The Oregon fought her with everything she had, but the damage was done. The rig had moved enough to upset the heavy-lifter’s center of gravity, and her list was now as bad as ever. The wave had dealt her a fatal blow.
“That’s it,” Max called over the radio. “Get out of there. That goes for you too, Juan.” He waited a beat. “Chairman, can you hear me? Juan? Juan, if you’re receiving this, get off the rig. Damnit, Juan. Answer me. You are out of time.”
But Cabrillo never answered.
16
JUAN WAS SO DEEP INTO THE J-6I RIG THAT ITS STEEL BLOCKED his walkie-talkie from sending or receiving. He probably wouldn’t have heeded Max’s warning anyway. He’d pushed too hard to fail now.
The guts of the platform were as confusing as a Cretan maze, with countless passageways that crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves. It didn’t help that his little light stabbed just a few feet into the darkness. He’d cracked his head several times on unseen obstructions and had bruises on his shin and quite possibly dents in his prosthesis.
Cabrillo had a highly developed spatial sense and had known when the Oregon had first arrived and shouldered the ship closer to an even keel. He could also tell that she was now losing the fight to keep the Hercules on the surface. The ship’s list was the worst it had ever been, and when the rig had slid across the deck several feet, he knew he was out of time, and yet he didn’t falter and didn’t question if he had done enough and should get out.
He tore down a flight of open metal stairs two at a time, cradling his bad arm with his good to lessen the impact. Down this deep the rig was an industrial forest of massive cross braces, bulkheads, and thick columns. The floor was bare metal coated in a thin layer of spilled crude that had congealed to the consistency of tar. It was slick and sticky at the same time.
“Linda?” he roared, and in the silence that followed his fading echo he thought he heard something. He called her name again, louder.
There!
It was muffled and indistinct, but he heard a response. He raced toward the sound of a woman screaming for help. In the far corner of the space was a closed-off room without windows. A wedge had been rammed under the door as an added precaution, though the handle was locked from the outside.
“Linda?”
“Is that really you?”
“Galahad to the rescue,” he said, and dropped onto his butt to hammer at the wedge with his artificial leg.
“Thank God!” Linda breathed. “You have to get us out of here!”
“Us?” Juan said between blows.
“Soleil Croissard has been a prisoner here for weeks.”
Even as he worked to free them, Cabrillo’s mind went into overdrive. There was no logical reason for Roland Croissard to imprison his daughter and then try to kill her. She was here as a hostage and thus leverage to get him to do someone else’s bidding. Smith? He didn’t seem the type. He was a henchman, not a mastermind. Someone else entirely. They’d spent untold hours tearing into Croissard’s life, only there weren’t any clues to his goals because they weren’t his goals at all. Some other person was offstage pulling all the strings, and they had no idea who. And if getting the mysterious item out of the jungle temple had been the goal, Croissard was most likely dead, leaving the Corporation with nothing.
The wedge finally popped free and skittered away. Cabrillo got to his feet and ripped open the door. Linda Ross came at him in a rush, ignoring his slinged arm. She wrapped her arms around him in a hug that for Juan was equal parts pain and joy.
Behind Linda was another woman, who in the weak glow of the penlight and after so many days of deprivation still managed to be stunningly beautiful. Her raven hair was raked back into a ponytail, exposing large brown eyes.
“Miss Croissard, I’m Juan Cabrillo.”
“Oui, I would have recognized you from Linda’s description.” Her accent was charming.
“We need to get out of here, like now.”
With Cabrillo in the lead, they made their way back up through the labyrinthine oil platform. Juan was on automatic pilot, trusting his memory to find the straightest route out to freedom, while another section of his mind worried over the identity of whoever was behind the enigmatic John Smith. He’d pump Soleil for information later. Maybe she had an inkling of what was happening, but, for now, Cabrillo looked at the problem with just the facts he knew.
He tried the walkie-talkie now that they were closer to the main deck. “Max, can you hear me?”
