Then off her port beam a weird blue glow grew out of the ocean like a bubble of gas escaping from the bottom of a swamp. The glow quickly engulfed the Sakir, yet it was still possible to see the three-hundred-foot supership.
With no warning, no dramatic yawl, the yacht simply flipped over as if it were a bath toy under the ministrations of a vengeful child. Water washed over her upside-down bow and raced along her length as her momentum continued to drive her forward while her twin ferro-bronze propellers beat the air.
The glow winked out a moment later. The men watching held their collective breath in anticipation of the huge yacht burying herself in the waves, but somehow she recovered enough for the water to pour off her red-painted bottom, and she settled into an unequal and doubtlessly short-lasting equilibrium. The video clip ended and reset itself to the opening frame.
“Helm!” Cabrillo shouted. “Emergency full. Hali, get Gomez down to the hangar to warm up the chopper. I want to be in the air as soon as possible. Have Linc meet us there. Eric, go down to the sub bay and bring me full scuba gear including a suit. Mark, Engineering. I need cutting equipment, and from stores grab an emergency inflatable boat.”
A ship the size of the Sakir would have a crew of ten and a staff of at least twice that number. A single inflatable could only carry ten, but Juan didn’t want to overload their helo and slow them down. Survivors would just have to take turns in the boat while the rest clung to its sides.
Survivors. Juan didn’t know if there would be any. The weather wasn’t ideal, so he doubted there were many people on deck when she capsized, and those trapped inside would be so disoriented that they might not be able to save themselves. Rescuing even ten was being overly optimistic. And if she sank before they arrived, this could turn out to be a total loss.
In that event, they would need the lifeboat for themselves, because their MD 520N helicopter had the range to make it out to the stricken yacht but not enough to return.
“Go!” Juan ordered, and his people scattered.
Afterward they would parse the video to find out how a ship the size of the Sakir could be capsized like that. This was definitely new technology, something that dovetailed into Tesla’s work, but what exactly it was and how it worked could wait until later.
Juan made a brief stop in his cabin to change into a leg better suited for swimming and grabbed some foul-weather gear. The Oregon’s rear hatch was open, and the gleaming black McDonnell Douglas helicopter sat on the hangar bay elevator like a bird of prey. Overhead, the sky looked pained as a storm continued to brew. Of course the weather wouldn’t cooperate. At times like this, Cabrillo found, Mother Nature had a cruel sense of irony.
“Gomez, how are we coming?”
George Adams ducked his head out of the cockpit. “You caught me with my pants down, Chairman. I just started swapping out a radio when Hali called. I need ten minutes to put the old one back.”
“You’ve got five.”
Linc and Mark showed up together. Murph pushed a handcart loaded with an oxyacetylene cutter and other gear while the ex-SEAL carried the eighty-pound inflatable boat in its hard plastic capsule on his shoulder with seemingly little effort. Hali must have told him what to expect because he was dressed in Carhartt’s under a rain suit and steel-toed boots.
“What’s up, Chairman?” Linc asked in his rumbling basso.
“Kenin somehow capsized the Sakir. We may need to cut our way in through the hull.”
“À la Poseidon Adventure?”
“Exactly.”
Next came Eric with Juan’s dive gear. This time, he wouldn’t bother with a bulky dry suit since he wouldn’t need to dive very deeply to access the ship’s interior. Hux arrived with a case of emergency medical supplies. She loaded the box into the chopper’s external storage locker as Cabrillo finished suiting up. He wedged his back against the chopper’s side so he could pull on his dive boots and then helped Eric load the rest of his gear on the chopper’s rear bench seat. Linc had already stowed the capsule behind the pilot’s seat.
“Gomez?” Juan questioned.
“One more minute. Might as well slow the ship now.”
“All right.”
There was an intercom mounted on the hangar wall. Cabrillo called the bridge, and almost immediately the sound of water gushing through her drive tubes changed as she went into full reverse.
Max is going to kill me for that, he thought to himself, not knowing that Hanley had meted out the exact same type of punishment when he was hunting the Russian Akula. As much as Cabrillo thought the Oregon indefatigable, she had her limits, and these sudden starts and stops wreaked havoc on her impeller blades and the motors that controlled their fine pitch.
“Saddle up,” Gomez Adams announced. He tossed a bag of hand tools to one of his hangar apes—the nickname for the men who serviced the helo—and settled himself into the pilot’s seat. A hum grew from the equipment when he hit the master switch and started the takeoff procedure.
While Juan and Linc jumped aboard, the pilot jacked his helmet into the chopper’s radios and did a communications check. “Max, you in the op center yet?”
“I’m here. Talk about your rude awakenings.”
Cabrillo had his own helmet on and spoke. “Have you seen the video?”
“Hali just showed it to me. You go get her, Juan.”
They would have reacted just the same had Linda not been on the Sakir, but her presence there made this rescue especially poignant.
“Don’t you worry about that. Anything on the radar plot?”
“Nothing to be concerned with.”
