For several long seconds their eyes were locked, neither giving an inch. Juan had known her strength, understood her intelligence, and now saw her passion. If he could forget that he had grown attracted to her, he would have asked her to join the Corporation right then.
“Just so you know,” he said in a low, intimate voice, “I can’t guarantee your safety.”
Tory sensed the shift in tone, and her anger was replaced with something softer, gentler. Their mouths were still inches apart, but for both of them it was an insurmountable distance. “I’m not asking you to. I just want to be there when you put an end to this once and for all.” She straightened reluctantly.
Cabrillo’s throat was suddenly dry, and he needed to finish his beer. “Deal.”
23
IF nothing more, Eddie Seng had to respect his captors’ efficiency. The volcano looming over what had been dubbed Death Beach continued to rumble and belch ash that fell in a choking black blizzard across the facility. Earthquakes were an almost hourly occurrence, and the sea had turned into a writhing sheet of lead. Yet the overseers never relaxed the pace of work even as they implemented their evacuation plans. The boilers in the separating plant remained lit so that the last precious gram of gold could be extracted before they left. Guards exhorted the workers with clubs and whips to keep toiling up and down the hillside burdened with baskets of gold-bearing ore. And at night the slave laborers were locked in the beached cruise ships dreading the call to start working again in the morning.
Out in the bay the crew of the tugboat had succeeded in ballasting the huge drydock so that the ship in its hold could be floated free. The rough seas had caused numerous delays in the tricky operation, which explained why the evacuation had gone slower than Eddie had anticipated. He had seen a young turbaned Sikh arguing with the Russian, Savich, and assumed that he was refusing to sacrifice the expensive drydock when the volcano finally blew. Unloading the ship meant they wouldn’t have any incriminating evidence when they sailed away.
Like the other ships already littering the beach, the newest vessel brought to Kamchatka was a cruise liner. At around four hundred feet it wasn’t large, but she had rakish lines, a classic champagne-glass stern, and balconies for nearly all the cabins. In her prime she would have filled a niche market for only the wealthiest passengers, those willing to pay anything for a chance to visit the Galapagos or explore the Antarctic wastes.
Today she was just another derelict, her once bright hull smeared with the excrement of those poor souls who’d endured the harsh journey to Russia. Hundreds of Chinese immigrants crowded the rail as the cruise ship was left to drift in the bay. Because her engines had been removed and she was unballasted, she rode so high that a thick band of antifouling paint could be seen above her waterline. Even the smallest waves made her roll dangerously. Eddie could hear the cries of the people trapped aboard her when a big wave sent the vessel reeling.
Fortunately, the tide was coming in, and it drove the ship closer and closer to the beach. With the winds whipping up the frigid bay, Eddie knew that a storm was coming. Hopefully the vessel would soundly ground herself onshore before it hit; otherwise she would drift back to sea. If that happened he knew the liner would turn broadside to the wind and capsize when the swells hit above ten feet. She carried no lifeboats.
Eddie switched his attention from the drifting cruise ship back to the drydock. Her massive bow doors had been closed once again, and water jetted from pump outlets along her hull. It would take several hours for her hold to be drained of seawater and make her light enough for one of the tugs to take her away. The second of the two tugs that had brought the drydock north had been maneuvered into position about a hundred yards from the ore processing building.
As Eddie had noted earlier, the processing plant had been built on a flat barge that had been towed to the bay. They had used heavy equipment to drag the large structure high above the tide line. Under the watchful eye of armed guards, workers were now clearing debris and rocks that had washed onto the beach behind the plant so the tugboat could haul it back into the sea. Drums of machine oil were standing by to be poured onto the rocky shore to ease the barge’s progress back to the water. Paulus, the South African supervisor, had ordered that all the excess mercury be dumped in an area beyond the processing plant. Lakes of shimmering mercury collected in pools that eventually drained into the sea. Already wave action had claimed hundreds of gallons of the toxic metal.
The Chinese laborers given this dangerous job were those who had already been exposed to fatal doses of mercury vapor working in the plant. Most moved like zombies, their brains destroyed by the cumulative effects of mercury poisoning, while others were so afflicted with tremors they could barely stand. If by some miracle they survived the next few days, they would never recover from the exposure. And even if they did, they had received such high doses that generations of their children would suffer unspeakable birth defects.
Eddie burned the image of the brain-damaged workers splashing about amid the mercury puddles into his mind. He was so intent that he didn’t realize the worker next to him had finished filling his plastic bucket with muddy ore. The young Chinese tried to catch Eddie’s attention, but a guard noticed the lapse first. He lashed out with a weighted piece of hose that caught Eddie behind the knee. His leg buckled, but he refused to allow himself to fall. He knew not to even glance at the guard, because such defiance would send the Indonesian into a frenzy that in his condition Eddie didn’t know if he could survive.
He hoisted the fifty-pound bucket onto his shoulder, smearing old abrasions that wouldn’t heal in the constant damp. Eddie’s roommate from the cruise ship, Tang, had timed his work so the two of them would trudge down the hill together. Of the original ten men crammed into the cabin when Eddie first arrived, only he and Tang were still alive.
