And then Cabrillo saw it. He typed at the keyboard again, and the water of the South China Sea seemed to evaporate off the map projected on the big video screen. Less than a hundred miles from Brunei the continental shelf fell away sharply into the Palawan Trough, a fifteen-thousand-foot chasm that split the seafloor like an ax stroke.
“That’s where they’re heading,” he said. “They’re going to deep-six the rig with Linda aboard her. Navigator, plot us a course to a point on the trough’s rim closest to the rig’s last-known location.”
Eric Stone, who was the ship’s chief helmsman, took over the navigation workstation and made the calculations himself. It took the Oregon a few degrees more northward on their northwesterly heading. They would be cutting a corner on the busy sea-lanes, but as the ship’s bow came about, Stone was calculating the speeds and relative positions of all the vessels near enough to show on their broad-range radar.
“If we increase to thirty-five knots, we’ll thread right through them,” he announced.
“Do it, and once we’re clear of all traffic, put the hammer down.”
DAWN FOUND CABRILLO up in the wheelhouse, a big mug of black coffee in hand. The seas remained calm, and fortunately free of shipping. The water was a green as deep as the finest emerald, while the rising sun, diffused through distant clouds, smeared the horizon in a red blush. Somewhere along the line, probably during their slower passage through the Straits of Malacca, a large gull had landed on the starboard wing bridge. He was still there, but with the ship traveling so fast he’d hunkered down behind a wall plate to shelter himself from the ungodly wind.
Cabrillo continued to use the sling for his broken collarbone. Because of it, he wouldn’t be joining the raid on the J-61. He would have to confine himself to being a spotter in their MD 520N chopper, which was being preflighted down in the hangar under the number 5 cargo hatch. They would be in position to launch in another thirty minutes.
He hated sending his people into danger when he wasn’t there to lead them, so his passive role in this operation was especially maddening. Once the Hercules had been sighted, Gomez Adams would return to the Oregon to pick up the combat team, leaving Juan to sit on the sidelines. Linc, Eddie, and the other gundogs were more than capable of taking down whoever Croissard had guarding Linda.
The central elevator whispered open behind him in an alcove at the rear of the pilothouse. The crew knew that when the Chairman was up here alone, it was best to leave him that way, so he was mildly irritated at the interruption. He turned and the reprimand died on his lips. Instead, he smiled. MacD Lawless wheeled himself off the elevator. It was clear that he was struggling, but also just as clear that he was determined to make it on his own.
“Ah’d forgotten what a pain it is getting into and out of elevators in these damned contraptions.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Cabrillo said. “After the Chinese blew off my leg, I was in one for three months before I could walk on a prosthetic.”
“Ah thought some fresh air would do me some good, but Ah was warned to stay clear of the main deck.”
“Unless you like that windblown look, it’s good advice. We’re making better than forty knots.”
Lawless couldn’t hide his astonishment. Because he was in a wheelchair, he could only see the sky through the bridge windows. Cabrillo got up from his seat and crossed to the portside flying bridge door. It was a sliding door, so that it could be opened or closed no matter the conditions. As soon as it was slid back just a couple of inches, hurricane-force winds howled through the gap, rustling the old chart held to the table with equally out-of-date books on navigation. Though it was early morning, the air was hot and heavy with humidity, but at the pounding velocity with which it blew into the bridge it still felt refreshing.
Cabrillo opened the door completely and stood back so MacD could maneuver his chair out onto the flying bridge. His hair whipped around his head, and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the gale. “This is incredible. Ah had no idea a ship this big could move so fast.”
“There isn’t another like her on the high seas,” Juan told him pridefully.
Lawless spent a minute staring out to sea, his face unreadable, and then he backed himself inside once again. Cabrillo closed the door.
“Ah should get goin’ on to medical,” Lawless said with some reluctance. “Doc Huxley doesn’t know Ah’m AWOL. Good luck today.” He held out a hand.
