Juan wondered if this was being delivered to the village for Seti and concluded it probably was. Rage boiled up in him with an acid burn that tightened his throat and tensed up his shoulders so they were as rigid as steel trusses.
“Whatever you’re going to do,” Eddie shouted over the winds that whipped through the bullet-riddled bus, “make it fast. There’s another turn coming.”
Cabrillo and Lawless locked eyes for just a moment, the same thought running through their minds.
“How long, you reckon?” MacD asked.
“Forty-five seconds ought to do it.” Juan manipulated the timer to set it but didn’t activate it until they were almost at the hairpin turn.
Cabrillo hit the button to set the clock in motion and tossed the bomb out a window. Eddie braked hard, fighting the wheel with all his strength since the bus lacked power steering. As before, the road fell away in a sharp S-turn and twisted back on itself.
Gravel spit from under the tires when the bus slewed around the corner, becoming light on its inside wheels from the centripetal force of Seng’s reckless driving. It settled back on its suspension, and he gunned it again.
Just like at the first switchback, the Taliban pickup had slid to a halt so its machine gun could open fire on the bus’s exposed roof. The gunner had just depressed the weapon on its pintle mount so that the barrel was pointed at the bus, and his fingers began exerting the necessary pressure on the trigger, when the bomb, which had landed on the side of the road, unseen in the darkness not four feet away, went up in a mushroom ball of smoke, fire, and steel scrap.
The old Toyota was blown off the road entirely and started sliding down the rocky embankment toward the road below. The gunner had vanished in the blast, while the driver and one of the passengers in the cab were thrown through an open window as the vehicle tumbled onto its roof.
That’s when MacD Lawless either saved all their lives or killed them.
Unlike the others, who were watching the truck to see if it was going to miss the bus as it rolled down the hill, he’d glanced out over the valley and saw an odd ring-shaped flash of light in the sky. The Nintendo Commando back at Creech, behind his computer screen and joysticks, had received authorization to fire his Predator’s Hellfire missile.
Lawless didn’t waste the breath to shout. He raced forward, hurtling past a dazed Franklin Lincoln, and reached the driver’s seat in just over a second. He grabbed the steering wheel before Eddie knew he was even there and cranked it hard over.
The front tire sank into the soft shoulder as the bus left the road, followed quickly by the rear wheels, and then the vehicle rolled onto its side, throwing the occupants onto the right wall. Glass shattered, but before anyone could fall against the hard ground, the bus rolled again onto its roof.
An instant later, the Hellfire, with its eighteen-pound shaped charge, slammed into the mountainside at the exact place the bus would have been. The explosion resembled a miniature volcano, with dust and rubble erupting from the hole it had gouged into the stone.
Like a runaway train, the bus slid down the steep embankment, rattling and jarring its hapless passengers. It crashed into a thicket of bushes just before it was about to fly off the edge of the road where it had been cut into the mountain. Its speed greatly reduced, the bus ponderously rolled onto its side and then crashed to its wheels on the roadbed. After the tumultuous din of the mad slide, the silence was overwhelming.
“Is everyone okay?” Juan called out after getting his wits back. His body ached from head to toe.
“I think I’m dead,” Linc said shakily. “At least that’s the way I feel.”
Cabrillo found a REC7 on the floor and snapped on its powerful tactical light. Linc had a little blood tricking from where his hairline would be if he didn’t keep his head shaved. He spotted Linda emerging from between two of the bench seats. She was massaging her chest.
“I think my B’s are now A’s.”
Juan next turned the light on Seti. The boy had a knot on his head from where he’d banged it against the wall when the bus first overturned, but the harness they had rigged for him had kept him firmly in his seat and the drugs had shielded him from the horror of what had just happened. He envied the teenager.
“Eddie, are you all right?” Cabrillo asked when he reached the front of the bus. Seng was wedged under the seat near the vehicle’s pedals.
