Linc just laughed. While Juan was fluent in Spanish, Arabic, and Russian, Linc could speak and understand only English. Using a parabolic microphone during his surveillance, Linc had captured enough of Ortega’s speech to give Juan time to practice mimicking the Venezuelan’s cadence, tone, and accent. Although limited to a Saudi accent when speaking Arabic, Juan could modify his Spanish with ease to match virtually any accent in Latin and South America.
But the usefulness of the makeup and mimicry was predicated on cowing enlisted sailors and noncommissioned officers. If this lieutenant was very familiar with Ortega, it would only be a matter of time before he saw through the disguise.
Linc pulled up to the front of the warehouse office door next to a second Humvee. They got out, and Linc looped the FAL over his shoulder in as nonthreatening a way as possible. It was common to see soldiers and sailors carrying around assault rifles in South America, and Captain Ortega’s adjutant had been no different.
Juan flung open the door in the style he’d memorized from Linc’s video and strode into the office, surprising four men, three of whom were sitting behind desks, the fourth in front of a bank of video monitors and ignoring them. A radio in the background was playing a soccer match.
The heads turned toward the visitors as one and the radio flicked off. All four men leaped from their chairs and snapped to attention.
Juan scanned the group for only a moment and focused on the sailor with lieutenant’s bars on his epaulettes.
“¡Teniente Dominguez!” he bellowed. “¿Cuál es el significado de está?”—What is the meaning of this?
The chastened officer was caught off guard, his eyes wide with fear. He showed no sign that Juan’s voice was anyone’s other than Ortega’s.
“Captain Ortega, I thought you were in Puerto Cabello.”
“That’s what you were meant to think. I see that I should conduct surprise inspections more often. Despite your mistaken assumption, it is not your patriotic duty to listen to our national team play Argentina. Quickly—how many are on duty tonight?”
Dominguez practically spit the words out. “Myself and ten sailors. The four of us here, two at the guardhouse, three on sentry duty, two guarding the payload.”
“Only two in the warehouse?”
Dominguez hesitated for a moment. “I have no men in the warehouse. I could post some there, Captain, if that’s your order, but since it is empty I saw no need.”
“I see,” Juan said. But he didn’t. If the payload wasn’t in the warehouse, where was it?
“We have intelligence to suggest spies may be trying to gain knowledge about this facility. I want two of these men to join the sentry posts.”
Dominguez didn’t hesitate this time. “You heard the captain!” he yelled at the two men. “Move!”
The sailors snatched up their rifles and donned their caps as they scrambled out of the room. The only one to stay behind was the man at the monitors.
“Get back to work, seaman,” Juan said to him, and the man plopped into his chair. Juan shifted his gaze back to the lieutenant. “Show me the payload.”
“Sir, Admiral Ruiz ordered that no one was to view the cargo once it was loaded.”
“You will show us the payload or I will report that you disobeyed a superior officer.”
Another hesitation from Dominguez. “The admiral’s orders were very specific.”
“His orders are immaterial. That is the purpose of a surprise inspection.”
Juan was an excellent interpreter of people’s faces, and something that he’d just said was wrong.
Dominguez’s arm did nothing more than twitch, but Juan could sense that the lieutenant was attempting to be a hero. Juan drew his pistol and had the FN pointed between Dominguez’s eyes before the lieutenant could even get a finger on his own sidearm. Linc moved even faster, whipping the assault rifle around in one smooth movement.
Dominguez froze, then slowly raised his hands above his head without being told. Linc disarmed him and patted him down before gesturing that he had no other weapons. The seaman, who’d watched the whole sequence motionless and agog, moved against the wall with his lieutenant.
“Don’t make a sound,” Juan said. “Either of you.”
Slow nods confirmed the order.
“How did you know?” Juan asked.
“The admiral,” Dominguez said. “She’s a woman. You used the word ‘his’ when you talked about her orders.”
