Marauder (The Oregon Files)

by Clive Cussler

  When Murph and Eric got hold of the map, they cross-referenced it with a detailed satellite chart of the region. Within minutes, they had the supposed location of the U-boat pinpointed to a region south of the Amazon River in the Mapuá Extractive Reserve, a vast, protected rain forest that was crisscrossed by streams and supported a tiny population of native peoples. Jiménez’s cousins had lived in one of the reserve’s small riverside communities.

  Juan was with Linc, Bradley, and Murph in one Zodiac, while Eddie, MacD, and Raven took the other one. All of them were armed with MP5 submachine guns except for Bradley. Despite his request for a weapon, that was one point on which Juan wouldn’t budge.

  “We’ve got about four hours of daylight left to conduct our search of the jungle today,” Juan said. “Depending on how accurate that map is and how thick the jungle is, it might take several days to cover the whole area.”

  “I’ll be keeping track of our search pattern,” Murph said, holding up a GPS locator. “Should keep us from getting lost and backtracking on grids we’ve already covered.”

  Juan looked at Bradley. “You understand the terms of this deal, right?”

  “I’m a Navy SEAL, not a baby,” Bradley grumbled.

  “But when you’re with us, you’re under my protection and command. Deal?”

  Bradley nodded and glanced at Linc. “I have to stay by his side at all times.”

  “Well, don’t make it sound like torture,” Linc said, wiping his sweaty brow. “I don’t think I smell that bad yet.”

  “In this humidity, it won’t be long,” Murph said, spraying himself with a generous dusting of DEET to ward off the rain forest’s wealth of bugs. “I wish I had something that repelled snakes.”

  Linc tapped the machete on his hip. “That’s why I have this. For close encounters.”

  Murph smiled at Bradley. “I’d stay by his side.”

  They traveled two miles upriver to the point closest to the search area. The rest of the journey would have to be on foot.

  They hauled the Zodiacs out of the river and walked into the dense forest. Trees soared high above, blocking most of the light trying to make it to the ground. In the few places where there was a gap in the canopy, the thick undergrowth was virtually impassable. Birds, frogs, and insects chirped constantly, and the sound of moving water and branches waving in the wind surrounded them. Dead leaves crunched underfoot, the remains of the dry season.

  The term “dry season” was relative in this rain forest. They still had to wade through a multitude of sodden bogs and knee-deep creeks as they tramped through the jungle, guided by Murph and his GPS, which needed to be reset continually when its signal was obstructed by the foliage. Within fifteen minutes, Juan’s pants were soaked through, and his boots were caked with mud.

  For two hours, it was a monotonous trudge through the forest, without any sign of a single man-made object.

  Juan then heard a sound that was definitely made by man. The throb of a helicopter rotor was approaching. He held up his hand, and they all stopped.

  The chopper passed to the south of them, the noise faded into the distance.

  “Must have been a surveyor,” Eddie said.

  “Or a transport,” Raven suggested.

  “Out here?” MacD asked.

  “Let’s keep going,” Juan said, although the close proximity of the helicopter bothered him.

  They continued on for another fifteen minutes. Juan, who was right behind Murph, looked at his watch and saw that they had just another forty-five minutes before they had to give up the search for the day and return to the Zodiacs.

  That’s when he heard Murph’s foot clank as he stepped up onto what looked like a decaying brown log.

  Everyone halted. Juan put his foot against the object and tapped it with his toe. It rang out with a hollow sound. He bent down and wiped dirt away until he saw gray paint and rusted steel.

  A stand of bushes was blocking the view to the right, so Juan walked straight ahead for another forty feet and turned to face the rest of the group, who were all gawking at the discovery. It was only now that he could make out the conning tower sticking out of the ground like the stump of an immense tree. He had just walked across the stern of a World War I U-boat sitting in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

  The entire surreal shape was unmistakable, even though it was partially camouflaged by vines and other vegetation. The only part that had been uncovered completely, the muck and grime having been wiped away by the previous visitors, was the German Iron Cross and the name stenciled on the conning tower.

  BREMEN.

  44

  It took five minutes of pounding with the sledgehammers they’d brought to knock away the rust and loosen the gears enough to turn the wheel on the top hatch of the conning tower. A musty smell drifted from the interior, over ninety years of air closed off from the world. Juan put on his headlamp and descended the ladder.

  When he stepped onto the deck of the control room, his light settled on a mummified corpse, sitting up and leaning against the periscope. Two more bodies were sitting at the dive controls, mouths agape.

  As more of the team came down after him, their lamps gave a fuller view of the tiny room crammed with pipes, dials, levers, and switches, all of them labeled in German. There were dozens of valve wheels on virtually every surface for operating the ballast and compressed-air tanks. Although everything was filthy from its operational days, being closed to the humid air outside all these years had kept corrosion to a minimum. The Bremen still looked as if she were ready to put to sea.

  “Fan out and look for anything about the sonic disruptor,” Juan said.

  Raven and MacD went forward, while Murph and Eddie took the stern.

