The ship swung around, straining the cables so they vibrated with tension. A haunted moan escaped from the Selandria as her hull pivoted on the rocks and then came a rending scream of metal as she shifted farther.
“Come on, baby. Come on,” Juan urged. Tory had her hands to her mouth, her fist clenched so tightly her fingernails were a bloodless white. “Anything?”
Eric sent the Oregon careening back to starboard before answering. “No. Speed over the bottom remains zero.”
Max interrupted. “Juan, I’ve got temperature spikes showing in engines three and four. The coolant pumps are starting to go. We’ve got to shut down and try to get as many of those poor souls aboard as we can.”
Juan looked back. The Chinese had been warned to stay off the deck — a tow cable parting under tension would whip back with enough force to cut a man in two — however, the Selandria’s bow was a sea of pale, frightened faces, huddled and shivering in the cold rain. A rough count put the number of immigrants on the liner at over three thousand. The Oregon could take maybe a third of that number. “Okay.”
Max must have had his hands on the engine controls because they wound down to low idle the instant the word left Juan’s mouth. Free of the strain, the Oregon bobbed up, shedding water like a spaniel.
Tory gave Juan a sharp, disapproving look, a stinging rebuke at his giving up so easily, but she hadn’t let him finish speaking.
“Take the tension off the cables and spool out another hundred yards. Creep us ahead and prepare to weigh both anchors.”
“Juan, do you really think…”
“Max, our anchor winches are powered by four-hundred-horsepower engines,” Cabrillo pointed out. “I’ll take every pony we can muster.”
Down in the op center Max used computer keystrokes to disengage the clutch on both cable drums, allowing them to run free while Eric Stone engaged the engines again to move the ship farther out into the bay. When they reached the hundred-yard mark, Max let go the anchors. They sank quickly to the bottom, which was only eighty feet deep.
“Now back us gently and set the flukes,” Juan ordered.
The big Delta kedging anchors dragged along the rocky bottom, cutting deep furrows in the loose rock and boulders until their hardened steel flukes snagged bedrock. A computer control automatically adjusted the tension on the anchor chains to keep them from slipping.
“We’re ready,” Max announced, but his tone was less than enthusiastic.
“Tension the tow cables, then bring us up to thirty percent.” Juan snapped a pair of binoculars to his eyes, purposefully avoiding looking at the men at the Selandria’s railing. Waves continued to pound the ship’s bow, causing her to saw up and down, grinding her stern ever deeper.
“Thirty percent,” Eric announced. “No movement over the bottom other than stretching the cables.”
“Ramp it up to fifty,” Juan said without taking his eyes off the cruise ship. “Anything on the anchors?”
“Zero recovery on the winches,” Max answered. “Heat’s already building in three and four. We’re thirty degrees from red line and automatic shutdown.”
The forces acting on the tow were titanic, brute horsepower against twenty thousand deadweight tons of steel that had been pounded into the beach. Pulled taut by the cables, the Selandria’s bow stopped responding to the waves, so water washed under her, causing volleyballsized rocks to dance back and forth.
“Anything?” Juan called.
“No recovery on the winches,” Max said grimly, “and zero movement over the bottom.”
“Eighty percent!”
“Juan?”
“Do it and take the safeties off the engines.” Juan’s voice was charged with anger. “Bury them past the red line if you have to. We’re not leaving those people.”
Max complied, typing a few commands that told the computer to ignore the heat building up in the massive cryo pumps. He watched his screen as the columns indicating temperature turned red and then climbed above the safety limit. He reached out deliberately and shut off the computer monitor. “Sorry, my darlings.”
Juan could feel his ship’s torment through the soles of his boots as she fought the tow. The vibrations were tearing her apart, and each shudder sent a lance into his chest.
“Come on, you bitch,” he snarled. “Move.”
