“Down,” Juan shouted as the Zodiac crossed behind the tug’s sunken rail and shot under the ruined crane boom. There was barely three feet of clearance, and had they not ducked to the floorboards, the rusted steel derrick would have taken off their heads.
Juan looked back as soon as they were through. The utility boat was following in their wake but at the last second the helmsman must have seen the crane. He threw the wheel to its lock, but it was too late. They were going too fast. The boat smashed into the crane, and the metal easily ripped through the fiberglass hull. A gouge was torn down her entire length, and one of her big fuel tanks was ripped from its mounts.
None of the men aboard the doomed craft had time to brace themselves, and all twelve of them on the deck were launched over the bow by the sudden deceleration. Most landed safely in the water, although one hit the crane boom headfirst and died instantly.
The diesel spilling from the ruptured tank pooled inside the filthy bilge, but before enough seawater could dilute it, a spark from the ruined electrical system detonated the mixture in a ballooning fireball of orange and black.
“Scratch the last utility boat,” Cabrillo said over the tactical radio. “We’re headed home.”
The Zodiac’s engine died when they were still a hundred yards from the Oregon, forcing them to man the paddles. With the motor silenced they could hear continuous gunfire from the beach as Singh’s men fired blindly out to sea.
Juan threw the painter to a waiting deckhand as the rubber craft reached the ramp. By the time the last of Linc’s SEALs had piled out, Juan had limped to where Julia Huxley waited with a spare prosthetic leg. He’d radioed ahead. She used surgical scissors to cut away part of his wet suit and examined the stump. Apart from some purple swelling, his leg seemed okay, so she let him strap on the second prosthesis as she examined his head wound.
“What happened?” she asked, peering at the gash with a penlight.
“Rifle butt.”
She flashed the light into his eyes, checking if he had a concussion. She grunted, unsurprised that his pupils reacted normally. “You have a head like a cannonball. How do you feel? Dizzy? Lightheaded? Nauseous?”
“None of the above. It just stings a bit from the salt water.”
“I bet.” Julia knew that like most men, Juan was downplaying the pain. She swabbed out the four-inch-square wound, making sure that the antibacterial made him wince a few times before putting a large sterile dressing over the cut and swathing the top of his head with a gauze wrap. “That should hold you. Sorry, but I’m fresh out of lollipops.”
“Then I guess I should have cried more.” He dry-swallowed the painkillers she’d handed him.
Julia noticed Tory Ballinger standing nearby. “Do I even want to know what you’re doing here?”
“Tory works for Lloyd’s of London,” Juan said, getting to his feet and testing his weight on his artificial limb. While the stump was sore, he had full mobility. “She’s working the same case we are but from the other end.”
“And I thought it was my bedside manner.” The two women shook hands, and Julia asked if Tory needed any medical attention.
Tory was toweling off her hair. “Thanks, Dr. Huxley. I’m fine. Bit shaken maybe, but unharmed.”
“Juan has a good bottle of brandy in his cabin. I’m prescribing at least one snifter.”
“Chairman, you there?” It was Max Hanley over the ship’s intercom. Cabrillo hit the switch mounted to a nearby bulkhead.
“I’m here. What’s the situation?”
“They’re still firing at us from the beach. Just small arms. No RPGs. George Adams has the UAV circling the compound. A few minutes after the ship saw kicked off for the last time, he spotted someone running from the shed. They hopped into a jeep and tore out of the facility headed for a cluster of houses a mile or so up the coast. There’s a chopper on a nearby pad, but so far there’s been no activity around it.”
“What about our bird?”
“Crew has it on ten-minute standby,” Max replied, meaning the four-passenger Robinson helicopter could be in the air in ten minutes.
“Tell George to turn over the UAV to Eric Stone. The kid has enough hours on the Microsoft flight simulator to qualify for his commercial pilot’s license. I want to be airborne as soon as possible. We need Singh alive if we’re going to get to the bottom of this.”
“You sure you’re up to this?” Julia asked.
