistol out and pressed between the officer’s eyes before the man had realized he wasn’t alone in the staircase.

“No, please,” he cried sharply.

“Quiet,” Linc said and pulled back his automatic. “We’re the good guys.”

“You are American?” The officer was English.

“That’s right, Captain,” Linc said, noting the four gold stripes on his shoulder boards. “We’re about to put an end to this situation. We need to get to the roof.”

“Of course. Follow me.” They started up. “What’s going on? All I know is one minute we’re taking on our normal load of crude and the next some idiot has yanked the hoses, damaging my ship. I called the marine office but no one picked up. Then my lookouts report armed men on the pier. Now it sounds like my days in the Falklands out there.”

“Suffice it to say, your crew is going to be okay. Just don’t let any of them near the deck or any open spaces.”

“That’s been my standing order all morning,” the captain assured him. “Here we are.”

They’d reached the top of the stairwell. There were no doors but there was a hatch in the ceiling accessible by a ladder. Ski started up without a word.

Linc held out his hand, “Thank you, Captain. We’ll take it from here.”

“Oh yes, right. Good luck to you,” he said and shook Linc’s outstretched hand.

Ski got the hatch open, flooding the stairwell with brilliant sunlight. He climbed through, followed by Linc. There was no way to lock the portal from the top, so they would have to keep an eye on it to make sure that no one came up after them.

The roof of the pilothouse was a featureless plane of white-painted steel shadowed by the ship’s funnel and an antennae array. When they neared the edge they dropped to their bellies so as not to show themselves and again looked down over the dock. At the end of the causeway they could see Mike’s small army awaiting their signal. The UAV buzzed nearby.

“Oregon, this is Linc. We are in position. Give us some time to designate targets. Stand by.”

After setting up their rifles and placing full magazines along the lip of the roof so they could quickly shift positions, the two men scoped every one of the enemy soldiers, figuring out who the officers and noncoms were so they could decapitate the leadership, as the saying went.

“I’ll be damned,” Linc muttered.

“What?”

“Eleven o’clock. Guy with the shades chewing out some teenager.”

Ski shifted his rifle so he could see who Linc was talking about. “Got him. Yeah? So? Who is he?”

“That, my friend, is Colonel Raif Abala, the sneaky bastard who pulled the double-cross on us when we were selling him the guns. He’s General Makambo’s right hand.”

“Seems to be out of favor if Makambo sent him here,” Ski said. “Want to take him first?”

“No, I think I’d rather see his face when he realizes what’s what and who’s who. You ready?”

“I’ve got at least four officers on my half of the dock and six more who seem like they know what they’re doing. Rest are cannon fodder.”

“Okay, then let’s rock and roll.Oregon , we’re ready.”

“We’re good to go here,” he heard Mike Trono say over the tactical net.

Max’s reply was letting Mark Murphy unleash a torrent of shells from the Gatling gun. The water and oil soup ten yards off the causeway exploded in a line that extended its entire length. It was as though the ocean had reared up in a continuous wall. The rebels cowered at the sight and sound as they were doused with filthy spray. A soldier stationed on the causeway broke cover to run back to the floating dock.

With the Gatling’s scream overriding the sound of their shots, Linc and Ski got to work, firing as fast as they could. One shot equaled one kill. Every time. After firing five rounds they could see confused soldiers start to look around as their leaders dropped. The two snipers backed away from the edge and shifted further aft. When Linc looked through his scope again he could see Abala screaming at his men.

By the fear Link could see written in the faces of Abala’s troops his rants were having little success. In the distance, Mike and his team were cautiously coming down the causeway.

Again, he and Ski found their targets and again the rebel leadership was decimated. A soldier finally realized the shots were coming from above and behind them and looked up at the tanker. The guerilla was about to shout a warning to his comrades but got no further than opening his mouth before Ski dropped him with one of his Barrett’s half-inch slugs.

“Mike, you’re about eighty feet from the first ambush,” Tiny Gunderson said over the radio.

“What are they doing? My Softscreen’s down again.”

“If I were a betting man I’d say talking about giving up. No, wait, my mistake. I think one’s trying to rally them. No, wait again. He’s down. Nice shot, Ski.”

“That was me,” Linc said.

“And courage has left the building,” Tiny crowed. “They’ve dropped their weapons and are reaching for the sky.”

That first sign of capitulation broke the dam for the rest. All along the causeway and on the loading dock men were laying down their arms. Only Abala seemed interested in fighting on. He waved his pistol like a madman. Linc watched him level it at a young guerrilla, screaming at him, presumably, to pick up his AK-47. He shot off half of Abala’s foot before the colonel could murder the unarmed man.

Trono’s team swept through the defeated rebels, tossing their captured AKs into a pile and patting down each man for additional weapons.

Linc and Ski remained in their sniper nest, making sure there were no holdouts until the entire area had been secured.

“That’s the last of them,” Mike announced. He was standing over Colonel Abala, who was on the dock writhing in pain. “Who missed on this guy?”

“That was no miss, son,” Linc said. “Once he gets out of the hospital that’s the cat that’s going to lay this whole thing on Makambo and Singer.”

It took ten minutes for Linc and Ski to get down to the dock. Linc approached Abala and squatted next to him. The rebel colonel was nearly in shock and didn’t acknowledge his presence, so Linc lightly slapped his face until he looked over. Spittle bubbled from Abala’s lips and he had a deathly pallor under his dark skin.

“Remember me, numb nuts?” Linc asked. Abala’s eyes went wide. “That’s right. Congo River, about a week or so ago. You thought you could double-cross us. Well, this is what happens.” Linc leaned close.

“Never, and I mean never, mess with the Corporation.”

WHEN the Angolan army finally arrived at the Petromax terminal, theOregon —with her equipment, her crew, and all of Moses Ndeble’s men, alive or dead—was well over the horizon.

The Angolan forces found that the oil flowing to the loading pier had been shut off and crews had capped the two offshore wells. They also discovered eighty-six corpses laid out next to an administrative building and over four hundred frightened men roped together and locked inside, many of them wounded.

One of them, who had a bloody bandage wrapped around his truncated foot, had a sign draped over his neck that read:

MY NAME IS RAIF ABALA. I AM A COLONEL IN SAMUEL MAKAMBO’S CONGOLESE

ARMY OF REVOLUTION AND WAS HIRED TO PERPETRATE THIS ACT OF TERRORISM

BY DANIEL SINGER, FORMERLY OF MERRICK/SINGER. I UNDERSTAND THAT IF I DO

NOT COOPERATE THE PEOPLE WHO STOPPED US TODAY WILL FIND ME.

HAVE A NICE DAY.

29

THEshabby appearance of theOregon was expertly applied camouflage to make her look neglected, but the dilapidation of theGulf of Sidra was the real thing. For twenty years she’d tracked back and forth across the Mediterranean carrying her loads of oil while her owners eked every penny of profit they could. If something broke it was replaced with a used part, hastily repaired with duct tape and bailing wire, or discarded altogether. When her sewage treatment plant went down it was bypassed and repiped to dump directly into the sea. Her air-conditioning system merely moved hot air around the superstructure rather than cooled it. And with the galley’s walk-in cooler not working, the chefs had to balance taking food out of the freezer and letting it thaw but not spoil.

Her black hull was streaked with rust while bare metal showed on her superstructure, and her single funnel was so streaked with exhaust that it was impossible to tell it had once been painted green and yellow. The only modern piece of equipment aboard her was the new escape pod hanging over her stern, put there at the insistence of her captain once he learned where they were sailing.

With a beam of a hundred and twenty feet and the length of three football fields, theGulf of Sidra was a huge ship, though small in comparison to the 350,000-ton tanker that had been berthed at the Petromax terminal. Her outdated design left her seven holds capable of carrying only 104,000 tons of crude.

Though she had become a fixture lying at anchor outside the Mauritanian port of Nouakchott, a hazy silhouette against the western horizon that had been there for weeks, her departure went largely ignored.