Juan shook his head. Talk about playing the percentages. He didn’t know how many female admirals were in the Venezuelan Navy, but it couldn’t have been more than a handful. For once, the odds beat him.
“What did he say?” Linc asked.
“Apparently the admiral in charge of this operation is a woman. I will have to remember to look her up when we get back. Keep an eye on the lieutenant here while I collect what we came for.”
Since Linc didn’t speak Spanish, Juan would have to be the one to scour the files and computers for anything relevant to the smuggling operation. He hit the jackpot when he found an encrypted computer. He didn’t waste time trying to crack it. That wasn’t his expertise, and they didn’t have time. He’d let Murph and Eric, the Corporation’s computer specialists, do their magic once he got the computer back to the Oregon.
A phone started to ring, but not one of the desk phones. It was the trill of a smartphone. Juan spotted it under some papers on Dominguez’s desk.
Before either of them could stop him, Dominguez lunged for it and swept it off the desk, smashing it into the concrete wall.
Linc grabbed him and pressed the barrel of the assault rifle against his chest. “Don’t do that again, por favor.”
Juan picked up the pieces, making sure to get the memory card. Whatever was on there was important enough for the young lieutenant to risk his life to protect it.
Juan put the laptop and the phone pieces into Dominguez’s briefcase.
“Let’s see if we can get some pretty pictures,” Juan said to Linc.
“What about him?”
“Hmm. Methinks he’s not going to be very cooperative.” Juan turned to Dominguez. “¿Dónde está el baño?”
The lieutenant reluctantly pointed to a door at the other side of the room. They slipped plastic ties around the hands and feet of both captives and used torn uniform fabric as gags. When the men were cinched up tight against the toilet with more ties, Linc locked the door from the inside and closed it.
Killing them, of course, would have been easier and safer, but that wasn’t the way the Corporation did things. Although they were technically mercenaries, killing in cold blood wasn’t part of their moral code. Juan created the Corporation to stop terrorists and assassins, not become them.
“Two minutes and we’re back here,” Juan said. “Nobody should need the potty that soon.”
Linc nudged open the only other door in the room. After a quick sweep of his rifle, he said, “Clear. And I mean clear.”
Juan followed him through into the main body of the warehouse.
“You weren’t kidding,” he said.
The vast warehouse was bare. Although the concrete floor was chewed up as if a rototiller had gouged it, the space was bereft of crates or vehicles. But Dominguez had mentioned a payload. There had to be more here than met the eye.
Then Juan saw it. The back of the warehouse—the side near the dock—had a large door identical to the one at the front. He looked up and saw a section of the ceiling above the door that was similar to the gantry crane above the moon pool on the Oregon. The difference was that instead of a submarine, this crane held a horizontal metal sheet that could be extended out beyond the door, large enough to cover anything moving the fifty feet from the warehouse to a ship from the prying eyes of a spy satellite.
Yet the only ship currently docked was a tanker named Tamanaco.
“I think I know what’s going on here,” Juan said. “Let’s take a look.”
He and Linc went to the back of the warehouse and out the person-sized door next to the garage door.
Only this close could Juan spot a modification to the Tamanaco and, even then, only because he’d made similar alterations to the Oregon. A dark seam etched the outline of a huge door in the side of the ship. They had been loading the weapons onto the tanker, which must have been modified to carry cargo as well as fuel. No one would think of stopping a tanker to look for embargoed arms.
Still, they had no proof. One look inside and they’d have all the evidence they needed.
Juan spotted a sailor standing at his post next to a gangway.
“We’re going to continue the surprise inspection,” he whispered to Linc.
“Sounds good to me.”
They walked past the seaman, Juan returning the salute but saying nothing. Once they were on deck, they took the first flight of stairs they could find and went down until they saw another armed sailor posted at a bulkhead door.
“We’re here to inspect the cargo, sailor,” Juan said. “Open the door.”
