Cabrillo’s first order, as he was hobbling to the Op Center with Max supporting one arm, was to send a crewman to his cabin to get him another prosthetic leg.
The high-tech room buzzed with coiled energy that gave the air an electric tang. Eric and Mark Murphy were in their customary seats. Hali Kasim was to the right, monitoring communications, and Linc had taken over the radar station generally manned by Linda Ross when the ship was facing danger. Gomez Adams was at a spare workstation, flying an aerial drone over the area. The drone—really, just a large commercial RC plane—was fitted with a high-def Minicam that relayed incredible real-time pictures.
“Sit rep,” Juan commanded when he threw himself into the Kirk Chair.
“Single Hainan-class missile destroyer about twelve thousand yards off the port beam and coming in at about fourteen knots,” Eric reported.
“Wepps, how are we looking?” That was Cabrillo’s nickname for whoever commanded the Oregon’s array of weaponry, usually Murph.
“I’ve got target lock with an Exocet missile, and I’ve run out the 120mm cannon. I’ve also got two Gatlings deployed for antimissile defense.”
The Exocets were launched from tubes mounted in the deck with hatches designed to look like typical inspection ports. The Gatling guns were placed in the hull and protected by metal plates that could swing out of the way. The big cannon, which used the same fire-control system as an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, was housed in the bow. Clamshell doors opened outward, and the gun was run out on a hydraulic carriage that gave it almost one hundred and eighty degrees of traverse. This system’s only drawback was that the gun had to be decoupled from its autoloader at the extremes of its swing.
On the main view screen was an aerial image of the Myanmarian ship cutting through the waves. Every few seconds what appeared to be a cotton ball would burst from one of the twin muzzles of her turret-mounted main guns as they continued to fire at the Oregon. The ship was about one hundred and seventy-five feet in length, with a knife-edged prow and boxy superstructure. The resolution was crisp enough to see she was a tired-looking boat.
Cabrillo called up the specifications of the Chinese-built gunboat and grunted aloud when he saw it had a top speed of over thirty knots. The Oregon could still outrun her, but they would be in range of her 57mm deck gun for an uncomfortable interval.
“Wait, how fast did you say she was approaching?” he asked.
“Fourteen knots, steady.”
“Gotta love the Third World,” Juan said. “They don’t have the money for proper maintenance. I bet that’s all the speed she’s got.”
A warning alarm went off at the radar station. “He’s got a lock on us,” Linc warned.
“Jam it!”
“Missile launch detected.”
“Murph?”
“Got it.”
The portside Gatling gun, with its own radar, scanned the sky and spotted the big missile as it came at them at wave-top height. With its three-hundred-pound shaped explosive warhead, the rocket would blow a hole into the Oregon big enough to rival the damage done to the USS Cole. The Gatling’s computer processor designated the threat, adjusted its aim slightly, and let rip with a four-second burst. It didn’t sound like a gun as it fired but rather some sort of mechanical saw. It was the sound of tearing on an industrial scale.
At the same time, chaff launchers threw up a curtain of thin aluminum strips that obscured the Oregon from enemy detection on the off chance the missile got past the Gatling. And luminescent flares to confuse its heat-seeking capabilities were launched with the gusto of a Fourth of July fireworks show.
The missile tracked in dead level and ran into the hail of 20mm Gatling rounds when it had traveled less than three miles. Two hundred and seventy-six rounds completely missed the rocket and plummeted harmlessly into the sea. One round did connect, and the missile exploded, smearing the sky with an elongated trail of fire as its charge went off and the remaining solid rocket fuel detonated catastrophically.
But that wasn’t the end of the battle. The destroyer’s deck guns continued to fire at nearly eight rounds a minute. With both ships on the move, and the Oregon’s cross section half of what it should be because of some radar-absorbing material applied to her superstructure, the shots were falling pretty wild.