She’d steamed from the city as soon as Daniel Singer had arrived from Angola and had put more than two hundred miles between herself and the coast.

She was chasing a tropical depression moving across the Atlantic that had the potential to build into a hurricane. It was the storm Singer had been waiting for, the perfect conditions to test what the world’s brightest meteorological minds and the most sophisticated computer models said would happen.

With the temperature in his cabin hovering above a hundred degrees, Singer had taken to spending as much time as he could on the wing bridge, where at least the ship’s seventeen-knot speed created a breeze.

He’d just gotten word over the BBC wireless service that Samuel Makambo’s attack had been foiled by Angolan troops. Nearly a hundred guerillas had been killed in the swift counterattack and four hundred captured. Singer wondered briefly if Colonel Abala, the only rebel who could identify him, was among the living or the dead and decided it didn’t matter. If he was linked to the assault the publicity of a court appearance would only spread the word. He’d hire the flashiest lawyers he could find and get his case shifted to the World Court in The Hague. There he would use the opportunity to put humanity’s treatment of the earth on trial.

What truly bothered him about the failed attack was that estimates put the amount of oil spilled at about twelve thousand tons. Though an environmental catastrophe, it was far short of the million tons he’d been planning on. There would be no cloud of benzene arsonic acid lacing the storm and spreading its poison across the southeastern United States. It would be a punishing storm, the worst hurricane to hit America in recorded history, but without the noxious contamination he feared it wouldn’t touch off the panic he’d expected.

He knew he would have to contact the media and explain once the storm was over—or better yet, when it was about to make landfall—how a chance battle in a remote part of the world had prevented a catastrophe. It would be one more example of how interconnected the earth was, how we were leaving our future to the vagaries of chance.

Adonis Cassedine, the ship’s master, stepped out from the bridge. Unlike his handsome mythological namesake, Cassedine was a sour-looking man with an unshaven face and rodent-sharp eyes. His nose was askew from being poorly set after a break, so the smudged glasses he wore tilted off one of his cauliflower ears.

“I just got a report from a container ship a hundred miles in front of us.” Sunset was still hours away and already his breath smelled of the cheap gin he swilled. To his credit, however, he didn’t slur his words and his body only swayed a little. “They are encountering Force Four conditions with winds out of the northeast.”

“The storm is forming,” Singer said. “And just where we need it to be. Not too far out that it has settled on its course, but not too close that it could fail to coalesce.”

“I can get you there,” Cassedine said, “but I don’t like it.”

Here we go again. Singer was already angered over Makambo’s failure. He didn’t want to hear another complaint from this washed-up rummy.

“This ship, she is old. Her hull is rotting and what you have in her holds, it’s too hot. It is weakening the metal.”

“And I showed you the engineers’ reports that say the hull can take the thermal load.”

“Bah.” Cassedine dismissed the statement with a wave. “Fancy men in suits who know nothing of the sea. You want to take us into a hurricane and I say the ship will break in two when we hit Force Six.”

Singer moved closer to the captain, using his superior height to intimidate the Greek. “Listen to me, you damned lush. I am paying you more money than you’ve seen in your lifetime, enough to keep you in a bottle for decades. For that I expect you to do your job and stop bothering me with your predictions, your concerns, or your opinions. Do I make myself clear?”

“I am just saying—”

“Nothing!” Singer roared. “You are saying nothing. Now get out of my face before your breath makes me sick.”

Singer kept glaring at Cassedine until the captain backed off, as he knew he would. Singer believed most alcoholics were weak, and this one was no different. He was so far gone he would do just about anything he was told in order to keep up a constant state of inebriation. He felt no qualms exploiting such weakness, just like he’d felt no qualms exploiting the naïveté of Nina Visser’s eco-crusaders or Samuel Makambo’s greed. If that was what it took to make people stand up and notice the destruction they were doing to their planet, so be it. Hadn’t Geoffrey Merrick exploited Singer’s own genius to create their invention? Singer had done the lion’s share of the work while Merrick had taken the credit.

All along everyone believed Singer preferred to stay out of the limelight and in the background. What a load of junk. What person wouldn’t like to receive the praise of their peers, the accolades, the awards?

Singer had wanted all that, too, but it was as if the media only saw one half of Merrick/Singer, the telegenic half, the half with the easy smile and the charming anecdotes. It wasn’t Singer’s fault that he froze at the lectern and looked like a cadaver on TV or came across as an idiot savant in an interview.

He’d been given no choice but a shadow existence—only it was under Merrick’s shadow he’d had to live.

Again he cursed that his former partner wasn’t here, denying him the opportunity to lord it over him. He wanted to look Merrick in the eye and scream, “It’s your fault! You let the polluters keep destroying the environment and now you are going to see the consequences.”

He spat over theGulf of Sidra ’s side, watching his saliva fall until it became part of the ocean, a drop in the biggest bucket in the world. Singer had been like that once, a small piece of something so much larger than himself it was impossible to believe he could make a difference.

He would be insignificant no longer.

CABRILLO’S first order when he returned to theOregon was to send her charging northward, to where Africa bulged into the Atlantic and where the hot winds blowing off the Sahara eventually evaporated enough water to spawn hurricanes. He didn’t return to his cabin until he’d overseen the refitting of his ship. TheLiberty ’s hull was scrubbed and her tanks refueled and she was back on her davit. The two submersibles had had their coating of oil scoured off with solvents and brooms, their batteries recharged, and all the equipment that had been removed put back. The Gatlings, 40 mm, and .30 calibers had all been checked over, their barrels and receivers cleaned and their ammo bins refilled. Armorers were repacking the AK-47s given to Moses’ men and tagging the almost five hundred guns they had taken back from Makambo’s forces. Juan hadn’t forgotten the bounty Lang Overholt had put on those weapons’ return.

But as busy as he’d been, he couldn’t come close to the work Dr. Julia Huxley and her team were performing in medical. They had twenty-three patients to look after, a total of thirty-one bullets to remove, and enough organs and limbs to put back together it seemed she’d never leave surgery. The instant she stripped off one pair of bloody rubber gloves an orderly snapped on a fresh pair for her to tackle the next injured man. At one point her anesthesiologist quipped he’d passed more gas than a judge at a chili contest.

But after fifteen straight hours of work, she sewed closed a bullet graze on Mike Trono’s shoulder, a wound he didn’t even remember receiving, and knew there were no more. When Mike had hopped off the table Julia had rolled onto it with a theatrical groan.

“Come on, Hux,” Mike teased. “Getting the injuries is a lot tougher than fixing them.”

She didn’t open her eyes when she replied, “First of all, that little scratch you got doesn’t even qualify as an injury. The cat I used to have clawed me worse than that. Second, if you don’t appreciate my work I’ll be more than happy to pull the stitches and let you bleed a while longer.”

“Tsk, tsk, what about your Hippocratic oath?”

“I had my fingers crossed when I took it.”

He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, Doc. Thanks.”

No sooner had Mike left the OR than a shadow blocked the lights hanging over the table. Julia levered open her eyes to see the chairman looming over her. By the grim look on his face she saw he knew.

“I want to see her.”

Julia got off the table and led Cabrillo through to another part of the medical bay, a small chilled room with a single table in the center. Four stainless-steel drawers were built into one wall. Without saying anything, she slid open one of them to reveal a nude body enclosed in an opaque plastic bag. Juan tore the plastic covering the head and stepped back to study the pale gray face of Susan Donleavy.

“How’d she do it?”

“It was a nasty way to die,” Julia said, ten times more exhausted now than she’d been a moment earlier.

“She stuck out her tongue as far as she could and let herself fall forward. Her chin slammed the deck and her teeth severed her tongue. She then rolled over and basically drowned in her own blood. I can’t imagine what it takes to fall like that and not try to stop it with your hands.”

“She was cuffed.”

“She could have turned her head at the last second.” Julia looked at the body sadly. “For all we know maybe she did it again and again until she got her courage up for a final attempt.”

