Клайв Касслер - Typhoon Fury

The driver and his companion shut down the truck, came around the back, and began unloading it. For fifteen minutes, they shuttled food crates inside with dollies. While they did, Juan had Linda pan the camera as much as she could to focus in on whatever was in view so they could construct a map of the place.

Then a female voice made Juan sharply say, “Quiet!”

Everyone in the op center fell silent. The driver and his pal were noisily chatting while they removed boxes from the truck, masking the woman’s voice.

“Turn up the gain on the audio,” he said to Linda. “See if you can find the source of the voice.”

The camera turned until they saw Beth’s flaming red hair. Her clothes were filthy, but she was walking normally, and there was no apparent pain on her face even though she had a bandage on her left shoulder.

Salvador Locsin was walking next to her, yanking her by the arm so that she would keep up with him.

“I told you, I’m not going to help you anymore,” Beth said, her voice full of bluster.

“You will if you want any more Typhoon,” Locsin said.

“I don’t care what you do to me.”

“You’ll change your mind in a day or two without your dose.”

They entered the same building where the food was being taken and went out of range of the microphone.

“They’ve been making her take that stuff?” Linda said with disgust. “Didn’t Langston Overholt say it’s addictive?”

Juan nodded. “Very. According to the World War Two records, the addiction becomes permanent in just a few days, maybe a week at most. We need to get her out of there as soon as Hidalgo finishes passing or she might be irreversibly hooked on it.”

Then Juan heard one of the men inside the truck say Beth’s name and he held up his hand for quiet again, but the conversation was brief and in Tagalog. The men were silent as they went inside with more boxes.

“Play that back, Linda,” Juan said. “I want to hear them again.”

When the recording rewound to the point where Beth and Locsin entered the building, Linda began playing it forward, and Murph ran it through the computer interpreter to convert it to English. The translation wasn’t perfect, but they got the gist of it.

“He is right, Dolap,” one of the men said. “She tells him anything. Remember the thing that happened to that administrator, Alonzo? I wanted to throw up all the times I saw him chained to that rock out there.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dolap said. “Locsin and Tagaan tell me we kill her tomorrow. They already see the effects of the Typhoon they want to. I will ask them to allow me do it. Beth Anders is a big pain in my side since she arrived here.”

Linda gasped. “That’s long before Hidalgo will be gone. It’ll still be near full strength tomorrow. The eye is forecast to pass right over us at four in the morning.”

Everyone in the op center was quiet again, this time from the shock of the death sentence they’d just heard. Juan didn’t want to admit defeat, not when they were so close. But mounting a mission in the middle of a Category 3 typhoon seemed beyond even their capability. In fact, he was worried that Eddie, Raven, and Hali wouldn’t make it back before the brunt of the storm hit.

Then he sat forward in his chair as something Linda said resonated.

“Linda, put the predicted storm track up on the screen and lay it over the map of the truck’s route.”

She did so, and the center of Hidalgo was not only predicted to go over the Oregon but the cavern as well.

“How wide is the eye of the typhoon and what’s the speed?” he asked her.

“The eye is twenty-three miles across, and the wind speeds could be up to one hundred and twenty-five miles per hour when it makes landfall.”

Juan shook his head. “Not the wind speed. The forward speed of the entire typhoon.”

She furrowed her brow at the odd question. “About ten miles per hour.”

“Then that gives us a little more than two hours to work with.” The cavern was only seven miles from their present position.

Both Eric and Murph turned to him at the same time with incredulous looks on their faces.

“Are you seriously thinking of going out in the middle of a typhoon?” Eric asked.

“Technically, the middle of a typhoon is very calm,” Murph said. “There could even be blue sky inside the eye during daytime hours.”

“So, technically, we can do it,” Juan said.

Eric looked at Murph, who shrugged and then said, “I guess so. But if you get stuck out there when the eye finishes passing over, you won’t be able to get back to the Oregon for a long time.”

“Then we need to have a good plan. Have Eddie and Raven join me, Linc, MacD, and Gomez when they get back.” He checked the clock. It was nearly two in the afternoon. “We’ve got fourteen hours to put together the mission.”

Linda shook her head in amazement at the idea of venturing out of the Oregon during a major storm. “Max is going to have a heart attack when he hears this one.”

“Then you get to tell him,” Juan said. “And maybe have Hux with you when you do just in case she needs to revive him.”

62

Juan didn’t know if this was the craziest thing he’d ever done, but flying in a helicopter in the literal center of a typhoon had to be up there. Even though it was four in the morning, the towering eye wall of Hidalgo was brightly lit by a nearly full moon. The roiling clouds just a few miles in the distance were a stark contrast to the eerie calm around them.

Nobody aboard the Oregon had gotten much rest since the typhoon arrived. Max’s repairs to the ship’s engines had been completed in time to weather the storm, but the ride during the tidal surge in the bay was pretty rough.

Despite the menacing conditions, Gomez lazily chewed gum like he was piloting a routine recon mission. Behind Juan were Eddie, Linc, and Raven, who had taken the last seat in place of MacD. Julia had ruled him out for the op as soon as she saw his swollen ankle and diagnosed it as a severe sprain.

All of them were dressed in jungle camo gear and carried M4 assault rifles equipped with flash suppressors and 40mm grenade launchers under the barrels. If everything went according to plan, they wouldn’t need to use them. Their objective was to get in undetected, spring Beth, plant explosives to take out the Typhoon pills recovered from the Pearsall , and get back to the helicopter before anyone besides the guards on duty woke up. Though the helicopter had only five seats, the high payload capacity meant they could squeeze Beth in as well.

To aid their silent infiltration, all of them except Linc were carrying Smith & Wesson M&P 22 Compact pistols threaded with suppressors and loaded with subsonic rounds. MacD had entrusted his faithful crossbow to Linc.

The MD 520N, the Oregon ’s onboard helicopter, was launched from an elevator platform that rose from the internal hangar near the ship’s stern. It had no tail rotor, steering instead with the turbine exhaust routed through the finned tail. This feature not only made it safer to be around because it didn’t have a vertical spinning blade of death, it also made the helicopter much quieter, which meant they could land relatively close to the cavern without betraying their presence.

Their destination was a clearing a mile up the dirt road from the cavern. Gomez circled to make sure it was still clear, using his night vision goggles to verify that no trees had fallen into the landing zone. Then he touched down on the soaked grass as gracefully as a hummingbird.

While Linc, Eddie, and Raven got out and lowered their night vision goggles, Gomez shut down the engine and looked at his watch, then at Juan. “Linda estimates that we’ve got to take off in forty-eight minutes if we want to reach the Oregon before the opposite edge of the eye wall does.”