Juan checked their speed and guesstimated that they would remain in range for the better part of fourteen minutes. That left the potential for more than a hundred rounds coming at them. A few were bound to be magic bullets and hit. His ship was armored against the types of weapons pirates employed—heavy machine guns and RPGs fired at the hull. An explosive round arcing in on a high parabola would slice through the deck plates, and the charge would detonate inside the ship with deadly results. If it managed to hit the liquid nitrogen storage tanks, the resulting explosion would unleash a deadly cloud of superchilled gas that would freeze the entire crew solid and so distort the hull’s steel that the ship would crush herself under her own weight.
It was a risk he couldn’t take. He noted too that a Hainan-class destroyer carried a crew of seventy. An Exocet launch would sink them. And there was no close-by shipping to rescue survivors.
He made his decision quickly.
“Helm, bring us hard about one hundred and twenty degrees. Wepps, when you have a bearing on that ship, engage with the one-twenty. Let’s see if we can convince him that this is a fight he can’t win.”
The Oregon dug her shoulder into the sea as her directional jets, with the help of an athwartship thruster, threw her into the tightest turn she could make. Loose items flew off shelves, and everyone had to lean into the turn to keep balanced. As the bow came about, Mark Murphy waited until he had a lock and then opened fire. Typically, they could fire twice as fast as the Burmese ship, but the gun was at its most oblique angle so the autoloader had to reengage after every round.
Unlike the smaller gun firing at them, the 120 fired at a flat, lancing trajectory. The Oregon shuddered when the gun roared.
All eyes were on the view screen. A second after the cannon discharged the discarding sabot round, the tungsten dart hit the destroyer square in the turret. The kinetic energy blew through its thin armor without a check in speed, and it impacted the breech of one of the two 57mm guns and detonated the round that was in the chamber. The turret came apart like an opening umbrella, its skin flaying up and out in a blistering cloud of fire and smoke. The smoke curled and coiled over the ship’s deck as she charged on blindly for a few seconds.
Juan gave them a count of ten, and, when the Mayanmarian ship didn’t slow, said, “Fire two.”
The big cannon had gone through the complicated loading sequence automatically, so when Mark pressed a key on his computer, it discharged another round.
This time he put the shot right through a bridge window. Had he used a high explosive, it would have killed everyone in the room. As it was, the sabot round hit with massive force, blowing out all the windows, wrecking helm control, and turning the radio room just aft of the bridge into a charred ruin.
The Hainan-class destroyer began to slow. She would have sheered away on a different course but could no longer control her rudder, and it would be several minutes before anyone senior enough left alive transferred steering to auxiliary control.
“Nicely done, Wepps,” Juan congratulated. A smile tugged at his lips when he saw Maurice enter the bridge, carrying one of his artificial legs. This limb was all titanium struts and exposed mechanics and looked like something out of a Terminator movie. The steward had had the foresight to bring Juan another pair of shoes. “You don’t know how ridiculous I feel without that thing.”
“And look, Captain,” Maurice deadpanned. “How ridiculous you look too.”
“What’s our new heading, Juan?” Eric asked.
“Get us to Brunei at the best possible speed. Maurice, rustle up some food and bring it to the conference room. I want all senior staff except Hux, who has to stay with MacD, in there in thirty minutes.
We have a lot of ground to cover.”
CABRILLO GAVE THEM a tight deadline because he had no intention of luxuriating in a long, steamy shower. He didn’t want to unwind. He wanted to stay as tight and focused as possible until Linda Ross was safely back aboard the Oregon.
Juan was the first to arrive in the boardroom. The thick glass table could seat a dozen comfortably on black leather ergonomic chairs. The walls were painted a chocolate/gray with recessed pin spotlighting and flat-panel screens on the two shortest walls. Louvers could be lowered over large square windows to let in natural light, but Maurice had rightly left them closed. The steward was just finishing laying out silver chafing dishes filled with several Indian curry dishes.
An orderly in blue scrubs was also there with an IV bag on a skeletal metal stand.
