Midnight Zone: a Cade Rearden Thriller

by JK Franks

  Charlie studied the pictures. “Wounds look the same as most of the fish. Like a damn buzz saw went through them.” They were not the familiar jagged bite marks of a shark or other ocean predator. Most of these were perfect circular wounds with deep puncture wounds evenly spaced within the carved out circle. “I guess we aren’t heading back home just yet.”

  29

  Guyana

  “No, Sarge, they speak English,” Nance said, her frustration with the man growing. Leaving the fish kills off the Mosquito Coast far behind, they had flown south to investigate the next event on the list. A string of somewhat contradictory reports of attacks on offshore oil rigs in Guyana and just off the coast of several of the smaller islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Part of the team was also tracking down reports of the space probe.

  Charlie put his SmartCom away. He’d been about to repeat the request in Spanish, using the phone as a translator. He was wearing a light business suit and looked as out of place as he felt. He could already feel the sweat stains spreading on the light-colored fabric. Posing as insurance investigators for the oil company, they attempted to board the rig, then interview all of those who’d witnessed what happened. Their credentials were perfect, but they ran into brick walls with every official they approached. None of the unit managers would allow them onto the rigs, nor give them a list of personnel to interview. They wouldn’t even share the reports that their people had filed.

  “Mister Chavez, you realize that Sulanis Petroleum will be on the hook for the entire amount if we are not allowed to inspect. Your company pays us millions to insure that is not the case.” The man wouldn’t respond, did not argue, nor did he offer any explanation. This was the fourth such official they had interviewed. Like most of the others, he simply shook his head in refusal.

  Walking out, Charlie wiped sweat from his forehead and spat in disgust. Sulanis has reportedly had two of the billion-dollar oil rigs damaged and out of commission. If any of the companies would talk, it should have been Chavez.

  “They are a multi-national venture, joint owned by Canadian and Japanese investors,” Nance said, looking at the screen of her SmartCom. “The largest customers are China and the U.S.”

  Doris had brought them up to speed on the flight down. Guyana was poised to leap onto the list of top oil producing countries in the next several years. While holding fewer oil reserves than its northern neighbor, it didn’t suffer the political and economic turmoil of Venezuela.

  “So, all of these guys are stonewalling us. Why?” Greg asked.

  “They were paid off, ordered not to, or just scared,” Nance said. “It’s a different culture down here, we don’t understand what may be going on behind the scenes.”

  “Still, you would think they would file insurance claims on these, just for lost production if not the actual damages.”

  “It makes little sense, Greg. That’s true.”

  The youngest member of Bravo thought about it as they rejoined the rest of the team. Calling Dee, he asked her to run some new searches. He detailed the parameters and then instructed her to run the results by Jimmy as well. She acknowledged, and within the hour, provided him the very short list he needed.

  Greg put his phone down on the table after reading the information. He was sitting with Charlie and Nance in the little waterfront café. “Okay, we have a possible rig we can go check out.” The other two stopped eating and looked at him.

  “Go on, you have our attention,” the sergeant said, eyeing the rest of his fish sandwich greedily.

  “Only thing is, it isn’t on our list,” Greg said. “Not one of Sulanis’s, the huge state-owned petrochem company, nor Exxon’s, nor any of the others. I had them checked out when this started. You know, most of the damaged rigs we know about were all within about six weeks of each other. Like the Venezuelan oil workers that washed up dead. All these others were about then, too. So…I wondered which was first.”

  “You found the first one?”

  “I did, Captain. Well, to be accurate, Jimmy found it. It was originally leased to a Chinese group well offshore. No one reported any accident, but it was unexpectedly sold off for salvage several months ago. They just got it towed back to the breaking yard a few weeks ago. Doris intercepted some messages between the rig foreman and his bosses back in China that makes her suspect it may have been the first.”

  “How far away?”

  Greg checked. “Maybe forty minutes away, Deuce.”

  Charlie grinned. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Eat up, people. We gotta move.”

