Marauder (The Oregon Files)

by Clive Cussler

  “It may have worked on our sub, but there’s no way it’ll work on a ship the size of the Oregon, whatever it is.”

  “Oh, it has. Remember the Kansas City? Why do you think it went down in the first place?”

  Juan was stunned. “You sank a U.S. nuclear sub just to prove you could do it?”

  “Among other reasons,” Tate said. “But that’s not what I want to do to the Oregon. Imagine what I could do with another ship like the Portland. I think I’ll rechristen the Oregon as the Eugene.”

  Juan gagged at the thought of Tate ever setting foot on his ship, let alone commanding her.

  “They would die before letting you hijack the Oregon.”

  Tate smiled and pointed at Juan. “Exactly. When my helicopter lands on the deck of your ship, there may be a few stragglers who haven’t died, but the assault team should be able to take care of that in short order. And guess what?”

  Tate nodded at the guards, who pushed Juan down into a chair, the same one Overholt had been sitting in during the video chat.

  “You’ll get to watch the whole thing,” Tate went on. “I’ve even equipped the assault team with GoPro cameras so we can watch them take over your ship in real time. Won’t that be fun?”

  Juan sneered at Tate but said nothing. Tate had underestimated his ability to save Overholt, but it looked like Juan had made the same mistake of underestimating his old CIA colleague. Now his crew might pay the price, and Juan would have to see it all happen live. This was Tate’s idea of torture.

  With a flourish, he pressed a button on his armrest.

  “Yes, Commander?” came a voice over the intercom.

  “Are you in position?” Tate asked.

  “Yes, sir. The disruptor is ready. Helicopter standing by.”

  “Good.” Tate threw a smug glance at Juan. “Commence the hijacking operation.”

  29

  SOUTHEAST OF MONTEVIDEO

  Linda was doing her best to help prep the Gator for the upcoming dive, but she still couldn’t hear more than a muffled rumble. Doc Huxley said it might be a few more days before she got some partial hearing back, but Linda was worried that it would never return to normal. In the meantime, she wanted to show she was useful no matter what her condition was. Doing nothing but paperwork for the last few days in her role as the Corporation’s VP had bored her to death.

  She had Mark Murphy hastily whip up a special speech-to-text app to use in conjunction with his old Google Glass headset. She felt like a geek while wearing it, but now she could understand what someone was saying to her by reading the words projected on the small lens. It wasn’t a perfect solution. Background noise was a problem and multiple voices speaking at once could be difficult to decipher. The translation was even worse than when she was dictating a text message to her phone, but it was good enough for her purposes. It allowed her to assist with the checklist of the Gator’s cockpit functions before it was launched for the nuclear sub search.

  From her seat, Linda had a good view of the technicians in the Oregon’s moon pool going over the equipment and MacD doing the final check of the dive gear. Raven was behind Linda in the submersible’s main cabin, reading each item off a tablet.

  Oil press her? it read on the glasses.

  “Oil pressure nominal,” Linda replied. She wished she would actually be piloting the sub, but Mark Murphy was going to be coming down from the op center soon to take her position for the dive.

  Buttery powder?

  “Battery power one hundred percent and delicious.”

  What?

  Linda turned to see Raven’s confused expression and smiled. “The speech recognition software on this device is a tad obsolete.”

  What did hit say I said?

  “Buttery powder.”

  Raven looked down at the tablet and shook her head with a deadpan look.

  No, that’s write.

  Linda laughed and turned back to the instruments.

  There was a pause. When it went on for a few more beats, Linda said, “Ready for the next item.”

  They’re here. It’s buzzing.

  “Now, that one I didn’t get,” Linda said. “Come again?”

  As she waited for the correction, she glanced out the window and was puzzled to see that everyone had stopped moving. She thought perhaps they were listening to a shipwide message that her headset wasn’t picking up until she saw MacD abruptly lean down and pick up one of the scuba tanks, raising it high over his head.

  “What is he doing?” she asked herself aloud.

  MacD’s eyes bulged with terror as he looked into the water of the moon pool. His mouth rounded into a scream that Linda couldn’t hear, and he reared back as he threw the tank into the moon pool as if he were trying to kill something rising out of the depths, which was impossible because they hadn’t opened the keel doors yet.

  The rest of the technicians in the cavernous moon pool seemed to go just as crazy, running wildly, fighting each other or hurting themselves.

  Linda finally understood what she was seeing. It was happening again. The same thing that had affected the crew of the Gator in Rio.

  This time, Linda seemed immune. Maybe being in the sub now was preventing her from being affected.

  She turned and saw that wasn’t the case.

  Raven had dropped the tablet and was prying open the case holding the sub’s emergency life raft at the aft end of the cabin. She seemed to be babbling to herself.

  We’re thinking. There sending us to the bottom.

  Linda yelled and leaped out of her seat to stop her, but she had only reached the external hatch ladder when Raven yanked the cord on the inflatable raft.

  The pressurized CO2 canister began blowing it up, and soon neither of them would have room to move. Linda raced up the rungs, and her head poked out of the hatch as the raft began pushing her feet up and out.

