Clive Cussler: Mirage

The shooter was headed someplace, and Cabrillo needed to find out where. But, so far, nothing made him certain he was right about this situation. Armed crewmen were rare but not unheard of. And maybe the guy watched a lot of action movies and recognized the grenade.

The exit led to a corridor lined with doors on one side. These would be cabins for the officers. One door flew open, the occupant no doubt alarmed by the noise. The guy was dressed in boxers, and he too had a weapon. Juan didn’t give him the opportunity to use it. He put a round in each of the Chinese officer’s shoulders. It was enough to take him out of the fight but not enough to kill him. Cabrillo refused to use lethal force until he was positive.

He came to another staircase and used his last flashbang, rushing down even as the thunderbolt reverberated off the ship. He’d seen blood drips on the floor. He’d winged his man, and now the trail would lead him straight to his quarry.

At the bottom of the stairs was another gray metal passageway, with cables and pipes running along the ceiling. The blood looked black in the inadequate lighting, but it was enough to follow. Cabrillo went through the door to his right and stopped short, his mind reeling.

He was wrong. Way wrong.

Ranks upon ranks of sedans were lined up as tidily as cars in an airport’s parking garage. They ran as far as the eye could see. All the colors of the rainbow were represented, and although they were dusty, they shone like jewels in the otherwise dank confines of the legitimate car carrier’s hold. They had hijacked an innocent ship, and Juan had shot two simple sailors. The defeat and guilt were crushing.

He was reaching for his throat mic to tell the others that they had been mistaken when he recognized the decorative badge on all the cars’ hoods. For an instant, he was back in Uzbekistan with old Yusuf, and they were looking at the car in which his brother had died when the ferry he was riding on sank. Like that rusted-out wreck, these cars had the distinctive Viking-ship-silhouette hood badge that Juan had looked up upon his return from the Aral Sea. These were Russian cars. Ladas. And all their tires were flat. The meaning behind this discovery was immediate, and his respect for Russian war planners went up a couple of notches.

Cabrillo started running after the wounded sailor again.

In order for the Soviet stealth ships to be used in case of a war with the United States, they needed to stay close to the carrier battle groups at all times. The carriers were deployed all over the globe, and to shadow them without raising suspicion, the Russians disguised their support ships as car haulers, bolstering this camouflage by going so far as to load them with the iconic Russian car, the ubiquitous Lada. This was in case the ship was ever boarded by customs inspectors. The cars here were dusty and all the tires flat because they’d been locked in the hold since the demise of the Soviet Union. Neither Kenin nor the Chinese had bothered to unload them.

The blood trail led Cabrillo down a spiraling car ramp. He slowed at the bottom to peer out onto this next cargo deck. More Ladas, more flat tires, and so many years in the salt air had covered many of them with lesions of rust. A pistol shot pounded off a fitting next to his head, and a sliver of metal nicked him at the temple. Blood trickled down his jaw. He fired off the rest of his clip, blowing glass and bits of metal into the air, while the shooter crouched behind a Lada wagon. The onslaught was enough to make him break cover and run.

Cabrillo didn’t want to kill the man. He wanted him to keep running and show him how to enter the secret parts of the ship, the ones, like on the Oregon , that customs men never saw. He changed magazines at a run, listening over the comm net to MacD and Eddie coordinate rounding up the rest of the crew.

The shooter descended one more level before making a beeline aft. Juan stayed on him like a scent hound, letting the man get far enough ahead that he didn’t bother taking delaying shots at his pursuer. Finally, Juan saw him come to a door that looked as though it was in the ship’s aft-most bulkhead. They should be directly over the propeller, and Juan should have been able to feel its vibrations through the soles of his boots. He quickly glanced toward the bow.

Cabrillo had an excellent sense of spatiality and knew immediately that the distant gloom of the forward part of the hold was considerably less than the nine-hundred-foot length of the ship. The closet was built into a false wall.

He looked back and could see over the man’s shoulder that it was a storage closet. This was it. The Oregon had the exact same setup. Cabrillo ran, cutting the distance, dodging and weaving around cars, until he accidentally knocked a wing mirror off one of the rustier ones. The noise alerted the gunman. He had been fumbling with something on the closet’s back wall. He whirled and raised his pistol.

Cabrillo already had the Super V tucked hard against his shoulder and cut him down with a quick pull of the trigger that unleashed a half dozen big.45 caliber slugs.

“Eddie, you there?” Juan said. Operational security demanded he not take his eyes off the body, but he knew the gunman was dead.

“Roger.”

“You guys secure?”

“Just the bridge and crew areas. Still haven’t swept the engine room or cargo area.”

“Don’t worry about that. Come aft on deck three. I think I hit the jackpot.”

Juan stalked toward the fallen man and confirmed he was dead. He let the Super V drop down on its single-point sling and dragged the corpse out of the way. He couldn’t find the trigger mechanism that would give him access to the ship’s secret area, so he rigged it with a block of plastic explosives.

“We’re coming,” Eddie announced over the radio when he and MacD approached Cabrillo’s location. No sense in getting killed by friendly fire.

“Any trouble?”

“Nothing a club over the head with the barrel of an old Mr. Uzi here couldn’t fix,” MacD drawled. “What’s up? We swabbing the decks for them?”

“Watch and learn.” Cabrillo backed them away from the utility closet and keyed the electronic detonator. The blast was an assault on the senses, loud and concussive, and it carried, echoing up and down the rows of cars.

He had blown a hole through the back of the closet. Beyond was something out of a James Bond movie. The aft section of the ship, a good hundred fifty feet in length, was a cavernous open space ringed with metal catwalks and staircases. Down below, water sloshed gently against a pair of piers that rose almost twenty feet. Thrusting out of the water between the docks was a cradle made of timbers that would secure the stealth ship, once it was in position, and the mother ship refloated to its proper trim.

To Juan’s disappointment, the cradle was empty. The stealth ship was out there, hunting the Stennis .

Atop one of the piers was a small structure that had to be a control room. It had a big plate-glass window overlooking the floating dock. The three men took off running across the catwalk and down the stairs. The door to the control room didn’t have a lock. MacD nodded to Juan, who opened it. As soon as it was ajar, Lawless tossed a flashbang, and Juan slammed the door to contain the blast.

The grenade went off with a roar that bowed the plate glass but didn’t shatter it. Cabrillo threw open the door again. Two Chinese men, wearing mechanic’s overalls, were staggering around, dazed and nearly half mad from the blast. Juan tackled one, MacD the other. No sooner were they down than Eddie had them cuffed.

Cabrillo studied his surroundings, finally taking a chair at what looked like the main controls. Everything mechanical was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and then he noticed the room was painted that bland green the Soviets so loved. The computers were new additions. Mark Murphy had met up with the Chairman just before he’d stepped out on deck and handed over a standard-looking flash drive.