“I’m more pissed than hurt,” he told her. “Singh knew we were coming.” He snapped on the intercom again. “Max, it’s me. Listen, Singh’s been a step ahead of us. He unloaded the Toya Maru from the Maus a while ago. Probably when you broke off at Taiwan. Hiro’s tanker is already inside the shed and halfway to becoming razor blades.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter now, but I think the Maus has better radar than we thought. She must have known you were tailing her. Have Hali get ready to file a report with the Indonesian authorities. I suspect Singh’s plugged in with the government, so he’ll have to cut through a lot of red tape, but bottom line is we need this place raided by the navy or coast guard as soon as we’re clear.”
“I’m on the circuit,” Hali Kasim interrupted. There was a manic edge to his voice. “Chairman, you’re not going to believe this, but I just got a signal from Eddie’s transponder.”
“When?”
“Just now! Two seconds ago.”
“Jesus. Where is he?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.” Doubt crept into the communications officer’s tone.
“Talk to me, Hali.”
“Russia, sir. The western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. What the hell is he doing there? I thought the snakeheads had their conduits running into the U.S or Japan.”
Juan went still and turned his mind inward so he could no longer hear Linc and the other SEALs stowing the Zodiac and their gear or feel Julia’s concerned look or Tory Ballinger’s intrigued scrutiny. Eddie Seng had been taken to Kamchatka. While the question of why worried at part of his mind, the bulk of his intellect was forming a plan, calculating speed, distances, and the priorities of the mission. He factored in the Oregon’s speed, the maximum speed of the Robinson R-44 with various payloads, and the need to interrogate Shere Singh.
He was sure Eddie wasn’t the only Chinese immigrant that had been taken to the isolated part of Russia, a volcano-strewn jut of land that had been closed off to the world for the better part of the past century. How many more had ended up on its rugged shores was something he couldn’t know, but instinct told him there would be a great many.
What was Singh’s connection? Transportation was the obvious answer. He could move men and ships inside the pair of floating drydocks with virtual impunity. He could hijack vessels carrying illegals from the open seas and make sure any witnesses, like Tory’s hapless Avalon, never survived long enough to file a report. All Singh needed to know was which ships were carrying immigrants, and he could target them at will. That would mean that someone in China was supplying that information, Cabrillo realized, but was the smuggling the only crime taking place, or was it a means to an end?
“They need cheap labor,” he said aloud.
“What was that?” Tory asked. She’d stripped off her wet jacket and wore only a thin black T-shirt. A fluffy towel was draped over her shoulders to cover her breasts. Her dark hair was damp and untamed and somehow incredibly attractive. If she had any questions about what she’d seen of the Corporation so far, she had the good sense to keep them to herself.
“This is about cheap labor; slaves. The night we saved you we also took out a pirate boat that was carrying a shipping container. We sank the ship and managed to recover the container, but not in time to save the people who’d been locked inside. We later learned they were illegal Chinese immigrants. I had one of my men follow the route those poor bastards had taken in hopes of learning what they were up to and how it related to the pirates. He just turned up on the Kamchatka Peninsula.?
??
“We at Lloyd’s only suspected Singh of hijacking shipping in the region and using his facility here to eliminate the evidence.”
“There’s more than that,” Juan said. “He’s also hijacking ships carrying Chinese immigrants and transporting them to Kamchatka. And if he needs transporters as big as the Maus and her sister drydock, it leads me to believe they’ve probably seized hundreds, or maybe thousands of illegals. They’re using them as slave labor.”
“What on earth for?” Tory asked.
“It could be anything.” Juan hit the intercom again. “Max, make preparations to get us out of here. I’ll take Linc and Mike Trono with me to find Shere Singh. I want you headed for Eddie’s location with every knot the old girl can give. We’ll catch a flight to…” He needed a second to recall Kamchatka’s capital. “Petropavlovsk.”
“Not gonna happen, Chairman,” Mark Murphy said over the open circuit. “I’ve been on the Internet since Hali said that’s where Eddie is. The government is reporting a major volcanic event is under way. I confirmed it through the U.S. Geological Survey’s website. The Russians are saying there’s so much ash falling that they’ve been forced to shut down the airport. No one’s going in or out.”