Cabrillo didn’t say anything for a moment. He was remembering the boat chase in Sandwich Bay after he and Sloane had found Papa Heinrick murdered. The driver he’d been following had intentionally crashed his boat into the shore rather than risk capture. He had thought maybe it was out of fear, that he didn’t want to face an African prison, but the truth was the guy had sacrificed himself for the cause. Just like Susan Donleavy.

“No,” he said with certainty. “She did it right the first time.”

“You’ve reviewed the security tapes from her cell?”

He turned to face her. “Don’t need to. I know the type.”

“Fanatic.”

“Yup. Biting off the tongue was an acceptable alternative to hara-kiri for captured Japanese soldiers during World War Two.”

“I’m sorry, Juan. Scuttlebutt around the ship is that she might have known some more useful information.”

“She did.” He looked at Julia. “And I think Geoff Merrick knows it, too. I need you to wake him.”

“Forget it. His blood pressure’s still too low. I’ve barely checked his wound for fragments and am only now getting his infection under control. I admit his coma’s much shallower, but his body’s refusing to come around.”

“Julia, I don’t have a choice. Singer ordered the raid this morning at a specific time because he’s got something else planned. He kidnapped Merrick because he wanted him to see what it was. When Linda interviewed Susan she said that Singer spent a few hours at the Devil’s Oasis talking with Merrick. I am willing to bet he spilled the whole thing then.”

“Are you willing to bet his life?”

“Yes,” Juan said without hesitation. “Whatever Singer’s up to is likely to involve a hurricane. I think he’s devised a way to shape them somehow. Do you need me to lay out what that means? You took leave to volunteer in New Orleans after Katrina.”

“I was born there.”

“We can stop another city from suffering the same fate. Julia, you have full autonomy over medical decisions on this ship but only because I say you do. If you would prefer me to give you an order, I will.”

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll do it.

Juan knew he should ask Linda to conduct the interview, it was her area of expertise, but he wasn’t extracting information from a reluctant captive, only talking to a half-conscious victim. “Let’s go.”

Hux grabbed some supplies from the OR and led Cabrillo through to the recovery rooms. Where once Geoffrey Merrick had a room to himself, he now shared the space with three wounded Africans. His sunburned face was covered in gel to help his skin heal, but beneath it Juan could see the scientist remained pale. After checking his vital signs Julia injected a stimulant into his IV drip.

Merrick came around slowly. At first his eyes remained closed and the only sign of movement was his tongue attempting to lick his dry lips. Julia moistened them with a wet cloth. Then his eyes fluttered and opened. His looked from Julia to Juan and back to the doctor again, obviously disorientated.

“Dr. Merrick, my name is Juan Cabrillo. You’re safe now. You were rescued from the people who kidnapped you and are now in the sick bay of my ship.”

Before Merrick could reply, Julia asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Thirsty,” he rasped.

She tipped a glass of water with a straw to his mouth and he took several grateful sips. “How’s your chest?”

He thought about his answer for a moment. “Numb.”

“You were shot,” Juan told him.

“I don’t remember.”

“Susan Donleavy shot you during the rescue.”

“She wasn’t beat up,” Merrick said as a fragment of the memory came back. “I thought they had tortured her, but it was all faked with makeup.”

“Daniel Singer showed up one day when you were being held prisoner. Do you remember that?”

“I think so.”

“He did and you two spoke.”

“Where’s Susan now?” the scientist asked.

“She killed herself, Doctor.” Merrick stared at him. “She did that to prevent us from learning what Singer intends to do.”

“Oil rigs.” Merrick’s voice was fading to a whisper as his body fought the drugs in an attempt to return to unconsciousness.

“That’s right. He planned on attacking oil rigs off the coast of Angola and causing a huge slick. What else was he planning? Did he tell you?”

“You have to stop him. The oil is especially toxic.” His last words were slurred.

“We have,” Juan said. “His assault failed. The slick will be contained.”

“Ship,” he said dreamily.

“There was a ship at the terminal but it wasn’t attacked.”

“No. Singer has a ship.”

“What is he using it for?”

“It was Susan’s discovery. She took it to him. I thought it was only a test, but she had already perfected it.” His eyes closed.

“Perfected what, Geoff? What did Susan perfect? Dr. Merrick?”

“An organic gel that turns water into pudding.”

“Why?” Juan asked desperately, fearing Merrick was slipping away. “What is it used for?”

Merrick said nothing for nearly twenty seconds. “Heat,” he finally whispered. “It gives off a lot of heat.”

And there was the connection Cabrillo had been looking for. Hurricanes need heat and Singer was going to give one a boost. If he released the contents of a vessel laden with Susan Donleavy’s gel into the ocean, probably at the epicenter of a forming storm, the heat would give the weather system a kick start exactly when and where he wanted. That was how he knew when to attack the Petromax terminal. The prevailing winds would carry the oil vapors northward into the hurricane he had helped generate.

Juan knew the seas off Africa’s west coast were the logical place Singer would dump the gel, but the area was vast and there wasn’t enough time to conduct a search. He had to narrow the parameters.

“What kind of ship is Singer using?” A tanker was the most likely candidate, but Juan wouldn’t lead the semiconscious man with his suspicions.

Merrick remained mute, his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted. Julia was watching his monitor, and Juan knew the look on her face. She didn’t like what she was seeing.

He shook Merrick’s shoulder. “Geoff, what kind of ship?”

“Juan,” Julia said in a warning tone.

Merrick’s head rolled to face him but he couldn’t open his eyes. “A tanker. He bought an oil tanker.”

The monitor started to wail as his heart rate slowed dangerously. Julia pushed Juan aside, shouting,

“He’s crashing! Get the cart in here!” She threw aside the sheet covering his chest as one of her staff raced into the room with a portable defibrillator.

Through it all Merrick managed to open his eyes. They were clouded with pain. He reached out to clutch Cabrillo’s hand, his mouth forming three words he didn’t have the breath to say aloud.

The chirping alarm turned into a continuous tone.

“Clear,” Julia said, the paddles poised over Merrick’s naked torso. Juan took his hand away so Julia could apply the electrical impulse to restart Merrick’s heart. His body convulsed as the charge ran through him and the monitor showed a corresponding spike before returning to flat line.

“Eppy.” The orderly handed Julia a syringe full of epinephrine. The needle seemed impossibly long. She speared the area between two of Singer’s ribs and loaded the drug directly into his heart. “Up it to two hundred joules.”

“Charging, charging, charging,” the orderly said watching the machine. “Go.”

She applied the paddles again and for a second time Merrick’s body jerked partially off the bed. The line on the monitor peaked again.

“Come on. Come on,” Julia urged and then the beat was back, widely spaced at first but improving steadily. “Get a ventilator in here.” She shot a scathing look at Cabrillo. “Was it worth it?”

He met her gaze. “We’ll know when we find a tanker named theGulf of Sidra .”

30

THEweather was turning foul as theOregon raced northward, forcing a delicate balance between speed and the need to keep the wounded from being further injured by the ship’s motion. Julia had torn a page from the nineteenth century by slinging the worst of the wounded in hammocks so they swayed with the swells and were cushioned when the ship was hit by a particularly tall wave. She hadn’t left Merrick’s side for more than twenty minutes since getting his heart started again.

After getting the name, it had taken Murph and Eric less than a half hour to discover that a tanker called theGulf of Sidra had been anchored off the coast of Mauritania for nearly a month but had weighed anchor the day before. The ship had been owned by Libya’s state oil monopoly until a recent sale transferred her to a newly incorporated Liberian firm called CroonerCo., which Murph recognized as a thinly veiled reference to Singer’s last name.

With that information the duo had been able to calculate an ever widening arc where the vessel could be hiding, an area that would soon include a tropical depression swirling six hundred miles off the African coast. They were driving as hard as they dared for that region.

