Skeleton Coast

  Max was seated at the opposite end of the burnished table, his bulldog face more dour than normal. “Makambo knew from the moment we first made contact pretending to be arms merchants that he was being set up. Isaka told him about how the weapons had been fitted with radio direction tags. His first step after we made our escape was to dismantle the AKs and RPGs and toss the tags into the river.”

  “Isaka has admitted to this?”

  “Not publicly,” Max said. “But I’ve been on the phone with a couple of people in their government. Once I explained who I am and all, they told me the team sent to track the arms reported they never left the dock before they simply stopped transmitting.”

  “And when they reached the dock,” Juan said, coming to the same conclusion as the others, “there was no sign of the rebels or the guns.” He looked at Mark Murphy. “How about it, Murph, are our tags still working?”

  “They should be for another twenty-four to thirty-six hours. If I can get up to the Congo in time I have a shot of finding them from a chopper or a plane.”

  “Has Tiny reached Swakopmund with our Citation?” Juan asked, his mind calculating distances, speeds, and time.

  “He should be there by about one.”

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. As soon as we’re in range Murph will chopper to the coast and Tiny’ll fly him up to Kinshasa. From there, Mark, it will be up to you to charter any aircraft you need because Tiny has to fly back for tonight’s parachute drop.”

  “I’ll need a hand,” Murph said.

  “Take Eric. Max can act as captain and helmsman when we make our rescue attempt.”

  Eddie Seng spoke up for the first time. “Chairman, there’s no reason to believe those arms haven’t been spread all over the Congo by now.”

  Cabrillo nodded. “I know, but we have to try. If the ten guns we put our tags on are bunched together it stands to reason all the other weapons are there, too.”

  “Do you think Makambo’s planning an assault of some kind?” Linda asked.

  “We won’t know until Mark and Eric locate them.”

  “Gotcha!” Mark exclaimed, looking up from the ThinkPad.

  “What have you got?”

  “There were some encrypted files on this computer. I just cracked them.”

  “What’s on them?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Juan sipped his coffee while Linda demolished another piece of pastry. Doc Huxley suddenly appeared at the conference room door. She only stood five foot three but had the commanding presence endemic in the medical profession. Her dark hair was tied in its customary ponytail and under her lab coat she wore green scrubs that did little to flatter her curvaceous figure.

  “How’s our patient?” Juan asked as soon as he spotted her.

  “She’s going to be fine. She was a little dehydrated but she’s over that. The wound required twenty stitches and she also has two cracked ribs. I’ve got her sedated for now and she’ll be on painkillers for a while.”

  “Great job.”

  “Are you kidding? After patching up this group of pirates for a couple of years I could have tended her in my sleep.” Julia helped herself to coffee.

  “Is she going to be okay until you get back, or should you stick with her?”

  Hux gave the question a moment’s thought. “As long as she doesn’t show any signs of infection, like fever or an elevated white count, she won’t need me hovering around. But if the kidnappers have injured Geoffrey Merrick or any of you…well, you know. You’re going to want me on our Citation for immediate treatment. I’ll make my final determination just before I leave, but my gut’s telling me she’ll be okay.”

  As always Juan left all medical decisions to Dr. Huxley. “That’s your call.”

  “I will be damned,” Mark said in awe. Eric Stone was leaning over his best friend’s shoulder, the text from the laptop reflecting in his newly required glasses.

  All heads turned to the young weapon’s specialist.

  He continued to read unaware for a moment until Juan cleared his throat and he looked up. “Oh, sorry. As you know, what you found out there is a wave-powered generator, but on a scale I can’t believe. As far as I knew this technology was in its infancy, with just a couple machines off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland undergoing sea trials.

  “What it does is use the power of the waves bending its joints to push hydraulic rams. These rams, in turn, force oil through a motor using a smoothing accumulator to even the flow. The motor then turns a generator and you’ve got electricity.”

  As an engineer Max Hanley was the most impressed. “Damned ingenious,” he said. “How much can these things produce?”

  “Each one could power a town of two thousand people. And there are forty of them, so we’re talking some serious juice.”

  “What are they for?” Juan asked. “Where’s all that electricity going?”

  “That’s what was encrypted.” Mark told him. “Each generator is anchored to the seafloor with retractable cables, which is why George didn’t see them when he did his flyby a couple days ago. When the water’s calm or radar on the guard boats spots an approaching vessel they are lowered about thirty feet. A separate cable feeds the electricity to a series of heaters spaced along the length of the generators.”

  “Did you say heaters?” Eddie asked.

  “Yup. Someone thinks the water around here is a bit cool and decided to heat it up.”

  Cabrillo took another sip of coffee and helped himself to a Danish before Linda polished off the plate. “Can you tell how long they’ve been in operation?”

  “They came online in early 2004.”

  “And what’s been the effect?”

  “That data isn’t on the computer,” Mark replied. “I’m no oceanographer or anything, but I can’t imagine even this much heat having much of an effect on the entire ocean. I know the waste heat from a nuclear reactor can warm a river a few degrees. But that’s pretty localized.”