“I have a newfound respect for anything that goes into a clothes dryer,” he said as he pulled himself free.
MacD Lawless lay crumpled in the stairwell. Juan bent to check on him, pressing two fingers against his neck to look for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady, and no sooner had Cabrillo moved his hand away than Lawless began to stir.
“So,” Juan said, “we went from us saving your butt to you saving ours in a little over an hour. I think that might be a record.”
“No offense,” Lawless slurred, “but Ah’d take it all back if Ah didn’t hurt so much.”
“You’re fine,” Cabrillo grinned, and grasped the man’s outstretched hand. “And if you’re not, well, it’s your own damned fault.” He turned serious. “How in the hell did you see that? And how did you move so fast?”
“Um, luck.” MacD allowed Juan to pull him to his feet. He smiled back. “And fear.”
“You okay?”
“Ah’m good,” Lawless replied. “Sorry, but grabbing the wheel was all Ah could think of.”
“It was the right call,” Juan assured him. “Insane but right.”
Lawless said, “Marion.”
“What?”
“My first name. You saved my life, Ah saved yours. In my book that makes us tight enough to tell you that my first name is Marion. Marion MacDougal Lawless III.”
Cabrillo considered this for a moment. “You’re right. MacD is better.” They shook hands formally. Juan turned back to Eddie. “Is there anything left in this poor girl?”
Seng replied by reconnecting the wires and revving the engine. “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”
A rear axle was bent, giving the bus a wobbling sway like a lame horse, but Eddie assured them it would get them to Islamabad by sunup.
4
BRUNEI
THEY ROSE FROM THE SEA LIKE MODERN-DAY CASTLES, protected by the largest moat in the world. Slab-sided and immense, oil rigs mounted atop massive pilings dotted the ocean, with tall flare stacks belching tongues of greasy flame. One sweep of the horizon revealed two dozen of the monstrosities, while hundreds more were just over the earth’s curve.
The huge oil fields made this tiny sultanate on the north coast of the island of Borneo one of the richest countries in the world and its ruler one of the wealthiest individuals.
Above the rigs, choppers ferried men and material to production and drilling platforms while sturdy workboats plied the seas between them. One such chopper, a little Robinson R22, belonged to the Oil Ministry and was carrying an inspector out to one of the larger rigs for its annual going-over. His name was Abdullah. As was common in this part of the world, he had no last name.
Slight, and just twenty-six years old, he was new to the job, this being only his third such inspection. In truth, he wouldn’t be performing the main search. Another team would be following in a couple of hours. His job was to gather and collate the mountains of paperwork required by the Ministry for each of the rigs in their territorial waters. It was scut work that befitted his rookie status. But he knew he’d be amply rewarded once he’d put in his years—senior inspectors made six-figure salaries and lived in mansions with servants and a driver.
He wore heavy-duty coveralls, despite the fact that he wouldn’t see anything much beyond the rig’s administrative office, and he held a plastic hard hat on his lap. As required, his boots had steel-reinforced toes. Wouldn’t want them crushed in a paper avalanche.
The pilot hadn’t said more than ten words to Abdullah since taking off, so when he heard a sound coming through his radio earmuffs he turned to se
e if the man was speaking to him.
To his horror he saw the pilot clutching at the side of his head. With no one holding the controls, the two-seat chopper started moving violently downward. For a fleeting instant Abdullah thought the pilot, a veteran by the look of him, was having fun at the expense of a newbie inspector, but then the man simply slumped over against his door, his body held somewhat erect by his safety belts.
The Robinson started to rotate on its axis.
Abdullah surprised himself by remembering the rudimentary training he’d received. He grabbed the stick and the collective control down by his side and placed his feet on the pedals. He gently applied opposite pressure on the foot bar to correct the spin and gave the aircraft more power to gain altitude. After about fifteen seconds he had the helicopter somewhat steadier, but by no means was it flying as well as it had under a real pilot’s control.