After a squelch of static he thought he heard, “’Ta ’ere.”
“Max?”
“ ’Et outta ’ere ’ow.”
“We’re almost clear.”
As they kept rushing up the final set of stairs, the reception improved. “Juan, Gomez is standing by on the pad, but you have less than a minute. We can’t hold her any longer.”
“Max, listen carefully. Put an armed guard on MacD Lawless. If he tries to get to a phone or radio, shoot him.”
“What? Why?” Hanley’s incredulity made his voice crack.
“I’ll explain when I see you. Do it.”
The last steps were so slanted, it was like running through a fun house, and when they finally burst out the door to the catwalk suspended over the sea, all three of them crashed into the railing because they couldn’t stop their onward rush. Running along the walkway, with the Oregon’s deck one hundred feet below them and at a twenty-plus-degree angle, made them all realize that Max’s promised minute was overly optimistic. They had seconds before the rig toppled.
Gomez Adams held the 520 over the helipad, one skid touching the deck, the other hovering over a massive gap. He was level. It was the platform that was skewed. The tips of the rotor blades on one side of the chopper thrummed dangerously close to the deck.
“Go! Go! Go!” Juan shouted.
Below them, the rig screeched once again as gravity pulled it closer to the tipping point. The Hercules’s rail was buried in the sea, and a gap began to show under the uphill side of the platform as it started going over.
In the Op Center Eric Stone redirected the drive-tube nozzles and put on a burst of speed, redlining the engines in a desperate bid to get the ship clear of the steel avalanche crashing toward them. Aboard the capsizing heavy-lifter, Eddie, Linc, and Mike had no choice but to hold on to any solid surface they could find, so they clung to the topside railing with everything they had.
Cabrillo unceremoniously shoved both women into the chopper as Adams started lifting clear and leapt in after them as the rig slid the rest of the way off the deck. The stress was too much for the platform’s spindly drill tower and it broke free, twisting steel wrenched apart as though it were a balsa wood model. The rig moaned like amplified whale song.
The helicopter’s tail boom cleared the helipad with inches to spare, its three passengers staring agog at the destruction they had just escaped. The platform crashed into the ocean scant feet from the fleeing Oregon’s jack staff and created a titanic wave that lifted the ship like a toy in a bathtub and nearly drove her bow into the swells. Eric deftly steered them across the wave front like a surfer peeling down the face of one of the big ones off Oahu’s North Shore.
The top-heavy rig turned turtle as soon as all of it was in the water, upending so that the air-filled pontoons were pointed at the sky. It bobbed almost merrily. Unburdened of so much deadweight, the Hercules pendulumed back until she was almost straight, before the inertia of water sloshing in her tanks returned her to a deadly list. The three men holding fast to the rails were thrown violently but managed to maintain their grip.
When they let go, each slid across the deck on his backside, maintaining a safe speed by pressing gloved hands and shoes against the plating. When they came up against the lower rail, all three simply stepped into the ocean and started swimming away. Adams maintained a hover over them to direct the rescue launch racing from the Oregon’s amidships boat garage.
The RHIB reached them just moments before the Hercul
es succumbed to the inevitable and rolled ponderously onto her side, her barnacle-scaled bottom exposed to the sun for the first time in her long career. Air trapped in the hull burst out through portholes and vents, spewing and sputtering as though the old ship was fighting her fate.
And then he remembered that this wasn’t the end of the affair but the very beginning, and all thoughts of humor vanished.
“Gomez, get us back to the ship ASAP.”
MacD Lawless had betrayed them from that very first night in Pakistan, and Cabrillo wanted answers.
No sooner were they down and the RHIB back up the ramp in the boat garage than he ordered the Oregon to stand off the platform and rake its waterline with the ship’s 20mm Gatling gun. The depth here wasn’t optimal—the Hercules’s crew must have been rushed after all—but they were over the continental slope, and, with luck, the J-61 would tumble down the undersea cliff and end up in the crushing depths of the abyssal plane.