  Bradley was the second to last to enter, and he easily came down despite his broken arm. Linc followed close behind.

  “And I thought the Kansas City was cramped,” Bradley said, taking in the room that now looked even smaller with Linc’s huge frame taking up so much space.

  “This was actually a huge submarine for the era,” Juan said, having studied up on the Bremen during the trip on the Amazon. “Over two thousand tons, with an extended range of twenty thousand miles.”

  “How many crew members?”

  “Eight officers and sixty enlisted.”

  Linc whistled. “I hope they were all good friends.”

  “If they weren’t at the start of the cruise,” Juan said, “they would be by the end.”

  “As long as they didn’t kill each other first,” Bradley joked, before clearing his throat, embarrassed, when he realized his statement echoed what happened to the KC. “Why is it so big?”

  “She was designed as a blockade-runner,” Juan answered. “The Brits were trying to keep any materials from reaching German ports, so the Bremen and other U-boats like her were meant to sneak under the blockade. She could carry up to seven hundred tons of cargo.”

  “The question is, how and why did it end up in the middle of the Amazon jungle?” Linc said.

  “The how is probably a little easier to answer,” Juan said. “I’m guessing that we’re currently standing on what used to be an old riverbed. This whole area is one big floodplain. Every time they get a major storm, it’s possible for the higher river waters to carve out new pathways. That would have left the Bremen stranded here. Assuming it’s been here since the First World War, that’s plenty of time for the overgrowth to swallow it.”

  “And the why?” Bradley asked.

  Juan shrugged. “If we find the captain’s log, it might tell us.”

  As they began a search of the control room, Bradley said, “I don’t speak German. What will it look like?”

  “It might say Kriegstagebücher on the cover,” Juan said. “That literally means ‘War Diaries.’”

  “Long German word,” Linc said sarcastical
ly. “Gotcha.”

  They rifled through the maps and code books, but they found nothing that looked like a logbook.

  Then Juan glanced down at the body propped up against the periscope and saw the corner of a book protruding from under the corpse’s leg. He bent down and tugged at the cover until it came free.

  The letters KTB were etched on the cover. He gingerly opened it. Although the pages were yellowed, the neat German handwriting was easily legible. The date on the first page read “Der 7.9.16.”

  September 7, 1916.

  “Found it,” Juan said as he flipped through the book.

  Bradley and Linc came to him and looked over his shoulder.

  “What does it say?” Bradley asked.

  Juan shook his head. “I don’t know German, either. Murph can help us translate it. But what’s strange is that the last date in the book is June 18, 1922.”

  “That’s four years after the war ended,” Linc said.

  “I’m guessing they went into business for themselves,” Juan said.

  “Why do you think so?” Bradley asked.

  “Because as I was scanning through the pages, I saw the names of some American vessels, including the Carroll A. Deering.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Linc said.

  Juan nodded. “It’s a pretty famous maritime mystery. She grounded herself near Cape Hatteras after a storm. The ship was completely intact, but the entire crew had vanished and was never seen again.”

  “We still don’t know why Tate went to so much trouble to kill Jiménez and sink the KC,” Bradley said. “Why would he care if we found this ancient U-boat?”

  Juan was about to give his theory for Tate’s motives when he heard a call from the bow.

  “Chairman, I think we’d better leave as soon as we can!” Raven yelled.

  Juan gave the log to Linc and hurried forward until he reached the torpedo room. He found Raven and MacD standing with their backs to the bulkheads, as far away as they could get from the two torpedoes strapped to cradles at the center of the room.

  They were fully intact, but one of the winch chains used to move the torpedoes into the tubes had fallen onto the torpedoes. It was hanging from the contact fuse at the front of one of the weapons.

  “Was it like this when you entered?” Juan asked.

  “Yes,” Raven said calmly. “It’s exactly as we found it.”

  “Ah wouldn’t go anywhere near those things,” MacD spluttered.

  “All right,” Juan said. “Don’t touch them. We don’t know if the warheads are still active or if the chemicals inside have broken down and become more volatile.”

  “What about the fuel?” Raven asked.

  “I don’t see a leak, but the kerosene might also be sensitive to vibration.”

  “Not to mention a spark,” MacD added.

  Juan nodded. “We don’t want to give it a static shock. Let’s back out of here slowly.”

  As they eased away from the torpedoes, Juan said, “Did you find anything?”

  Raven shook her head. “Seven more bodies. No papers, except for a few personal letters and some novels.”

  “Then let’s hope Murph and Eddie have had more luck. In any case, we’re leaving in five minutes no matter what.”

  As they walked back toward the control room, Juan noticed for the first time the bodies that Raven mentioned. All of them were lying in bunks that he had raced by.

  Juan went toward the stern, past the captain’s minuscule cabin, and found Eddie and Murph going through the crew’s lockers.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “A lot of clothes and personal effects,” Eddie said, “but nothing related to the sonic disruptor.”

  “There’s got to be an operator’s manual or plans, or something,” Murph said, frustrated at coming up empty.