A rumble built across the bay, so deep and resonant that it was a feeling across the skin rather than a sound that hit the ears. The top of the mountain was hidden by a dense cloud of ash, and the ground shook so strongly that the beach seemed to become a liquid. This was it. The main eruption. The volcano was going to blow like Mount Saint Helens, and a wall of superheated ash and gas would tear down from the summit in a deadly avalanche that scientists called a pyroclastic flow, one of the most destructive forces on earth. Juan had gambled all and was about to lose everything. It was too late to go back and save any of the Chinese. Tears stung his eyes, but the firm line of his jaw never slackened.
“We’ve got to cut the tow,” Max said.
Cabrillo said nothing.
“Juan, we’ve got to go. We need a couple of miles between us and that volcano if we’re getting out of here alive.”
He didn’t doubt the words. The pyroclastic flow would reach far out to sea in an enveloping noxious cloud that would smother anything in its path. But still he remained silent.
“Movement!” Eric shouted. “Port winch is recovering, five yards a minute.”
“Must be slippage,” Max countered. “She’s dragging across the sea floor.”
It was as if the sun had been eclipsed. Darkness came so swiftly that it left Juan’s eyes swimming. He could barely see the Selandria through the swirling ashfall. Hot ash stung his bare hands as he held the binoculars to his face. He just couldn’t tell if the liner had moved or whether Max was right and the anchor had slipped.
No one spoke for what felt like an eternity. Stone’s eyes never left the speed indicators, which remained stubbornly at zero.
Then over the sound of the eruption, the Selandria screamed, a mortal, almost human sound, as if she could no longer endure the tremendous pressures of tow and storm.
“Got her,” Eric shouted as his speed indicators tickled ever so slightly.
Max turned his computer screen back on. “Recovery on both winches.”
“Speed over the bottom is ten yards a minute. Fifteen. Twenty.”
As more and more of the ship’s weight felt the buoyancy of her natural element, the speed continued to increase. Tory clutched Juan’s hand as they watched the Selandria get drawn back to the sea, her hull plates shrieking in protest as she was dragged over the rocks. And when a particularly large wave pounded the beach, she gave it a squeeze as the ship rode up its face, her stern coming high in her first moment of freedom.
“She’s free,” Juan called down to the op center and heard a roar of approval from his crew. Someone, probably Max, who was a rank sentimentalist under his tough veneer, sounded the ship’s horn — a keening celebratory note that echoed and echoed.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Juan said and led Tory back inside the bridge. They descended into the op center. Another cheer rose from the throats of his people, and his back was slapped black and blue.
Now that the Selandria was refloated, Juan ordered the power output cut to fifty percent and had the view from the aft-facing cameras brought up on the main screen. Already water frothed along the liner’s waterline as the Oregon continued to accelerate down the bay.
“Dear God.” Tory gasped.
The top of the mountain had been vaporized. A solid black wall of ash was pouring down the mountain, a swirling, choking mass that seemed alive. Everything before its fury was cut flat. Trees that had stood for a hundred years were ripped from the ground and tossed like matchsticks. A second later the sound of the explosion reached the ship, a painful assault on eardrums that was the loudest yet.
Workers on the Selandria scrambled to get back inside the
ship as the pyroclastic flow finally reached the surf line in an explosion of steam, and still the ash roared onward, spreading outward so it swallowed the other ships left abandoned on the beach. One of the smaller ones was blown onto its side, while the barge carrying the processing plant was flipped completely upside down.
“Hold on,” someone said unnecessarily as the ash enveloped the Selandria and completely filled the camera’s view.
It hit the Oregon like a sledgehammer blow, a hurricane of ash and pumice that shattered windows and heeled the ship over so her starboard rail was buried into the sea. But she kept driving, shouldering aside the fresh onslaught of nature’s fury until she burst out of the cloud and into shadowy daylight.
No one moved or even breathed as they watched the screen. Seconds dribbled like molten lead. Then suddenly the bow of the Selandria emerged through the curtain of ash like a ghost becoming real. Her hull was covered in clinging dust, but she’d never looked more beautiful. But still the crew waited, watching. A tiny movement caught everyone’s attention. Mark Murphy quickly zoomed in as a door on the upper deck opened tentatively. A small figure stepped out, looked around, and then motioned at someone inside the ship. In seconds there were a dozen people on the deck, kicking up clouds of ash in a spontaneous game to celebrate their survival.