Juan wanted no evidence that this act of sabotage hadn’t gone off as planned. The heavy-lifter wouldn’t last another ten minutes on the surface, and once they’d peppered the rig’s floats with a couple thousand holes it would join the ship on the bottom.
Because he was covered in gooey oil from his search for Linda, Cabrillo went to his cabin first, while the two women were escorted to the infirmary for a checkup. As much as he longed for a shower, he simply stripped out of the clothes he’d been wearing, balling them up for the trash rather than tossing them into a hamper, and threw on a navy blue jumpsuit and clean boots.
He was down in medical seven minutes after Adams got them safely home.
Max was there waiting, a look of concern on his bulldog face. “First off, glad you’re okay. Second, what the hell is going on?”
“We’re both about to find out,” Juan said, and led him through the door.
“About time I get some answers,” Dr. Huxley said with mild irritation. “Why is my patient under guard?”
“How are Soleil and Linda?”
“They’re fine. Soleil is a little wrung out from her ordeal, but up until they moved the oil platform she was cared for. How about it, Juan?”
“Croissard was duped the same way we were and by the same person.”
“MacD?”
“Nope. But let’s go have a chat with him.”
Juan could see that the guard had taken the added precaution of securing MacD’s wrists to the frame of his hospital bed. Cabrillo dismissed him with a wave and spent several seconds eyeing their newest member turned prisoner.
Cabrillo started, “I’m going to tell a story and I want you to correct me where I get it wrong. If I’m satisfied when we’re finished, I’ll untie you myself. Deal?”
MacD nodded.
“At some time during your most recent posting to Afghanistan when you worked for Fortran, you befriended a local, probably someone younger than yourself.”
“His name was Atash.”
“You told him all about your daughter back home in New Orleans, never considering the kid was part of a terrorist cell and that the information you gave him would be used against you.”
Shame washed over Lawless’s face.
“When they were ready, the cell sent a team to the United States to kidnap her. Proof of her abduction was somehow provided, and you were told that if you didn’t do exactly what they said, she would be killed. You had no choice. They set up a bogus ambush to get you across the border into Pakistan, where you were roughed up a little to make your capture appear legit. On a night they knew we were watching that village you were paraded around, setting us up to rescue you at the same time we nabbed the little boy, Setiawan.
“I always figured our escape out of that town was too easy,” Cabrillo said. “Not the ambush on the road later. That was a separate group that had no idea what was going on. But the people in the village were under orders to let us go with minimum fuss.”
“Hold on,” Max said. “I thought you said they opened fire on the bus.”
“Oh, a couple of Johnny Jihadis shot at us, but they either missed entirely or fired up at the roof so as not to hit anyone. It was a show to convince us that we’d made the greatest escape in history. All hat and no cattle, as the old saying goes. Later, after we escaped the roadblock, we had a Predator launch a missile at us. I never even saw it, but MacD here did, and moved faster than an Olympic sprinter. He saved our lives. It was an impressive feat for someone supposedly beaten half to death by the Taliban and stuffed into the trunk of a car for a few days. No way would you have been able to move like that. Your injuries were mostly faked.”
Lawless didn’t deny it.
“I don’t get this,” Hanley persisted. “How did they know when we were going to rescue that kid?”
“You don’t see it yet?” Juan asked. “That kid didn’t need rescuing because his father had sent him to Pakistan in order to lure us to that village.”
“I must be dense or something. Why lure us there?”
“The whole thing was set up so that we would take MacD into the fold. Gunawan Bahar is the mastermind of everything we’ve been through these past couple of weeks. He wanted to plant a spy on the Oregon, so he hired us to ‘rescue’ his son from the Taliban while he also planted a man whose daughter’s life he controls in place for us to rescue too.
“It was a brilliant piece of misdirection. As soon as we were double-crossed by Smith in Myanmar, all suspicion automatically went to Croissard. No one ever considered there was another layer to this onion and that Croissard was no more in control of his actions than MacD.”
