“What the hell?” he said aloud, not sure whether or not to believe what his eyes were telling him.
And then it finally dawned on him. He was on the J-61. Of all the rotten luck, this was the one rig that was off-limits to all Ministry personnel. He didn’t know the reason behind the order, only that it came from on high, and he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he was to never, ever set foot on this platform for any reason.
But he didn’t understand. What was the big deal? All he saw were a bunch of—
“Hey, you!”
The voice had come from behind him. Someone had approached down the hallway. Abdullah turned, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry. You see, my helicopter cra—”
The man slammed a fist into Abdullah’s stomach with enough force to knock him off his feet. Before he could even think about defending himself, he was struck again, a punch to the temple that stunned him into paralysis. And then a heavy boot crashed into his face, and Abdullah’s world went black.
He came to slowly, like that morning after he and some friends had flouted Islamic tenets and gotten blind drunk. His head ached, his stomach was on fire, and he could barely open his eyes. He saw nothing but blurred edges and blobs of light. Nothing made sense. He heard men’s voices and tried to turn his head. His vertebrae felt fused. He had never been in so much pain in his life. What happened? he wondered.
The voices. The man. A guard perhaps. The beating. It came back in a rush. He tried to move but realized he was tied to a chair. Panic seized him, sharpened his senses a little, and to his horror he realized he was back in the helicopter, strapped in next to the singed corpse of the pilot.
Someone had flipped the bird back onto its landing struts and secured him into his seat. He tried to unclasp the harness, but the buckle had been wound with duct tape so many times it was a big silver lump in his lap. He felt movement.
They were pushing the chopper!
He looked out just as the horizon soared over his head. The windshield was filled with a view of the ocean, and then the acceleration hit him. He was falling, strapped helplessly as the chopper plummeted off the rig.
The Robinson hit the water at near-terminal velocity, snapping Abdullah’s neck and mercifully ending his life before he could drown.
Twenty minutes later, when the administrator of the rig he was supposed to start inspecting contacted the Ministry, an alert was sounded. Rescue helicopters and patrol boats were launched immediately. Of the Robinson, its pilot, and its lone passenger, no trace was ever found. One canny chopper jock even circled rig J-61 “just in case,” but it looked as deserted as ever because any trace of the fire had been studiously wiped clean. The secret it harbored was safe once again.
5
CABRILLO HAD SPENT THE FIRST HALF HOUR OF THE FLIGHT in the back of the Gulfstream V’s luxurious cabin in contact with Max Hanley. Hanley was the Corporation’s vice president, the Oregon’s chief engineer, and Juan’s best friend. He’d been with Juan since he’d first conceived the idea of a private security company based on a ship. All the crew knew this, but one story few had heard was how the two men had hooked up in the first place.
Cabrillo had spent his professional career as a NOC, a non-official cover, for the Central Intelligence Agency. This was bureaucratic-speak for a spook. Fluent in Arabic, Russian, as well as Spanish and English, he’d been posted to some of the hottest spots in the world and had gotten himself into and out of more jams than he could count.
When he’d come to the realization soon after the Berlin Wall fell that the end of the Cold War would mean an increase in regional conflicts, and that none of America’s intelligence agencies were going to be adroit enough to respond, he’d decided to go out on his own as a private contractor. The Corporation would tackle those jobs that were so black no one else could handle them with any kind of deniability. Juan had enough contacts in the government to ensure they would be busy for years.
He’d talked it over with Langston Overholt, his mentor. Lang had regretfully agreed with Cabrillo’s assessment. He hated to lose his star agent but also recognized the possibilities the Corporation would give him.
He’d suggested that Juan track down one Maxwell Hanley. When asked who Hanley was, Lang had explained that he’d been the chief engineer aboard the Glomar Explorer, the famed Howard Hughes-built ship that had partially raised the Soviet Golf-class submarine, K-129.
Juan had protested that the Glomar had done its thing in 1974, which would make Hanley simply too old to work as a mercenary.