“Keep an eye out. Kenin had to use either a ship or another submarine to pull that off. Ping active as you follow us, and watch for surface contacts. You know about L’Enfant?” Juan asked.
“Hali told me the little rat sold us out.”
“True, but he didn’t spill that we could track Kenin’s sub and had the capability to sink it. I don’t think Kenin knows we have a chopper or that the Oregon’s the fastest ship in the world for her size.”
“Good point.”
“Kenin underestimated us once. Let’s pray he does it again.”
“Understood. We’ll keep an eye out.”
“We’ll do the same.”
The crew never wished one another luck before a mission, so Max repeated his earlier plaint. “You bring her back.”
“Roger.”
Juan curled his fingers in frustration while they waited for temperatures in the single turbine to reach the correct levels. Only then did Adams engage the transmission, and the rotor began to turn, lazily, at first, and then it vanished in a blur of motion. At the tail of the craft, rather than a second, smaller rotor, the chopper vented its exhaust through ducted ports for gyroscopic stability.
“Max,” Adams radioed, “how we looking on winds across the deck?”
“You’re clear,” Hanley replied.
“Then we’re out of here.” He applied more power and eased up on the collective so that the angle of the rotor blades changed and they began to bite into the air.
The chopper lifted from the deck and barely cleared the fantail railing while the Oregon pulled away from under it. They adopted a nose-down attitude to pick up some speed and then rose steadily into the sky. Occasional patters of rain pelted the windshield as they clawed their way up to a thousand feet and continued to accelerate southward.
“You did the calculations, right?” Juan asked.
“Yes. I put us over the target with fumes left in the tank if we maintain a speed of one hundred thirty knots.” Gomez glanced over his shoulder to look at Cabrillo for a second. “Not to be the Negative Nelly of the group, but what happens if the yacht isn’t there anymore?”
“We ditch and wait for the Oregon in this life raft here, and when we’re saved, I deduct the price of the chopper
from your stake in the Corporation.”
“I can follow you on the first two, but number three doesn’t seem too fair to me.”
“He’s pulling your leg,” Linc said. “Otherwise, he’d have to deduct the cost of replacing the Nomad from his own share. Eddie told me the emergency ascent was the Chairman’s idea.”
Juan grinned, thankful for the banter to keep him from dwelling on Linda’s predicament. “How’s this. If we ditch, we’ll call it square.”
“Sounds good.”
Linc spent most of the flight studying the ocean through a pair of powerful binoculars that even his massive hands could barely fit around. He would watch individual ships plying the Atlantic seaboard until he was certain they were no threat. Then something caught his eye, and he kept watching it far longer than any other target. He finally passed the binoculars over his shoulder and pointed to a spot about forty degrees off their route. “Juan, what do you make of that?”
Cabrillo adjusted the glasses and looked to where Linc indicated. He thumbed the focus wheel until the image became clear. He saw a ship’s wake where it was widening and flattening into the choppy sea. He followed its trail, but it vanished before he saw the ship making it. Confused, he scanned again. The wake was a white-foaming wedge on the ocean’s surface culminating in absolutely nothing at all and yet its leading edge continued to move away from them.
The impossibility of what he was witnessing dulled his cognitive reasoning, and he continued to stare without comprehension or the ability to accept the reality of it.
A hundred feet in front of the flattened apex of the wake, occasional puffs of white water appeared, like the bow of a ship cutting through the swells, but between these two points was nothing but open water.
Juan blinked and looked harder. No, not open water, a distortion of what open water looks like, a facsimile of nature, not nature itself. Then the reality hit.
“Science fiction. Those two aren’t going to let me hear the end of it.”
“You want me to get closer?” Adams asked.
“No. Keep true. Maybe they don’t know we’ve spotted them.” Juan handed the binoculars back to Linc and keyed on his radio. “Max, you there?”
“Standing by.”
“Go to encrypt beta,” Juan ordered, and Gomez switched to the chopper’s secondary encrypted channel. “You still with me?”
There was a second delay in the rest of their conversation because the computers needed the extra time to decrypt the secure comm line. “Still here.”
“I don’t know how Kenin capsized the Emir’s yacht, but I know how he got close enough to activate the weapon. We’ve got eyeballs on a ship’s wake, only there isn’t a ship making it.”
“Come again.”
“They have some sort of optical camouflage. The ship he used to target the Sakir is, well, it’s invisible.”
“You sure this isn’t a delayed symptom of the bends?”
“Linc sees it, or doesn’t see it, too.”
“Juan,” Lincoln said urgently, thrusting the binoculars back at him. “Check it out now. They must think they’ve cleared the danger zone.”
Juan found the wake again and again followed it to its source. This time, the ship was there, and what a craft it was. It reminded him of the U.S. Navy’s pyramidal Sea Shadow, an experimental stealth ship with a design based loosely on the F-117 Nighthawk. This boat was painted a muted gray that perfectly matched the surrounding seas, and it had sloped, faceted sides that met at a peak about thirty feet above the waves. Unlike the Sea Shadow, it wasn’t a catamaran but a monohull, with a flat transom and a long overhanging deck above her bow. Function rather than aesthetics had gone into her design, making her the ugliest vessel Juan had ever seen.