Maurice appeared in the op center as if by magic. The tray in his hand held a trio of Dom Perignon bottles and enough cut crystal flutes for everyone on duty.
Amid the raucous celebration, Tory whispered into Juan’s ear, “So who was the bitch?”
“Huh?”
“When we were on the flying bridge you said, ‘Come on, you bitch, move.’ Who was the bitch you were talking about? The Oregon or the Selandria?”
“Neither.”
The corner of her mouth turned downward as she thought about his answer. And then her lips parted in a beaming smile. “Max is right. You are a crafty bastard. You were talking to Mother Nature.”
He couldn’t keep the satisfied smile from his lips. “I knew there’d be a major earthquake just before the main eruption. Water-saturated soils undergo what’s called liquefaction. Basically, the shaking causes the ground to turn into quicksand. That broke the suction that had built under the Selandria’s hull and allowed us to drag her off.”
“Cutting it awfully close, weren’t you?”
“You only get the big rewards when you’re willing to face the big risks.”
“Chairman.” Mark Murphy was still at his weapons station. “I’ve got a radar contact six miles dead ahead, moving at seven knots.”
“The tug,” Max said.
“Speaking of rewards.”
Even with the Selandria in tow it took the Oregon only fifteen minutes to come within visual range of the fleeing tugboat. Juan scrambled the deck crew to get in position as he ordered Eric to take the squat tug down the port side. There were only a handful of pirates on the tug, so they were almost on top of them before anyone realized they weren’t alone. Two of them raced out onto the tug’s flying bridge with their AK-47s, but they quickly ran for cover when Murph opened up with one of the gimble-mounted fifty-calibers housed in hidden bunkers on the Oregon’s deck.
“Mike, Ski, can you hear me?” Juan called over the radio.
“I thought you’d forgotten all about us,” Pulaski replied over the tactical communications channel. “Mike and I were thinking we were in for a long cruise vacation.”
“Sorry, boys. You’re not up for leave for while yet. I can see the two containers on the tug’s stern. Which one are you on top of?”
“The rearmost.”
“And the lifting assembly?”
“Ready to go.”
“We’ll be alongside in about one minute.” Juan then addressed Murphy. “Disable the tug’s rudder assembly, would you please.”
“With pleasure.”
He called up the Bofors 40mm autocannon, waited for the weapon to be deployed from its concealed bay, and put a half-dozen rounds under the tug’s fantail. Her speed dropped off instantly, and a trail of oil began to seep from where her hull had been penetrated.
Eric Stone kept his hands loose on the controls as he brought the Oregon alongside the tug, slowing to match speed as the gap between the two ships shrank to just a few feet. He used rudder and bow thrusters to keep the vessels in virtual lockstep. Murph never took his eyes off his cameras, waiting to provide cover fire if any of the pirates showed themselves.
Up on deck, a pair of deckhands swung the boom of the Oregon’s main derrick across the gap, feeding out line so the hook dangled scant inches above the shipping container. Trono and Ski finally emerged from under the tarp and attached the hook to the beam they’d secured to the metal box. Mike made a circular gesture with his hand, and the crate came free of the deck.
Mohammad Singh, Shere Singh’s second-eldest and therefore second most trusted son, had survived the initial assault on the tug because he’d hidden in a cabin while his father’s men fought and killed the crew and were later gunned down by the Gatling. Fighting was something that his father paid others to do. However, when he saw the crane swing over the side of his ship, he immediately understood that someone was trying to rob him. He raced down from the bridge, brandishing a pistol, and burst out on the afterdeck, screaming curses at the top of his lungs.
Mark Murphy saw the man dash across the deck but was a fraction too slow training one of the .50 calibers.
Singh leapt for the container just as it began to pendulum from the wave action. He scrambled to find a grip and was forced to drop his pistol in order to hold on tight.