  She tumbled onto the deck of the Gator and saw complete pandemonium in the moon pool. MacD had run out of scuba gear and was now frantically tossing any random object around him into the water.

  Linda remembered how single-minded and insane she’d been in the same condition. Reasoning with any of them was futile. If the rest of the crew was like this, it was just a matter of minutes before people started killing themselves or endangering the ship.

  The op center was the only place where she could get the situation under control. As she raced out of the moon pool, Linda realized she might be the sole person on the Oregon who was unaffected by whatever was causing this.

  But she had been affected before. Why not now?

  Julia Huxley dashed by in hysterics, which terrified Linda even more because it was so out of character for the normally calm doctor. She was yelling something that the Google Glass interpreted as We’re going to fly. It suddenly hit Linda.

  She was deaf. Some kind of sound wave had to be the trigger for all of this panic.

  Linda had to keep the crew from self-destructing while also getting the Oregon away from the source of the sound.

  When she passed one of the ship’s firefighting stations, she got an idea and snatched a mask with a filter from the cabinet. She put it on as she ran.

  When she reached the op center, there were only two people left at their posts. Murph was hunched over his position at the weapons console, tapping furiously on the keyboard and talking to himself. Max sat in the command chair, pointing at the main view screen and shrieking as if he were watching the world’s scariest horror movie. Nothing was visible except the horizon.

  Her glasses typed out a jumble of messages from both men that didn’t make any sense.

  I see them!

  Won’t get us.

  Swallow us all!

  Nothing left to eat.

  Linda didn’t bother with either of them. She headed straight for the nearest conso
le and brought up the controls for intruder countermeasures.

  Before she could find what she was looking for, she felt a thump reverberate through her chair. She looked up and saw a flash on the view screen, followed by a trail of smoke.

  Linda instantly realized what had happened. The thump she’d felt was the launch of a rocket. Murph had fired an Exocet anti-ship missile.

  It headed directly south. She glanced at the radar and realized it was racing toward some kind of boat.

  * * *

  —

  Farouk and Li both leaped to their feet when they saw the Exocet shoot into the sky eight miles away.

  “You said they were going to kill themselves!” Li shouted at Farouk. “Not us!”

  Farouk shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t understand.” He never imagined that anyone would still have the capacity to take such a complex action as activating a defensive weapons system. “How do they know we should be a target?”

  “What do we do?” Li shouted.

  With the missile streaking toward the fishing charter at seven hundred miles per hour, there wasn’t any time to start the boat and take evasive action.

  “Swim!” Farouk yelled.

  Both of them dove overboard and swam for their lives.

  They had gotten ten yards from the boat when the missile reached them.

  And it kept going.

  Farouk and Li watched in amazement as it tore past them.

  “It missed!” Li said with a whoop. “But how?”

  As he was treading water, Farouk thought they’d simply gotten lucky. Maybe the person who fired was as crazed as he’d expected.

  He was about to say so when he saw the Exocet change course. It went into a tight arc until it had made a complete one-hundred-eighty-degree turn.

  “It looks like I’m going to owe you five hundred dollars,” Farouk said.

  Li looked at him in confusion. Then it dawned on him. “Our bet?”

  Farouk nodded, watching the trail of smoke leading back to the disguised freighter. “The missile didn’t miss us. Its target is the Oregon.”

  30

  Linda had twenty seconds before the Exocet missile would hit and blow a lethal hole in the Oregon. She pushed Murph aside and knocked him to the floor to access the weapons controls and initiate the self-destruct.

  She punched the ABORT button, but nothing happened. The missile continued on its course. Murph must have locked it out.

  The only remaining option was to shoot it down. Linda brought the port Gatling gun online and set it for autotargeting.

  The system required no further input from her. On the outside of the Oregon’s hull, the plates slid aside instantly to reveal the six-barreled cannon. Its built-in radar locked on to the incoming Exocet and spun up to firing speed.

  She sensed the rapid firing of the gun in vibrations through the hull. On the main screen, at a rate of three thousand rounds per minute, tracers homed in on the missile until the tungsten shells slammed into the warhead, blowing it to pieces, while it was still a mile from the ship.

  With the immediate danger passed, Linda raced back to the other workstation and found the controls for the intruder countermeasures.

  The Oregon was equipped with several mechanisms to deal with enemy boarding parties. The first line of defense was a set of automated .30 caliber machine guns hidden in the barrels strewn across the deck. They would pop out and cut down any gunmen trying to gain access to the interior of the ship.

  But if intruders did manage to get inside and take hostages, the venting system could direct a tranquilizing gas to any compartment on the ship. It didn’t knock anyone out. Sleeping gases, on the other hand, were too unpredictable and could easily be lethal in large concentrations. But the invisible, odorless tranquilizer did cause the victims to lose any energy or ability to move, as if they’d taken a few Valium.

  Linda didn’t intend to target any particular part of the Oregon. She was going to flood the whole ship with the gas.

