The distraction of the tender’s destruction gave Juan no advantage. Gunny Winters nearly shot him in the face when Cabrillo charged. The old Marine had the reflexes of an Olympic fencer and the concentration of a Zen master. Even as the Gatling continued its dreadful wail, Winters was ready for a fight. Juan had barely pushed Winters’s arm aside when the gunny cycled through four snap shots, the noise exploding in Cabrillo’s ear. They crashed, chest to chest, and Juan felt like he’d run into a cement-block wall. Winters was about Juan’s height, but under his loose shirt his body was thick with muscle. Winters smashed forward with his head like a striking cobra and would have crushed Cabrillo’s nose had the Chairman not whirled back, maintaining his grip on Winters’s gun hand. A lightning kick aimed for his groin came next, and Juan twisted his leg to take the massive blow on his thigh. His leg felt weak down to his toe.
Most fighters armed with a pistol would concentrate on using the weapon and ignoring everything else. Not this man. He came after Juan with everything he had. It was as if the pistol clutched in his right hand was meaningless. Meanwhile, Cabrillo opened himself up to punches and kicks as he was forced to maintain his grip on the gun hand.
The Gatling finally went silent, and smoke poured from the hundreds of holes shot into the tender’s hull. The fight in the wheelhouse was in its seventh second when Cabrillo realized he was more than likely going to lose. And that set him off—the idea of defeat. He slammed Winters’s hand into a window frame again and again until the pistol fell to the deck.
He released the hand, knowing it would be useless to Winters, and threw a combination of punches that the gunny expertly parried. Juan just had to buy a few more seconds. The plan called for his people to overwhelm the guards on deck and retake the bridge. Max would be storming through the door any second with Linc and MacD on his heels.
Winters’s right hand should be worthless and yet he managed to unsheathe a fighting knife he carried strapped inside his shirt. Cabrillo fought the natural urge to get away from the blade. Instead, he stepped closer, limiting Winters’s ability to swing the knife. Winters flipped the blade and started to plunge it into Juan’s shoulder. Juan grabbed at his wrist, but the former Marine had the better position and superior leverage, and the knife sliced into the meat of Cabrillo’s trapezius muscle. Winters was angling the blade so it would eventually find the major arteries feeding the brain.
Hot blood poured from the wound and down his chest. Cabrillo roared as he tried to keep the knife from digging deeper while Winters tried just as hard to ram the blade all the way home.
It went in an inch. The deeper it was driven, the less Juan could check its remorseless plunge. He could sense his opponent gathering himself for one last effort, one last thrust, that would kill him.
He felt the spray of blood on his face before he heard the shot. Winters collapsed, lifeless, the knife ripping savagely from Cabrillo’s body as he collapsed in a heap. Max stood in the doorway leading aft, a compact Glock in his hand still pointed at the ceiling, still smoking.
“The other four surrendered without a fight,” Hanley said.
“I had just about every advantage under the sun, and he still nearly killed me.” Juan peeled back his sodden shirt to look at his wound. It was a small slit, and little blood was seeping out.
“Better get Hux up here with her sewing kit,” Max remarked mildly.
“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”
“Ah, but I did just save your life.”
“A charge I can’t deny.” Juan looked down at Winters’s corpse. “Tough old bird.”
“What do they say, there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.”
Within a few minutes, the bridge was crowded. Hux had Juan on a seat with his shirt off so that she could clean, stitch, and dress the wound. Max was overseeing the rescue of the passengers and crew of the oil field tender. The boat was sinking by the stern so steeply that her bow was already out of the water. She was going too fast for them to launch a lifeboat, so men jumped free, with life jackets if they could find them, and started swimming for the big freighter they had come out here to rob.
Linda, MacD, and Mike Trono, all armed, were near the lowered gangplank ready to welcome their new guests.
Cabrillo refused anything stronger than Tylenol and was back on his feet in time to see the crawler crane rip from its restraining chains and smash its way across the tilted deck and destroy the already-submerged helicopter.
“Someone’s not getting their toys back.”
“Dollars to donuts,” Max said around the stem of his pipe, “the tender and crane were rented, but that helo was owned by whoever financed this little caper.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Juan agreed.
The tender’s bow was now sticking straight up in a frothing roil of air bubbles escaping from the countless 20mm punctures. And then she was gone. The water continued to boil for a few seconds, but the hull planed off far enough that that too came to an end. All that remained was a small slick of oil and a few pieces of unidentifiable flotsam.
The first of the survivors reached the boarding stairs. Each was thoroughly patted down and told to sit on their hands in an open section of deck near the four men who’d choppered aboard.
Juan and Max went down to the deck to inspect their prize. As they had guessed, the tender’s crew was hired help—in this case, native Indonesians who probably worked the oil fields off Brunei. They would be detained and questioned but ultimately released. What interested Juan were the four Westerners. Two of them, he suspected, were the two from Iraq. The other two were older, and while they looked like a couple of drowned rats after their unexpected swim, they both had a sage dignity and a predisposed haughtiness. He didn’t recognize either of them, and they remained mute when he asked their names.