Juan kept his arms at his side. “Sorry, but we kind of have a superstition about that. Never wish someone luck before a mission.”
“Oh, sorry. Ah didn’t . . .”
“Don’t sweat it. Now you know and you won’t spook the others.”
“How’s this? See you later.”
Cabrillo nodded. “You got it. See you later.”
On Juan’s orders the Oregon’s engines were reversed when they were at the absolute limit of their chopper’s range. They would have very little time over the target area, but he wanted to find the Hercules as quickly as possible. If he had miscalculated and the FLO-FLO heavy-lift ship wasn’t transiting toward the Palawan Trough, there was virtually no chance they’d spot it from the helicopter no matter how much time they had on target. The ship, and its cargo, would be long gone.
The impeller blades inside the gleaming drive tubes had their pitch reversed, and the water that had been blasting through the stern was suddenly jetting out the forward intakes. It looked for a moment like two torpedoes had struck the ship, with frothing water exploding up and over the bows. The deceleration was enough to buckle knees. As soon as her speed dropped below ten knots, the rear hatch cover rolled forward, and a hydraulic lift pushed the black chopper into the daylight. Cabrillo was already buckled into the front passenger seat, a large pair of binoculars over his shoulder. Max Hanley sat in back to act as a second spotter.
Technicians locked the five folding rotor blades into place as soon as they cleared the ship’s rail, and Gomez fired the souped-up turbine. When he had greens across the boards, he engaged the transmission, and the big overhead rotor began to beat the sultry air. Because of her NOTAR configuration, the 520 was a much quieter and steadier helicopter as the blades reached takeoff velocities. Adams fed her more power and gave the collective a slight twist. The skids lifted off the deck, and then he goosed her hard, pulling up and away from the Oregon in a blinding climb that kept them well aft of her forest of derrick cranes.
They had to loop far to the east so that they would approach the search area from behind the Hercules. They did this for two reasons. One, they would be coming out of the rising sun, effectively making them invisible to any lookouts. Second, with the big oil platform straddling her cargo deck, the ship’s forward-mounted radar would have a huge blind spot back over her fantail. They would never see them coming.
The flight was tedious, as any flight over water tended to be. No one was in the mood for conversation. Usually there would be banter between the men, a way to alleviate the tension gripping them all, but cracking jokes while Linda Ross’s life hung in the balance wasn’t appealing to any of them. So they flew on in silence. Juan would occasionally scan the sea through his binoculars, even when they were still far outside their target area.
It was only when they were about forty miles out that he and Max started studying the ocean surface in earnest. They worked in tandem, Max looking forward and left, Cabrillo forward and right, both men sweeping the binoculars back and forth, never allowing themselves to be mesmerized by the sun glinting off the shallow waves. They were ten miles from where Cabrillo estimated the ship would be, and just shy of where the continental shelf plunges into the Palawan Trough, when Juan spotted something ahead and off to starboard. He pointed it out to Adams, and the pilot banked around slightly to keep their backs to the sun.
Cabrillo was instantly concerned. They should have found the ship by first spotting her miles-long wake and following it in. There was no wake. The Hercules was dead in the water.
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It was an otherworldly sight. The ship itself was nearly twice the length of the Oregon, but what was so remarkable was the towering drill rig sitting astride her open deck. Her four legs were as big around as aboveground swimming pools. The floats beneath them, covered in red antifouling paint, cantilevered a good seventy feet over the Hercules’s rails and were the size of barges. The platform itself was easily several acres in area, far larger than Cabrillo’s initial estimate, and the distance from the deck to the top of the drill tower was more than two hundred feet. All told, the combination of ship and rig weighed in at well over a hundred thousand tons.
“What do you think?” Adams asked. Their plan was to find the rig and immediately return to the Oregon. But with her lying at idle, he was unsure.
Cabrillo wasn’t. “Get in closer. I want to check something.”