To narrow the odds further, Juan had again called upon Lang Overholt to use the United States’

government’s halo of spy satellites to search the grid coordinates for theGulf of Sidra . Now that everyone was aware of the stakes, Overholt had taken Cabrillo’s findings to the CIA’s director. The president was briefed a short while later and orders went out to the Coast Guard and Navy as well as NUMA and the National Weather Service, which was conducting regular patrols of hurricane alley. A guided missile cruiser returning from interdiction patrols in the Red Sea was diverted and a destroyer paying a courtesy call to Algiers cut short her stay and started out of the Mediterranean. There was also a pair of nuclear attack submarines close enough to the area to reach it in twenty hours.

The British government was apprised of the situation and offered to send two vessels from Gibraltar and another from Portsmouth. They would arrive on station days after the Americans, but their help was greatly appreciated.

Juan knew, however, that even with all of these ships streaming in to search for the tanker, theOregon , with her superior speed, would be the first to reach the edge of the storm and it would fall on his shoulders to stop Daniel Singer.

SLOANE Macintyre weaved down the passageway carrying a dinner tray that Maurice had personally prepared. With her arm still in a sling it was awkward, and she found herself leaning a shoulder against the walls to keep herself steady. It was almost eleven and she didn’t see another soul as she made her way aft. She came to the door she wanted and had to use her foot to tap on it softly. When there was no reply she hit it a little louder with the same results.

She set the tray on the carpeted deck and cracked open the door. She could see dim lighting from inside.

“Juan,” she called softly and retrieved the tray. “You weren’t at dinner so I had Maurice fix you a little something.”

She stepped over the threshold, not yet feeling that she was intruding. A lamp spilled a pool of light across half of Cabrillo’s desk. The other half was blushed with the muted glow of a computer monitor.

The chair was pushed back as if Juan had just gotten up from working but he wasn’t at the file cabinet or the antique safe. The sofa tucked under a darkened porthole was empty.

She set the tray on the desk and said his name again as she approached his dim bedroom. He lay facedown on the bed and before Sloane took in the whole picture she looked away, thinking he was nude. When she peeked back shyly she saw he wore a pair of boxer shorts nearly the same color as his skin, though a crescent of pale white showed above the boxer’s waistband. Then she feared he wasn’t breathing until his chest expanded like a bellows.

For the first time she allowed herself to stare at his stump. The skin was red and puckered and looked raw, no doubt from all the fighting he’d been involved in. The muscles of his upper legs were large and even in sleep they didn’t seem relaxed. In fact, none of him did. His whole body was tensed. She held her breath to listen carefully and heard his teeth grinding together.

His back was a patchwork of old scars and new bruises. There were six identical marks that looked as though he’d taken a shotgun blast and what she hoped was a healed surgical incision and not a knife wound because it began just over his kidney and disappeared under his shorts.

His clothing had been tossed onto the floor and as she folded it, she wondered what kind of man would pay such a heavy price to do what he did. He gave no outward sign that at night his dreams gave him a case of bruxism that sounded like he was going to pulverize his teeth. And although he was barely in his forties, he had accumulated two lifetime’s worth of scars. Some force drove him to put himself in danger despite the cumulative effects it was having on his body.

It wasn’t a suicide wish, of that she was sure. She could tell by his easy banter with Max and the others that Juan Cabrillo loved life more than anyone. And maybe that was it. He had put it upon himself to make certain others had the opportunity to enjoy their lives as much as he did. He had made himself a protector even if those he looked after would never know of his efforts. She thought back to their conversation about what he would be if not the captain of theOregon . He’d said a paramedic, an unsung hero if ever there was one.

When she draped his pants over a wooden valet, his wallet fell to the floor.

Sloane looked over at Juan. He hadn’t moved a muscle. Feeling a twinge of guilt, but not enough to overcome her curiosity, she opened the wallet. All it contained was cash in a variety of currencies. No credit cards, no business cards, nothing to identify him in any way. She should have known. He wouldn’t carry around anything that could link him back to his ship or give his enemies information about who he really was.

Sloane looked over to the office, where the lighting made his desk seem to dominate the space. She padded silently to it, glancing in his direction again before gently tugging open the middle drawer. This is where Cabrillo kept himself. She found a gold and onyx Dunhill lighter and an ornate cigar cutter. She found his American passport and saw nearly every page had been stamped. She preferred his hair short like he kept it now versus the photo taken six years earlier. There were two more U.S. passports, one with the picture of a great slob of a man named Jeddediah Smith, and it took her a moment to realize it was Juan in disguise. There were others from various countries and under different aliases, as well as matching credit cards for all the personas, and shipmaster’s licenses for both Juan and his Smith character. She found a gold pocket watch inscribed to Hector Cabrillo from Rosa and suspected it belonged to his grandfather. Amid the bric-a-brac were a few letters from his parents, his old CIA ID

tag, a small four-barreled antique pistol like a riverboat gambler might carry, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, and a rusted Cub Scout pocketknife.

Toward the back of the drawer was an inlaid Turkish box and inside she made a discovery she never expected—a gold wedding band. It was a simple pipe-cut ring, and judging by how little it was scratched, Sloane thought it hadn’t been worn much. She wondered what stupid woman had let a man like Juan get away. They were one in a million and if you were lucky enough to find one you did whatever it took to make it work. She looked more carefully into the box and saw a piece of paper folded so it completely covered the bottom.

She was on the cusp between snooping and prying and glanced over her shoulder to where Juan was sleeping before reaching for the slip of paper. It was a police report of a single-car accident in Falls Church, Virginia, that had claimed the life of Amy Cabrillo. Tears pricked Sloane’s eyes. As she read through the dry report she learned that Juan’s wife’s blood alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit.

A man like Juan would marry once in his life, to the woman he felt certain he could grow old with. The fact that this woman had taken that from him made Sloane hate her all the more. She wiped at her cheek and carefully refolded the report and set everything back into the drawer the way she’d found it. She picked up the tray of food and retreated from the cabin.

Linda Ross rounded a corner just as Sloane got the door closed.

“Hi, roomie,” Sloane said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “I didn’t see Juan at dinner so I brought him some food. He’s asleep.”

“Is that why you’re crying?”

“I…” Sloane could say nothing more.

Linda smiled warmly. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be our secret. For what it’s worth he’s probably the best man I’ve ever met.”

“Have you and he?”

“I’ll admit he’s as handsome as the devil and the thought crossed my mind when I first came aboard; but no we haven’t and never will. He’s my commander and my friend and both are too important to screw up with an affair.”

“But that’s all it’ll ever be, isn’t it? I sense he’s a one-woman man and any opportunity has passed.”

“You know about Amy?”

“I was snooping and saw the police report.”

“Don’t tell Juan you saw that. He doesn’t think any of the crew knows he’s a widower. Max made the mistake of telling Maurice once and, well, Maurice gossips like an old woman. And yeah, it would probably only be a short-term thing but not because he’s in mourning over Amy. He’s got another love, one no woman can compete with.”

“TheOregon .”

Linda nodded. “So think through what you want to do before you do anything.”

“Thanks.”

As they walked away Juan’s cabin door opened slowly and he peered down the corridor. The sound of his desk drawer opening had wakened him but he’d feigned sleep so as not to embarrass Sloane. He would have to talk to Max about his inability to keep a secret and Maurice, too, for that matter. He closed the door again, thinking that what he overheard made a decision he’d been contemplating a bit more difficult.

JUAN was in the living room of the guest cabin talking with Moses Ndebele. His men were resigned to their beds, nearly incapacitated by seasickness. He enjoyed Ndebele’s intellect and his ability to forgive considering how harshly he’d been treated by his government. Unlike some men, who when they gain power trample freedoms and impoverish their people in a quest for wealth and personal glory, Ndebele really did want what was best for Zimbabwe. He spoke of economic reforms, of getting the country’s once thriving agriculture sector back to its former capacity. He talked about power sharing among the tribes and an end to the nepotism that ruined many African nations.

More than anything else he wanted his people to no longer fear their own government.

Cabrillo was more convinced than ever that making his bargain with Moses had been the right call. They had the chance to restore what had once been a shining beacon in sub-Saharan Africa and make it again the envy of the continent. Of course, all it would take was to find a boat lost for a century that had sunk somewhere in about a thousand square miles of ocean.

