“I’ll give you ten minutes to get as close as you can. By then the cops will have holstered their pistols, and the guy on the machine gun should be relaxed.”
It was bad luck among the Corporation team to wish someone good luck, so they parted without another word. Julia and Eddie stepped into the mangrove forest, sloshing through kneehigh water, and soon vanished from sight.
Juan had no watch, but his internal clock worked with quartz-powered precision. He gave them exactly five minutes before kicking down on the starter. It refused to fire. He jumped on it twice more with the same result.
“Come on, you stupid thing.” He kicked again. Each thrust with his leg caused the broken ends of his collarbone to grate together.
He feared he’d flood the motor, so he gave it a few seconds before trying again. He got the same result. In his mind’s eye the marine patrol was securing tow ropes to the Liberty’s bow and the cops were headed back to their car.
“Okay, you sweet little jewel of a tuk-tuk, cooperate with ole Uncle Juan and I promise I’ll treat you nice and gentle.” It was as if the vehicle knew its fate and wanted no part of it.
Then finally on the tenth kick the motor sputtered to life. Juan rubbed the fuel tank fondly. “Good girl.”
Without a foot to shift the pedal into gear, he had to bend over and move it manually at the same time he let out the clutch. The tuk-tuk came within a hairsbreadth of stalling, but he managed to keep the engine fired. As soon as he could, he popped the transmission into second, and then was in third by the time he cut through the cannery gate. The cops stood on the quay while the patrol boat was backing toward the Liberty.
So intent on their prize, none of them paid attention to the buzz-saw whine of the tuk-tuk barreling into the complex. Juan made it to the parked cruiser, its single dome light still pulsing, before one of the officers started back to see what was happening.
Cabrillo slid off, lit the gas-soaked wick sticking out of its tank, and started to commando-crawl as fast as he could.
The sock burned in an instant and detonated the gasoline seconds later. Juan felt the searing heat on his back when the mushroom of flame and smoke erupted like a miniature volcano. Had he been running, the concussion would have blown him off his feet, but he was slithering like a snake and never slowed his pace.
The tuk-tuk blew apart like a grenade, with shrapnel piercing the side of the cruiser on the rear quarter. The car started leaking fuel, and it too went up in a conflagration many times larger than what had just gone off. The rear half of the vehicle lifted five feet into the air before smashing back onto the concrete apron hard enough to snap its frame. The cop who’d left the dock to investigate the three-wheeler’s arrival was blown back ten feet.
Through all the carnage Juan continued to crawl, unseen amid the debris littering the open parking lot and the forest of grasses and shrubs that grew up through the cracked pavement. He whimpered each time he moved his bad arm but fought through the pain.
Back in the canal, Julia and Eddie, towing the unconscious MacD, had used the cover of the pier to reach the Liberty after making it through the mangrove swamp. The lifeboat was big enough to accommodate forty passengers in its fully enclosed cabin. She had two conns. One was a fully enclosed cockpit at the bow, and the other was an open helm at the very stern, with a door leading down into the hull. A band of narrow windows ringed the cabin, and there was a second hatch to gain entry just behind the cockpit. It was low enough that Julia could tread water and still manage to open it. She popped the lock as soon as the jitney cab detonated.
Kicking her legs and pulling with her arms, she managed to wriggle through. Forty feet away, and in plain view, the four men on the sleek patrol boat were watching the fireworks and paying no heed to the lifeboat. Juan’s distraction was working flawlessly.
By the time the police cruiser exploded, Eddie had passed up MacD and was halfway into the Liberty himself. The interior was low-ceilinged but bright. The bench seats all had three-point harnesses for the passengers almost like the safety gear on a roller coaster, because in heavy seas the Liberty could flip completely over and still manage to right herself.
Julia went straight for the cockpit while Eddie bent over the bilge cover to recover a long plastic tube clipped down in the dank recess of the craft. The twin engines rumbled to life, and Julia gave it no time to warm up before advancing the throttles to their stops.