The sailor probably had the same orders not to let anyone inside, but he wasn’t going to disobey a captain.
“Aye, sir,” he said, and turned smartly. He swung the door wide, and Juan and Linc stepped through. The sailor flipped a switch and fluorescent lights flickered on.
The payload was here, all right, but it wasn’t what the Corporation had been led to expect. The Venezuelans were suspected of shipping Russian technology to the North Koreans.
Instead, Juan counted twenty American Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a dozen of the latest M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks.
They didn’t have time to snap even one photo. Without warning, the tanker’s steel hull reverberated with the sound of a klaxon.
Someone had pulled the alarm.
Like a crocodile lying in wait for its prey, the submarine drifted at periscope depth as the supertanker cruised toward it. Two freighters had already passed by less than a thousand yards away. Few cargo vessels carried active sonar, so the sub remained undetected. As long as Linda Ross kept the Discovery 1000 below the surface, the oncoming 113,000-ton Sorocaima would have no way of knowing it was there.
The Discovery had been on-station for the past four hours since the Oregon had lowered it into the Caribbean fifty miles north of the Venezuelan coast. The shipping lane curved around the island of Nueva Esparta before turning east. The spot was chosen because it was along a well-traveled route for tankers from Puerto La Cruz heading to the Mediterranean.
The mini-sub was large enough to carry eight passengers to a depth of one hundred feet, but it currently held only Linda and the two men playing cards behind her. This would be a quick in and out mission, and more than two men infiltrating the tanker would increase the risk of them being seen.
Linda, a Navy vet who’d served aboard a guided-missile cruiser and as a Pentagon staffer before she was hired by the Corporation to be vice president of operations, was beneath only Juan and Max in the crew hierarchy. Her petite figure, upturned nose, and soft voice had once been a hindrance in her career, preventing her from being taken seriously enough to ever warrant command of her own ship. But she’d earned the respect and trust of everyone on the Oregon, to the point that she was tagged to lead some of its toughest missions. She had a habit of changing her hair color often and tonight her long ponytail was a fiery red.
Linda peered at the monitor showing the feed from the periscope camera. The full moon and starlight enhancement turned night to day, and the outline of an approaching tanker was unmistakable. Though she couldn’t read the name on the side of the ship from this distance, there was no doubt it was their target. The tracking device Linc had planted on the vessel during his visit to Puerto La Cruz pinged strongly. The Sorocaima was right on schedule, only a mile off their stern.
“Here she comes, guys,” she said.
Marion MacDougal “MacD” Lawless and Mike Trono looked up from their cards. The two gundogs, as Max called members of the shore operations team, had been playing gin rummy, and from the Cajun-inflected whoops of triumph she’d been hearing from MacD for the past two hours she guessed he was trouncing Mike.
“It’s just as well,” Mike said, and tossed his hand on the pile. “I was about to find out how this grunt was cheating.”
As VP of operations, Linda knew the files of every crew member backward and forward. Sporting thin brown hair atop a slender frame, Mike had been an elite pararescue jumper for the Air Force, dropping behind enemy lines multiple times in Iraq and Afghanistan to save downed pilots. He left the military and got his kicks racing offshore powerboats before joining the Corporation when he realized the adrenaline surge of real-world operations was the only thing that would do the trick.
“Cheatin’?” MacD retorted in his molasses-thick Louisiana drawl. “Why would Ah have to cheat against a wing nut like you? Ah’m just good.”
“Because that would make life really unfair. You can’t be good at cards and look like an underwear model.”
Linda had to agree with Mike on that. While Mike was cute and lean, former Army Ranger MacD had a physique sculpted in marble and a face fit for a movie star. He was one of the newest members of the crew, and his down-home New Orleans charisma and quick thinking in battle had charmed everyone on the Oregon.
“Now Mike, you and Ah are two sides of the same coin,” MacD said.
“How’s that?”
“Neither of us was stupid enough to become a swabbie.”
