As soon as they went off, the MSS agents charged through, blazing away with their assault rifles and taking down anything that moved. The firefight continued for a few moments, and then the dining car went silent.
“Clear!” one of the men yelled.
“Dining car,” Eddie said quietly for Juan’s benefit. His earpiece had been stowed in a tiny pocket sewn into his belt line. He had inserted it into his ear when he was sure no one was looking.
Zhong motioned for Eddie to follow him in. Dead triad soldiers littered the car.
“Find Jimmy Su,” Zhong said. “If they weren’t able to make the exchange already, he’ll have the flash drive.”
Eddie looked around and said, “Where are the Americans?”
“They must have fled to another car. The agents who went to the rear car are making a sweep forward. If the Americans try to jump off the train, my men are ordered to shoot them. They’ll be found.”
While Eddie waited at the front of the car, Zhong’s men searched the corpses for the drive. Zhong kept watch at the far end for a counterassault.
A hand grasped Eddie’s arm from behind. Someone must have been hanging from the undercarriage, was his thought when he felt a pistol barrel against his temple.
“Put your guns down,” Jimmy Su barked. His breath was hot on Eddie’s neck.
Zhong whipped around and raised his assault rifle. “Or what? You’ll kill him?”
“No. I’m just using him as a shield. If you don’t put your guns down, you’ll never see that flash drive again.”
“You picked a bad choice for a shield. I don’t really care if you kill your own man.”
Su whirled Eddie to the side and his mouth gaped when he saw what appeared to be a phantom standing in front of him. Before Su could say anything, Eddie took advantage of the surprise and lashed out with his elbow, pushing the gun away from his face. With the immediate danger gone, he chopped Su in the throat. While the Ghost Dragon leader went down clutching his neck, Eddie kneed him in the side of the head, knocking him cold.
Eddie was about to pick up the gun when Zhong told him to freeze. He sensed the three guns trained on him and went like a statue.
“Back away,” Zhong ordered. Eddie did as he was told.
Eddie smirked at Su’s unconscious form. “Did you see the look on his face? He thought he had me killed and yet here I am. I think this proves I’m on your side.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re on your own side.” He nodded to one of his men. “Search him.”
“Which one?”
“Both of them.”
The MSS agent did a thorough pat-down on Eddie, then frisked Su’s inert form.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Then the Americans must have the flash drive,” Zhong said. “If we don’t find it on them after they’re dead, we’ll tear this train apart until we do.”
“What about Su? Should I kill him now?”
“No. We may need him later to help us find the drive. Bind him.”
The agent took out some zip ties and cuffed Su’s hands and feet and tethered him to a metal grab bar so he couldn’t crawl away.
When Su was secure, they moved toward the sixth car. Seeing that it was empty, the first agent walked in and promptly set off the flashbang trip bomb that was waiting.
While the agent writhed on the floor, Eddie said, “We must not have finished off Su’s men.” He knew full well that bombs were set by Juan.
Zhong leaned over and checked out the cylindrical grenade, still intact because this type of flashbang didn’t destroy its casing.
He held it up and said, “Have you ever used anything this sophisticated in the Ghost Dragons?”
Eddie shook his head.
“This is made by the United States,” Zhong said. “Military-grade. Laser trip sensor. The Americans must have put it here.”
“Then there might be more of them ahead,” Eddie said.
Zhong stood up and rolled the spent grenade down the center aisle of the car. It didn’t set any more trip bombs off, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any there.
“We’ll have to proceed slowly, which will give them an opportunity to escape.” Zhong looked at Eddie. “If they do, you die.”
Eddie nodded hastily. “Have your men coming from the other direction made contact with the Americans yet?”
Zhong radioed his men and asked the question.
“No, sir,” came the reply. “We’re in the eighth car.”
“They’re in the eighth car?” Eddie repeated for the benefit of Juan. He knew he had to buy time not only for the Chairman but also for the team out on the Oregon. “Then I have an idea how to attack the Americans.”
9
On the deck of the Oregon, near the tramp freighter’s superstructure, Mark Murphy paced, impatiently waiting for the drone carrying the flash drive to arrive. He squinted into the sun as he watched the locomotive enter another tunnel and wished he’d brought some sunglasses with him. He hated not being able to see what was going on in the train. Before coming outside, he’d been down in the ship’s darkened operations center listening to both Juan’s and Eddie’s conversations. He’d heard the threat that the Chairman had given the Ghost Dragon leader about the Predator drone and its Hellfire missile ready to blow up the train. While there was no attack drone circling above, his threat wasn’t a bluff. The Oregon had more than enough firepower to destroy the entire train from its position a mile offshore.
Murph would be the best one to know since he served as the ship’s weapons officer. As the only crew member without a military or intelligence background, he had joined the Corporation after getting his first Ph.D. by the time he was twenty and then working in the defense industry as a weapons designer. One of the reasons he loved his current job was because the crew accepted him for who he was. The Chairman didn’t make him change his punk rock style, even letting Murph convert the deck of the Oregon into a skateboard park during R & R and putting him in a cabin far away from the others so he could blast his music at full volume and play video games with Eric Stone late into the night.