  “They wouldn’t have kept something that valuable in the open where anyone in the crew could get to it,” Juan said.

  “And they’d want it to be watertight.”

  “Somewhere only the captain, and maybe one other person, would have access to it,” Eddie said.

  Juan went with them back to the captain’s cabin, and they ran their fingers along every joint and seam.

  Finally, Murph yelled, “Eureka!”

  He pulled a panel open to reveal a hidden compartment. Inside was a stack of notebooks.

  Murph opened the top one and said, “I’ve never seen this language.”

  He showed it to Juan, who spoke Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, but he didn’t recognize the finely printed words, either.

  Murph pointed his phone at the page and snapped a photo. “Just using my translation app.”

  After a few seconds, he said, “Hungarian. According to a rough translation, the first sentence reads ‘Notes for the producing of sound systems to advance mind revision and conduct by Istvan Horváth.’”

  “There’s German words there,” Eddie said, pointing at two scrawled at the bottom of the page.

  Irre Waffe.

  Murph translated again. “Crazy weapon.”

  “This is what Tate was trying to keep secret,” Juan said. “Pack it all up, and we’ll decipher it back at the Oregon.”

  He went back to the control room and smiled at Bradley. “We found what we came for. It was hidden in the captain’s room.”

  Bradley sighed in relief. “I’m sorry Jiménez couldn’t be here to see this. You’re going to find Tate and bring him down, aren’t you?”

  “That’s the plan. But I don’t think you can be part of it.”

  Bradley nodded. “It’s time for me to go home.”

  “We’ll drop you off at the nearest city with an airport and put you on a plane.”

  “What should I tell the Navy?”

  “The truth. But they might not believe you.”

  “When I bring them back here, they will. I never thought—”

  Juan put up his hand to interrupt him. It was the vibration in his feet that he noticed first. Then a rhythmic beat against the steel hull became audible. If they had been underwater, he would have thought it was the sound of a destroyer’s screws as it approached to depth-charge the U-boat.

  But to Juan’s mind, the reality sounded just as ominous.

  Linc looked upward, as if he were peering at the sky through the ceiling of the U-boat, and said, “The helicopter is back.”

  45

  The Agusta had been flying the pattern set by Farouk, who was now in the front seat next to the pilot, and Tate had grown bored. They’d been at this all day, and he was getting sick of staring down at the featureless green expanse of trees. Ballard was dozing opposite him, and Li was checking the crate of C-4 plastique he’d loaded onto the helicopter, twelve bundles in all. They’d been fitted with time detonators, and he was adjusting the settings. Half a minute would give them time to get free of the explosion.

  He sighed in irritation, but he sat up when Farouk spoke.

  “Go back,” he said to the pilot.

  “Did you see something?” Tate asked.

  “A long cigar shape. It could be a log, but it seems particularly large.”

  The helicopter swung around and retraced their path.

  A few seconds later, Farouk raised his fists in triumph.

  “That’s it!” He held up the laptop. Sure enough, Tate could make out the distinct outline of a U-boat.

  Farouk guided the pilot until they were hovering.

  “We’re right over it.”

  Tate leaned out the open door, but he could see nothing unusual. The canopy of trees completely shielded the ground from view.

  “Where can we land?” he asked the pilot.

  “I haven’t seen a clearing for miles,” the pilot replied, “at least none big enough for the chopper.”

 
“We’ll have to get a boat and come back upriver,” Ballard said. “We can hike in and plant the explosives.”

  “No,” Tate said. “That’ll take too long. Li, can we drop those bricks without them blowing on impact?”

  Li nodded. “The C-4 is very stable. And I’ve installed the detonators so that they won’t be dislodged when they hit the ground.”

  “You’ve got enough bricks to completely destroy the U-boat?”

  “More than enough. Half that number should be plenty.”

  “Then we’ll drop them from here,” Tate said. “After the explosions, we’ll make another pass, and Farouk can take a look at the aftermath. If anything is left, we’ll do it again.”

  Li rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Sounds good to me. I’ve been waiting all day for this.”

  With Farouk’s help, Li set the timers on the bricks and dropped them into the trees. When the sixth one was away, the pilot wheeled the helicopter around and raced away at top speed.

  Tate looked back out the door while Li counted down.

  “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  There was a series of bright flashes visible through the canopy, and the surroundings swayed from the blasts.

  But that wasn’t all. A moment later, a huge fireball erupted in the same spot, throwing whole trees into the air. The immense shock wave pummeled the helicopter, and Tate had to hold on to keep from falling out the door.

  “What was that?” he yelled at Li.

  Li, wide-eyed at the result of his handiwork, shrugged helplessly. “It shouldn’t have been nearly that big of an explosion.”

  “I bet I know,” Ballard said. “It’s a U-boat, right? Maybe they had some torpedoes left.”

  Tate nodded as he thought about it. “That must be what happened.”

  “It made the job easier for us,” Farouk said. “There won’t be much left of it now.”

  Tate breathed easier when he realized Farouk was probably right.

  “Still, we should go back and make sure.”