Adams dropped them lower until the skids were dancing over the waves. Unless a lookout was stationed at the fantail, they would still be pretty much invisible. It was when they were within a half mile that Juan realized the Hercules had developed a list to port. He wondered briefly if they had miscalculated the load and stopped to adjust it.
But when they came around the back of the ship, he saw heavy steel cables dangling off the superstructure’s boat deck, and the metal arches of her davits were extended. The lifeboat had been launched. At the waterline he could see roiling bubbles caused by water filling her ballast tanks and expelling air. They weren’t readjusting the load—they had abandoned ship because they were scuttling her.
15
SWING US AROUND THE OTHER SIDE,” CABRILLO CALLED urgently.
As nimbly as a dragonfly, Adams maneuvered the chopper around the heavy-lifter’s bow and along her starboard rail. Like on the opposite side of the ship, the davits were swung out and the lifeboat long gone. However, here there was no indication that the pumps had been activated. They were filling the tanks on only one side so that the Hercules would capsize under the tremendous weight of the J-61 rig.
“Get us down there as fast as you can! We have to stop those pumps.”
“Juan,” Max said, “what if they took Linda with them?”
Cabrillo called the Oregon. Hali Kasim answered right away. “Go ahead, Chairman.”
“Hali, have we received a signal from Linda’s tracker chip in the past hour or so?”
“No, and I’ve got one of my screens dedicated to her frequency.”
“Wait one.” Cabrillo flipped back to the internal helicopter comms channel. “There’s your answer, Max. She’s still aboard. Gomez, get us down there. Hali, you still with me?”
“Right here.”
“We’ve found the Hercules, but it looks like they’re scuttling her. You have our location, yes?”
“I show you eighty-two miles out at a bearing of forty-six degrees.”
“Get here as fast as you can. Bust the guts out of the Oregon, if you have to.” Juan killed the connection. “Change of plans. Gomez, put me on top of the rig, then you and Max try to find a way of disabling the pumps.”
“You’re going to look for Linda?” Hanley asked.
“If all else fails, she and I can jump for it,” Juan said, knowing that his idea was born of desperation and would probably end up killing them both.
The look of concern that flashed across Max’s face told Cabrillo that Hanley thought it was pretty dumb too. Juan shrugged as if to say, what else can we do? He accepted a walkie-talkie that Max had grabbed from an emergency cache kept under the rear seat. Max would carry its twin.
“You don’t want me to get more people from the Oregon?” Adams asked as he lifted the chopper up the towering side of the oil platform.
“I don’t want her slowing for any reason,” Cabrillo told him.
Gomez centered the helo over the landing pad. Cabrillo didn’t waste the time it would take to settle the helicopter properly. He unsnapped his harness, threw open the door, and dropped three feet to the deck, his clothes and hair battered by the rotor’s thunderous downdraft. The 520 peeled away toward the stern, where there was enough deck space to safely land.
The landing jarred Juan’s injured shoulder and sent a stab of pain through his chest. He winced and then ignored it.
At more than two hundred feet up in the air, the slight list they’d seen from the chopper was much more pronounced, and Cabrillo was forced to lean slightly to maintain his footing. He had no idea if the Oregon would arrive in time.
He looked around. It was clear the rig was old. Rust showed through faded and chipped paint. The decks were heavily stained and dented where pieces of equipment had been slammed into it by careless crane operators. There was very little in the way of loose gear sitting around. He spotted a large bin loaded with thirty-foot lengths of pipe called drill string that was threaded together under the derrick and used to bore the hole into the earth. Heavy chain dangled through the drill tower like industrial lace. To Juan, all that was missing to indicate the platform was abandoned was the cry of a coyote and a few tumbleweeds.
Cabrillo made his way to the accommodations block, a three-story cube with the ornamentation of a Soviet apartment building. All the windows on the first level were small portholes no bigger around than dinner plates. He examined the single steel door. He could see that at one time it had been chained closed. The chain was still attached through the handle, but the pad eye had been snapped off the jamb. Now crude beads of solder had been used to weld it shut. He pulled at the handle anyway, heaving until his arm ached, but it didn’t budge even a fraction of an inch.