Cabrillo rolled his eyes. He took out his phone, snapped pictures of their faces, and e-mailed them to Mark Murphy, who was still plugged in to the DoD databases. They got a hit right away, and the answer rocked Juan back on his heels.
“Max, do you know who we have here?”
“A rat.”
“True, but a former Deputy Under Secretary of the Army kind of rat.”
“Deputy Under? That’s a real title?”
“Gotta love bureaucracies. Isn’t that right, Mr. Hillman? Don’t know who your friend is yet, but I’m guessing you’re the top dog here.”
“Who are you people?”
“Sorry, my party, I get to ask the questions. I think it’s funny that you thought you would get away with it. You honestly thought the Pentagon would casually write off a billion dollars? A billion untraceable dollars. This money will be funding black ops for years, and you thought the military would simply forget about it.”
By the crestfallen look Hillman shot Cabrillo, that was precisely what he and his co-conspirators thought.
“They have been planning on recovering this money for years,” Juan continued. “True, no one knew who had it, but they were damn sure they were going to get it back. We even knew you and your Iraqi buddies would turn on each other in the end. Had we made Jakarta, I fully expect a few hundred of al-Qaeda’s finest there for the reception.”
“Where’s Gunny Winters?” asked one of his friends from back in Umm Qasr, one of the men they suspected would be a former officer above Winters.
“He was one of your men?” Juan asked.
“I had the privilege of being his commanding officer on his last tour.”
“He was a good Marine?”
“The best.”
“He’s dead.” The man already knew because he didn’t react. “Max shot him while he was trying to skewer me like a pig, and now that good Marine is going to be forever known as a traitor and a thief. I hope all you are proud of yourselves.”
“What happens next?” This from one of the guards who’d fast-rop
ed down from the Sikorsky.
He looked too young to be part of the original cabal. Juan guessed he was a former soldier now working as a mercenary and had been hired on for this job. He probably didn’t know what was fully at stake.
“In a few hours, a Navy amphibious assault ship that has been following us since we left the Persian Gulf is going to steam over the horizon. They’re going to send a boat to pick up the lot of you and a big Chinook helicopter for The Container. The four of you who fast-roped down to my ship will be charged, tried, and convicted of piracy, while these lovelies will spend the rest of their lives in some unnamed allied country’s worst prison, and most likely without the benefit of a trial. If I were a betting man, I’d say Sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV rate among inmates is close to fifty percent.”
Hillman and the others visibly paled.
“You see, Mr. Hillman,” Juan added, “Uncle Sam won’t acknowledge a theft of this magnitude took place. It makes our government look inept, and that means you are going to be quietly swept under the carpet.”
“Shows what you know,” the former DoD official sneered. “They’ll make a deal because I’m not the ‘top dog.’ I can name names, and then I’ll walk away clean.”
Cabrillo leaned in close so that the man could see the depth of Juan’s hatred and the joy he was taking in Hillman’s defeat. “That’s a problem. See, you’re top enough, in their book. You’re taking the rap and the fall. Sing as much as you want, they’re just going to ignore you.”
He and Max walked away. He had no idea if his threat was true, but it was nice to see Hillman really start to shake as he contemplated his fate.
Eddie and Linc pulled the last container from the hold, following the takedown, and set it on the deck. Cabrillo and Hanley walked around it once. The customs seals were still in place. Juan put a hand on the metal side of the box as if he could sense what was inside.
“Tempted?” Max teased.
“Don’t start that again. But there’s something I have to do. Overholt won’t be too pleased, but I’ve got to at least look at it.” He cranked open the rear door, breaking the delicate seal.
What they saw were square bundles about the size of hay bales wrapped in various shades of colored plastic. The bundles were stacked like any other commodity and ran almost to the ceiling. They could have been packages of tangerines or DVD players or any other commodity shipped in conex containers.
“Ho-hum,” Max said. “What did you expect? Ali Baba’s treasure room?”
Juan started at how accurate his friend had been. “Never hurts to hope.”
Cabrillo wrestled one of the bales from the stack and slit open the plastic with the knife he always carried. Fresh pain erupted from his shoulder, reminding him that he would need to take it easy for a few days. He opened the tear enough to pull out some money, a four-inch-thick chunk of hundred-dollar bills.
“I read someplace that a stack of one thousand American dollar bills is a little over four inches thick. These are hundreds, so I’ve got a hundred grand here.” They both looked at the enormity of the cache and had a better understanding than just about anyone on the planet of exactly what a billion dollars really was.
He wedged the money back into place, and this time let Max put the bale back into the container. They closed the door, the locking arm coming down with a finality that ended an eight-year operation. Ironically, their fee would most likely come from this very stack of money once it made its way into a black budget account.
Hours later, after the dead Iraqis had been buried at sea and the prisoners and cash transferred over to the USS Boxer, the Chairman hosted a dinner for the crew in the dining room and, to rounds of raucous applause, detailed the money each member of the Corporation should expect for the successful recovery of The Container.
As fate would have it—and, in their business, fate dealt more hands than most—Juan had just poured his second glass of Veuve Clicquot when he felt his phone vibrate.