Lang had told him, in turn, that Hanley wasn’t on that first expedition but a later one that was still classified top secret. Hanley had overseen the ship’s operations while she was supposedly mothballed at Suisun Bay in California. In fact, they had mocked up an old freighter to look like the Glomar Explorer while they had taken her to a spot off the Azores Islands to raise a Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine with its full complement of twenty ICBMs and two hundred nuclear warheads. That had been in 1984, and while Hanley had gotten his start as a riverine warrior in Vietnam, he was too ornery to be considered old.
Cabrillo found Max running a scrapyard outside of Barstow, California, and in the course of ten minutes had him tossing the keys to the place to his assistant and heading out the door. By the time the Oregon had been selected as their base of operations and her conversion work completed in Vladivostok by a corrupt Russian admiral who loved Yankee dollars and Korean girls in equal measure, the two men were like an old married couple. Sure they argued, but they never lost respect for each other.
Hanley later admitted he would have followed Juan out of the junkyard after the first sixty seconds of his pitch.
“So that’s him on paper,” Max said over the secure phone link. He was aboard their ship still anchored just off Karachi.
“Pretty damned impressive,” Juan opined. He’d called Max as they were driving along the six-lane superhighway connecting the Khyber Pass to Islamabad and asked him to run a full background check on Marion MacDougal Lawless. “Two years at Tulane, but he left and joined the Army as a Nine-Twelve-er.” Meaning the day after the September 11th terrorist attacks he’d walked into an Army recruiting station and signed on as a common soldier, like thousands of other brave men and women.
“Got into the Rangers, excelled by all accounts. He racked up a couple of combat citations, and after eight years opted out to join up with Fortran Security as a private contractor.
“Same skill set as a Ranger,” Max said, “only ten times the pay.”
“I know Fortran,” Juan countered. “They’re a top-notch outfit, so they pay more like twenty times.”
“Whatever,” Max said in his normally irritated manner. “He’s got an ex-wife and a daughter. Nearly all his pay goes to an address in New Orleans that I can only assume is the ex.”
“Only one, huh,” Juan teased. Max had three, and alimony payments to all of them.
“We’re in the middle of a recession. There are thousands of out-of-work comedians out there, and you think you are funny? Talk about delusions of grandeur. Anyway. Like I said, that’s him on paper, what’s the real version like?”
“Max, I’ll tell you. He’s been beat six ways to Sunday, and while I’m rubbernecking a technical getting blown up he sees the Predator I know is out there fire its missile and moves like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He saved our lives. No two ways about it.”
“So?” Hanley prompted.
“Since we lost Jerry Pulaski in Argentina, we’ve been down one gundog. I want to talk it over with Eddie, as head of shore operations, and Linc, as our lead war fighter, but I think we might have our replacement. He was an Army Ranger for eight years and has spent a lot of time deep in the ugliness. Not to mention he managed to impress me in just over an hour of knowing him.”
“What about his contract with Fortran?” Max asked. “Also, I would like to verify the story of how he got captured. Just playing devil’s advocate,
but maybe this guy’s lost his edge.”
“I’ll talk to him and follow up with you before I make any decision,” Cabrillo promised. “Any word from the Setiawan’s dad?”
“There’s an air-ambulance jet at Karachi Airport. The old man didn’t come, but he sent his wife and the kid’s grandparents. I let them know as soon as you hit the Islamabad road that you would be here soon. What’s your ETA?”
“Another forty minutes.”
“Okay. George is already on the tarmac in the chopper to ferry you guys out to the ship, and we’ve maybe got another job lined up.”
“Really? That was fast.”
“Came through from L’Enfant. Some Swiss financier’s daughter crossed the border from Bangladesh into Myanmar, and he now can’t raise her on her sat phone. He’s afraid something’s happened to her and wants us to get her out.”
“Two questions,” Juan said. “What’s she doing in that godforsaken area in the first place and, second, has he been in contact with the government?” The first was really rhetorical. It didn’t matter. But the second was critical.