“Doctor Huxley’s orders,” he said when Juan questioned his presence. “The amount of dehydration you suffered has unbalanced your electrolytes and played havoc with your kidneys. This will help.”
Cabrillo had to admit he wasn’t anywhere near a hundred percent. His head ached, and he felt fluey. He sat at the head of the table while Maurice prepared him a plate of food and an iced tea and the orderly threaded the IV into his left forearm, freeing his unhurt right to eat.
“Any word on MacD?” he asked.
“Sorry, no change. He’s still in a coma.”
Eddie Seng and Max Hanley came in moments later, followed by Eric Stone and Mark Murphy. The two techno-junkies were carrying laptops that could jack into the ship’s dedicated Wi-Fi and were discussing the most useless apps for the iPhone.
Everyone helped themselves to the food and took their customary places around the table. Linda’s empty seat was a grim reminder of why they were there, and the absence of her elfin face and quick wit made for a somber mood.
“Okay,” Juan began. He set a napkin aside. “Let’s go over the knowns. Roland Croissard double-crossed us. His hiring us to find his daughter was just a pretense to help his henchman, Smith, get into Myanmar and presumably steal whatever was in a small satchel we found on the body of someone I can only assume was a member of a team he had sent into the country earlier.”
“Their failure was why he brought us in,” Max said in an acknowledging tone. It made sense, and everyone nodded.
“What was in the satchel?” Eddie asked.
“No idea,” Juan replied. “Probably it was something looted from a long-lost Buddhist temple. As I look back on it, there was damage to a wooden dais in the main prayer chamber. Whatever it was had probably been hidden there.”
“Just to play devil’s advocate,” Max said. “What if Croissard’s clean and it was Smith who pulled off the double cross?”
“Has anyone been able to contact Croissard since this mission turned sour?” Juan looked around the table.
“No,” Hanley admitted.
“Besides,” Juan added, “we were sent out supposedly to find his daughter. I’m sure now that the body in the river was that of a slender man with longish hair. You have tried calling Croissard’s office number and not just his cell?”
“Yeah. We even managed to get to his private secretary. She says that he is traveling and can’t be reached.”
“Typical runaround,” Juan summed up. He looked to Mark and Eric. “I want you two to track him down. He flew into Singapore on a private jet, I’m sure. Find out which and track where it went after our meeting. It’s probably owned by his company, so it shouldn’t be too tough.”
“What about the attack in Singapore?” Max asked. “Does our thinking change on that, knowing what we know now?”
“I had time to consider it while I was being held prisoner. I can’t see how Croissard’s betrayal changes our perception of that assault. I really believe it was just like we thought originally. Wrong place, wrong time. The big question on my mind is, why? Why did Croissard do this? Why hire us only to betray us?”
“Because whatever he was after was something he knew we wouldn’t get for him,” Eric said. “Croissard came to us through the Cypriot information broker L’Enfant, right? He knows the kinds of missions we deal with. So in order to get us to accept, Croissard had to make it something he knew would interest us. And come on, Juan, could you resist saving the beautiful daughter of a billionaire? Could any of us?”
“Damsel in distress,” Max grumbled. “Oldest ploy in the book.”
“The other thing I’m wondering,” Mark Murphy interjected. “How did the Myanmar military get mixed up in all this? I mean, if Croissard had contacts in the government, why not use them instead of sneaking around?”
The question hung unanswered because no one had a logical answer.
Eddie finally said, “Could he have brokered a last-minute deal?”
Everyone agreed quickly since it was the only suggestion put forth. Cabrillo knew that this was dangerous groupthink, but he also had a feeling that in this instance it was the correct answer.
He asked, “How are we coming on a more in-depth look at Croissard?”
“Ah,” Mark started, but then Eric Stone stepped in.
“Max has had us digging since you and Linda dropped comms and began choppering out of the jungle. Of course we looked into his background as a standard part of taking on a new client. That check showed he was squeaky clean. And as much as it pains us to admit it, the more we’ve dug, the shinier the guy is.”