Eddie staggered back under the brutal acceleration but kept on his feet. As soon as he got a better stance he unscrewed one end of the tube and slid out an FN FAL, a venerable Belgian assault rifle, and two magazines. No one really knew why Max had cached a weapon like this on a lifeboat, but Eddie was grateful for it now because once they had the Chairman, he knew the fight was far from over. He rammed home one of the mags and joined Julia in the cockpit. She intentionally brushed against the slightly smaller patrol boat as they shot past. The hit scraped paint off both vessels but, more important, dumped the guy manning the machine gun into the canal.
They left him bobbing in their wake even as another crewman scrambled to get behind the weapon.
In just a few seconds they were adjacent to the small promontory at the end of the man-made canal, but there was no sign of Cabrillo. And the patrol boat was halfway turned around for a pursuit. Juan suddenly emerged from where he’d been lying behind an overturned barrel. His face was a mask of determination even if his body looked utterly ridiculous as he hopped one-legged for the boat. Each leap carried him almost four feet, and his balance was such that he barely paused before flinging himself forward again.
Eddie ran aft to open the upper hatch, and as soon as he popped out into the sunshine he loosed a short burst from the FN at the patrol boat. Angry fountains of water erupted all around the black-hulled craft, and the men ducked for cover beneath the gunwales.
Julia throttled back but didn’t kill power entirely as she came abreast of Cabrillo. He gathered himself for one more leap and hurtled across the open space between the shore and the boat and crashed onto the upper deck in an ungainly belly flop. She buried the throttles as soon as she heard him hit. The speed with which the Liberty got on plane was such that, had Eddie not grabbed him, Juan would have tumbled over the stern.
“Thanks,” Cabrillo panted. He pressed himself into the molded jockey seat that was little more than a padded shelf for your butt and rubbed at his thigh. The muscle burned with built-up lactic acid.
They had at least a hundred yards on their pursuers, but now that the patrol boat wasn’t under fire it was quickly accelerating. The gap narrowed deceptively fast. The sailor behind the machine gun bent to take aim. Juan and Eddie ducked a second before he opened fire. He raked the seas to their port side and then swept the barrel across the transom, high-powered rounds chewing at the fiberglass.
Julia juked the Liberty to throw off his aim, but the maneuver cost her speed, and the gap tightened further. Eddie rose from behind cover and opened up. This time he was aiming to hit something, but even on a smooth river a boat is not the best firing platform, and his shots went wide.
Traffic on the water was heavy, with barges under tow and all manner of shipping, from small one-man skiffs to five-hundred-foot freighters. The two boats raced each other like competitors. The Burmese skipper knew he had superior speed to the bluntly ugly lifeboat, but he couldn’t get too close to the gunfire. It was a standoff that lasted for a mile as both craft tried to get an advantage by using other ships as moving obstacles.
“Enough of this,” Juan said when he felt he was sufficiently rested. He ducked his head into the cabin and shouted over the engine’s roar, “Julia, I’m taking the conn.”
“Okay. Good. I need to check on MacD. This can’t be doing him any good.”
The control panel at the rear helm station was simple and straightforward except for one switch hidden under the dash. Cabrillo eyed the speedometer for a second and saw they had more than enough speed. He hit the button. Activated by hydr
aulics, it extended a series of wings and foils under the hull that knifed through the water with almost no resistance. The hull was lifted until only the foils and her prop were in contact with the river.
The acceleration was twice anything they’d experienced before, and the lifeboat/hydrofoil was soon doing sixty knots. Juan glanced back in time to see a look of awe on the patrol boat skipper’s face before the distance grew too much and he became just a dot on a rapidly receding horizon.
They cut across the water with the beauty of a porpoise, swinging around slower ships like a Formula One car chasing the checkered flag. Juan knew there wasn’t a boat in the Myanmar navy that could touch them, and he seriously doubted they’d get a chopper into the air in time.
Two minutes later Julia popped up through the hatch. She handed Juan a bottled water and helped him ease his arm into a sling. She also taped a chemical ice pack to his shoulder and shook some painkillers into his hand.
