Eric pulled up another screen on his computer that detailed the ship’s position and speed and had a running estimate of their journey. “Forty-five hours.”
“Eddie, I want you and Linc to dust off our contingency plan for storming an offshore oil rig. Go over them with the rest of the gundogs and make sure everyone’s up to speed. Eric and Mark, keep digging up anything you can find on Croissard and his pet Neanderthal, John Smith. I bet he really was in the French Foreign Legion. Maybe you can snoop through their electronic archives.”
“You got it.”
“What about me?” Max asked.
Juan got up from the table and winked. “Just sit there and look pretty.”
He was back in his cabin, the drapes closed, the air-conditioning cranked, and his covers pulled up tight less than sixty seconds later. Despite his exhaustion, his mind was troubled with images of Linda Ross being held captive, and the nagging feeling they had all missed something critical. Sleep came grudgingly.
The jangling of an old-fashioned telephone dragged him out of the abyss. He threw aside the blankets and grabbed up the handset. The matte-black telephone looked like it had come from the 1930s, but it was a modern cordless.
“Chairman, sorry to bother you.”
“No bother, Eric,” Juan said. “What’s up?”
“Eh, we just heard back from the helicopter-charter company.”
“I take it it’s not good news?”
“No, sir. Sorry. There’s nothing at the coordinates we gave them. They say the pilot overflew it directly.”
Juan swung his legs out of bed. If it hadn’t been a rig, then Linda had been transported to a ship. A ship that had several days’ head start, and they had no idea in which direction it was heading. Linda was well and truly lost.
“How are you coming along to get better satellite photographs of that area?” he asked after a short pause.
“Well, we, ah, hadn’t really looked. The chopper was our best shot.”
“You’re right, I know, but humor me. Find some recent pictures anyway. There might be a clue. Maybe they took her aboard a drill ship of some kind. If that’s the case, we at least know which needle in the Pacific haystack we’re looking for.”
“Okay.” Stone was about to hang up but remembered his report wasn’t complete. Like anyone, he was reluctant to admit failure. “We’re still drawing blanks on Croissard, and, as for Smith, we can forget it. Just a quick hack into Foreign Legion archives shows roughly fourteen thousand John Smiths have served with the unit over the past fifty years. It’s a popular nom de guerre.”
“I figured as much,” Juan admitted, “but we have to try everything. Keep me posted.”
After a quick shower and shave, Cabrillo stopped in the medical bay. MacD Lawless lay on a standard hospital bed surrounded by some of the most high-tech lifesaving equipment in existence. A heart monitor beeped a strong measured cadence. He was able to breathe on his own, but a clear plastic cannula carrying pure oxygen had been fitted around his ears and under his nose. Juan noted that Lawless’s bruising was fading fast and that most of the swelling had gone down. Along with his good looks, the guy had the constitution of an ox.
Hux came around the curtain separating MacD from the rest of the sleek medical ward. As always, she wore her hair in a ponytail and sported a lab coat. Her face bore a doctor’s professional blankness.
“How is he?” Juan asked, trying not to sound grave.
Julia suddenly smiled, a beaming grin that lit up the already bright room. “He’s asleep.”
“I know. He’s been in a coma—”
“No,” she cut him off quickly. “He came out of the coma about three hours ago. He actually just barely fell back asleep.”
For whatever reason, there wasn’t a doctor in the world that was bothered by waking a patient no matter how badly his body needed sleep. Julia Huxley was no different. She gently shook MacD’s shoulder until his eyelids fluttered open. He stared blankly until his jade-green eyes could focus.
“How you doing?” Juan asked warmly.
“Great,” MacD replied, his voice raspy. “But, man, you should see the other guy.”
“I did,” Cabrillo said. “He had some of the worst bruised knuckles I’ve ever seen.”
Lawless started chuckling, but the pain made him moan. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.” MacD suddenly grew sober as he remembered who he was talking to and how he had crumpled under Soe Than’s torture. “Ah’m sorry, Juan. Ah really am. Ah had no idea it would be so bad.”
