Clive Cussler - Skeleton Coast

Despite the danger, or maybe because of it, Cabrillo found he was enjoying the challenge. It was a test of his skills and the capabilities of his ship against the vagaries of the raging flood—the epic struggle of man versus nature. He was the type of man who never backed away from anything because he knew his limitations and had yet to meet a situation he didn’t think he could handle. In others this trait would come off as cockiness. In Juan Cabrillo it was simply supreme confidence.

“Scouring action has cleared the second tube,” Max announced. “Just be gentle on her until I get a team into it to check for damage.”

Juan dialed up the second tube and immediately felt his ship respond. She was no longer sluggish coming about and he had to use the thrusters less and less. He checked their speed—twenty-eight knots over the bottom and eight through the water. He had more than enough speed to control the freighter, and now that they’d covered several miles the once-turbulent flow had started to even out. Colonel Abala’s forces were either dead on the river or left far behind and the two choppers he’d stolen had peeled off soon after the wave hit.

“Eric, I think you can take her from here on down to Boma.”

“Aye, Chairman,” Stone replied. “I have the helm.”

Juan sat back in his chair. Max Hanley placed a hand on his shoulder. “Hell of a piece of driving if I say so myself.”

“Thanks. Don’t think I want to do that again anytime soon.”

“I’d love to say we’re out of the woods, but we aren’t. Battery charge is down to thirty percent. Even with the current at our backs we’re going to run out of juice a good ten miles from the sea.”

“Do you have any faith in me at all?” Juan asked, pained. “Weren’t you here when Eric said mean high tide is in…” Juan checked his watch. “An hour and a half? Ocean’s going to run fifteen or twenty miles inland and turn the Congo brackish. Might be like running regular gasoline in a race car engine but there’s enough salinity to spool up the magnetohydrodynamics.”

Max cursed. “Why didn’t I think about that?”

“For the same reason I get paid more than you. I’m smarter, more clever by half, and much better looking.”

“And you wear your humility like a well-tailored suit.” Max then turned serious. “Soon as we get to Boma I’ll get some of my engineers into the tubes, but from what I could tell from the computer I think they’re okay. May not be at hundred percent, but my gut tells me they don’t need to be relined.”

Though he carried the title of president within the Corporation and was tasked with a lot of the day-to-day affairs of running a successful company, Max most enjoyed his role as theOregon ’s chief engineer, and her state-of-the-art engines were his pride and joy.

“Thank God.” Replacing the lining of the drive tubes was a multimillion-dollar job. “But I don’t want to be in Boma any longer than necessary. Once we pick up Linc and Eddie I want us in international waters just in case Minister Isaka can’t keep the heat off us for opening their dam,” Juan said.

“Good thinking. We can check the tubes in the open ocean about as easily as tied to a dock.”

“Anything else from the damage reports you’ve gotten?”

“Other than a broken X-ray machine down in medical and Maurice squawking about a whole lot of broken dishes and glassware, we came through okay.” Maurice was theOregon ’s chief steward, the only member of the crew older than Max. Better suited to the Victorian age, Maurice was also the only non-American aboard. He’d served in the British Navy, overseeing the mess on a number of flagships before being cashiered out because of his age. In his year with the Corporation he’d quickly become a crew favorite, throwing the perfect parties for everyone’s birthdays and knowing which delicacies they preferred from the ship’s highly trained cooking staff.

“Tell him to go easy on what he orders this time. When we lost all those dishes racing to save Eddie a few months back Maurice replaced them with Royal Doulton to the tune of six hundred dollars a place setting.”

Max arched an eyebrow. “Quibbling over a few pennies?”

“We lost forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of finger bowls and sorbet cups.”

“Okay, a couple of dimes, then. You forget that I’ve seen our latest balance sheets—we can afford it.”

Which was true. The Corporation had never been in better financial shape. Juan’s gamble at forming his own private security and surveillance outfit had surpassed even his most optimistic estimates, but that also meant there was a downside. The need for such organizations in the post–Cold War world was a sobering fact of life in the twenty-first century. He’d known that without the polarizing effects of two dominant superpowers, regional flare-ups and terrorism would proliferate all over the globe. Being in a position to make a profit from conflicts, provided they had a say in which side they chose to help, was both a blessing and a curse that wracked Cabrillo in the sleepless hours of the night.

“Blame my grandmother,” Juan said. “She could stretch a dollar for a mile and have change left over. I used to hate going to her house because she always bought stale bread to save a couple of cents. She’d toast it, but you could tell, and toasted bologna sandwiches are about as disgusting as you can get.”

“Okay, to honor your grandmother, I’ll tell Maurice to stick with Limoges this time,” Max said, and sauntered back to his station.

Hali Kasim approached Juan carrying a flatscreen clipboard. A frown turned down the corners of his mouth and made his gunslinger mustache droop.

“Chairman, the Sniffer caught this a couple minutes ago.” The Sniffer was their name for the dedicated surveillance array that swept the electronic spectrum for miles around the ship. It was able to siphon in everything from regular radio broadcasts to encrypted cell phones. The ship’s supercomputer sifted through the minutia every half second, trying to detect a grain of intelligence wheat in all that chaff.

“Computer just broke the code. I’d call it high-end civilian or mid-level military encryption.”

“What’s the source?” Juan asked, taking the glowing clipboard from his communications expert.

“Satellite phone broadcasting from forty thousand feet.”

“That means either a military aircraft or an executive plane,” Juan said. “Commercial jetliners rarely fly above thirty-eight thousand.”

“That’s what I think, too. Sorry, we caught just the beginning of the conversation. Sniffer went down the same time as the radar and by the time it was back up the plane was out of range.”

Juan read the single line aloud. “…not quite so soon. We’ll have Merrick at the Devil’s Oasis by fourA.M. ” He read it again silently and looked at Hali, his face a mask. “Doesn’t mean much to me.”

“I don’t know what the Devil’s Oasis is, but when you were on the dock unloading the weapons Sky News broke the story that Geoffrey Merrick was kidnapped along with an associate from his company’s headquarters in Geneva. Working backward given the information provided by the wire services, a fast executive jet would put Merrick and his kidnappers right over our heads at the time we intercepted this call.”

“I assume we’re talking about the same Geoffrey Merrick who runs Merrick/Singer?” Cabrillo asked.

“The billionaire whose inventions in the field of clean coal have opened up a world of possibilities for the industry and made him one of the most hated men on the planet by environmental groups because they still think coal’s too dirty.”

“Any ransom demands yet?”

“Nothing on the news.”