“Ah, yes. I see that you are correct and are within the ten miles.”
“We can come in closer if you’ve made repairs to your rudder.”
“No, we have not, but the supernumerary has volunteered to stay aboard to keep working on it.”
“The rest of you are abandoning him?” Max asked, playing the part of a concerned mariner.
“He is the vessel’s owner and understands the risk,” Cassedine told him.
“Understood,” Max said with mock unease. “After you launch the boat and get clear of the tanker steer a heading of two seventy degrees and transmit a tone on the EPIRB emergency frequency so we can home in on you.”
“A heading of two seventy degrees and a tone on 121.5 megahertz. We will launch in a couple of minutes.”
“Good luck, Captain. May God go with you,” Max said seriously. Even if Cassedine and his crew were knowingly helping Singer, the sailor in him understood the dangers of getting into a lifeboat in this sea state.
A quarter hour later, Hali Kasim put the 121.5 MHz marine distress band on the op center speakers so everyone could hear the high-pitched directional tone.
“Got that, Juan?”
“I hear it. We’re heading in.”
Even flying at five hundred feet they only broke through the clouds when they were less than a mile from the supertanker. At ninety thousand tons heavier than theOregon she rode the waves much more smoothly with only occasional spray breaking over her blunt bows. They could just make out a tiny yellow speck motoring away from the red-decked behemoth. It was her lifeboat and, like he’d been ordered, Cassedine was heading due west, well away from theOregon so there would be no chance he could interfere. They could also tell that the tanker was picking up steam again after slowing to send the lifeboat down its rails.
“Check that out,” George said and pointed.
Near theGulf of Sidra ’s stern a jet of fluid arced from her side about eight feet below her rail. It was discharge from her sea-suction intake, a system of pipes and pumps that allowed her to take on or expel ballast water.
Only she wasn’t pumping water. The fluid gushing from the three-foot-diameter hole was thick and viscous, like the oil that had contaminated the bay around the Petromax terminal in Angola. Only this was clear and seemed to spread across the ocean faster than the pump was ejecting it from the ship.
“It’s growing on its own,” Eddie said from the backseat. Next to him were the thick ropes of Hypertherm. “The organics within the gel are contaminating the surrounding water and turning it into goo.”
They circled the supertanker to take a look at that damage on her port side. There was a gash in the hull rising up from her waterline and extending to her railing. As the hull flexed with the waves the rend opened and closed like a vertical mouth. The sea around the tear was coated with a growing skin of gelatin-thick flocculent.
“Where do you want me to drop you?” George asked.
“As close as you can to the bow,” Juan said.
“I don’t want to risk getting doused by spray so it’ll have to be at least a hundred feet back.”
“We won’t have the time to hunt for Singer, so make sure when you come back to grab us you can do it quickly.”
“Trust me, Chairman, I don’t want to hover over anything in this wind one microsecond longer than necessary.”
Adams looped them around and into the wind, coming at the tanker from an altitude of a hundred feet, the restless sea seeming to pulse just below the landing skids. They crossed over the ship’s rail and George reined in the little chopper, holding her steady against the gusts in an expert flying demonstration as he dumped altitude. He maintained a hover twenty feet higher than the deck rose on even the biggest waves.
“Eddie, go.”
Eddie Seng pushed open the door opposite him, fighting to keep it open with one foot while he used the other to kick the coils of Hypertherm out of the helicopter. The explosives fell to the deck below like an entangled nest of snakes. When the last of it disappeared over the sill he straightened and the wind slammed the door closed.
“Now for the hard part,” George muttered, keeping an eye on the horizon, gauging the swells and the frequency of the gusts. A few drops of rain pattered against the windscreen. He didn’t let this ominous development crack his concentration.
Juan and Eddie both waited with their hands poised on their door handles, their machine pistols slung across their backs.
An explosion of spume erupted across the width of the tanker’s bow as she plowed into another monster wave; as she started riding up it, George started to lower the Robinson. He’d judged it perfectly.