He felt the ship suddenly veer. He judged the turn to be at least fifteen degrees and was getting to his feet when his phone chimed.

“Someone found her,” he said, knowing it was Max with the news they’d been waiting thirty hours to hear. He mouthed an apology to M oses as he strode from the room.

“She was detected by something called Mag-Star,” Hanley said. “Apparently it’s a new military satellite that can detect the distortion a large steel-hulled ship has on the earth’s magnetic field.”

Juan was familiar with the technology. “How far are we from her?”

“Another hundred and fifty miles and, to answer your next question, we’re still the closest of all the vessels vectoring in.”

Calculating speed and distances Juan said, “That’ll put us on her about sunset, not that we’ve seen the sun in a while.”

TheOregon had been steaming under a roiling veil of cloud cover since before dawn, while the seas had built to fifteen-foot waves that pounded her hull. The ship had no problem shouldering aside the swells; she was designed to absorb much worse and at speeds greater than she was making, but the wounded were taking a beating despite Hux’s best efforts. The wind hovered around thirty knots with gusts edging Force Eight on the Beaufort Scale. Although the rain hadn’t started yet, the forecasts predicted it would hit within a couple of hours.

“Taking down theGulf of Sidra in this storm’s going to be tough enough,” Max remarked. “Darkness is only going to make it worse.”

“Tell me about it,” Juan said. “I’ll be there in a second.”

Moments later he strode into the operations center. The regular watch standers were being replaced by the Corporation’s best team. It was difficult because the ship was pitching violently and the crew had to keep one hand continuously braced against a counter or bulkhead. Eric Stone was already at the helm; Mark Murphy, sporting a shirt that advocated nuking the whales, was sliding into the weapons station while Hali was jacking into the communications systems. Linda Ross arrived while Eddie and Linc stood against the back wall, as different as Mutt and Jeff in every aspect but competence.

Max came over from where he was monitoring his beloved engines as soon as Juan got into the center chair. On the main monitor was a satellite picture of the Atlantic. The clouds were beginning to curl into the familiar pattern of a burgeoning hurricane. The image shifted every few seconds to show the past several hours of the growing storm. The eye was just beginning to form.

“Okay, where are we and where’s theSidra ?” Juan asked.

Stone tapped at his computer and two flashing icons appeared on the monitor. TheGulf of Sidra was positioned right at the edge of where the eye was growing, with theOregon driving in hard from the southeast.

They watched the screen for more than an hour as it was updated by the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive government agency that oversaw nearly all U.S. spy satellites. The more the storm took on a hurricane’s distinctive shape, the tighter Singer’s tanker turned, keeping just inside the strengthening eye wall.

“I’m getting some more information from Overholt,” Hali said, staring at his computer. “Says here the NRO has some additional data on the target. Checking back through their logs they’ve been able to re-create her course for the two hours before they ID’d her. Eric, I’m sending this over to you.”

When he received the e-mail from across the room Eric typed in the coordinates. “Coming up now,” he said and hit Enter.

The icon for theSidra bounced back a couple of inches on the screen then tracked forward. It looked as if the eye was forming along her course rather than her running along its edge.

“What the hell?” Juan muttered.

“I was right!” Eric cried.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius,” Mark said, then turned to face Cabrillo. “He and I were back in my cabin brainstorming. Well, we also did a little hacking into Merrick/Singer’s mainframe. Susan Donleavy didn’t keep notes on the computer. She either had a stand alone or just wrote stuff out longhand.

Anyway, all we found about her project was her original proposal and even that was pretty thin. Her idea was to create an organic flocculent.”

“A what?”

“It’s a compound that causes soils and other solids suspended in water to form into clumps,” Eric answered. “It’s used in sewage treatment plants, for example, to settle out the waste.”

“She wanted to find a way to bind the organic material found in seawater in order to turn water into a gel.”

“What for?” Max asked bluntly.

“Didn’t say,” Mark replied, “and apparently no one on the peer review committee cared because she got the go-ahead without explaining the need for something like this.”

Stone continued, “We know from your talk with Merrick that the reaction is exothermic and, from what I can guess, it probably isn’t sustainable. The heat will eventually kill off the organics and the gel will dissolve back into ordinary seawater.”

“I’m following you,” Juan said, “but I don’t see a point to all this.”

“If Singer lays down a line of flocculent it will spread for a while and then just fizzle out.” Mark blew a raspberry to emphasize his point. “The hurricane would absorb some of its heat as it passes over it but not really enough to make any major changes to its severity or direction.”

Eric butted in, “My idea is that if he spreads it in a circle just as the hurricane begins to revolve he will be able to dictate where and when the eye will form—and most important, how big it will be.”

“And the tighter the eye, the faster the wind can whip around it,” Max added.

“Andrew’s was eleven miles across when he came ashore in Miami,” Murph said. “Natural processes limit how small it can be, but Singer can push that so the hurricane goes above five on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. He might also be able to control where the storm tracks as it heads across the Atlantic, in essence pointing it like a gun at whatever coastal region he chooses.”

Cabrillo studied at the monitor again. It looked as though theGulf of Sidra was doing exactly what Eric and Murph predicted. She was in the beginning of a spiraling turn, using the heat generated by Susan Donleavy’s gel, which she was doubtlessly discharging as fast as her pumps could go, to tease the storm tighter and tighter. Singer would make the eye smaller and thus the hurricane more powerful than anything nature was able to create.

“If he finishes that turn there won’t be a damned thing we can do,” Eric concluded. “The eye will be formed and no force on earth will be able to stop it.”

“Any idea where he’s sending it?”

“If it were me I’d take out New Orleans again,” Murph said, “but I don’t know if he’ll have that level of control. Safest bet would be to slam it into Florida where the warm coastal waters won’t weaken it.

Miami or Jacksonville are the highest profile cities. Andrew caused something like nine billion in damages and that was Category Four. Hit either city with a Category Six and it’ll topple skyscrapers.”

“Max,” Juan said without looking at him, “what’s our speed?”

“Just a tick under thirty-five knots.”

“Helm, take us to forty.”

“The doc ain’t gonna like that,” Max chided.

“I’m already in Dutch for making her wake Merrick,” Juan said humorlessly.

Eric followed the order, ramping up the magnetohydrodynamics to eke more electricity from the sea to feed into the pump jets. TheOregon began to ride even rougher as she cut across the waves. An external camera showed her bow almost being swamped as she slammed into the swells. Water sheeted across the deck in a three-foot-deep surge when she lifted free.

Cabrillo tapped at his communications console to dial up the hangar. A technician answered and went to get George Adams per Juan’s request. “I don’t like that you’re calling me,” Adams said by way of greeting.

“Can you do it, George?”

“It’ll be a nightmare,” the pilot replied, “but yeah I think I can as long as the rains don’t hit. And I don’t want to hear any grief if I damage the Robinson’s landing struts.”

“I won’t say a word. Place yourself on ten-minute standby and wait to hear from me.”

“You got it.”

Juan killed the connection. “Wepps, what’s the status on our fish?”

On each side of theOregon ’s prow below her waterline was a tube capable of launching a Russian Test-71 torpedo. Each of the two-ton weapons were wire guided, with a range of nearly ten miles, a maximum speed of forty knots, and four hundred and fifty pounds of high explosives loaded into its nose.

When he’d designed theOregon Cabrillo had wanted American-made MK-48 ADCAP torpedoes, but no amount of sweet-talking would budge Langston’s refusal. As it was, the surplus Soviet torpedoes were powerful enough to sink any but the most heavily armored ships.

“You’re not considering torpedoing theSidra , are you?” Mark asked. “That’ll dump her entire load of gel in one concentrated spot. At this stage that much heat could have nearly the same effect as if the ship had completed her circle.”

“I’m just covering all my options,” Juan reassured him.

“Okay, good.” Mark called up a diagnostic on the torpedoes. “They were pulled from the tubes three days ago for routine inspection. A battery on the fish in Tube One was replaced. Both are showing full charge now.”

“So what’s your play?” Max asked Juan.