“Don’t worry about it. All you gave was my name and the name of the ship—a name, I might add, that rarely graces her fantail. Had you not told them who I was, the Chinese government wouldn’t have made a deal to haul us back to Beijing, and Eddie wouldn’t have been able to figure out a way to rescue our sorry butts. You unwittingly saved our lives.”
Lawless looked dubious, as if there couldn’t possibly be an upside.
“Seriously,” Cabrillo went on. “We’d both be in a Chinese prison right now, looking at life sentences, if you hadn’t told Than what you did. If you want to feel bad about breaking, man, I can understand that, but you also have to own up to the fact that in doing so you made our escape possible. It’s the whole gray cloud/silver lining thing. What you have to figure out is, which one you want to concentrate on. Choose wrong, and I have no use for you. Okay?”
MacD sniffed back to clear his throat. “Ah understand. And thanks. Ah hadn’t thought about it that way. It looks like that’s the second time Ah saved your life.” He tried to smile but couldn’t make it stick.
Juan knew that Lawless would come around, and he knew too that hiring him had been the smartest thing he’d done in a long while. “You get some rest. We’re tracking Linda as we speak, so in a few days it’ll all be just a story we tell each other over drinks.”
“What? Wait. You’re trackin’ Linda?”
“Every Corporation operative has a tracker chip embedded in the thigh. It runs biometrically and can be seen from satellites. We’re en route to Brunei right now. The last place her chip transmitted from. We’ll get her back. No worries.”
“No worries,” Lawless parroted.
Cabrillo nodded to Hux and left medical.
14
THE OREGON POUNDED ONWARD, DRIVEN AS MUCH BY HER anxious captain as by her remarkable engines. It was fortunate for them that the seas remained calm because the speeds they reached would have meant a terrifying ride had there been significant chop. Usually the ship would stray from a direct route so that no passing vessels would get an inkling of its capabilities, but not this time. Cabrillo didn’t care who saw them cutting through the waves at better than forty knots. They were hailed several times, usually by bored radio operators who wanted to know who or what they were. On the Chairman’s orders, the Oregon maintained radio silence.
The only attempt to look remotely normal was the fake smoke belching from the ship’s single funnel. Most sailors who saw her pass by assumed the old tramp freighter had been retrofitted with gas turbines.
Sitting in the Op Center, his arm still in a sling, Cabrillo watched the sea’s passage on the big monitor. A glance to his right showed him a big radar repeater dotted with nearby shipping. The Straits of Malacca were perhaps the busiest shipping route in the world, and the near-traffic-jam conditions had forced the Oregon to a fraction of her capabilities.
This wasn’t Juan’s normal watch. It was eight o’clock at night, and the third shift had the conn. The sun was sinking rapidly behind them, turning the sea into an undulating sheet of burnished copper. When it vanished completely, he knew the shipping would slow even further. The big containerships and tankers had modern navigational aids and could maintain their speed in nearly any condition. The delay would be caused by the dozens of fishing boats and small coastal freighters that they would need to go around.
His only consolation was that they were approaching the end of the narrow strai
t. Once they reached open waters again, he could give his beloved ship free rein and crank up the magnetohydrodynamics even higher.
“Good evening, everyone,” Julia Huxley announced herself as she entered the Op Center from a passage at the rear of the room. Seated in a wheelchair in front of her, and wearing a hospital johnnie, was MacD Lawless. “I’m giving my patient the nickel tour. You may recall, Juan, all he saw before was the hallway on the other side of the mess hall.”
“Wow,” Lawless said, wide-eyed. “This is like the bridge of the Enterprise. That’s where Chris Pine sat.”
“Who?” Cabrillo asked.
“Chris Pine. He plays Kirk in the movies.”
Juan let the comment pass rather than reveal how far behind the times he was. “How you doing?”
“Goin’ stir-crazy, to be honest,” he drawled. “The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak. Ah can’t stand lyin’ around in bed all day. Say, where are we?”