“No. He’s a smart guy. He knew that if he reached out to the ruling junta, his daughter would be hunted down and either ransomed or imprisoned for life.”
“That’s good. Listen, we’ll talk about it when we get back to the ship. Meanwhile, start a background check on the financier and his daughter and anyone she was traveling with.”
“Eric and Mark are already on it.”
“Oh too, if MacD comes back with us, it’ll be on a limited access basis for now. Tell Hux to bring her medical bag to meet us. I want her to make sure the guy’s not worse off than he’s letting on.”
“Ranger tough, huh?”
“Macho 101 is the first class they teach at Benning.” Juan killed the connection.
In the main cabin of the executive jet, Linda was bent over Seti, checking on his condition. He asked how the boy was doing.
“The sedative’s starting to wear off. I don’t want to risk giving him any more, but I also don’t want him regaining consciousness before we transfer him.”
“They have an air ambulance waiting. If you juice him a little, they’ll be able to handle it.”
“Okay.”
Linc and MacD Lawless were swapping Afghanistan war stories. Linc’s had been one of the first pairs of boots on the ground while MacD hadn’t gotten into the country until a few years later. They didn’t know any of the same people, but the situations they’d faced were usually similar, especially when dealing with the locals.
“Pardon the interruption,” Juan said. “MacD, can I have a word with you?”
“Sure.” He set aside the bottled water he’d been sipping and limped after the Chairman to the rear of the aircraft. “What’s up?”
“How’d it happen?”
Lawless immediately grasped what he was being asked. “There were three of us guarding a Pakistani TV crew—myself and two locals we’d worked with before. We were about an hour out of Kabul when the cameraman asks to pull over. Ah tell him it’s a real bad idea, but he said it was an emergency. The terrain was clear, so Ah figure, what the hell. We pull over, and no sooner had the wheels stopped turning than about a dozen Taliban materialize out of the ground. They’d been hiding under blankets that they covered with sand. It was a perfect ambush. Ah didn’t even get a shot off.
“The camera crew was a plant. They killed the two Afghan guards on the spot and trussed me up like a Thanksgiving turkey. They stole our truck, and, well, you pretty much know the rest. At some point Ah was transferred to the trunk of a car, Ah think before we crossed into Pakistan, but there’s no way to be sure. Whenever they got the chance, they’d smack me around some, and brag about how Ah was going to be a hit on the al-Qaeda version of YouTube.”
He spoke as if he were reporting the events of someone else’s life. Cabrillo suspected that it was still too fresh in his mind. The one thing he could tell was that Lawless regretted what had happened to the two Afghans more than his own capture.
“By now,” Juan said, “you’ve figured out what we do, yes?”
“Private security, like Fortran.”
“It goes well beyond that. We’re also an intelligence gathering operation. We do some consultancy, and we take on some ops for Uncle Sam when he needs complete deniability, though for reasons that aren’t important right now that line of work has dried up for the time being. We thoroughly vet all our clients. We work only for the good guys, if you follow my meaning. And we work so far under the grid that only a handful of people in the world know who we are. Your bosses at Fortran, for example, have no idea. You won’t see us mentioned in the media because I run a tight outfit that leaves no room for error.”
“Sounds like a pretty good crew,” Lawless said neutrally.
“It’s the best at what it does. Each member has been handpicked, and when someone new comes aboard everyone gets a vote.”
“Are you offering me a job?”
“Provisionally. A couple months ago we lost a man. Jerry Pulaski was his name. He was what we called a gundog, a hardened combat veteran used mostly for when the fur starts flying. You’d fill his position.”
“Do you guys mostly operate in this area?”
“No. Actually, this is our first time here. This whole region’s lousy with outfits like yours and Blackwater, or whatever they call themselves these days. We’d just as soon leave it to them. This rescue was a one-time type of deal.”
“My contract with Fortran runs for another few months,” Lawless told him.
“Don’t you think after what happened to you that they would let you out of it?”