“Simplest solution is to chopper a team over there, take control of the tanker, and shut off her discharge pumps.”

“You know, Chairman,” Eric said, “if we sail her far enough away from the eye and start dumping the gel again, the heat should generate excess evaporation and create another powerful low pressure zone. It would disrupt the storm and literally tear it apart.”

“Oh, God!” Hali exclaimed suddenly. He hit a switch on his panel and a strident voice filled the control room.

“I repeat, this is Adonis Cassedine, master of the VLCCGulf of Sidra . A storm has cracked our hull.

We are under ballast so there is no oil spill but we must abandon ship if she breaks up any more.” He gave his coordinates. “I am declaring an emergency. Please, can anyone hear my signal? Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

“Under ballast, my eye,” Max grumbled. “What do you want to do?”

Cabrillo sat motionless, his hand cupped around his chin. “Let ’em sweat. He’ll keep making reports even if nobody answers him. Eric, what’s our ETA now?”

“Still looking at about three hours.”

“TheSidra won’t last that long in these seas with a cracked hull,” Max said. “Especially if her keel’s affected. Hell, she could break apart in three minutes.”

Juan couldn’t argue the point. They had to do something but his options were limited. Letting the tanker break up on her own was the worst of them and it seemed Eric’s idea of using her to defuse the storm was out. The best he could hope for was to put the ship on the bottom with the least amount of spilled gel. The Test-71 torpedoes could do the job, but it might take hours for the hull to finally disappear under the waves, which meant hours of her continuing to disgorge her cargo.

Inspiration came from his experience on theOr Death with Sloane, when the boat was hit by a missile fired from the yacht guarding the wave-powered generators. She’d sunk in an instant because her bow had been ripped off while she was at speed. Cabrillo didn’t consider the countless pitfalls in his crazy idea, he just set about getting it organized.

“Linc, Eddie, go down to the stores and get me two hundred feet of Hypertherm, the stuff with the electromagnets on the casings.” The plastic explosive–like material was a magnesium-based compound capable of burning at nearly two thousand degrees Celsius and was used in salvage operations to cut steel underwater. “Meet me in the hangar. Eddie, kit up on your way. I can’t guarantee what kind of reception we’re going to get on theSidra .”

“What about me?” Linc asked.

“Sorry, but we’ve got weight limitations.”

Max touched Juan’s shoulder. “Obviously you’ve come up with something devious and underhanded.

Care to enlighten us?” After Cabrillo explained his plan, Hanley nodded. “Like I said, devious and underhanded.”

“Is there any other way?”

31

GEORGEAdams’s face was a mask of concentration, his fingers curled tightly around the Robinson’s controls. Wind and the furiously spinning main rotor blades made the small chopper jittery on the raised helipad, but he wouldn’t take off until the timing was just right.

TheOregon dropped down the back of a large swell and a wall of water suddenly loomed up over the deck, its crest curled and threatened to swamp the helicopter and its three occupants.

“Talk to me, Eric,” he said as the ship started to climb the next wave.

“Hold on, the camera’s almost reached the top. Okay, yeah, there’s a large trough on the other side.

You’ve got plenty of time.”

The instant the ship reached the apogee of its ascent Adams gave the Robinson a bit more power, knowing that when they took off theOregon would drop from under them rather than rise up on a hidden wave and crash into the chopper. As they took to the air the tramp freighter plummeted. George dipped the nose to gain airspeed and then lifted out of the reach of the surging sea and into a maelstrom of wind.

He had to turn with the wind to gain more speed and altitude before swinging back into the gale.

Hammered by a fifty-knot headwind, the Robinson was making only sixty knots over the ocean, not much faster than theOregon herself, but Juan had wanted to get to theGulf of Sidra as quickly as possible.

If the plan held, his ship would be in torpedo range by the time he and Eddie had finished laying the Hypertherm charges.

“I calculate our flight time to be an hour and twenty minutes,” George said after settling in for the difficult flight.

“Juan?” It was Max over the radio.

“Go ahead.”

“Cassedine’s sending another SOS.”

“Okay, go ahead and answer it just like we talked about.”

“You got it.” Max left the channel open so Cabrillo could hear the conversation. “Gulf of Sidra, this is the MVOregon , Captain Max Hanley. I have heard your distress call and am making all possible speed to your location but we’re still two hours away.”

“Oregon, thank God!”

“Captain Cassedine, please advise on your situation.”

“There’s a split in the hull amidships port side and we’re taking on water. My pumps are going at full capacity and we don’t appear to be sinking, but if the tear gets any worse we will have to abandon ship.”

“Has the hole gotten any bigger since it first occurred?”

“Negative. A rogue wave running across the wind hit us and tore the plating. It has been stable since.”

“If you turn due east we can reach you quicker.” This wasn’t true but if theGulf of Sidra turned as she spewed her poison it would distort the hurricane’s eye somewhat. Basically it was a test to see who had control on the ship, its master or Daniel Singer.

Static filled the airwaves for almost a minute. When Cassedine came back there was a new current of fear in his voice. “Ah, that isn’t possible,Oregon . My engineer reports damage to our steering gear.”

“Most likely a gun to his head,” Juan said to Max.

They had considered this scenario, so Max went on as if it wasn’t a big deal. “Understood damage to your steering. In that case, Captain, we can’t risk a collision in these conditions. When we are ten miles from you I will request that you man your lifeboats.”

“What, so you can put a line on my ship afterward and claim her for salvage?”

Juan chuckled. “This guy’s facing death and he’s worried we’ll steal his vessel.”

“Captain, theOregon is a thousand-ton commercial fishing boat,” Max lied smoothly. “We couldn’t tow a tanker on a millpond let alone in the teeth of a hurricane. I am just unwilling to risk a runaway derelict ramming us in the middle of this storm.”

“I, ah, I understand,” Cassedine finally said.

“How many souls aboard?”

“Three officers, twelve crew, and one supernumerary. A total of sixteen.”

The extra man would be Singer, Juan thought, realizing that was a small number even by tanker standards, which were so automated nowadays that they typically carried just a skeleton crew, but he supposed it was enough for what Singer intended.

“Roger that,” Max replied. “Sixteen people. I will call you when we are in range.Oregon out.”

“Affirmative, Captain Hanley. I will radio immediately if our situation changes.Gulf of Sidra out.”

“Don’t get too used to that Captain Hanley stuff,” Juan said when the tanker was off the air.

“I don’t know,” Max said airily. “Has a nice ring to it. So do you think Singer will abandon with them?”

“Tough to say. Though he’s hit a setback he might try to complete his mission without the crew aboard.

They will need to slow in order to launch the lifeboat, but if Cassedine shows him how to get her back to speed then he could finish tightening the storm into an eye less than six miles across.”

“Would you?”

“If I were him and I’d come this far, yeah, I think I would see it through to the end.”

“Which means two things. One is that Singer’s crazier than an outhouse rat and two, you and Eddie better keep an eye out for him when you’re laying the cutting charges.”

“We’ll be careful.”

An hour later George radioed back to theOregon that they had reached their first waypoint on the flight.

It was time to clear theGulf of Sidra of her crew.

“This is theOregon calling Captain Cassedine.” Max said over the radio.

“This is Cassedine, go aheadOregon. ”

“We are ten miles from your position. Are you prepared to abandon ship?” Max asked.

“I do not want to argue, Captain,” Cassedine replied, “but my radar shows you are nearly thirty miles from us.”

“You’re trusting radar in twenty-foot seas?” Max scoffed. “My radar doesn’t even show you. I’m relying on my GPS and by our estimates you’re ten miles from us.” Hanley rattled off the longitude and latitude numbers of a spot ten miles due east of theGulf of Sidra . “That is our current location.”

“Ah, yes. I see that you are correct and are within the ten miles.”

“We can come in closer if you’ve made repairs to your rudder.”

“No, we have not, but the supernumerary has volunteered to stay aboard to keep working on it.”

“The rest of you are abandoning him?” Max asked, playing the part of a concerned mariner.