“I think they are leaving today,” Tang said out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes downcast on the treacherous footing.
“I believe you’re right, my friend. The drydock will be empty soon, and it won’t take them long to drag the processing plant off the beach. And have you noticed the fishing boats haven’t been around for a while?”
“How can I not?” Tang replied with a sparkle in his voice. “The only thing worse than ground-up fish paste is three-day-old ground-up fish paste.” They maneuvered around a particularly tricky spot before Tang remarked, “There is also what is happening around the ship the guards use as their dormitory.”
For the past few days a double-ended tender had been making trips between the dormitory ship and the tug they were going to use to take away the processing plant. The area around the dorm ship had always been off limits to the Chinese, but since the transfer had begun the number of guards had doubled. Most of them were Indonesian, but there were also a handful of hard-looking Europeans who reported to Savich and not the Sikh. Judging by their discipline, Eddie thought they were ex–special forces, Russia’s elite Spetsnaz. He could also tell that the Russians were as suspicious of the Indonesian guards as they were the laborers.
It didn’t take a genius to know that they were transporting the gold they had already processed. Judging by how low the thirty-foot tender was in the water when she motored out to the tug, Eddie estimated they’d moved a hundred tons of bullion. The gold was being stacked in two shipping containers lashed to the tug’s deck.
“What do you think will happen to us?” Tang asked.
“I told you what I heard Paulus tell Anton Savich, that they’re going to leave us behind.”
“So, we die on this forsaken stretch of coast whether they are here or not.”
Eddie could tell from the sorrow in Tang’s words that the younger man had reached his emotional and psychological limit. Like in any survival situation, keeping a positive attitude was half the battle to stay alive. In the past week Eddie had seen people endure unbelievable hardships because they would not let it penetrate their souls, while others had died in a few days, almost as
if they willed their deaths to come quickly. Eddie knew that if Tang lost hope now, he wouldn’t last the day.
“Listen to me; we are not going to die here.”
Tang shot Eddie a wan smile. “Thank you for your strength, but I am afraid your words are empty.”
“I’m not Chinese,” Eddie said, and then corrected himself. “Well, I am Chinese, but I was raised in NewYork City. I am an American investigating illegal immigrant smuggling. There is a team of people looking for me right now.”
“Is this true?”
Using his best De Niro, Eddie said in English, “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”
Tang stopped and stared, unable to believe what he’d just heard. “I know this movie!” he exclaimed.
“You’ve seen Taxi Driver?”
“Yes! We were shown it in school because it was so decadent that it drove one of your people to try to kill the president.”
Eddie chuckled, imagining some Communist party official putting a spin on how Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Reagan related to a breakdown of our running dog capitalist ways.
“You really are an American?”
“Yes,” Eddie said. “And very soon a ship’s going to enter the bay.”
Tang looked over his shoulder at the smoldering volcano. It was a couple miles up from the beach but seemed to blot out half the horizon. Ominously, the ash had stopped spewing from the caldera, though it continued to drift over the work site.
“I know,” was all Eddie could answer to the unasked question.
“Hey, look,” Tang pointed out to sea. The pair of fishing trawlers was headed back toward the beach. “Fresh slop tonight, eh?”
Eddie watched the squat boats for a moment. Gulls swarmed around their fantails. There was no logical reason for them to return. Savich was abandoning the Chinese in the shadow of an erupting volcano, so why would he bother feed them? Then he noticed that they were moving faster than normal; white foam boiled around their blunt bows, and the seabirds had to wing hard to keep pace. Their holds were empty, Eddie realized, and he saw, too, that they weren’t headed for the jetty but angling more toward the tugboat in position to pull the processing plant from the beach.
Eddie’s senses went on high alert, sending a jolt of adrenaline that could make him forget, at least temporarily, his exhaustion and misery. The Russian guards must have felt the same thing. They clutched their weapons a little tighter and instinctively moved to cover positions.
“Follow me,” Eddie ordered.
He and Tang were near the sluice boxes, twenty yards from the separating plant. If his fears were correct, the two of them were much too exposed. He led Tang around the far side of the long metal tables and up the hillside, trying to put as much distance between them and the coming crossfire.
“What is happening?” Tang panted.
Before he could reply, automatic gunfire rippled from the nearest trawler. The dozen Spetsnaz had already found sufficient cover, so they could ignore the incoming rounds and instead concentrate on taking out the Indonesian guards who’d turned their weapons on them. The battle reached a fever pitch in less than five seconds. Tracer fire cut the smoggy air like laser beams, and laborers too slow or too disorientated to dive out of the way were cut down indiscriminately.
There had to be fifty or more Indonesians with more joining the fight in an attempt to overwhelm the Russians, but the Russians’ superior training and better weapons more than evened the odds. None had been hit in the ambush, and as the fight became more fixed, they were picking off their foes with near impunity.
The timing of the betrayal was nearly flawless. Savich and Jan Paulus were on the cruise ship where the gold had been stored. The Sikh, the likely architect of the double cross, was already on the tug with a few of his guards overseeing the transfer. With the oceangoing towboat securely fastened to the processing barge by inches-thick cables, the vessel’s captain couldn’t make a run for it.