The deck was no more than five feet from the chopper’s skids when the ship started to settle again.
“See ya, boys.”
Cabrillo and Seng opened their doors and jumped without a moment’s hesitation, freeing Adams to lift away from the ship before she slammed another wave in the unrelenting cycle.
Juan hit the deck and rolled, immediately surprised at how hot the metal was. He could barely stand the temperature through the thick weave of his fatigues and he got to his feet as fast as he could. He knew the heat would seep through the rubber soles of his boots in minutes. He didn’t care about his prosthesis, he’d never feel it, but his other foot and Eddie’s were in for first-or second-degree burns if this took too long.
“This is going to suck,” Eddie said as if reading Juan’s mind.
“The spray hitting the bow should make it a little cooler there,” Juan said as they reached the pile of Hypertherm. He waved up at George in the Robinson hovering five hundred feet above them. Adams was their lookout in case Singer appeared.
Because of theGulf of Sidra ’s inertia, Juan had decided changing the ship’s course or ramming her engine into full reverse would have little effect. The best chance of stopping Singer was laying the Hypertherm as quickly as possible.
The metal-cutting explosives were configured in twenty-foot lengths with electricity-conducting clips on their ends so sections could be joined into a single charge. The detonator and battery pack could be set between any two segments, but in order to produce the desired results they would need to set it as close to the middle as possible.
Juan lifted ropes of the Hypertherm over his shoulders until he felt his knees about to buckle. By the time he was finished his left sock was soaked with perspiration.
“Ready?” he grunted.
“Let’s go.”
Staggering under their hundred-and-fifty-pound loads, the two men marched toward the bow, both trailing dreadlocks of gray explosives. The wind and the ship’s motion made them lurch drunkenly but they fought on. When they finally reached an area soaked by spray they saw tendrils of steam spiraling up from the deck. It reminded Juan of a visit to the hot springs at Yellowstone when he was a kid. He dumped his burden thirty feet from the prow. It was as close as they could get without risking being swept overboard by the eruptions of spray.
“How are we looking, George?” Juan panted.
“I did a flyby of the bridge but didn’t see anyone. The decks are a mess of pipes and manifolds. I don’t see Singer anywhere.”
“How about you, Max?”
“We’re within the torpedoes’ range and waiting for your signal.”
“Okay.”
What Juan thought was an eruption of spray blasting over the front of the ship turned out to be a microburst of heavy rain. It slackened after a few seconds but didn’t entirely abate. They had been running under two unforgiving deadlines. One was to prevent the tanker from completing its turn, and the other was to lay the explosives and be back aboard theOregon before the rain made flying impossible.
He could only hope they had better luck with the former.
Eddie started laying the explosives across the width of the ship along one of the seams where two hull sections had been welded together. Juan was busy with the detonator, testing it a couple of times with the remote control he ca
rried in his pocket before jacking it in to the first length of Hypertherm. It took six twenty-foot segments to span the tanker’s beam. Each one contained a battery that when activated generated a magnetic field that anchored the explosives to the steel deck and prevented it from rolling with the ship.
Eddie and Juan had to work together to lower a length over each of the tanker’s sides so that some of the Hypertherm dangled in the water. Again the electromagnets clamped it to the hull along one of its welded seams. When they were finished they had a line of explosives that covered every inch of the ship above the waterline. The extra lengths they left piled on the deck.
Juan radioed George for extraction as soon as Eddie made the final connection. The rain was growing heavier, near horizontal sheets that cut visibility so the distant superstructure was as nebulous as a ghost.
As Adams prepared to make the trickiest pickup of his distinguished career Cabrillo called Hanley.
“Max, the charges are laid. Go ahead and fire the torpedoes. We should be out of here by the time they arrive.”
“Roger that.” Max replied.