Juan cursed under his breath. “Okay, that doesn’t change anything. I still want the Oregon under way as soon as possible.”
“What about Shere Singh?” Max asked.
“My window to catch him just narrowed, that’s all. Even with the Oregon moving at maximum speed, we should have a half hour here before you steam out of the Robinson’s range.”
“May I say something, Captain Cabrillo?” Tory asked.
Juan nodded.
“I infiltrated this facility from the landward side, and I have to say it’s bloody enormous. I’ve been observing the place for a week, and even I don’t know the full scope of Singh’s operation.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that if you’re only giving yourself thirty minutes to find him, then I think I can lead you to where he keeps his residence when he’s here.”
Juan hesitated for a fraction of a second. Tory Ballinger was a virtual stranger to him, but he felt like he knew her because he recognized a great deal of himself in her steady gaze. She’d handled herself well just moments earlier, and he still didn’t know how she’d kept her wits when she was trapped aboard the Avalon. He saw in her the same indefatigable British spirit that had once made their island the most powerful nation on earth and had seen England through the blitz during World War Two. While in Winston Churchill that look came across as pugnacious confidence, in Tory it was alluring drive.
And to top it off, Juan thought, her own investigation had led her to the very same place his had taken him, and he doubted she’d blown up a building and kidnapped a corrupt lawyer to get here.
“You’re on.”
Tory had expected an argument. It was in the storm clouds building behind her bright blue eyes. Juan’s quick acceptance of her offer left her off balance for a moment and her mouth agape.
“We’ve got about five minutes to change and kit up. Come with me. You, too, Linc. We’re not done yet.”
Moments after the Robinson R-44 lifted from its hydraulically operated pad, the Oregon cut a tight circle in the bay using her athwartships bow thruster, and Linda Ross gave Eric Stone the order for full speed. Max Hanley was down in his beloved engine room. As soon as the order came through, the quad magnetohydrodynamic engines spooled up like aircraft turbines, and almost instantly the water at her stern boiled up with the raw force of her revolutionary propulsion system. Linda also ordered Mark Murphy to rake the sea just short of the beach with the Gatling gun to give the departing chopper a few moments of cover fire.
George Adams sat in the Robinson’s left-hand seat with Juan at his side. Linc and Tory took up the rear bench seats. With their personal weapons and equipment as well as the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle lying across Linc’s lap, the chopper was crowded. Adams looped them out to sea and crossed the shoreline well north of the breaker’s yard.
“There’s a compound up the beach about a mile,” Tory said over the helo’s intercom. “It’s where the executives live. I watched them for a couple of days over the past week. One of the houses is much larger than the others, and now that I’ve seen Shere Singh up close and personal, I remember him living there.”
“Any guards?” Juan asked.
“A few, but after tonight I expect the area to be lousy with them.”
Juan smiled at her turn of phrase, but inside he knew to expect the worst. “What about access to the facility?”
“There is a road that runs north and south behind it. There’s a hydro dam and a smelting factory to the north.”
“Much traffic?’
“Mostly lorries hauling the steel plates to be melted. And almost nothing after nightfall.”
“Okay, folks, we’re coming back over the coastline.” Adams’s helmet was integrated with a night vision camera mounted on the Robinson’s nose to give him greater visibility. “I see the compound she just mentioned. A lot of lights and a lot of people milling around. And, as luck would have it, a few of them aren’t armed.”
“Keep us out of their range and let’s see what’s happening.”
“I see a chopper pad a little farther away from the compound,” Adams said. “It looks like they’ve got a JetRanger, and her rotors are starting to turn.”
“Can we follow them?” Tory asked.
“She’s got us by forty or fifty knots and at least a hundred miles of range,” Juan told her. He looked back at Franklin Lincoln. “How about it, big man?”
“I’m on it, boss.”
“George, hold us steady,” Lincoln said as he loosened his shoulder harness. He opened his door, ignoring the frenzied hurricane of downwash from the rotors that whipped into the small chopper’s cabin. The Barrett was an ugly weapon, nearly five feet long and heavy. In the hands of an expert the half-inch bullets it fired were accurate up to a mile.