“He is the vessel’s owner and understands the risk,” Cassedine told him.

“Understood,” Max said with mock unease. “After you launch the boat and get clear of the tanker steer a heading of two seventy degrees and transmit a tone on the EPIRB emergency frequency so we can home in on you.”

“A heading of two seventy degrees and a tone on 121.5 megahertz. We will launch in a couple of minutes.”

“Good luck, Captain. May God go with you,” Max said seriously. Even if Cassedine and his crew were knowingly helping Singer, the sailor in him understood the dangers of getting into a lifeboat in this sea state.

A quarter hour later, Hali Kasim put the 121.5 MHz marine distress band on the op center speakers so everyone could hear the high-pitched directional tone.

“Got that, Juan?”

“I hear it. We’re heading in.”

Even flying at five hundred feet they only broke through the clouds when they were less than a mile from the supertanker. At ninety thousand tons heavier than theOregon she rode the waves much more smoothly with only occasional spray breaking over her blunt bows. They could just make out a tiny yellow speck motoring away from the red-decked behemoth. It was her lifeboat and, like he’d been ordered, Cassedine was heading due west, well away from theOregon so there would be no chance he could interfere. They could also tell that the tanker was picking up steam again after slowing to send the lifeboat down its rails.

“Check that out,” George said and pointed.

Near theGulf of Sidra ’s stern a jet of fluid arced from her side about eight feet below her rail. It was discharge from her sea-suction intake, a system of pipes and pumps that allowed her to take on or expel ballast water.

Only she wasn’t pumping water. The fluid gushing from the three-foot-diameter hole was thick and viscous, like the oil that had contaminated the bay around the Petromax terminal in Angola. Only this was clear and seemed to spread across the ocean faster than the pump was ejecting it from the ship.

“It’s growing on its own,” Eddie said from the backseat. Next to him were the thick ropes of Hypertherm. “The organics within the gel are contaminating the surrounding water and turning it into goo.”

They circled the supertanker to take a look at that damage on her port side. There was a gash in the hull rising up from her waterline and extending to her railing. As the hull flexed with the waves the rend opened and closed like a vertical mouth. The sea around the tear was coated with a growing skin of gelatin-thick flocculent.

“Where do you want me to drop you?” George asked.

“As close as you can to the bow,” Juan said.

“I don’t want to risk getting doused by spray so it’ll have to be at least a hundred feet back.”

“We won’t have the time to hunt for Singer, so make sure when you come back to grab us you can do it quickly.”

“Trust me, Chairman, I don’t want to hover over anything in this wind one microsecond longer than necessary.”

Adams looped them around and into the wind, coming at the tanker from an altitude of a hundred feet, the restless sea seeming to pulse just below the landing skids. They crossed over the ship’s rail and George reined in the little chopper, holding her steady against the gusts in an expert flying demonstration as he dumped altitude. He maintained a hover twenty feet higher than the deck rose on even the biggest waves.

“Eddie, go.”

Eddie Seng pushed open the door opposite him, fighting to keep it open with one foot while he used the other to kick the coils of Hypertherm out of the helicopter. The explosives fell to the deck below like an entangled nest of snakes. When the last of it disappeared over the sill he straightened and the wind slammed the door closed.

“Now for the hard part,” George muttered, keeping an eye on the horizon, gauging the swells and the frequency of the gusts. A few drops of rain pattered against the windscreen. He didn’t let this ominous development crack his concentration.

Juan and Eddie both waited with their hands poised on their door handles, their machine pistols slung across their backs.

An explosion of spume erupted across the width of the tanker’s bow as she plowed into another monster wave; as she started riding up it, George started to lower the Robinson. He’d judged it perfectly.

The deck was no more than five feet from the chopper’s skids when the ship started to settle again.

“See ya, boys.”

Cabrillo and Seng opened their doors and jumped without a moment’s hesitation, freeing Adams to lift away from the ship before she slammed another wave in the unrelenting cycle.

Juan hit the deck and rolled, immediately surprised at how hot the metal was. He could barely stand the temperature through the thick weave of his fatigues and he got to his feet as fast as he could. He knew the heat would seep through the rubber soles of his boots in minutes. He didn’t care about his prosthesis, he’d never feel it, but his other foot and Eddie’s were in for first-or second-degree burns if this took too long.

“This is going to suck,” Eddie said as if reading Juan’s mind.

“The spray hitting the bow should make it a little cooler there,” Juan said as they reached the pile of Hypertherm. He waved up at George in the Robinson hovering five hundred feet above them. Adams was their lookout in case Singer appeared.

Because of theGulf of Sidra ’s inertia, Juan had decided changing the ship’s course or ramming her engine into full reverse would have little effect. The best chance of stopping Singer was laying the Hypertherm as quickly as possible.

The metal-cutting explosives were configured in twenty-foot lengths with electricity-conducting clips on their ends so sections could be joined into a single charge. The detonator and battery pack could be set between any two segments, but in order to produce the desired results they would need to set it as close to the middle as possible.

Juan lifted ropes of the Hypertherm over his shoulders until he felt his knees about to buckle. By the time he was finished his left sock was soaked with perspiration.

“Ready?” he grunted.

“Let’s go.”

Staggering under their hundred-and-fifty-pound loads, the two men marched toward the bow, both trailing dreadlocks of gray explosives. The wind and the ship’s motion made them lurch drunkenly but they fought on. When they finally reached an area soaked by spray they saw tendrils of steam spiraling up from the deck. It reminded Juan of a visit to the hot springs at Yellowstone when he was a kid. He dumped his burden thirty feet from the prow. It was as close as they could get without risking being swept overboard by the eruptions of spray.

“How are we looking, George?” Juan panted.

“I did a flyby of the bridge but didn’t see anyone. The decks are a mess of pipes and manifolds. I don’t see Singer anywhere.”

“How about you, Max?”

“We’re within the torpedoes’ range and waiting for your signal.”

“Okay.”

What Juan thought was an eruption of spray blasting over the front of the ship turned out to be a microburst of heavy rain. It slackened after a few seconds but didn’t entirely abate. They had been running under two unforgiving deadlines. One was to prevent the tanker from completing its turn, and the other was to lay the explosives and be back aboard theOregon before the rain made flying impossible.

He could only hope they had better luck with the former.

Eddie started laying the explosives across the width of the ship along one of the seams where two hull sections had been welded together. Juan was busy with the detonator, testing it a couple of times with the remote control he carried in his pocket before jacking it in to the first length of Hypertherm. It took six twenty-foot segments to span the tanker’s beam. Each one contained a battery that when activated generated a magnetic field that anchored the explosives to the steel deck and prevented it from rolling with the ship.

Eddie and Juan had to work together to lower a length over each of the tanker’s sides so that some of the Hypertherm dangled in the water. Again the electromagnets clamped it to the hull along one of its welded seams. When they were finished they had a line of explosives that covered every inch of the ship above the waterline. The extra lengths they left piled on the deck.

Juan radioed George for extraction as soon as Eddie made the final connection. The rain was growing heavier, near horizontal sheets that cut visibility so the distant superstructure was as nebulous as a ghost.

As Adams prepared to make the trickiest pickup of his distinguished career Cabrillo called Hanley.

“Max, the charges are laid. Go ahead and fire the torpedoes. We should be out of here by the time they arrive.”

“Roger that.” Max replied.

Back in the op center Mark Murphy opened both outer tube doors and brought up the torpedo control program on his computer. Linked through the ship’s radar and sonar systems, a three-dimensional wire frame representation of the tactical picture came up on his screen. He could clearly see theGulf of Sidra steaming seven thousand yards from theOregon . In the parlance of World War Two submariners, this was going to be a turkey shoot.

“Wepps, on my mark fire Tube One,” Max ordered. “Mark.”

Cocooned in a bubble of high-pressure compressed air, the twenty-one-foot torpedo shot from the tube and put nearly twenty yards between itself and its mother ship before the silver-zinc batteries engaged its electric motor. It took just a few seconds for the Test-71 to ramp up to its operational speed of forty knots.