He hadn’t taken a sidearm with him because this was supposed to be a scouting mission. He looked around for something he could use to smash a window. It took ten frustrating minutes to locate a discarded cover for an oxyacetylene tank. It was roughly the size of a grapefruit and heavy enough to shatter the glass. With his one arm still in a sling, his aim was off, so it took him three tries before he could even hit the window, and that blow merely starred the shatter-resistant pane. He used the metal cover like a hammer and beat the glass out of the frame.
“Linda?” he shouted into the empty room beyond. He could see it was an antechamber where workers could strip out of their oilsoaked coveralls before making their way to their cabins. “Linda?”
His voice was swallowed by the metal walls and closed door opposite him. He bellowed. He roared. He thundered. It made no difference. His answer was silence.
“Linda!”
MAX JUMPED FROM the 520 as soon as its skids kissed the deck and ran crouched under the whirling disc of its rotors. He had two football fields to cover before he even reached the fortresslike superstructure. He knew after the first dozen steps that he was woefully out of shape. Yet he kept moving, his stout legs pumping, his arms sawing back and forth. Behind him, Gomez settled the chopper and cut the turbine.
It was only when he reached the slab-sided pontoon float that Max realized they had made a critical error. The pontoon stretched the entire width of the Hercules’s deck and was as sheer as a cliff, a vertical wall of steel nearly thirty feet tall without a ladder or handhold. The ship’s crew would need access to the aft of the vessel during transit, so he began retracing his steps, looking for a hatch.
“What’s wrong?” Adams asked. He’d ditched his flight helmet and unzipped his one-piece jumpsuit to the navel.
“There’s no way over the float. Look for an access hatch.”
The two men scoured the deck to no avail. The only way to get to the superstructure was over the oil rig’s two enormous pontoons, an impossible feat for either man.
“Okay,” Hanley said, coming up with an alternative. “Let’s get back to the chopper. There must be someplace on the superstructure where you can hover and I can jump.”
Because the engine was still hot, they were airborne a few moments later. The Hercules’s bow was a jumble of equipment and antennae, and the roof of the pilothouse was obscured by the guy wires supporting its radar mast. Gomez Adams had tho
usands of hours at the controls of nearly every helicopter in the world and could thread a needle with the MD 520N, but there was simply no place large and open enough for Max to safely jump. After five frantic minutes, Adams banked away.
“New plan,” Hanley announced. “Put me on top of the forwardmost pontoon.”
He climbed between the two front seats and rummaged around in the emergency kit for twenty feet of half-inch nylon rope. It wasn’t long enough, but it would have to do.
Adams edged the helo under the soaring platform and just above the rust-red pontoon, the rotordraft buffeting them from above and below. He held the 520 rock steady with its skids just inches above the pontoon so that Max merely had to step out of the craft and onto the rig itself. Gomez pulled away once again and settled the chopper onto the fantail. He throttled down the Rolls-Royce turbine but didn’t cut it completely.
As soon as he was down, Max tied off one end of the rope to a support bracket near the rig’s stout leg and tossed the other end over the side. It hung a good fifteen feet from the deck of the Hercules . He groaned.
“I’m getting too old for this stuff.”
He maneuvered until his legs dangled over the pontoon and slowly lowered himself down the rope, clutching tightly with his thighs because he feared his belly was more of a load than his arms could take. When he reached the rope’s end, he simply let go.
The deck slammed into his feet, compressing every vertebra in his spine and sending electric jolts of pain throughout his body. He hadn’t rolled properly, and that mistake cost him a thrown back. He strung together a run-on sentence of expletives the likes of which he hadn’t uttered since his days in Vietnam.
Slowly getting to his feet, he shuffled toward the rear of the superstructure. But where others would collapse in pain, Max gutted it out, moving like an old man but moving nevertheless.
“How are you coming down there?” The question was tinny and indistinct. Then he remembered the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.