  Charlie didn’t know how Doris had found it. The location was in a rundown neighborhood, and the breaking yard where decommissioned marine vessels were dismantled and sold off for scrap looked and smelled about like you would imagine…or maybe worse. “Still not as bad as the fish,” Nance said, grinning.

  The rest weren’t so sure. Nance and Charlie led the contingent up the rusty metal stairs and took a look for themselves. Workers were busy removing the remainder of the oil company’s equipment, but the team could instantly see damaged structural pieces. Broken railings and corrugated metal walls with giant gashes. One of the interior rooms had what looked to the sergeant like a spray pattern of arterial blood. Charlie had seen similar scenes enough times that there was no mistaking it. “We’ve got to talk to someone who was on this thing.” He looked at Nance, who was nodding slowly in agreement as she took in the scene.

  Dee’s voice broke in on his command channel with a sense of urgency. “Deuce, be aware, I am picking up some unmistakable signals showing your team is under surveillance.“ That wasn’t a real surprise. After all, they were operating in a foreign country and asking questions about one of the most valuable commodities.

  “Electronic surveillance?” he asked, nonchalantly as he edged out from under an overhanging metal roof.

  “Affirmative, as well as visual tracking by at least two aerial drones.”

  Charlie nodded, now looking over the railing at the shipyard and dilapidated neighborhoods beyond. He leaned over as if he were eyeing the support beams and made a discreet call to Greg down on the ground. “Get some of those mini-drones airborne. Dee will feed them instructions on what to search for.” The bird-shaped drones were almost indistinguishable from doves, but as he thought about it, he wasn’t entirely sure doves were native to this region.

  “Birds are up,” came the quick response.

  The crew spent two more hours on the rig, taking pictures, measurements, and everything else someone might expect an accident investigation team to do. Charlie didn’t want whoever was watching them to think they were anything other than what they claimed to be. Dee had kept him posted on what the doves had found, which was absolutely nothing. They had briefly spotted one of the flying drones, but it had rapidly descended into thick foliage and not reappeared. Electronic sensors had twice picked up a possible eavesdropping signal, but upon investigation, the little doves also found nothing. Charlie loaded the teams up with a growing sense of unease. If someone is out there watching—they’re damn good.

  “What are you thinking, Sarge?” Nance asked.

  He drove back toward town, eyes scanning the road ahead. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Something tore that rig to pieces. I believe it's what happened to the others, too. We really need to find someone who was on it to talk to. It’s time we started getting answers.”

  Answers would take a while. For whatever reason, Doris had a challenging time hacking into the Chinese company’s servers to get the crew manifest. Then it became obvious that most of the labor for the rig was off the books. No official names, identities, or addresses. “They probably just gathered up crews from the docks whenever they needed to swap out. Lots of experienced, unemployed people around,” Greg said, listening to Doris’s report. She had been on it for two days while Charlie's crew sat around a cheap hotel getting restless. Ultimately, she came up with a single possible match.

  They were on the road in minutes, all
of them ready to be done with this investigation.

  “Dee, are you sure this is the place?” Greg asked nervously as he pulled down a road that was closing in on both sides with thick vegetation.

  “Affirmative, you are at the correct coordinates.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “Damn, I was really hoping you were wrong.” He was still amped up over someone watching them at the scrap yard. Somehow, this innocent little mission seemed to be feeling more ominous with every passing day.

  “Right there,” Greg said, glancing up from the nav system on the phone.

  “Team Two, take the back alley. Watch our six. Greg, get some doves airborne. No surprises.” As leader of the mission, Deuce Taylor was taking no chances.

  He turned to the captain using her call sign, “Magellan, you do the door knock.”

  She looked at him as if to say, “Why me?”

  “You have a friendly face. Plus, I’ll be on your nine o’clock locked and loaded.” So far, they had not been carrying weapons in Guyana, but the squalid homes and desperate looking villagers made the need a prudent one.