The winchman drew back cable so the container cleared the railing and had just started to pivot the boom back over the Oregon when a heavy rolling wave surged past the two ships. Stone did an excellent job of keeping the vessels from crashing against each other, but the deckhand couldn’t stop the container from arcing across open space and slamming into the tug’s bridge with a wet slap. When it swung back, all that remained of Mohammad Singh was a meaty red stain.
Most of the crew not on duty assembled in the hold where the container had been lowered once the Oregon was well beyond weapons range of the floundering tug.
Ski and Trono doused everyone with a cascade of champagne froth when Maurice handed them each a bottle.
“It’s kind of anticlimactic,” Juan shouted over the revelry, “because these two clowns had to sneak a peek on the tug, however…” He drew the word out as he swung open the big doors.
The lighting in the hold wasn’t particularly conducive for examining treasure, but the golden reflection that radiated from the container was the most beautiful color any of them had ever seen.
Juan hefted one of the bars, pumping it over his head like a trophy, while around him the men and women of the Corporation went wild.
25
JUAN Cabrillo leaned back in the sofa with an exhausted sigh and took a sip of the brandy he’d bought from the duty-free shop at Zurich’s airport. For the first time in nearly two weeks he felt he could finally relax.
He gazed into the fire burning in the open hearth, losing himself in the flames’ hypnotic dance.
When they’d dragged her off the beach, the Selandria’s hull had been holed by sharp rocks. They managed to tow her twenty miles down the Kamchatka’s west coast before maneuvering her into a shallow inlet and letting her sink. They transferred as much food as they could spare and emptied nearly all the supplies from the medical bay. Juan allowed Doc Huxley and her team just twenty-four hours to evaluate and treat as many people as she could before he ordered the Oregon to continue south.
They came across the second tugboat and the drydock Souri only 150 miles from what Eddie said the workers called Death Beach. As Cabrillo had said, she’d had a hard time making headway in the storm. They put a torpedo into the Souri as they passed her by without so much as a warning and blew the rudder off the tug’s sternpost with a blast from the 40mm.
It was only then
that Cabrillo contacted the Russian Coast Guard. He routed the radio call through a half dozen satellite relays to mask their position and reported that there were several ships in distress in the Sea of Okhotsk and gave their GPS coordinates. He explained about the Chinese refugees, which the operator he spoke to didn’t seem all that concerned about, and how there was a fortune of illegally mined gold on one of the tugs, which seemed to get more of a reaction.
News of the dramatic rescue and incredible find following the worst volcanic eruption in Asia for a decade broke as the Oregon limped into Vladivostok. They turned the Russian mercenaries over to the authorities and laid up the ship for much-needed repairs.
It was there that Juan phoned Langston Overholt, their principle CIA contact, and told him the whole story. He also called Hiroshi Katsui to inform him that the pirate menace that had overwhelmed the waters off Japan was over and gave instructions for their final payment.
He considered the fortune in gold they’d made off with a bonus that their client didn’t need to know about.
Two weeks after the eruption, Lang sent Juan an e-mail. The first rescue workers to reach the bay reported that someone had survived the eruption aboard one of the cruise ships. He’d barricaded himself in a food locker as the pyroclastic flow buried the vessel under five feet of searing hot volcanic ash. Lang thought Juan would like to know the survivor gave his name as Anton Savich, a volcanologist well-known in the region. Savich was currently staying at a hotel in Petropavlovsk.
Juan wanted to go himself, but he felt that Eddie Seng needed it more. Franklin Lincoln went along for the ride. They were back two days later with the name Bernhard Volkmann. He was the banker who was going to fence Savich’s gold.
“How’d you do it?” Juan had asked his two officers across the desk in his cabin.
“Simple, really,” Eddie had said. “Once we broke into his room and kidnapped him, we drove him to the airport and promised that we wouldn’t kill him if he told us what we wanted to know.”
“And?”
“He had nothing to lose and everything to gain, so he told us.”
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