Adams turned the Robinson broadside to clear Linc’s view. A few guards in the distant compound fired at the hovering helicopter, but the distance was too great. Lincoln fitted the big rifle to his shoulder and checked the sight picture through the night vision scope. The world was an eerie green through the optics, but somehow intimate. He could see the frustration on the guards’ faces as they fired at the chopper. He scanned the scene and settled the reticle on the idling JetRanger helicopter. His view was so sharp he could see the air shimmering from the heat that poured from the turbine’s exhaust.
The crack of the gun sounded like a cannon, and Linc absorbed the brutal recoil without taking his eyes from the sight. The bullet arrived long before anyone on the ground heard it, so the destruction came as a stunning surprise. It struck the JetRanger’s rotor mast, the most vulnerable part of any helicopter. The whirling mast came apart so that her blades were launched like a pair of deadly scythes. One cut through a cluster of men who were setting up a shoulder-fired missile. The dismemberments were something even a veteran like Franklin Lincoln had a hard time stomaching.
The other blade hit a large fuel tank mounted on stilts. The highly volatile aviation gas went up in a towering explosion that overwhelmed the scope’s light filters. Linc looked over the rifle and saw flames mushrooming outward and upward. Anyone standing within a hundred feet of the tank was knocked back by the concussion. Anyone within fifty feet had been immolated.
“I’ve got movement,” Adams called out. “Rear door of the JetRanger just opened. Guy wearing a turban is running for it.”
“That has to be Shere Singh,” Tory said. “Where’s he going?”
“Hold on.” A few tense moments passed. “Okay, he’s getting into a car. Looks like a big Mercedes sedan. He’s getting into the backseat. There’s only him and the driver.”
“Want me to take him out, Juan?” Linc asked, bringing the sniper rifle to his shoulder again.
“
Not here. Let him get out onto the highway and away from all these guards.”
“Singh must have radioed someone,” George announced. “Another car is pulling away from the residential compound. Looks like at least three armed men inside.”
“We knew this wouldn’t be easy.” Cabrillo checked his watch. A third of their thirty-minute window to catch the Oregon had gone by.
A moment later they all saw the headlights of the pair of cars race out the facility’s back gate and head south. The road was hemmed in by dark jungle, so the lights reflected as though the vehicles were speeding through a tunnel. George opened the throttle to the Robinson’s engine and quickly overtook the vehicles.
The drivers maintained a fifteen-foot separation. It was a little tight for what Juan had in mind, but he had no other choice. He plucked a grenade from the web harness over his shoulder and opened the small window set into the chopper’s right-hand door. Optimally the grenade should have a five-second fuse; however, each incendiary’s timer varied by as much as a second—not a big deal when throwing one into a foxhole or trying to take out troops advancing on foot—but with the cars hurtling at ninety miles per hour, they could cover more than a hundred feet in a single tick of a watch.
Cabrillo pulled the pin, maintaining a firm grip on the spoon, and held the grenade outside the window. The toss was more experience and instinct than calculation. He released the spoon to prime the weapon, waited a few moments, and let it drop.
The grenade was instantly swallowed by the darkness, but a second later the Mercedes swerved as the driver reacted to something heavy bouncing off the trunk. The grenade rolled off the car, hit the road, and momentum kept it tumbling down the asphalt. The trailing car raced over it as though they hadn’t seen it or didn’t understand what it was. Another second passed, one of the longest in Juan’s life. He was sure that the guards’ car had safely passed the grenade and was reaching for another when it detonated directly under the vehicle’s gas tank.
The two explosions came an instant apart. First the low crump of the grenade and then the second spectacular detonation of the gasoline. The rear of the car lifted off the road, and it pivoted on its nose for a heartbeat before slamming onto its roof. It rolled seven times, shedding sheet metal and waves of burning fuel. It ended up careening off the road and slamming into a utility pole, the force of the impact bending the car in two around the teak pole.