On Mark’s screen he could see the torpedo streaking toward the tanker, tiny filaments representing her wire guidance cables trailing in its wake. For now he let the fish run free, but he had a joystick control for when he needed to steer the weapon.

“Fire two.”

Murph launched the second torpedo, the sound of its discharge ringing through the ship like a hollow cough. After moment he said, “Both torpedoes away and running true.”

“Juan,” Max called, “you’ve got a pair of fish on the way so now’s the time to get out of Dodge.”

“Working on it,” Cabrillo replied.

He was looking up into the storm as George brought the Robinson lower and lower. It was his third attempt to put the chopper on the deck. The shrieking winds had aborted the first two when the helo was still fifty feet above the ship. A gust hit the helicopter and George compensated instantly, crabbing the aircraft to keep pace with theSidra ’s seventeen-knot forward speed.

“Come on, Georgie boy,” Eddie said, lifting his feet to keep the soles from searing. “You can do it.”

The Robinson came lower still, its rotor wash whipping the rain off the deck in a circular pattern. They could see Adams behind the Plexiglas windscreen. His movie star–handsome face was taut with concentration, his eyes unblinking. The skids hovered a tantalizing ten feet above the deck and as the Sidra rose on another swell the gap shrank. Eddie and Juan got into position so they could open the chopper’s rear doors and dive in as quickly as possible.

Adams managed to keep the helicopter exactly on station for nearly fifteen seconds waiting for the tanker to reach the top of the wave. When it started to drop again, he let the Robinson fall the last couple of feet. Cabrillo and Seng whipped open their doors and dove inside headfirst even as the helo bounced back into the sky. Adams twisted the throttle sharply and they lifted away from the supertanker.

“That was one fancy piece of flying,” Juan said, getting himself settled and his safety belt fastened.

“Don’t congratulate me yet. I still have to land on theOregon ,” Adams replied. Then he grinned. “But that was damned smooth if I do say so myself. Oh, just so you know, that crack amidships has gotten bigger. The deck’s starting to split, too.”

“Won’t make much of a difference now,” Juan said and keyed his radio. “Max, we’re away. Where are the torpedoes?”

“Two thousand yards and closing. Call it four minutes to impact.”

The Atlantic was too rough to see the weapons’ tracks as they moved through the water, though the three men in the chopper hovering at eight hundred feet were going to have a spectacular view of their detonation.

“I’ll trigger the Hypertherm ten seconds before impact,” Juan said. “Hitting her on both port and starboard will shear everything below her waterline and the explosives will burn through everything above. The bow will come off like a piece of sliced bread.”

Murph came on the tactical net. “I’ll call out the ranges. At fifty yards go ahead and blow it.”

A tense three minutes passed as Mark guided the torpedoes so they would slam into both sides of the Gulf of Sidra in the exact spots below where Juan and Eddie had laid the Hypertherm. Juan had the remote detonator in his hand, his thumb poised.

“One hundred yards,” Mark reported.

As the torpedoes converged on the tanker they drew closer to the surface, so it was possible to see the faint line of their wakes. Murph was vectoring them in perfectly.

“Seventy-five.”

With his keener vision Adams was the first to spot it. “What the hell is that?” he suddenly shouted.

“What? Where?”

“Movement on the deck.”

Cabrillo saw it then, a tiny figure running from theGulf of Sidra ’s bows. He was wearing a rain suit that was nearly the same shade of red as the tanker’s deck, the perfect camouflage to stalk the maze of pipes in order to reach the bow unseen. “It’s Singer! Look away!”

He mashed the detonator button and turned his head to shield his eyes from the intensity of the burning Hypertherm. When he didn’t see the sun-bright luminescence in his peripheral vision he stared at the ship.

The Hypertherm was still in place but hadn’t cooked off.

“Wepps, abort! Abort! Abort!”

Mark Murphy could have triggered the torpedoes to self-destruct but instead he sent a signal to slow the hurtling weapons and used both joysticks to send them diving. On his screen he watched their descent.

The angle looked all wrong for them to pass below the tanker’s tremendous draft but there was nothing more he could do. They were close enough now that an autodestruct order would stave in theSidra ’s hull and consign her to a lingering death that would allow her entire load of gel to escape.

“Dive, baby, dive,” Eric Stone said from his station next to Murph’s.

Max was holding his breath watching the main monitor where it displayed the torpedoes’ paths. They passed within six feet of the tanker’s flat bottom and within eleven feet of each other. Everyone in the op center let out a collective breath.

“GET me down there,” Juan shouted, pointing at the tanker.

Adams threw the chopper in a steep dive before saying, “I can’t guarantee I can pick you up again.

We’re low on fuel.”

“Doesn’t matter.” There was fury in Cabrillo’s voice.

The Robinson rushed over the tanker’s bow like a hawk coming out of a stoop, its skids no more than ten feet off the deck as Adams chased Singer down the length of the ship. Juan already had his safety belt off and was ready with his shoulder braced against his door. He unslung his MP-5 and dumped it on the seat. When he’d jumped the first time the machine pistol had gouged painfully into his back. This leap was going to be even tougher.

Singer must have heard the chopper because he looked up over his shoulder. His eyes went wide and he started running even harder. There was a dark object in his hand that Juan recognized as the detonator battery. Singer cut to his right, trying to get his pursuers to fly into a manifold tower rising forty feet from the deck and also to reach the rail so he could hurl the battery into the sea.

Juan forced open his door. The drop was ten feet and the chopper was moving at least ten miles per hour, but he leapt anyway.

He hit hard, tumbling across the hot steel plates until he crashed into a pipe support. He hauled himself to his feet, his body feeling the collective result of so much punishment. He took off at a dead sprint, his pistol out of its holster and clutched tightly in his fist.

Singer had seen him jump from the chopper and redoubled his pace, his long strides eating distance like a gazelle. But no matter how badly he wanted to toss the battery overboard and complete his mission the man behind him was driven even harder. He glanced over his shoulder again to see Cabrillo gaining ground, his face a mask of rage.

A fresh waved surged under the tanker, making her hull moan with the stress. The tear along her port side slammed closed as the swell buckled the keel. Then, as it passed by, the split opened again, tearing wider than before. Singer had seen the gap and was far enough from the rail to avoid it when it closed but when it yawned opened he never thought it would rip the deck so easily.

Singer tried to avoid it, and was awkwardly shifting his weight when his foot fell through, shredding his rain pants and the flesh of his leg against the jagged edge. The paperback-sized battery pack went skittering. He screamed at the pain and his other leg fell into the hole, dangling above the slick surface of the flocculent still sloshing in the tank. The searing metal blistered his hands as he struggled to pull himself free before the gap slammed shut.

Cabrillo dove into him at full speed just as the tanker shifted again and the two sides of the tear scissored closed. He tumbled with Singer amid a spray of warm liquid and a keening cry that pierced his brain.

When he recovered from the fall he looked at Singer. Everything below the top of his thighs had been cut off and had dropped into the tank. Blood spilled from the clean slices in torrents that turned pink in the rain.

He crawled to Singer and turned him faceup. He was ghostly pale and his lips had already turned blue.

His scream suddenly ended as his brain refused to feel anymore pain. He was slipping into shock.

“Why?” Juan demanded before the man succumbed to the trauma.

“I had to,” Singer whispered. “People have to act before it’s too late.”

“Haven’t you figured out that the future takes care of itself? A hundred years ago you never saw the sun in London because of the industrial pollution. Technology evolved and the pall went away. Today you say the problem is cars causing global warming. In ten or twenty years something will come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete.”

“We can’t wait that long.”

“Then you should have spent your millions on inventing it sooner rather than squandering it on a demonstration that can’t possibly change anything. That’s the problem with your movement, Singer.

You’re all about propaganda and press releases, not concrete solutions.”

“The people would have demanded action,” he said weakly.

“For a day or a week. To effect change you need alternatives, not ultimatums.”

Singer said nothing, but as he died it was his defiance that was the last thing to fade from his eyes.