They both turned toward Linda, the lone Navy person on the mini-sub, and pointedly stared before laughing heartily. Mike and MacD were the butts of good-natured ribbing on the Oregon for being the only two non–Navy vets on the ship, but now she was the one outnumbered.
She stared back at them stoically but with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s it. I order the both of you to walk the plank.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, and started donning their black night gear—sweaters, pants, gloves, boots, and hats. The final touch was black greasepaint smeared on their faces.
While they were preparing for their excursion, Linda engaged the motor and aimed the Discovery directly into the path of the oncoming Sorocaima, which was on its way to the North Korean port of Wonsan.
The tanker held ten million gallons of refined diesel, ready for use by the North Korean Army for almost every vehicle in their arsenal. With fuel embargoed by most other nations and having few refineries of their own, the increasingly belligerent North Koreans depended on regular diesel shipments from Venezuela, whose president was a personal friend of their leader. Without the fuel, the North’s armed forces would grind to a halt.
The Oregon could easily sink a ship of even the Sorocaima’s size with the weapons at its disposal, but the mission was more subtle than that. Not only did the Corporation refuse to sink unarmed vessels but there was no shortage of tankers or Venezuelan oil, so at best the shipment would only be delayed. Instead, Linda, MacD, and Mike were going to ruin the fuel on board the tanker, laying waste to a huge swath of vehicles in the North Korean military.
At the back of Discovery were six thermos-sized canisters, one meant for each hold on the tanker. The canisters were loaded with bacteria developed in secret by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Mutated from a strain of the anaerobic bacteria clostridium and dubbed Corrodium by the biologists who created it, the microbe multiplied easily in diesel, contaminating an entire tank once it was introduced. It was colorless and odorless, so the contamination was undetectable without laboratory testing.
The bacteria changed the composition of the diesel so that it would burn much hotter. When the tainted diesel was ignited in engines, it would cause them to overheat and seize up, resulting in a total loss. Wi
th luck, the Corrodium that they had injected into the holds of the Sorocaima would go on to infect the entire North Korean supply, rendering it unusable and destroying the engines of any vehicles into which the diesel had been loaded.
The hard part was getting the Corrodium into the fuel without being detected. If there was any suspicion that the diesel had been tampered with, the Sorocaima crew would test it and find out the problem long before it reached Wonsan. Once the North Koreans knew about the potential for bacterial infection, they would have every delivery of diesel tested for it. Linda and her team had to get the mission right the first time because there wouldn’t be a second.
The delicacy of the operation was also the reason for conducting it simultaneously with the Chairman’s recon mission. If they were done separately and the initial one in the sequence failed, success with the other operation would be in jeopardy.
Linda’s responsibility on this mission was to keep the mini-sub on-station while MacD and Mike climbed the side of the tanker with the Corrodium and delivered it into the holds using the ship’s own deck piping system.
But they couldn’t get on the ship while it was moving. Even if they could match the tanker’s speed, maneuvering the Discovery next to it and keeping it stable while MacD and Mike tried to disembark was a recipe for disaster. They had to get the Sorocaima to stop.
Disabling the tanker in any way was out of the question. It might be tugged back to port, instead of going on to North Korea, and investigators might realize the damage was intentional, prompting questions about who had done it and why. Stealth was the only option, and it had a side benefit as well. If the North Koreans blamed the Venezuelans for the contamination, it would make them less likely to trust their suppliers for future diesel shipments.
It was Max as usual who had used his engineering expertise to devise a way to get a tanker to stop without hijacking or damaging it.
The Discovery’s robotic arms cradled an apparatus the size and shape of a coffin, flat on the long sides, with watertight Plexiglas sealing the ends and an uninflated tube on top. A filament connected the object, which they called the beatbox, to a control system inside the mini-sub. When attached to the hull, the beatbox, which was equipped with a high-impact rotating hammer, would knock with each rotation of the propeller shaft.
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