He glanced at the pilot. The man remained slumped over, and while he had yet to start losing color Abdullah knew that he was dead. The way he’d grabbed at his head made Abdullah think the older man had suffered a massive stroke.
Sweat trickled down Abdullah’s forehead as a lump swelled in his stomach. The rig they were heading for was still thirty miles away, while their base was twenty-five miles behind him. He had no illusions that he could keep the aircraft flying for that long. His only option was to attempt to land on one of the nearby platforms.
“Um, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he called out, not knowing if the radios were set on the right frequency, not even knowing if his headset could access the radio. There was no reply.
When he scanned the instrument panel to see what he could do, he lost concentration momentarily, and the helicopter began to rotate again. Panicked, he overcompensated, losing altitude the whole time. The altimeter showed he was at five hundred feet, but the ocean seemed to surge just below the landing skids. He eased his grip on the controls, remembering that flying helicopters was all about finesse. The light touch, the instructor had said over and over during his two-day tutorial. Though he wasn’t allowed to solo, Abdullah had landed an identical helo exactly twice, and both times the instructor’s hands had never been more than a millimeter from the controls.
Once he had stabilized the chopper, he looked out across the sea for the nearest oil rig. Uniformly, they all had landing pads either on top of the accommodations block or, more commonly, cantilevered over the ocean. To his dismay, he was in one of the few regions of the oil and gas field that wasn’t currently being worked. He saw only one rig, about three miles away. He recognized it as an older semisubmersible. Below its four stout legs, and under the water, were two enormous pontoons that could be filled or emptied via computer control. Such a rig could be towed to any location in the world. Once there, the ballast tanks could be filled to stabilize it, and anchors set on the seafloor to keep it in place. The platform was quite possibly abandoned. He saw no telltale plume of fire spewing from the vent stack, and as he got closer he noted the rust and peeling paint.
It wouldn’t matter, he realized. Once he was down he could devote his full attention to the radio and call for help.
Amid the monochromatic gray paint scheme was a faded yellow circle enclosing a yellow letter H. This was the rig’s landing pad, a steel platform hanging a hundred feet over the water. The pad wasn’t solid but rather was a grille that allowed the chopper’s downdraft to pass through, thus making it easier to land.
Abdullah coaxed the little Robinson closer and closer. There was no movement on the deck, no roughnecks working on the drilling floor, no one coming out of the accommodations block to see who was approaching. It was a ghost rig.
He brought the helo to an unsteady hover, slowly easing off the power so it sank down toward the platform. He praised Allah that there was no wind to contend with. Keeping a helicopter in a hover required the same skill and coordination as balancing a Ping-Pong ball on a paddle. A cross breeze would have been deadly. The chopper waggled and wiggled as he brought it lower. He wished he could wipe the sweat from his palms. They were slick on the controls, and a bead of perspiration dangled from the end of his nose.
When he thought he was about four feet from the landing platform, he chopped the power dramatically. But in his unfamiliarity with judging vertical distances through the Plexiglas bubble at his feet, he was closer to ten.
The Robinson slammed onto the deck hard enough to bounce it into the air again, and, when it did, it tilted over onto its side. The rotor blades smashed into the steel grille and splintered, bits of them peppering the sea far below.
The chopper’s hull crashed to the deck on its side and fortunately remained still. Had it rolled, it would have plunged off the platform. Abdullah didn’t know how to shut off the engines. His only concern was getting out of the aircraft. Everyone who watched as many action movies as he had knew that cars, airplanes, and helicopters always exploded following a crash.
He clicked off his safety belts and climbed over the inert form of the pilot, fear overcoming his revulsion at actually touching a corpse. The four-cylinder Lycoming engine continued to squeal behind the cockpit. He managed to unlatch the pilot’s door and thrust it up and over so that it lay flush with the fuselage. He had to physically stand on the pilot’s hip to get enough leverage to haul himself from the chopper.
Did he smell gas?