Like on most days, Murph was dressed all in black, a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt bearing the name of the band Screeching Weasel. His hair was dark and shaggy, with matching scruff on his chin that he passed off as a beard, and the caffeine in the energy drinks he constantly consumed made it tough to put weight on his tall, gangly frame. Not only did he like the nonconformist look, any more effort thinking about his clothes and appearance just wasn’t worth the time.
When Eric, his best friend, was on board the Oregon, he and Murph were usually inseparable. They were the youngest crew members and shared an appreciation for complex software coding, gaming, and Internet dating, the last of which didn’t work nearly as well or as often as they hoped. They had been working together on a still-classified weapons system for the Arleigh Burke class destroyers when Eric convinced him to join the Corporation.
That was why Murph was so anxious to retrieve the drone. He knew that every minute Eric and the others were on the train, they were at risk. The Oregon was more than a workplace. The crew was family. Murph took pride in his job, but helping his crewmates get through dangerous situations was what really drove him.
It was also a very lucrative workplace, although he had earned an even higher salary as one of the world’s top weapons designers. The Corporation was formed as a partnership and all the crew members shared in the profits. The riskier and more difficult the job, the greater the payday. All of them anticipated retiring as multimillionaires.
The current job was one of the trickiest they’d ever undertaken. In this case, the most important part of the operation was out of their hands, which made Murph itchy to get the mission over with.
“Drone One coming in,” Gomez said over the headset Murph was wearing. “Starboard sid
e, four o’clock.”
Murph turned and put his hand up to shield his eyes from the setting sun. The view across the Oregon’s deck would have concerned anyone not familiar with the ship. From far away she looked like she was ready for the breaker’s yard. Up close, her exterior looked even worse.
The 560-foot Oregon had been built to haul lumber from the Pacific Northwest to Japan, but it’d been years since the 11,600-ton freighter was in her prime. Rust seemed to coat everything, from the leaking barrels and broken machinery scattered randomly about the deck to the chains connecting the sections of railing that were missing. The flaking paint was slathered on haphazardly in several different shades of a sickly green, and the fraying cables of the ship’s five cranes looked as if they were in danger of snapping just from their sagging.
From her blade-like bow to her graceful champagne-glass-shaped stern, steel plates were welded to the Oregon’s hull as if to conceal cracks that threatened to rip it in two. The dingy white superstructure separated the five cargo holds, three forward and two aft. The bridge was barely visible through the mold-covered windows, one of which was covered in plywood. It was topped with bent antennas held together by duct tape.
Murph was so used to the ship’s rickety appearance that it didn’t even register, as he watched the small quadcopter zoom toward him. It came to rest on the barrel next to him and shut down. He scooped it up and ran toward the nearest door.
“Got it,” Murph said as he went inside. “Let them know I’m on my way down.”
The chipped linoleum of the interior corridor was stained brown every few feet from some unknown substance, the peeling walls bowed out as if they were about to collapse, and the few fluorescent lights that did work flickered and buzzed. A bathroom Murph passed was coated with a layer of grime and emitted a stench so powerful that any harbormaster coming aboard for an inspection would spend the least time possible before fleeing in disgust.
Murph opened a broom closet, which was stacked with mops and cleaning supplies that had never been used. At the slop sink, he twisted the hot and cold handles in a specific order as if he were a safecracker. With a distinct click, the back wall swished open noiselessly. Murph raced through and tapped a button on the other side to close it again as he passed.
It was like stepping from a sewer into a luxury hotel. Instantly, the stink was gone. Paintings by masters like Monet and Renoir adorned mahogany-paneled walls, and recessed lighting cast a warm glow in the halls. Plush carpeting softened Murph’s footfalls.
All of the apparent decay and shabbiness was merely a meticulously designed façade. Though she still outwardly appeared to be a tramp steamer, the Oregon had been refitted from the keel up at a naval base in Vladivostok after a generous payment to a friendly commandant. He told his workers that they were constructing the Russian Navy’s latest secret weapon. Everything on the outside of the Oregon was meant to repel and disgust so that it would go by unnoticed or unsuspected, but the interior was designed for her true mission as a spy ship and as a home for her crew.
Each cabin was uniquely decorated according to its occupant’s specifications. Murph’s wouldn’t have looked out of place as a rich college student’s dorm room. Other than a functional bed and a huge desk with the latest ergonomic chair for work, the key furnishings of his cabin were centered on the leather sofa and gigantic television connected to all of the latest consoles.
When he was out of his cabin, Murph spent much of his time with the Oregon’s vast array of hidden weaponry. The welded plates on the side of the hull could drop away to reveal 20mm Gatling guns modeled on the ones aircraft carriers used for antimissile defense, and clamshell doors in the bow opened for a 120mm cannon like those mounted on Abrams tanks. A Metal Storm hundred-barrel gun could rise out of the stern to fire tungsten projectiles at the fantastic rate of a million rounds a minute. Six of the leaky oil drums on deck held .30 caliber machine guns that would pop up to fend off boarders and were remotely manned from the operations center. A closed-circuit camera system gave expansive views of the ship itself and anything around it out to the horizon.