Mark Murphy nodded. “But we know there’s something, right? I mean this guy has serious ulterior motives. We’ve even double-checked on his daughter, Soleil. The upload to her Facebook account that talks about her upcoming trip came from a personal laptop using a Wi-Fi connection at a coffee shop two blocks from her apartment in Zurich. She was booked on a Lufthansa flight from Zurich to Dubai and then on to Dhaka, Bangladesh. She checked into her room at the Hotel Sarina and caught a flight the next day to Chittagong, where she said she and her friend—”
“Paul Bissonette,” Cabrillo offered, knowing now that name would be seared on his brain forever. “Smith positively ID’d his body, but I guess that was bogus.”
“Anyway, his travel itinerary matches hers, though he had a standard room and she slept in the Imperial Suite. It was from Chittagong that they had planned to start their trek.”
“Any idea how she was getting into the jungle or her exact destination?”
“No. She was cagey about that on Facebook. She did send a Twitter message from Chittagong, saying that the real adventure was about to begin, and then nothing other than what Croissard says she phoned in.”
“So Croissard used his daughter’s planned expedition into the jungles of Bangladesh as cover for his own mission. We have to assume that she’ll return soon enough with her buddy, yes?”
“More than likely,” Murph agreed.
Cabrillo went silent for a moment, his chin resting on his hand. “Okay, that’s all in the past,” he said. “Tell me about the present. Where did they take Linda?”
Eric flipped open his laptop and worked the keys for a second. An overhead image of the open ocean appeared on the two flat-panel displays at either end of the room. The picture was tight so the resolution was poor. “This is a Google Earth shot of the exact coordinates where her tracker chip’s signal went dark.”
“And there’s nothing there,” Cabrillo snapped. He was looking for answers, not more enigmas. “She was ferried out to a ship, probably Croissard’s private yacht, and it’s long gone by now.”
“That was the first thing we checked,” Stone said. He hit another couple of keys, and the picture of a snowy-white luxury cruiser snapped up on the screens. She looked to be well over two hundred feet long and capable of cruising through the roughest seas. “This is the Pascal, Croissard’s private yacht, and she’s been anchored off Monte Carlo for the past five months. I confirmed with the harbormaster this morning. She hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“Okay, so another boat.”
“Maybe not.”
Eric returned to the origina
l picture of the ocean where Linda vanished and started zooming out so that a greater and greater swath of the sea was revealed. Small square objects appeared at the edge of the picture. Stone moused the cursor over one, clicked to center it, and started zooming back in.
“What the ...”
In seconds the image resolved itself to reveal a massive offshore oil platform, complete with a flare stack, loading crane, and a chopper pad cantilevered over the side.
“These are some of the most oil-rich parts of the world,” Eric remarked. “There are literally hundreds of drilling rigs off Brunei’s coast. That’s how the sultan got so rich. Also, there’s more than enough metal on one of those behemoths to block Linda’s tracker chip.”
“But there wasn’t a platform anywhere near where her signal dropped out,” Max said.
“No,” Mark chimed in, “but who knows how long ago these pictures were taken? Google updates their maps all the time, but they still lag far behind the real world. An oil rig could have been installed just a couple months ago and it might not show up for years.”
“Then we need more updated imagery,” Juan said.
“We’re doing one better,” Eric told him. “We’re trying to hire a chopper to fly out there and put some eyeballs on the target.” Stone put up his hands in a defensive posture when he saw a look sweep across Cabrillo’s face. “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure he stays far enough away so no one gets suspicious.”
“When will you hear back?”
“I’m hoping today. The helicopter-charter company is mostly booked up, taking workers and equipment out to the oil fields, but they told me that they might be able to divert one of their helos this afternoon for a quick look-see.”
“Good idea.” With his belly full and the IV clearing his mind and restoring his body, Cabrillo needed all his focus to stay awake. “What’s our ETA?”