Back in the op center Mark Murphy opened both outer tube doors and brought up the torpedo control program on his computer. Linked through the ship’s radar and sonar systems, a three-dimensional wire frame representation of the tactical picture came up on his screen. He could clearly see theGulf of Sidra steaming seven thousand yards from theOregon . In the parlance of World War Two submariners, this was going to be a turkey shoot.
“Wepps, on my mark fire Tube One,” Max ordered. “Mark.”
Cocooned in a bubble of high-pressure compressed air, the twenty-one-foot torpedo shot from the tube and put nearly twenty yards between itself and its mother ship before the silver-zinc batteries engaged its electric motor. It took just a few seconds for the Test-71 to ramp up to its operational speed of forty knots.
On Mark’s screen he could see the torpedo streaking toward the tanker, tiny filaments representing her wire guidance cables trailing in its wake. For now he let the fish run free, but he had a joystick control for when he needed to steer the weapon.
“Fire two.”
Murph launched the second torpedo, the sound of its discharge ringing through the ship like a hollow cough. After moment he said, “Both torpedoes away and running true.”
“Juan,” Max called, “you’ve got a pair of fish on the way so now’s the time to get out of Dodge.”
“Working on it,” Cabrillo replied.
He was looking up into the storm as George brought the Robinson lower and lower. It was his third attempt to put the chopper on the deck. The shrieking winds had aborted the first two when the helo was still fifty feet above the ship. A gust hit the helicopter and George compensated instantly, crabbing the aircraft to keep pace with theSidra ’s seventeen-knot forward speed.
“Come on, Georgie boy,” Eddie said, lifting his feet to keep the soles from searing. “You can do it.”
The Robinson came lower still, its rotor wash whipping the rain off the deck in a circular pattern. They could see Adams behind the Plexiglas windscreen. His movie star–handsome face was taut with concentration, his eyes unblinking. The skids hovered a tantalizing ten feet above the deck and as the Sidra rose on another swell the gap shrank. Eddie and Juan got into position so they could open the chopper’s rear doors and dive in as quickly as possible.
Adams managed to keep the helicopter exactly on station for nearly fifteen seconds waiting for the tanker to reach the top of the wave. When it started to drop again, he let the Robinson fall the last couple of feet. Cabrillo and Seng whipped open their doors and dove inside headfirst even as the helo bounced back into the sky. Adams twisted the throttle sharply and they lifted away from the supertanker.
“That was one fancy piece of flying,” Juan said, getting himself settled and his safety belt fastened.
“Don’t congratulate me yet. I still have to land on theOregon ,” Adams replied. Then he grinned. “But that was damned smooth if I do say so myself. Oh, just so you know, that crack amidships has gotten bigger. The deck’s starting to split, too.”
“Won’t make much of a difference now,” Juan said and keyed his radio. “Max, we’re away. Where are the torpedoes?”
“Two thousand yards and closing. Call it four minutes to impact.”
The Atlantic was too rough to see the weapons’ tracks as they moved through the water, though the three men in the chopper hovering at eight hundred feet were going to have a spectacular view of their detonation.
“I’ll trigger the Hypertherm ten seconds before impact,” Juan said. “Hitting her on both port and starboard will shear everything below her waterline and the explosives will burn through everything above. The bow will come off like a piece of sliced bread.”
Murph came on the tactical net. “I’ll call out the ranges. At fifty yards go ahead and blow it.”
A tense three minutes passed as Mark guided the torpedoes so they would slam into both sides of the Gulf of Sidra in the exact spots below where Juan and Eddie had laid the Hypertherm. Juan had the remote detonator in his hand, his thumb poised.
“One hundred yards,” Mark reported.
As the torpedoes converged on the tanker they drew closer to the surface, so it was possible to see the faint line of their wakes. Murph was vectoring them in perfectly.
“Seventy-five.”
With his keener vision Adams was the first to spot it. “What the hell is that?” he suddenly shouted.
“What? Where?”