  As she typed in the commands, she saw Murph edging back to the weapons console. He was going to launch another missile.

  Linda ran over and kneed him in the gut. Although she was little, she packed a punch. The wiry computer genius fell back, but she knew he wouldn’t be down for long. She snatched a power cord from a nearby laptop and hastily tied his wrists to the base of the anchored helm chair.

  She ran back over to the console and switched on the dispenser for the tranquilizing gas. It would take a minute to reach its full concentration, so she kept an eye on Murph, who was tearing at the cord with his teeth to little effect.

  Linda thought she was in the clear until she stared in shock at the main view screen as another Exocet missile shot from the Oregon’s deck.

  She realized her mistake and turned to Max, who was furiously stabbing at the controls on the command chair’s arm. Many of the ship’s most important functions could be operated from that single seat if needed, including weapons.

  It wasn’t Murph who had fired the first missile. It was Max.

  The Exocet took the same course, racing out before turning to make its final run on the Oregon.

  Linda ran to the weapons console to reactivate the Gatling gun, but she was tackled from behind. She flipped over to see Max holding her legs and babbling nonsensically, which was projected on the Google Glass she was wearing under the mask.

  Nothing left who eat. No thing left to heat.

  His words brought back the panic she’d felt on the Gator. He thought something was coming to eat them and he didn’t want to leave anything to consume. Linda understood how his thought process seemed crazy to her but logical to him. He was trying to stop her from letting the nonexistent monsters eat everybody aboard.

  She glanced at the screen and saw the missile make its final turn and rocket back toward them. If she didn’t stop it, the Exocet could penetrate the ship’s armor and explode in one of the ammo magazines, tearing the ship in half.

  Linda tried to kick Max away, but he was still quite strong despite his age and outweighed her two-to-one. He hauled her toward him and slapped her mask, knocking it askew.

  Linda couldn’t see, so she flipped the mask off her head, along with the glasses, and held her breath. She got one leg free and jabbed her foot at Max’s face. Her heel smashed into his nose, causing a gush of blood to flow, but he wouldn’t let go of her other boot. She finally had to take a breath, and she could instantly feel a tingling as the tranquilizing gas hit her system. Her tiny frame would absorb a sedating dose of the drug much faster than Max’s would.

  The missile was only seconds away from hitting them. Linda angled her foot, and the boot slipped off. Max fell backward, and Linda launched herself at the weapons panel.

  She smashed her finger on the GATLING GUN button and it fired on automatic, detonating the Exocet mere yards from the hull. She felt the Oregon rock from the impact.

  Linda was now getting woozy from the gas. She collapsed to the floor and felt around until her hand clasped the mask. With her last bit of strength, she pulled it over her head.

  She sucked in a few deep breaths, and her mind started to clear. When she was back to normal, she saw Max and Murph lying on the floor, conscious but looking like they were blotto from drinking a fifth of vodka.

  Linda got to her feet and staggered over to the command chair. Using the armrest controls, she set course due west and brought the engines up to full speed. The Oregon leaped forward.

  She wondered how far she’d have to take the ship to get out of the danger zone. She guessed fifty miles ought to do it, but she’d be ready to re-release the gas just in case.

  Once they were in the clear, Linda knew there would be two main priorities. First, get the whole crew back together, including the Chairman. And, second, figure out some way—any way—to defeat the nasty sonic weapon that
nearly caused the destruction of her ship.

  31

  BUENOS AIRES

  Juan smiled as he watched the Oregon race toward the horizon.

  “That probably didn’t go the way you were expecting,” he said to Tate, who stared at the Portland’s op center view screen in disbelief.

  “Get Farouk on the line!” Tate yelled. “I want to know what happened.”

  After a minute of no response, the camera switched from the drone to one on board the small fishing vessel. It showed two drenched men, one Middle Eastern, the other Asian, standing on the deck, puddles of water at their feet.

  “They got away,” the Middle Eastern man said in what Juan recognized as an Egyptian accent. He had to be Farouk.

  “I know they got away, you idiot!” Tate screamed. “How?”

  The Asian man shrugged. Farouk shook his head and said, “I don’t know. The sonic disruptor was working.”

  “Where’s the helicopter?”

  “I told it to turn back,” the Asian man said.

  “Well, applause for you, Li,” Tate said, slowly clapping his hands. “That was brilliant not to have the chopper continue out into the ocean for no reason whatsoever. You two get back here as soon as you can. I want to inspect the sonic disruptor myself.”

  He slashed across his throat in the universal Hang up gesture. Farouk and Li disappeared from the screen, looking terrified.

  “Look at the bright side, Tate,” Juan said. “The Oregon is still around for you to hijack some other time.”

  Tate stalked over and glowered down at him.

  “I’m so glad you’re enjoying this because it’s the last time you’ll enjoy anything.”

  Juan smirked. “I don’t know about that. Do you have another operation you want me to watch you screw up?”

  “You’re not staying much longer,” Tate said, waving over Catherine Ballard to them.

  “Where am I going?”