Defensive capabilities also included surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles, Exocet antiship missiles, and the latest Russian torpedoes, all purchased on the black market so they couldn’t be traced back to the U.S. Someday Murph hoped to add antimissile lasers and electromagnetic railguns to the arsenal after a previous mission had shown him up close how powerful they could be in battle.
In addition to the Magic Shop, which contained racks of clothing, various props, and a makeup department that would make a movie studio envious, the ship had a waterline boat garage for handling all types of small vessels, including wet bikes, Zodiacs, and her RHIB—short for “rigid-hulled inflatable boat,” the same kind Navy SEALs took into combat. The center of the Oregon contained the moon pool, the largest single space on the ship. The pool in the cavernous room had a water level equalized with the sea level outside and was used to launch underwater missions through massive keel doors—anything from scuba divers to its pair of submarines.
Of the five deep cargo holds in the Oregon, two of the forward holds had been modified to house the crew quarters, and one of the rear holds housed a hangar with the ship’s MD 520N helicopter that rose up on a platform for takeoff. Those three had been cleverly covered by false roofs of crates and containers to fool anyone looking down on them from the deck into thinking that the holds were full of cargo.
The other two holds, which could be serviced by the two working cranes on deck, often carried actual freight to throw off inspectors. But today the forward hold carried a secret cargo, which was Murph’s destination.
He opened the hatch to the hold, and instead of timber or containers, he was met by row upon row of server racks surrounding a massive computer that took up fully half the space. A giant refrigeration unit cooled the hold so that the electronics didn’t overheat in the sweltering tropical environment.
Three workstations were occupied by two men and a woman, all on loan from the National Security Agency. When the offer to sell the flash drive was made by the Ghost Dragons, Langston Overholt IV, Juan Cabrillo’s venerable CIA mentor who had been instrumental in encouraging Juan to build the Oregon and had assigned most of the Corporation’s missions from the government agency, had seen the potential for an opportunity that might never present itself again.
He knew that the Oregon had been operating in Southeast Asia hunting down pirates targeting American containerships and quickly got agreement from the NSA chief to provide the equipment they’d need for a special mission. Fort Meade’s newest cryptographic supercomputer, one of the few in the world that could break the Chinese code, was loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy cargo jet and flown to Guam, where it was transferred to the Oregon.
Not only did the Oregon have enough space to hold the computer, she had a revolutionary engine that could supply its huge power requirements. Instead of the original diesels, the Oregon was powered by a pair of magnetohydrodynamic engines that used magnets cooled by liquid helium to strip free electrons from the seawater. Four pulse jets forced water through Venturi tubes to propel her to speeds that shouldn’t have been possible on a ship her size, and the vector nozzles on the jets made her as agile as a jackrabbit.
“Here it is,” Murph said to Abby Yamada, a slender woman in her forties who was the NSA’s chief cryptanalyst on the mission. He removed the flash drive from the drone and handed it to her. He looked at his watch and added, “You’ve got six minutes fifteen seconds.”
“Thanks,” she said, inserting it into the USB port. “Let’s get this done.”
Since Murph had a top secret clearance, they allowed him to stay while they worked. English was the universal coding language, so he could understand most of what they were doing. He watched in curiosity as they attempted to hack into the drive without erasing it, but he would have much rather been doing it himself. He wasn’t used to bei
ng a bystander on his own ship.
A minute into the job, one of her colleagues said, “I’ve got a serious problem here.”
“What is it?” Yamada asked as she continued to type.
“When I was hacking into the code, I somehow activated a timer.”
All heads turned toward him. He looked ashen.
Murph went over to his terminal and saw that the drive was asking for a password. If the correct one wasn’t input within three minutes, the drive would erase itself and the entire mission would be for nothing.
10
Memories churned to the surface for Max Hanley as Vietnam’s coast passed by on the huge screen in front of him. He had served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War on Swift Boats patrolling the coastline and the Mekong Delta, sweating through every square inch of his uniform and swatting at the incessant mosquitoes as he and his fellow sailors waited for the ambushes they knew would come. His crewmates were some of the best men he’d ever known. Many of them had been killed or gone missing. He almost joined them when his boat was destroyed and he was captured. He spent six months in a POW camp before escaping.
Now, more than forty years later—with twenty extra pounds at his belly and a ring of ginger circling his chrome dome where a full head of hair used to be—it was hard to believe he was sitting in air-conditioned comfort as he watched another battle unfold on the same soil. The operations center was the heart of the Oregon. Located directly below the window-dressing bridge in the superstructure, virtually every function of the ship could be handled from this one room through a new Cray supercomputer. Max noted with pride that the Oregon’s computer nearly matched the sophistication of the NSA’s, if not its raw computing power.
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