“And that, fearless leader, is the best medical science has come up with for a broken collarbone,” she said, giving him a couple of protein bars from an emergency rations kit. She then grew a little sheepish. “Sorry, I forgot this tub has turbo boost. I would have kicked it into high gear sooner.”
“No worries. Get on the horn and tell Max we’re heading home. Wait. How’s Lawless?”
Her expression darkened. “Don’t know. He’s still nonresponsive.”
They continued to thunder down the river, flashing under two more bridges. To their left the city scrolled by—container ports, cement works, lading piers—and finally they were past the downtown business district, with its clutch of high-rise office towers and apartment blocks.
A police boat had been launched to intercept them. Juan could see blue lights flashing on its radar arch as it skimmed across the waves on an intercept course. If this was the best the city had to offer, it was sadly short. Cabrillo calculated the vectors as the speedboat came at them and realized that it would pass at least a hundred yards astern of the Liberty.
He gave the captain kudos for effort, because even when it became clear they had no chance of catching the hydrofoil, he kept his two outboards pegged until he swung into the lifeboat’s wake at the exact distance Juan had figured. He chased them for almost a half mile, the distance lengthening with each second, until he finally admitted defeat and broke off. Juan threw him a wave as if to acknowledge the game attempt.
The river widened the closer they came to the sea until the banks were distant blurs of jungle. It grew muddier too as tidal action and ocean waves stirred up sediment from the bottom. Traffic thinned to just the occasional containership or fishing smack. Juan knew the smart thing to do now was to throttle back and act just like any other vessel out here, but he hadn’t forgotten that the navy had assets in the air and along the coast hunting for the Oregon, so the quicker they made their rendezvous, the quicker he could get them all safely over the horizon.
Julia came back with a spare radio, since Eddie’s had been in the drink. Juan called his ship on a preset frequency. “Breaker, Breaker, this is the Rubber Duck, come back.”
“Rubber Duck, you’ve got the Pig Pen, ten-four.”
“Max, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re almost to the mouth of the Yangon River. What’s your twenty?”
Hanley read off some GPS coordinates, which Eddie jotted down and then entered inversely into the Liberty’s navigation computer. It was a simple ploy on the off chance someone who understood idiomatic American CB lingo was paying them any interest.
“We’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” Juan said when the readout flashed their ETA.
“That’s good, because the Burmese navy will have one of their Chinese-built Hainan-class missile destroyers on our doorstep in about twenty-five. She’s got a mess of cannons and packs antiship rockets up the wazoo. We’ve been swatting at helicopters for the past hour. Haven’t splashed any of them yet since no one’s fired at us, but things are going to get real hairy real soon.”
“Copy that, good buddy. Smokey’s a-comin’. Best if we transfer to the boat garage and deep-six the Liberty.”
“Sounds like a plan, just so long as we don’t have a problem and sink being one lifeboat short.”
“Never a fear,” Juan said with typical bravado. “Oh, and alert medical that we have a head-trauma case. Have a gurney standing by. The secret police did a number on MacD in prison.”
Cabrillo pressed the throttle levers to see if he could coax another knot or two out of the Liberty’s engine, but it was giving everything it had. The air lost a lot of its humidity and freshened as they made the transition from the river to the ocean. The seas remained calm, so Juan could keep the hydrofoil up on her wings and skipping across the water.
The next fifteen minutes passed without incident, but then Juan spotted something in the distance, a speck floating just above the horizon. It soon resolved itself into another Mil helicopter that was thundering toward them at full military power. The big helo was flying at less than five hundred feet when it roared overhead, the whop of its rotors sounded like crashing thunder.
The pilot must have satisfied himself with a positive identification, because when he came around again the side door had been rolled open and a pair of soldiers stood ready with AKs. Points of light winked at the muzzle tips, and lead rained from the sky. Their aim was thrown off by the speed of the chase, but the amount of ammunition they were pouring down on the hydrofoil was staggering. Holes erupted on the Liberty’s unarmored roof while bits of chewed-up fiberglass whipped by Eddie and Cabrillo at the helm. Eddie fired a controlled burst back at the chopper and managed to score a hit. A spray of blood pattered the inside of the copilot’s window.