“Malacca Straits.”
“We’re makin’ good time,” Lawless commented.
“The old girl has a little something extra under the hood, though right now we’re down to fifteen knots because of the damned traffic.”
Lawless studied the view screen and said, “Looks like the I-10 back home.”
“I grew up in California,” Juan told him. “You don’t know traffic until you’ve seen the 405. So what else has Julia shown you?”
“Your dining room, which Ah have to say is about the swankiest Ah’ve ever seen. Um, the pool, which was amazin’, the gym, some of the crew’s quarters. What else? The boat garage and the hangar.”
“You haven’t seen the half of it. Down at the keel are doors that open to the sea where we can launch and recover submarines, and the Oregon packs more firepower than just about any ship afloat.”
“Don’t ruin my tow,” Julia interjected.
“Once you’re feeling better,” Juan said, “we’ll talk about your cabin. It’s empty right now, but you start figuring out how you want it set up, and we’ll make it happen.”
“Ah’ve been bunking with a bunch of other operators in a former auto body shop in Kabul, and, before that, housin’ was courtesy of Uncle Sam. Ah don’t know the first thing about decoratin’.”
“Talk to Linc, then. He opted for a cot and a metal locker and put the rest of his allowance into a Harley Fat Boy he keeps in the hold.”
“Ah like his style.”
Julia intervened, “You can start your biker gang later. Right now, I’m taking you back to medical.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lawless said, making his voice sulky like a recalcitrant child and throwing Cabrillo a wink.
Just then Eric Stone and Mark Murphy burst into the room. “Chairman, we got it,” they said in unison. Neither looked like he’d slept much in the past thirty hours.
“What did you get?”
“Good night, y’all,” MacD said as Hux wheeled him out of the room.
“There was an oil rig there,” Eric said.
He had an open laptop in his arms, which he set down at a spare workstation. In seconds he had an overhead image of an oil production platform on the main viewer. Details were hazy because the shot was so tight, but Juan could see a chopper pad hanging off the side of the rig and make out the shadow of her tall derrick falling across the deck. If he had to guess, he’d say the platform was easily a square acre.
“It’s designated the J-61 and hasn’t been in use for two years.”
“Who owns it?”
“Dummy front companies. Mark and I are still working on piercing the corporate veil.”
“Is it self-propelled in any way?”
“No. She’s a semisubmersible with no propulsion whatsoever. If they moved her, they had to tow her.”
“We know damned well they moved her,” Juan said, staring at the screen as if a satellite picture could give him answers. “The only question is, when?”
Mark helped himself to coffee from the urn. “A rig that size would need at least two tugs. We’re checking all the big firms to see where their largest boats are now. So far we haven’t turned up any in the area recently.”
“Does Croissard have any connection to oceangoing-tug operators?”
“I don’t think so,” Mark replied. “I know he has no dealings in oil or gas exploration.”
“Double-check,” Juan said. He thought about everything that moving a structure of that size would entail. If Linda was on it just a couple of days ago and now it was gone, Croissard would be moving quickly. Coordinating multiple ships in a tight space and then building up enough speed from a dead stop would take how long? he wondered. Four days? Five? That’s if everything ran smoothly, and how often did that happen?
If he was in charge of the operation, he’d want something more efficient. How would he do it? How would he transport twenty thousand tons of steel quickly and quietly out of an anchorage it had occupied for years?”
“Wait,” he said aloud as the answer hit him. “Not a tugboat. A FLO-FLO.”
“A what?”
“FLO-FLO. Float-on/float-off. A heavy-lift ship.”
“A heavy-lift . . . ? Damn, you’re right,” Mark said. He took Eric’s laptop and typed into a search engine.
The picture that flashed up on the view screen was of a ship unlike any other in the world. Her superstructure was pressed well forward over her bows, with two boxy stacks and bridge wings that extended over her rails. The rest of the nearly eight-hundred-foot-long vessel was open deck space that barely rose above her waterline. This particular picture was of the MV Blue Marlin as she carried the crippled USS Cole back to the United States for repairs.