“Movement on the deck.”
Cabrillo saw it then, a tiny figure running from theGulf of Sidra ’s bows. He was wearing a rain suit that was nearly the same shade of red as the tanker’s deck, the perfect camouflage to stalk the maze of pipes in order to reach the bow unseen. “It’s Singer! Look away!”
He mashed the detonator button and turned his head to shield his eyes from the intensity of the burning Hypertherm. When he didn’t see the sun-bright luminescence in his peripheral vision he stared at the ship.
The Hypertherm was still in place but hadn’t cooked off.
“Wepps, abort! Abort! Abort!”
Mark Murphy could have triggered the torpedoes to self-destruct but instead he sent a signal to slow the hurtling weapons and used both joysticks to send them diving. On his screen he watched their descent.
The angle looked all wrong for them to pass below the tanker’s tremendous draft but there was nothing more he could do. They were close enough now that an autodestruct order would stave in theSidra ’s hull and consign her to a lingering death that would allow her entire load of gel to escape.
“Dive, baby, dive,” Eric Stone said from his station next to Murph’s.
Max was holding his breath watching the main monitor where it displayed the torpedoes’ paths. They passed within six feet of the tanker’s flat bottom and within eleven feet of each other. Everyone in the op center let out a collective breath.
“GET me down there,” Juan shouted, pointing at the tanker.
Adams threw the chopper in a steep dive before saying, “I can’t guarantee I can pick you up again.
We’re low on fuel.”
“Doesn’t matter.” There was fury in Cabrillo’s voice.
The Robinson rushed over the tanker’s bow like a hawk coming out of a stoop, its skids no more than ten feet off the deck as Adams chased Singer down the length of the ship. Juan already had his safety belt off and was ready with his shoulder braced against his door. He unslung his MP-5 and dumped it on the seat. When he’d jumped the first time the machine pistol had gouged painfully into his back. This leap was going to be even tougher.
Singer must have heard the chopper because he looked up over his shoulder. His eyes went wide and he started running even harder. There was a dark object in his hand that Juan recognized as the detonator battery. Singer cut to his right, trying to get his pursuers to fly into a manifold tower rising forty feet from the deck and also to reach th
e rail so he could hurl the battery into the sea.
Juan forced open his door. The drop was ten feet and the chopper was moving at least ten miles per hour, but he leapt anyway.
He hit hard, tumbling across the hot steel plates until he crashed into a pipe support. He hauled himself to his feet, his body feeling the collective result of so much punishment. He took off at a dead sprint, his pistol out of its holster and clutched tightly in his fist.
Singer had seen him jump from the chopper and redoubled his pace, his long strides eating distance like a gazelle. But no matter how badly he wanted to toss the battery overboard and complete his mission the man behind him was driven even harder. He glanced over his shoulder again to see Cabrillo gaining ground, his face a mask of rage.
A fresh waved surged under the tanker, making her hull moan with the stress. The tear along her port side slammed closed as the swell buckled the keel. Then, as it passed by, the split opened again, tearing wider than before. Singer had seen the gap and was far enough from the rail to avoid it when it closed but when it yawned opened he never thought it would rip the deck so easily.
Singer tried to avoid it, and was awkwardly shifting his weight when his foot fell through, shredding his rain pants and the flesh of his leg against the jagged edge. The paperback-sized battery pack went skittering. He screamed at the pain and his other leg fell into the hole, dangling above the slick surface of the flocculent still sloshing in the tank. The searing metal blistered his hands as he struggled to pull himself free before the gap slammed shut.
Cabrillo dove into him at full speed just as the tanker shifted again and the two sides of the tear scissored closed. He tumbled with Singer amid a spray of warm liquid and a keening cry that pierced his brain.
When he recovered from the fall he looked at Singer. Everything below the top of his thighs had been cut off and had dropped into the tank. Blood spilled from the clean slices in torrents that turned pink in the rain.
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