It was the duty officer in the op center. “Sorry to ruin the party, Chairman. There’s a call on your private line.”
“L’Enfant,” Juan breathed. It had to be, and that could only mean the information broker had found Pytor Kenin. After this untimely but lucrative distraction, it was time to get back on the trail of Yuri Borodin’s murderer.
Considering their destination, it made sense that Eddie Seng would accompany Juan for the scouting mission. L’Enfant had only provided an address. Mark and Eric had done their usual excellent research on the location, but nothing beat eyes on the ground. They flew commercial from Jakarta to Shanghai.
Neither man was particularly comfortable in Eddie’s native land. Seng didn’t like it because he’d spent much of his CIA career here, recruiting agents to spy for him, and he’d had more than his fair share of scrapes with the various security arms of the People’s government. He suspected the dossier on him ran about a thousand pages. He looked nothing like he did in those days, the very best plastic surgeons the CIA’s money could buy had seen to that, but, nevertheless, every time he’d returned here he felt that he was being watched.
Cabrillo was also a person of interest to the Ministry of State Security since he had once blown up a Chinese Navy destroyer called the Chengdo. Technically, Dirk Pitt had blown it out of the water, but he’d done so while aboard the Oregon. That wasn’t what weighed on the Chairman. It was the fact that that particular battle had cost him a leg. He spent little time dwelling on the loss, which he’d more than made up for in so many ways, yet there were times when he felt it acutely.
Home to twenty-five million people, Shanghai was arguably the largest city in the world. As they rocketed through suburbs and sprawling acres of apartment blocks festooned with drying laundry aboard the Maglev train from the airport, Juan didn’t doubt it. Eddie had been here on many occasions, this was the Chairman’s first. Hitting speeds in excess of two hundred and fifty miles per hour, the ultrasleek train riding on a cushion of air took just minutes to reach the city’s Pudong District. A cab would have taken hours to cover the eighteen miles.
Just a few years ago, Pudong, on the eastern side of the Huangpu River, had been sparsely populated, unlike the western bank, which contained the old sections of the city and masses of bland skyscrapers left over from the 1970s expansion. Now Pudong was the face of the city, with its iconic skyline of oddly shaped buildings, most notably the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, with its two strange globes stacked on top of each other, and the beautiful Shanghai World Financial Center. The streets had the hustle and noise of New York City.
They cabbed over to their hotel but checked in separately, since two men staying in one room would arouse suspicion. As luck would have it, neither room faced the right direction, so Juan had to play the ugly American and demand a different room. The second one was perfect.
The address L’Enfant provided was one of the newer skyscrapers in Pudong, a gleaming rectangle of black reflective glass that topped out at over four hundred feet. It wasn’t the tallest building in the district, not by a large margin, but it was still impressive.
Eddie met Cabrillo in his new room with a view of their target tower. The hotel wasn’t as tall as the building, but for now their view was fine. Eddie had entered China as a medical devices salesman so he could pack in some unusual electronics. Customs had gone over it, of course, but had seen nothing amiss.
He took one of the devices to the window, which opened a crack, and stuck a probe outside and aimed it at the nearby building. He watched a digital display as he aimed the probe at each individual floor, starting at the ground and working his way up. When he was aiming the probe at the second-to-top floor, he grunted at the display. The top floor showed him similar information.
“Well?” Juan asked.
The device was a laser that could read the vibrations on a windowpane. With the right software, those vibrations could be turned into
the spoken words of anyone on the other side of the glass. They hadn’t bothered bringing a computer to interpret the vibrations. They were only interested if anyone in the target building was trying to counter the use of such a laser detector.
“Top two floors have random-flux generators,” Eddie replied, putting the device back in its case. “The panes are dancing like dervishes. Impossible for a laser to get a read on what’s being said inside.”
Juan nodded thoughtfully. This didn’t necessarily mean L’Enfant was correct, but it boded well that whoever occupied the top two floors was so security conscious. “Okay, this is looking good. We’ll split up now and find out all we can about the occupants of those floors.”
Eddie was already wearing his first disguise, a package-delivery boy. Later, he would change into a suit so he could try to talk his way into the building as a prospective tenant.
Juan was dressed as a tourist, complete with fanny pack, baseball cap, and a windbreaker with a panda logo. Thanks to an online photo-mapping service, they already knew the building had an extensive rooftop garden, and he had determined the best place to look down into it.
Four blocks from the black tower, Cabrillo entered the ornate lobby of another building, one so new it still smelled faintly of paint. There was an express elevator to the observation deck. A group of schoolgirls in matching skirts and sweaters talked and giggled and played elaborate hand-slapping games while they waited for the elevator. The two teachers chatted with a representative from the building’s staff.
The elevator car finally arrived and the group entered. Juan gave the two teachers a goofy grin and they soon ignored him. They exited seven hundred eighty feet above the street onto an open deck surrounded by a chest-high glass barrier. The vista was stunning. Far below, they could see ships in the Huangpu River and the famous Bund Promenade on the opposite side. To the north was the mighty Yangtze. And if one looked east, over the sprawl, there were the placid waters of the East China Sea.