“Yeah, probably,” he drawled. “Um, listen, though, Ah’ve got a little girl to support.” He paused, swallowed, and went on. “My folks are raisin’ her, and they need the extra money Ah make.”
“What were you being paid?” Juan asked bluntly. MacD gave him the number, which sounded reasonable.
“Okay, you’ll keep making that during your probationary period. After that, if things work out, you’ll become a full member of the Corporation and share in the profits.”
“Um, are y’all profitable?”
Cabrillo responded by asking, “What do you think this plane’s worth?”
Lawless looked around for just a second. “G-Five like this? About fifty million bucks.”
“Fifty-four, to be exact,” Juan told him. “We paid cash.”
THEY HANDED OVER a still-sleeping Setiawan to his tearful mother on the tarmac between the Corporation’s aircraft and a chartered Citation fitted out as a flying hospital. The grandmother too was weeping, while the grandfather watched the exchange stoically. Arrangements had already been made to have Customs and Immigration look the other way. They whisked the boy onto the idling jet, and as soon as the door was closed and sealed it began to roll.
Juan had planned to send their plane out of the country, but with the possibility of a new job soon he told the pilot to park it and find himself a hotel room in the city. They hefted their guns and equipment in nondescript nylon bags and made their way to where a row of helicopters was backed up to a Cyclone fence about fifty yards from the General Aviation terminal building. These were all civilian choppers. For the most part they were painted white with a stripe of color across their noses and along their flanks.
One, however, was a glossy black and looked as menacing as a gunship, though she carried no visible weapons. This was the Corporation’s MD 520N, a state-of-the-art helo that vented exhaust through its tail rather than relying on a secondary rotor. This NOTAR system made it the quietest jet-powered helicopter in the world.
The pilot saw the four men and one woman approaching and began hitting switches in the cockpit to fire the turbine.
It would be a tight squeeze, but the 520 had more than enough power to take them all out to the Oregon.
“Looks like it went well,” the pilot remarked when Juan opened the passenger door and shoved his equipm
ent bag under his seat.
“Nothing to it,” Cabrillo said in typical fashion.
George “Gomez” Adams knew better. The veteran pilot could tell by their swagger when they were approaching that things had gotten dicey and that they’d handled it well. “Who’s the new guy?”
“MacD Lawless. He’s a Fortran operative who got nabbed outside of Kabul. Seemed a waste to let them behead him.”
“We keeping him?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t like guys who are better-looking than me,” Gomez said. With his gunslinger mustache and matinee idol looks, there weren’t many men in the world who qualified.
“Can’t handle a little competition,” Juan grinned.
“Exactly.” Adams looked over his shoulder and thrust out his hand to MacD. “So long as you never beat me out with the ladies, we’ll be fine.”
It was clear Lawless had no idea what to make of that statement, but he shook Adams’s hand anyway. “No problem. So long as you never crash with me aboard, we’ll be better than fine.”
“Deal.” Gomez turned his attention back to the chopper, radioing the control tower to get flight authorization.
Juan said to Lawless, “When we get to the ship, the first thing we’ll do is get you a secure link to your people. They must be going nuts, about now. Same thing with your folks, if they’ve been told.”
“I doubt Fortran would have contacted them yet. I was grabbed less than forty-eight hours ago.”
“Okay. One less thing to worry about.”
A minute later, the turbine shrieked as Adams fed in more power. The airframe shuddered, and then everything became smooth when the skids lifted from the concrete pad.
Gomez fought his instincts to hotdog it, so they rose at a sedate pace and started flying out over the mangroves and mudflats to the north of the sprawling city of fifteen million. A dense pall of smog cut visibility dramatically so that Karachi’s office towers and high-rise apartment buildings appeared indistinct in the distance. Everything looked like the color of rust, the buildings, the air, even the water in the enclosed inner harbor. It was only when one looked west, out toward the ocean, that there was any true color. The water was a deep sapphire blue. They flashed over the China Creek, where the main port was located, and Baba Channel, which led to the open sea. It was crowded with all manner of shipping awaiting its turn at the docks.