Clive Cussler - Skeleton Coast

“We’re ready,” Trono replied. His voice had the emotionless timbre of total concentration.

“Lifeboat away and good luck.”

Out on deck and hidden from the oil platform by the ship’s hull, the lifeboat carrying sixty freedom fighters practically sitting on one another’s laps was lifted off its cradle and swung over the rail. The davits slowly lowered the boat to the sea and as soon as it had settled Mike had the lines released and the engine spooled up.

When Trono had left the Air Force after six years as a para-rescue jumper, with five successful downed pilot rescues to his credit, he’d done a stint as a professional power boat racer. The thrill of flying across the water at more than a hundred miles an hour had tempered some of his adrenaline addiction, but he had jumped at the chance to join the Corporation, bringing with him the experience of being one of the elite boat drivers in the world.

He had the lifeboat on plane in no time. Then he extended the foils and poured on the power. The ugly looking craft skimmed across the water like a flying fish, keeping well out of any terrorist’s range as he waited for the order to turn east and make landfall near the Petromax terminal’s tank farm. From there he’d lead the counterattack to wrest control back from Makambo’s men.

There was an unexpected explosion on the rig theOregon had targeted. Tiny zoomed in with the camera to show a pair of rebels in one of the aluminum outboards reloading a rocket launcher. Flames and dense smoke coiled from a catwalk where moments before two oil employees had been shooting hundreds of gallons of seawater at the attackers. The men were gone and the water cannon was a twisted ruin.

“I’m getting another call from the rig to Petromax headquarters in Delaware,” Hali said, holding up a finger as he listened. “They’re abandoning the platform.”

“No they’re not,” Max said savagely. “Wepps?”

“I got ’em.”

Mark loosened the safeties on the Gatling and gave the computer permission to fire. Capable of throwing a stream of 20-mm depleted uranium slugs at six thousand rounds per minute, Murph had dialed back the barrels’ rotation speed, so in the two seconds that ammunition blurred through the loading feeds, only eighty rounds erupted from the weapon with a sound like an industrial buzz saw.

Under the platform the cheering terrorists never knew what hit them. One moment the four boats jinked and juked and the next two of them had vanished in a pall of shredded aluminum and vaporized flesh.

The Gatling had destroyed Tangos Two and Four. The driver of Tango One must have seen where the fire had originated because he shot his boat around the far side of one of the columns and didn’t reemerge into theOregon ’s sights. The computer waited for the boat a moment longer than Murph would have liked, so as he flipped a toggle to override the Gatling’s automatic fire controls he made a mental note to check the system’s programming.

On his main flat panel display a reticle appeared where the barrel was currently aiming, the curved gray side of the support leg. He tracked back the camera’s zoom and found the fourth outboard speeding off for the next oil rig. A tiny movement of a joystick centered the sight on the fleeing craft and a second’s long touch of the trigger blew it to oblivion.

He reset the weapon to automatic and the multibarrel gun pivoted back to the platform for the last boat.

A sliver of the outboard’s stern appeared from around the column, a target that was less than a square foot. Even at five hundred yards from an unstable ship it was more than enough. The Gatling shrieked again. The outboard’s motor exploded, blowing the boat out of the water, sending its eight occupants flying in every direction. Some were launched into the sea, others were slammed into the column, and two of them seemed to have simply vanished in the blast.

“Platform three secure,” Mark said, exhaling a long breath.

“Helm, get us to the last rig under attack,” Max grunted, knowing the two submersible teams wouldn’t have it so easy.

CABRILLO was thinking the exact same thing as he crouched on an exposed stairwell hanging over the side of the platform. Below him the oil slick pulsed like a living thing even as it killed the surrounding ocean. It had stretched in an inky bloom as far as he could see and had probably already reached the concrete breakwater running along the front of the Petromax terminal. With a freshening wind out of the south the smell wasn’t as bad as it had been down below, but the petrochemical taint still hung in the air.

Unlike the mammoth oil rigs of the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico that could house hundreds of workers for months at a time and stood taller than many skyscrapers, this platform was no more than four hundred feet square, dominated by the spidery drill tower and a brightly painted mobile crane used to raise and lower supplies from tenders.

There were several metal-sided buildings clinging to the deck and cantilevered over the edges of the structure. One would be a control center; the others housed machinery to regulate the flow of crude from the well head on the sea floor. The deck was also crisscrossed with a maze of pipes and littered with equipment—broken auger bits, lengths of drill string, and a couple of small cargo containers for storage.

Though only a few years old, the platform was streaked with grime and showed signs of neglect. He thought it was a good sign that he didn’t see any bodies of dead workers.

At the base of the drill tower was an ever-erupting volcano of oil gushing from deep within the earth. The ebony fountain reached a height of fifteen feet before collapsing under its own weight, only to be replenished with fresh crude. The flow poured through openings around the rotary table and drained into the Atlantic. With that much oil bursting up the riser it was impossible to tell if the pipes had been permanently sabotaged or if the safety valves had been cracked open.

Cabrillo was ever mindful that a stray spark could ignite the oil. The resulting explosion would probably level trees along the coast.

When he and his team had first arrived at the top of the platform the terrorists had been milling around.

A few peered disinterestedly over the sides of the structure just to make sure no one was approaching, but on the whole they seemed certain they had the situation well in hand.

It wasn’t until theOregon approached the third rig and blew away their comrades like so much chaff that they found their discipline once again. The leader of the thirty-man contingent organized lookouts to watch for any approaching ships and had others prep their RPGs in case the freighter came within range.

Juan had hidden himself and his people in a chain locker when a four-man patrol circled the catwalk ringing the lower of the platform’s two decks.

Now that theOregon was moving farther down the string of offshore rigs, the terrorists seemed to be losing their vigilance somewhat. The lookouts’ attention wandered and men lined the far rail, watching to see what effects the ship would have on their compatriots attacking the final platform. Juan had recalled that many of Makambo’s forces were little more than teenagers, and he doubted the rebel general would supply Daniel Singer with his best troops no matter what he was being paid. He wouldn’t let himself dwell on how poverty and hopelessness had brought these men here, only that they were now perpetrating a terrorist act and had to be stopped.

He tapped Mafana to take his position at the top of the stair and retreated downward to confer with Linda Ross. “This was the first rig attacked so I think they probably took it without meeting any resistance,” he whispered, though his voice couldn’t carry over the sound of the spilling oil. “It was when they hit the second rig that the crew put up a fight.”