  Had the vines and rusted out junk machinery not been in the way, you could have recited the alphabet and barely made it to Q before being back where you started. Nance knocked, then knocked again. Stirring sounds and a shuffling noise preceded the wooden door being cracked open. A mottled cat ran out the door and between Nance’s legs. Her eyes never left the man’s face. An old and weathered face, a terrified face. She dropped the phony act they’d been using.

  She knew the man had no family and lived alone, but she kept her voice low. “Mister Nogales, I am with the U.S. Government, and we believe your life is in danger. We are here to offer you protection if you need it. Can we talk?” She smiled and tried to look as genuine as possible. After all, it was not a lie.

  Charlie looked at her like she’d lost her mind. The expression from Nogales was pretty much the same. He seemed to consider it, then shrugged and opened the door wide, waving them both in.

  Forty-three minutes later, they left with Nogales in tow. They’d told him to bring anything he wanted to keep. If the man’s story checked out, Doris would help them move the man somewhere safe. Of course, if what he’d said was true, Nance wasn’t sure any of them were safe.

  30

  Antarctica

  “Nomad!”

  The shout pulled Cade from a mostly internal focus to an external one in seconds. Glancing toward the front of the Rover, he saw Alan talking frantically with someone. He slapped his CommDot, “Go for Nomad.”

  Alan began speaking almost simultaneously to both McTee from MARs-2 and Dee. Cade’s normal ability to separate and identify voices was making no sense of the confusion of sounds. To make matters worse, the barbarian, Brutus, had decided this was an obvious threat condition and suddenly was hellbent to take over. “Everyone shut the fuck up for a second!” Assessing the situation, Cade decided Dee would be the most efficient. Holding up a silencing finger to the others in the cramped space, he told her to give him the unpleasant news….and he already knew it would be bad.

  “You have an unidentified aircraft closing on your position, Nomad. I suspect hostile intent. You will need to take evasive action.”

  So many things ran through his mind concurrently. How was anything up in this weather? How did they know it was hostile, and most of all, how in the hell could they take evasive action? “We are in a freaking school bus with tank tracks for wheels driving over a half-mile thick sheet of ice.”

  “I have them on radar,” Alan said from the front seat.

  “Cutter, put some room between us and McTee,” Cade yelled. “Alan, give me some options. What do we have?” Cade’s eyes looked out in the direction Alan was pointing where he saw a massive, helicopter gunship approaching from the southeast. It was a Kamov KA-52 Alligator. “Shit,” Cade said. The Russian-built all-weather war machine was bristling with weapons. Who in the hell has this down here? he wondered. Leaving that thought for the analyst, he and Gus began working on a way to escape the approaching beast.

  McTee had MARs-2 heading directly at the approaching gunship, presenting as small a profile as possible. Cade was still hoping that whoever was in it had peaceful intentions, but none of his inner voices agreed on that premise. He saw one cannon spitting fire as it began its strafing run on the small convoy. “Here we go, people, it’s about to get hairy up in here,” he yelled. Glancing at the stack of cases, he began running through options. They had weaponry, but no missiles, no RPGs, and everything was buried under tents and crates of food and supplies. Strategically, that had been shortsighted, but they had expected no encounters down here, hostile or otherwise.

  “MARs-2 took an indirect…”

  Alan’s voice was cut off as a line of rounds stitched a line across the cabin roof of their own truck. “Full stop!” Alan yelled as the deafening sound of the KA-52 roared overhead.

  Cade quickly joined Alan, pulling case after case out onto the ice. The Battlesuits protected their bodies from the biting wind and bitter cold, but hands and faces were not covered. Within seconds, Cade could feel nothing through either hand. He’d never experienced cold this brutal. He knew they couldn’t last long outside the shelter of the Rover. “Dee, can you take control, screw with the targeting on that thing…. anything? You have to buy us some time.” Alan was pointing to a case and nodding.

  Cade reached for the latch, but his fingers wouldn’t obey his mind. All he needed to do was flip up the latch and pull the small metal hoop out, but that simple activity already seemed beyond him. Looking up, he shook his head at Alan and Alex, who’d also made it out of the truck. She ran up and pulled her hands out of her coat, revealing gloved hands. Quickly, she had the hard travel case open, and Cade pulled her down as an air-to-ground missile zoomed past them toward the MARs-2. It missed the vehicle by inches.