A new burst of fear shot through his body, and he jumped free. No sooner had his feet hit the grating than he was running off the landing pad in the direction of the accommodations block, a huge steel building that took up a third of the deck space on the massive rig. Above it all soared the drilling derrick, a spindly network of steel struts that looked like a miniature Eiffel Tower.
Abdullah reached the corner of the block and turned back. He saw no fire, but smoke billowed from the Robinson’s engine compartment, and it thickened by the second.
And then he had the terrible thought that maybe the pilot wasn’t dead. He didn’t know what to do. The smoke grew more dense. He could see into the cockpit though the nose canopy. Was the pilot moving, or was the image being blurred by heat?
He took a tentative step as if to return to the chopper when flames emerged at the base of the column of smoke. It wasn’t the dramatic explosion of Hollywood or Hong Kong moviemakers but a steady fire that quickly engulfed the aircraft. Its roar drowned out the whir of the helo’s engine. Smoke poured into the sky.
Abdullah stood frozen. Already he was thinking that he’d be stuck out here forever. If this was an abandoned rig, there was no reason for anyone to come out to it. He was trapped.
No, he told himself. He didn’t just survive a plane crash to die on a deserted oil platform. The smoke, he thought. Surely someone will see the smoke and come to investigate. Then he remembered that smoke poured off every rig within a hundred miles, and the fire wouldn’t last for very long. The odds that a passing workboat or helicopter would see it before it burned itself out were too long.
But if he saw one coming, he could start another fire to signal them.
Yes, that’s what he would do. He took several deep breaths. His hands weren’t trembling so badly anymore, and the knot in his gut was easing. He grinned at his good fortune and was soon roaring with laughter. He’d be a hero, once he got back to the office. They would probably give him a promotion, or at least some paid time off. Abdullah had always been able to find the good in any situation. He was an optimist, always had been.
He spotted a large fire extinguisher and, still concerned about an explosion, went for it anyway. The heat was brutal, but as he laid down the chemical suppressant the flames diminished rapidly. It appeared the fire was fed off of gasoline that had leaked out of the helicopter, but most of it had fallen harmlessly through the metal grille. In just a minute the flames were out. He was grateful to see the pilot’s body hadn’t been too ravaged by the fire.
With that taken care of, he felt he could leave the rig’s open deck and explore the accommodations block. There could be a
working radio left inside. He retraced his steps and quickly found a hatchway that led into the interior of the four-story block. It was padlocked shut.
Undeterred, Abdullah scoured the deck until he found a length of steel pipe that would suit his purpose. He threaded it through the shiny chain and heaved. The links didn’t even rattle, but the pad eye welded to the side of the building twisted and then tore free. He set aside the pipe and hauled on the door. It creaked on its hinges, setting his teeth on edge. It hadn’t been opened for months. The hallway beyond was draped in murky shadow. From inside a small pocket sewn to the sleeve of his coveralls he pulled out a penlight and twisted it on. It had been issued by the Ministry and cast a harsh white light that belied its small size.
The walls and deck were steel, utilitarian, and free of dust. It wasn’t that they’d been cleaned, it was just that with no human presence there was nothing to create dust in the sealed structure. He peered into several offices. The furniture had been left behind, and a three-years-out-of-date calendar, but there were no files or paperwork of any kind. Even the mundane items like staplers and spare pens were gone.
Although the rig was old, it was still much too valuable to be left abandoned like this. If nothing more, she represented several million dollars’ worth of scrap metal. He knew it wasn’t unusual for platforms to go unused for months at a time, but years? It didn’t make sense.
At the end of the hallway was a staircase leading up to the next level. He climbed it quickly. It was hot inside the steel box, which had been baking all day in the tropical sun. There were two doors leading off the landing. One led to another hallway and probably the crew’s rooms. When he opened the second, he was hit by a wall of chilled air. The change in temperature was so acute he staggered back a step before moving into the vast room beyond.