Juan weaved the hydrofoil back and forth, trading a little speed to keep them out of another deadly assault.
“My kingdom for a Stinger missile,” Eddie said.
Cabrillo nodded glumly.
“Rubber Duck, we have a chopper on radar at about your position,” Max called over the radio.
“He’s right above us. Anything you can do?”
“Wait two minutes.”
“Roger.”
The chopper dove in for another run once the soldiers had reloaded. Juan cut the hydrofoil hard to starboard, skipping it across the waves like a stone and nearly tearing away her underwater wings. His quick maneuver put the boat directly under the Mil and robbed the gunman of their open shots, and Cabrillo matched the pilot’s every turn as he attempted to shake them out of his blind spot. Eddie put the FN to his shoulder and fired straight up, peppering the underside of the chopper with a dozen perfectly aimed rounds.
This time it was the helicopter that was forced to retreat. It took up a station at around two hundred feet in altitude and more than a thousand yards off the Liberty’s starboard rail. The pilot maintained their speed but showed no interest in coming closer. That last attack had cost him.
Then from over the horizon came a streaking blur that cut the air like lightning. It was a burst from the Oregon’s 20mm Gatling gun dialed up to its maximum of four thousand rounds per minute. At that setting it wasn’t individual bullets she threw into the sky but a solid wall of tungsten hitting hypersonic speeds. Such was the ship’s targeting system that the rounds came within three feet of the chopper’s spinning rotor without hitting it. Had they wanted, they could have blown the helicopter into a falling meteor of scrap aluminum, but the demonstration of such awesome firepower was more than enough.
The Mil banked away violently and soon vanished.
A moment later Juan spotted the Oregon as she waited patiently for her wayward children. Under her patchwork coats of naval paint and artfully applied rust streaks she was the most beautiful sight in the world to him. The garage-style door of her boat garage was opened at the waterline amidships on her starboard side. While Eddie made ready to open the sea cocks and send the Liberty to a watery grave she did not deserve, Juan guided her in to a perfect stop. Max stood on the slopi
ng ramp with two orderlies from medical and a gurney for MacD. Behind them loomed a second RHIB assault craft like the one they had abandoned in the jungle. It sat on a launching cradle that could shoot it out of the ship using hydraulic rams.
Juan tossed Hanley a line, which he tied off to a cleat.
“Good to see you.”
“Good to be back,” Juan said with a weariness he felt all the way to his bones. “I tell you, my friend, this has been a nightmare from the word go.”
“Amen to that,” Hanley agreed.
The orderlies boarded the lifeboat, carrying a backboard to stabilize Lawless and prevent any more injuries. They moved quickly, knowing that they were minutes away from engaging in a battle with Myanmar’s finest gunboat.
Once MacD was lifted clear and was on his way to the infirmary with Julia huddled over the speeding gurney, Eddie opened the seacocks and leapt from the lifeboat.
“Sorry,” Juan said, and patted the Liberty’s coaming before making the jump himself.
Max mashed an intercom button that linked to the high-tech Op Center. “Punch it, Eric. We’re out of time.”
Then came an echoing boom from across the sea followed by the high-pitched shriek of an artillery shell in flight and then an explosion of water thirty yards beyond the wallowing Liberty. Hanley was right. They were out of time. Almost immediately they were bracketed by a second shell. The Oregon was pinned.
13
DEEP INSIDE THE SHIP’S HULL, HER REVOLUTIONARY engines came online with a command from Eric Stone. The supercooled magnets sitting encased in liquid nitrogen began stripping free electrons from the seawater being sucked through her drive tubes, creating an incredible amount of electricity that was transformed into horsepower by the pump jets. Like a thoroughbred that breaks from a standstill to a full gallop, the Oregon took off, a bone in her teeth and a creaming wake at her stern. The cryopumps’ whine soon went ultrasonic and disappeared above the normal range of hearing. A third blast concussed the air, and an explosive shell hit the ocean in the exact spot the ship had occupied moments earlier. It blew up a towering fountain of water that stayed suspended for what seemed like an impossible amount of time before collapsing with a guttural splash.