  “Doris is using our phones to project targeting interference, Captain,” Alan said.

  Cade knew that as close as the craft was, they could disengage the targeting systems as soon as they figured that out. He’d seen the Russians and Syrians using these craft with amazing precision. They were rugged beasts without a lot of the high-tech the American counterpart had. Whatever Doris was doing, though, would only buy them seconds.

  “Coming to you, Nomad!” he heard McTee say over the comms.

  “Negative, negative!” Cade yelled back. He wanted the other vehicle away from the battle. If they lost both of them out here, they were dead. “Make for those low mountains at top speed.” Any reply the other man might have made was lost as the twin cannons on the helicopter opened again. Multiple lines of ice were spewing up like mini-volcanos where the rounds impacted the ground. The lines were heading directly for them. He shoved Alex one way while diving across the cases toward Alan who was directly in the line of fire. He tried hard to think of the caliber the Russian ship normally carried. The Rapide Battlesuits were rated up to .30 caliber, but that was for penetration; a good portion of the kinetic energy would still be felt.

  The shots missed Alan but struck Cade in the shoulder, spinning him in a full circle and leaving that arm feeling as numb as his hands. Glancing over, he was pretty sure his shoulder was dislocated, if not worse. Tamping down the pain was not difficult; with the cold, he literally couldn’t feel anything. An old drill instructor had repeatedly told them that pain was only in the mind, which Cade now knew was, in fact, true. The nerves in damaged areas sent electrical signals to the brain that it interpreted to be pain. The DI had done his best to convince them if you could control that pain response, you were in charge. He’d bought into that lesson better than most, routinely punishing his body far beyond what his fellow soldiers could endure.

  The sounds coming from the gunship faded to his rear as Cade assumed it was turning for another pass. They were sitting ducks, and at any moment, the pilot would realize they weren’t fighting back and just hover and fire. Alex and Alan were pulling something from th
e open case. He tried to help, but his left arm was just dangling uselessly. To his dismay, he saw it wasn’t even a weapon, but part of the equipment supposed to be used at the site. Something to do with drilling ice cores, he thought. Alan was yelling something, but he was struggling to focus. Brutus was nearly front and center now.

  “What?”

  Cade caught the automatic as Alan tossed it. “Try to keep it off of us for a few seconds,” the kid said, this time through his CommDot.

  A few seconds might be all the time we have, Cade thought. Dee already had the gun ready for autofire mode. Cade was squeezing the trigger in rapid bursts before he even turned to see the thing he was shooting at. The targeting reticle appeared in his goggles and centered briefly on the pilot before moving back toward the engine cowling.

  “Negative damage,” Dee stated flatly in her very proper British accent.

  He could see that for himself. The heavily armored helicopter was deflecting the small arms rounds with ease. “Focus fire again on the glass,” he ordered. “Confine fire pattern to a single point.”

  “Acknowledged,” she responded as he saw the chopper begin to move more erratically. Dee, in control of the aiming, managed to focus the relatively small caliber rounds into a quarter-sized circle in the thick armor-like acrylic windshield. The bullseye was directly in line with the pilot’s forehead, and as the impacts began eating deeper into the windshield, it began cratering, and cracks started spider-webbing outward. While the rounds had a negligible effect on the flight worthiness of the craft, the effect on the pilot was profound. He pulled up and away moving that part of the windshield out of the line of sight.

  Cade could see now that the passenger seemed to be holding a pistol on the pilot. Perhaps he wasn’t the one we should have been targeting. Slowly, the gray beast began to hover, then crab walked sideways in their direction. “Whatever you’re thinking, Alan, now would be an excellent time.” The wind from the downwash erased whatever response the kid might have made. Cade fired off the last half mag in a series of three-round bursts, all targeting the passenger side window. He saw no reaction at all from the man with the gun.