He guessed she was making about fifteen knots, so more than likely if she was running from the scene of the crime, this was her maximum speed.
“So what do you want me to do about it?” Hanley asked.
At sea, the preservation of human life took precedence over everything else, there was no doubt about that. He couldn’t order the Oregon to deviate from her course and intercept this bizarre new weapon. And none of their missiles had the range to hit it, but that didn’t mean they were impotent.
“Give me a few minutes to figure out the vectors and relative speeds. I want you to be ready to launch Eddie and MacD in a RHIB to go after them.”
“That thing just capsized a three-hundred-foot mega-yacht. What do you think it would do to a puny RHIB?”
“I just want them to tail it. Once we’re finished with the rescue, we’ll track ’em down and handle it ourselves.”
“What about the storm?”
“There isn’t a gale on this planet a RHIB can’t handle.”
There was concern in his voice when Max cautioned, “It might take us days to find survivors from the Sakir.”
“We’re out of there as soon as the Coasties show up. You did radio them, right?”
“They’re three hours behind us.”
“There’s your answer. We do our thing for three hours and turn it over to the professionals. This is a good plan, Max.”
“A dangerous one,” Hanley retorted.
“Aren’t they all? Load the RHIB with extra fuel drums, and I’ll call when you’re closest to this stealth boat’s wake.”
“Okay,” Max relented. “But I’m not sending those boys out without full survival suits and redundant GPS trackers.”
“I didn’t think you would.” Juan had Max give him the Oregon’s relative position and speed and did the calculations. They would be on the Sakir when the Oregon was at its closest to the ship, so he radioed the time he wanted the RHIB launched and gave a relative bearing on their target.
“Juan,” Gomez said, “we’re approaching the Sakir’s last-known position. We could use extra eyes looking for her.”
“Okay,” Juan said, and over the radio to Max added, “We’re getting close. I’ll call again when we find her.”
“Roger. Good hunting.”
“You too.”
They were lucky in the sense that they knew to within a couple of miles where the Sakir had been when she’d been attacked. All members of the Corporation team had GPS tracking chips surgically embedded in their thighs. The chips weren’t powerful, so the signal was intermittent. But they had gotten a ping off Linda’s chip when she’d ventured on deck twenty minutes before the Sakir was capsized, cutting down the search area tremendously.
They were unlucky, however, that the ceiling of clouds had dropped, forcing them to an altitude of four hundred feet and thus cutting how far they could see to the horizon. For ten minutes, as the chopper’s turbine sucked gas like a drunk at an open bar, they crisscrossed grid lines Gomez had laid out on his kneeboard chart. And they found nothing.
“I don’t want to add to our woes,” Adams said over the chopper’s communications net, “but we’ve got about five minutes of fuel remaining.”
Linc didn’t take the binoculars from his eyes when he said, “Pessimist.”
And a moment later, he was proven correct. “There.” He pointed ahead.
Juan leaned forward between the two front seats and accepted the glasses from the former SEAL.
Like a belly-up fish floating dead in the water, the capsized hulk of the once beautiful luxury craft lay lost and forlorn, with waves crashing along its length and remarkably little debris around it. As they drew closer still, Juan saw two people, who’d been sitting near where one of the propeller shafts emerged from the hull, stand up and begin to wave frantically. For a moment he was hopeful one was Linda Ross, but it quickly became apparent they were both men dressed in identical dark suits.
“Security guards,” Juan said. “They must have been on deck when she flipped. They would have been thrown clear and then swam back to wait.”
Gomez
flew them in, hovering over the yacht just aft of amidships. He timed the hulk’s gentle roll and settled the helo with its skids straddling the Sakir’s keel. He killed the engine and powered down the electronics. The two guards rushed over to them, ducking below the still-spinning blades to reach the chopper.
Juan swung open his door. “Is it only the two of you?”
“There was a third,” the more senior man said. “He was with us on deck, but he never surfaced after the ship flipped over.”
“Any sign of other survivors? Have you heard anyone tapping from inside the ship?”
It was clear neither had thought to listen. Linc was already on his hands and knees sounding the hull with a giant wrench, his head cocked like a dog’s listening for a response.
Juan began to gather up his scuba equipment. “Let me get my gear out, and you two can sit in the chopper and warm up.” The guards were soaked to the skin and looked grateful for the opportunity to get out of the wind and rain. “My ship should be here in another hour or so, and we’ll get you some dry clothes and a hot meal.”
“Who are you?”
“Juan Cabrillo of the Corporation.”
“You’re the outfit the Emir hired for additional security.”
“The irony isn’t lost on me,” Juan told them.
Five minutes later, he walked down to where water pulsed and surged against the hull with his flippers in his hand. He bent carefully under the load on his back and slipped the fins over his dive boots, then settled his mask. He turned and walked backward off the side of the hull until the sea took up his weight and he was floating. He swam a few feet farther on so the waves wouldn’t toss him back against the unyielding steel. He adjusted his buoyancy by dumping some air from his vest.