This extraordinary class of vessel had ballast tanks that could sink the ship to a predetermined depth. It would then maneuver itself under its load, be it a bomb-damaged guided missile destroyer or an oil platform. Once in position, the ballast tanks were pumped dry, and the entire vessel rose up once again, its cargo piggybacked atop one hundred and twenty thousand square feet of deck space. When the load was secured with chains, or even welded to the deck, the FLO-FLO could cruise comfortably at around fifteen knots, far faster than a traditional tow, which rarely exceeded five with a load as cumbersome as an oil rig.
Eric took back the laptop, his fingers blurring across the keys, as he searched databases and company records. After four minutes, in which the only sounds in the Op Center were the background thrum of the ship’s engines and the whoosh of air through the vents, he looked up. “There are only five heavy-lift ships in the world big enough to carry a rig like the J-61. Two are under contract to the U.S. Navy, ferrying combat ships so they don’t waste engine time and needless maintenance while in transit. Another one is approaching the North Sea, carrying a rig to the gas fields from its builders in Korea, and one just delivered another oil platform to Angola. The fifth is ferrying a bunch of luxury yachts from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Seems the cruising season’s about to change over. Sorry, Juan, but your idea doesn’t pan out.”
A look of bitter disappointment clouded Cabrillo’s face. He was sure that he’d been onto something.
“Not so fast,” Mark Murphy said. While Stone had been busy with his laptop, Murph had been working with his iPad, which also linked wirelessly to the ship’s Cray supercomputer. “Croissard maintains a series of dummy shell companies all incorporated in the Channel Islands. None of them have been active until about a week ago. Since this is obviously a long-range plan, I merely skimmed the file. The company’s called Vantage Partners PLC, and it was funded by an offshore bank in the Caymans. Its sole act as an incorporated entity was to sell itself to a Brazilian company. I stopped looking, figuring this was a legitimate business deal that had nothing to do with Croissard’s plans in Myanmar.”
“I take it you just dug a little further,” Juan said.
“Yup. The Brazilian company has a division in Indonesia that operates a ship-breaking yard. No financial figures for the deals have been disclosed,
but I think what Croissard did was to sell Vantage Partners for significantly less than he funded it for as a way to buy the breaker yard and all the ships they’re under contract to dismantle.”
“Is one of them a heavy-lift ship?”
“Give me a second, my hacking into their computer system’s almost complete.” Even as he said it, his eyes glued to the iPad, he started grinning. “Got it. They’re taking apart three ships right now. Two commercial fishermen and a bulk carrier. The next job is the MV Hercules, a heavy-lift FLO-FLO that’s being dismantled as part of its owner’s bankruptcy deal. Says here she arrived under her own steam, so she’s still in working order.”
“Bingo,” Cabrillo shouted in triumph. “That’s how they’re moving the rig. Croissard bought himself a heavy-lifter.”
“This brings up the next question,” Eric said. “Why? Why move the rig at all?”
“It’s not because Linda’s aboard,” Juan replied, “so there’s something else on it Croissard doesn’t want found.”
“It has to be something pretty big,” Murph pointed out. “Otherwise they would just take it off the rig and go.”
Cabrillo stayed silent, thinking. Why? wasn’t the question that interested him. He wanted to know where Croissard was taking the rig. He tapped at the integrated keyboard built into the arm of his chair and called up a map of the South China Sea. There were the big Indonesian islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, where Brunei was located, and literally thousands of others, most of which were uninhabited. Any one of those would make a perfect hiding spot. The problem was the volume of shipping passing through the region. A vessel as unusual as the Hercules, laden with an oil platform, was sure to be noticed and reported.
Just as in his first meeting with Croissard in Singapore, Juan felt like he was missing something. Maybe Eric’s question was more pertinent after all. Why risk moving the rig? Murph had said that there was something aboard it the Swiss financier didn’t want found. But you can’t really hide an entire platform. Not easily anyway.