  Juan leaned back again, drumming his fingers against his jaw. His eyes swam in and out of focus. The senior staff continued to talk around him, throwing out ideas and conjecture, but he heard none of their chatter. In his mind he could see the huge generator stations sawing away on the crests of waves while below them radiant heaters glowed cherry red and warmed the waters flowing northward along the African coast.

  “If it weren’t for the gun-toting goons cropping up left and right,” Mark was saying when Juan snapped back to the present, “I’d guess this was an art project by, what’s that guy? You know the one who wraps islands in fabric and built those gates in Central Park. Crisco?”

  “Christo,” Max replied absently.

  “Mark, you’re a genius.” Cabrillo said.

  “What? You think this is some messed-up art project?”

  “No. What you said about a river.” Juan glanced around the table. “This isn’t about warming the entire ocean, only one very specific part of it. We’re smack in the middle of the Benguela Current, one of the tightest currents in the world. It runs just like a river with clearly demarked boundaries. And right around here it splits in two. One branch continues northward along the coast while the other veers west to become part of the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The gyre carries water along South America where it is heated several degrees higher than the current that stuck close to Africa.”

  “With you so far,” Mark said.

  “The two currents meet up again near the equator and as they mix they act as a buffer zone between Northern Hemisphere currents and those of the Southern.”

  “I don’t see the big deal here, Chairman. Sorry.”

  “If the two currents are closer in temperature when they come together their buffering ability is going to be diminished, possibly enough to overcome the Coriolis effect that drives the prevailing winds and thus these shallow currents.”

  Eddie Seng paused from taking a sip of coffee to say, his face alight in comprehension, “This could al
ter the very direction of the ocean’s currents altogether.”

  “Exactly. The earth’s rotation determines prevailing wind direction, which is why hurricanes in the north rotate counterclockwise and cyclones in the south move in a clockwise direction. It’s also the reason the warm gulfstream current that runs along the east coast of the United States moves north and then eastward so that Europe enjoys the weather it does. By rights most of Europe shouldn’t be habitable. Scotland is more northerly than the Canadian Arctic, for God’s sake.”

  “So what happens if southern water flows past the equator near Africa?” Linda asked.

  “It’s going to enter the breeding grounds of Atlantic hurricanes,” Eric Stone, who acted as the Oregon’s unofficial meteorologist, replied. “The warmer waters mean more evaporation and more evaporation means stronger storms. A tropical depression needs a surface temperature above eighty degrees to gain enough strength to become a hurricane. Once it has that, it absorbs around two billion tons of water a day.”

  “Two billion tons?” Linda exclaimed.

  “And when they hit land they drop anywhere between ten and twenty billion tons a day. What causes the variation between a category one storm and a massive category five is the amount of time they spend sucking up water off the African coast.”

  Mark Murphy, usually the smartest person in the room, brightened as he finally understood. “With the Benguela being artificially heated and some of that water escaping north the storms can intensify much faster.”

  “And there can be more of them,” Juan concluded. “Anyone thinking what I am?”

  “That the severe storms the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of years have been given a little help.”

  “Hurricane experts all agree that we’re entering a natural cycle of increased storm intensity,” Eric said, countering Murph’s point.

  “That doesn’t mean the generators and heaters aren’t amplifying the cycle,” Mark shot back.

  “Gentlemen,” Juan said soothingly, “it is up to better minds than ours to figure out the effects of those things. For now it’s enough they’re turned off. After this meeting I’ll call Overholt and lay out what we’ve found. He’ll more than likely turn it over to NUMA and it will be their problem. Murph, have the computer ready so I can send him all the files.”

  “No prob.”

  “For right now,” Juan continued, “I want us to concentrate on rescuing Geoffrey Merrick. Then we can think about going after whoever installed the generators in the first place.”

  “Do you think there’s a connection?” Max asked from the opposite end of the long table.

  “Not at first. But now I’m convinced. The guy Sloane and I chased with the lifeboat intentionally killed himself rather than risk me getting my hands on him. He wasn’t trying to avoid an African jail. He was a fanatic willing to martyr himself so we didn’t discover the heaters. And we know Merrick’s kidnapping isn’t about ransom, its political—i.e., he’s pissed off somebody bad enough to snatch him.”

  “Environmentalists,” Linda stated flatly.

  “Has to be,” Juan said. “We’ve stumbled into a two-pronged attack of some kind. On the one side they want Merrick, for some reason, and on the other they’re trying to disrupt ocean currents with those big generators.”

  Eddie cleared his throat. “I don’t get it, Chairman. If these people care about the environment, why would they mess with the ocean like this?”

  “We’re going to find out tonight when we rescue Merrick and grab us a couple of kidnappers.”

  RIGGERS had laid out the insertion team’s parachutes in one of the Oregon’s empty holds. The shiny black nylon looked like spilled oil on the deck plates. When Juan entered after a twenty-minute conversation with Langston Overholt at the CIA, Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski were already there, carefully folding their parachutes so when they deployed twenty-five thousand feet above the Namib Desert they wouldn’t foul. Mike was a former para-rescue jumper from the Air Force while Ski had come to the Corporation after fifteen years as a recon Marine. Max was chatting with Eddie and Linc as they checked equipment and weapons arranged on trestle tables set up along one wall of the hold.