A jet of black smoke erupted from the funnel of the other tug, the one connected to the drydock, and the black water under her stern turned into a whirlpool as her isopod screws dug in. They were making their escape before the drydock was completely empty.
A swarm of guards came running down the hill past Eddie and Tang. They had been on duty up where workers blasted ore from the hillside with the water cannons. Hidden by a boulder, Eddie waited until one of the guards came too close. In a lightning move, he rammed the heel of his hand into the man’s nose. The guard’s momentum, more than Eddie’s strength, shattered the nose and sent shards of bone into his brain. He was dead before he fell to the muddy ground.
Eddie checked to make sure no one had seen his attack and grabbed up the fallen AK-47.
With adrenaline still coursing through his veins, he turned to Tang and said, “Payback time.”
The Oregon found herself in the teeth of the worst storm to hit the Sea of Okhotsk in a quarter century. It was the confluence of two low-pressure areas, ravenous holes in the atmosphere that sucked in great draughts of air from every point on the compass so the wind shrieked with a banshee’s wail and the tops of the waves were ripped clean off. The sky was an oppressive gray curtain that clung to the sea, split occasionally by electric blue forks of lightning. The temperature had dropped to the forties, so hail fell with the rain that pummeled the freighter in horizontal sheets.
The ship would rise up the backs of the tallest waves, driven by her high-tech engines until her bow pointed straight at the roiled clouds. Her bow cleaving a fat wedge through the crest was marked with explosions of seafoam that mushroomed as high as her funnel. She stood poised atop the wave for what seemed an eternity, exposed to the worst of the wind, and then her stern would rise as she plummeted down the back of the roller, her engines suddenly silenced because there was no water to force through her jets. In the sheltered lee of the towering wave the sound of the wind fell away, so an eerie quiet descended on the ship. Down the eleven-thousand-ton ship would drop so that all the bridge crew could see was the surging black of the ocean.
The Oregon plowed into the sea so that her bows were buried up to her first set of hatches. The sudden deceleration buckled everyone’s legs and made dangling radio cords slap the ceiling. The magnetohydrodynamic engines screamed as they rammed the ship through the sea, their sheer power able to push aside the water and raise her bow. A waist-high surge of seawater raced across her deck, swamping her derricks and pounding into the superstructure with enough force to shake the entire vessel. The water sloshed over her railings and poured from her scuppers like opened fire hydrants.
As the last of the water finally drained away, the bow would begin the laborious climb up the next wave, and the cycle would repeat.
Two things enabled the Oregon to make any speed in the naked face of such a powerful storm: her remarkable power plants and the sheer will of her master.
Cabrillo was strapped into his command seat in the operations center. He wore jeans, a black sweatshirt, and a watch cap. He hadn’t shaved since the Oregon plowed into the storm, so his cheeks and jaw were heavily stubbled. His blue eyes were rimmed red with exhaustion and tension, but they hadn’t yet lost their predatory sharpness.
The senior bridge staff had the watch, which put Eric Stone at the helm. His station’s flat-screen displays gave him a panoramic view around the ship so he could anticipate and compensate for the bigger waves. He had such a fine touch on the rudder and throttles that he could coax more speed out of the Oregon than her sophisticated autopilot.
Juan watched him work the ship, keeping an eye on the speed indicators above the central display screen. Her speed through the water, speed over the bottom, and drift were all measured using the global positioning system, and only when the big freighter bottomed out in the wave troughs did she lose any momentum.
Cabrillo had thrown caution to the wind, literally, in this mad dash up the Sea of Okhotsk. He was trying to outrace the fast-moving storm. The prize would go to the firs
t to reach the coastline where Eddie Seng’s transponder said he was stranded. With the storm tracking northward at eight knots, the Oregon and her crew had been subjected to two full days of constant punishment. Juan didn’t want to contemplate the strain the engines were going through, and he’d politely told Max Hanley where he could shove his disapproval.
He’d had no choice but to suspend most routine maintenance and with it too rough to cook, the crew had subsisted on U.S. Army issue MREs, meals ready to eat, known affectionately as morsels of recycled entrails, and coffee.
But the gamble was paying off. The latest meteorological information showed them nearing the storm’s leading edge, and already the barometer was rising. To his seasoned eye the freezing rain seemed to have lost its needle edge, while the swells, still towering, were coming with less frequency.
Juan called up their position on the GPS and did some mental calculations. Eddie was sixty miles away, and once they broke free of the storm, he could probably increase speed to forty knots. That would put the Oregon off the coast in an hour and a half with the storm barreling in on them less than six hours later. If he was right about there being thousands of Chinese laborers being used in a gold mining operation, then the window to rescue them was just too tight. They could pack maybe a few hundred onto the Oregon, a thousand if they jettisoned the submersibles and the Robinson helicopter, but given the ferocity of the storm, the impending volcanic eruption, and the weakened condition of the people he expected to find, the death toll could be staggering.