That last statement wasn’t entirely true. Since his time at Insein, Cabrillo had harbored a nagging doubt about something. He did not know what, but he sensed that some piece of information he’d been given was off in some way. It was instinct, but that was a feeling he’d learned to trust over the years, so when he saw Soleil on the rig he knew what had eluded him for so long.
“What gave it away,” he continued, “was the timing of the rig being sunk. Bahar knew from Lawless that we’d escaped Insein Prison and had Linda’s location because of the tracker chip. That pushed up his deadline to deep-six the J-61 platform by a few days or weeks. The clincher was when MacD came up to the bridge this morning. He’d been told we were steaming hard but had no idea the speeds the Oregon is capable of. As soon as he left me he called his handler, Smith, I assume, because of the way he seemed to get under your skin when we were back in the jungle. He told Smith that we were just hours away rather than days. The Hercules still wasn’t over the Palawan Trough, but they were out of time. They immediately opened the sea cocks and hit the lifeboats. To not only kill Linda and Soleil but also to hide the fact that the platform was home to perhaps one of the largest collections of interlinked computers outside a government lab. How’d I do?” He directed that last question to MacD.
Before Lawless could reply, a searing blast of sound made conversation impossible. It was the buzz-saw clamor of the Gatling raking the sides of the oil rig’s ponderous floats. It went on in staccato bursts for a full minute so that by the time the weapon was withdrawn back into the ship and its redoubt cover slid back into position, three thousand fist-sized holes had been blown through the floats, above and below the water. It would slip beneath the waves within the hour.
“How about it?” Juan prompted when it was clear Mark Murphy had finished the job.
“Nailed it. Everything.”
“I get it now,” Max exclaimed. “Croissard was controlled because Bahar had kidnapped his daughter too. All that crap on her website about going to Burma was bogus. They must have tried to get to that temple themselves, failed, and so he used Croissard to hire us, somehow knowing we’d get the job done.”
Cabrillo nodded. “And with both Smith and his spy on the team, Bahar had regular updates of our progress.”
“It all seems so elaborate. Why bother forcing MacD into this? Why the ruse? Bahar could have simply hired us to go into Myanmar.” br />
“Wouldn’t work,” Juan said. “No motivation. We would never take on some job to go tomb raiding. He needed the type of mission he knew we wouldn’t refuse. He’d already proven our soft spot for wayward kids, with the whole deal to save his son, so he just pulled the same trick again, only this time using Roland Croissard’s daughter as bait. Then, once he had whatever was in that bag, he called in his friends in the government to take us out.”
“Why not work with the government all along?” Max wondered aloud.
“No idea, but there was some reason. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered with us at all. My guess is that bringing in the military was a last-minute deal. MacD, any thoughts?”
“No, sir. They never gave me any information. Just took it.”
“So you have no idea what was in that bag we recovered from the body in the river?”
“None at all. And before you ask, Ah never even knew the name of the guy above Smith. I knew Smith wasn’t calling all the shots, but Ah didn’t know who was behind him.”
“Another mystery solved,” Max said, turning back to Cabrillo, “is the bombing at the hotel.”
“What? It wasn’t random?”
“It’s obvious that Bahar considers us such a threat that he felt the need to infiltrate our team, but he also took a shot at blowing us up in Singapore to end that threat early.”
Juan considered this for a moment and shook his head. “I don’t think so. As I said before, why not just have Smith blow our brains out as soon as we entered the room?”
Hanley’s face split into a wicked grin. “Because he would know the rest of the Corporation would search the ends of the earth for the shooter. But if we’d died in a suicide bombing, who would they hunt down?”
Cabrillo thought that his old friend might be onto something, but a lingering doubt remained. For the time being the past was unimportant. “For now, we need to concentrate on Bahar. We need to find out what he has planned. It’s something he sees us threatening, and it’s linked to whatever they pulled from the temple.”