  Cabrillo knew that every member of the Corporation could work with anyone else without the slightest problem, but there were a few dream pairings among the crew. Linc and Eddie were one, and Mike and Ski were another. When together, each team was absolutely devastating under fire and could operate at an almost telepathic level.

  Next to the tables were four rugged-looking motorcycles. These were what the Oregon had gone to Cape Town to pick up. Designed for hard desert riding, they had fat balloon tires for crossing soft sand and extra-powerful shock absorbers. In the past few days a team of mechanics had stripped them down to bare essentials to save on weight and covered up their once garish colors with a desert camouflage paint job.

  His ship’s cell phone rang as he walked across the cavernous space. “Cabrillo.”

  “Chairman, it’s Eric. Just want to let you know that we’ll be in range of Swakopmund in twenty minutes. I’ve already alerted George so he’ll have the chopper fueled and ready. Mark’s getting our gear together now. Tiny will be at the airport with the Citation by the time we reach him and I’ve even been able to charter a plane in Kinshasa.”

  “Good work.”

  “If everything goes as planned we’ll be on the hunt at dawn tomorrow.”

  “That’ll give you, what, eighteen hours to search before the batteries die?”

  “Give or take. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but we’ll find them.”

  Everyone aboard was well aware how personally Juan took being used by Benjamin Isaka and his rebel partner, Samuel Makambo. That he had unleashed so many weapons into a brutal civil war was like a lead weight in his stomach and every second they were in the field increased the likelihood they would be turned on innocent civilians. Despite what he’d said earlier to Sloane about responsibility, he knew if people died because of this debacle part of him would die as well.

  “Thank you, Eric,” he said softly.

  “No problem, Bossman.”

  “How are we looking?” Juan said as he approached the three men. On the table was a scale model of the Devil’s Oasis prison that Kevin Nixon in the Magic Shop had constructed using satellite images and the few grainy photographs they’d been able to find on the Internet.

  “Kevin made us a nice toy,” Eddie said, “but without knowing the interior layout and Merrick’s exact location we’re going in blind.”

  “So how do you want to make our play?”

  As chief of shore operations it was Seng’s job to plan the assault. “Just like we discussed right from the beginning. High-altitude high opening jump from about sixty miles north of the facility so they won’t hear our plane or get suspicious if they have radar. We glide in, land on the roof, and follow the old axiom that plans get tossed out the window as soon as you make contact.”

  Juan grinned.

  “While Linc lowers the bikes to the ground we will find Merrick and Susan Donleavy,” Eddie continued. “Once we have them, we hightail it out of there on the desert bikes and meet up with Tiny wherever George can find a passable place to land the jump plane.”

  “Don’t forget we need to grab one of the kidnappers so we can have a little chat about those power generators.”

  “I’ll personally truss one of them up like a Christmas goose,” Linc said.

  “You have the schedule all figured out for ferrying everyone to shore on the chopper?”

  “Yeah. Because of weight limitations George is going to get a lot of stick time today. It’ll take four runs to get everything to the airport. George and I figured it out so on the last run he’ll be carrying the least amount of weight. This way we can strap on the empty drop tanks. He’ll fuel up onshore and have more than enough range to scout for Tiny’s landing zone.”

  “Just make sure I’m on the last trip in,” Juan said. “I’d like
to get some sleep today.”

  “Already had that in my plan.”

  “You’re now head of the list for employee of the month.”

  “How’d it go with Lang?” Max asked.

  “I’ll tell you while I pack my chute.”

  Juan began his careful inspection of the mammoth parachute, one designed to allow a person along with two hundred pounds of gear to ride the prevailing winds up to seventy-five miles as he floated to earth. A favorite tool of Special Forces, the rig had extra padding along the straps and employed a two-tiered deployment system to ease the shock of transiting out of the brief free fall when exiting the plane. Even with these safety devices, pulling the cord was a test of nerves because the jumper knew he was in for a brutal assault to his body.

  “Good news on both fronts,” Cabrillo said, running his fingers along the riser lines looking for any sign of fraying. “Lang said he’ll contact NUMA and they’ll probably send a ship to investigate the generators. And because the CIA put the deal together with Isaka they will pay us to do what we were going to do anyway and get those weapons back.”

  “How much?”

  “Barely enough to cover costs, so don’t plan on early retirement.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  “That Benjamin Isaka turned out to be an agent of Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution has the CIA’s Africa desk in an uproar.” Cabrillo started arranging the risers so when he began to fold them he could bundle them together with rubber bands.

  “They never saw it coming?”

  “It came totally out of the blue. It’s got them rethinking every asset they have on the continent. Lang says the head of the Africa desk has already offered to resign.”

  “Will he?”

  “She, actually, and no. Provided we get those weapons back the CIA is going to wipe this whole fiasco under the rug.”

  “Why do I have the feeling there isn’t a whole lot of room under that rug anymore?”