Clive Cussler - Skeleton Coast

He looked the least shaken man in the eye and had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard over the banshee scream of the nearby jet. “Can you shut that down?” he asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

The man looked at him blankly. Mike pointed at the engine again and made a cutting motion across his throat. The universal gesture sank in. The engineer nodded and went to a control station. He used a mouse to scroll through a number of screens on a computer, clicking icons as he went. It seemed like nothing was working until suddenly the piercing whine began to fade past the point of pain to the merely uncomfortable. It continued to wind down as the compressor blades slowed until finally it fell silent, although Mike’s ears continued to ring.

He turned to the leader of his scout party. “Stay here and don’t let anyone refire that engine.” He’d already given him a walkie-talkie. “Call me if any rebels do show up.”

“Yes,Nkosi .” By his tone it was obvious he didn’t like being left out of the fight. “What about them?”

He waved the barrel of his assault rifle toward the bound rebels.

Mike started jogging for the exit. “If they give you any trouble, shoot them.”

“Yes,Nkosi .” The reply came with a bit more enthusiasm.

AS Linda led her men toward the platform’s main deck she was in communication with Juan, getting situational reports about the fluid gun battle. Rather then head to the nearest hatch leading out to the open, Cabrillo ordered her to thread her way through the lower floor so she would emerge on the rig’s far side, behind the greatest concentration of gunmen.

He had her pause just out of view as he made hand gestures to his remaining fighters, coordinating what he hoped would be a final push to either break the rebels’ will to fight or overwhelm them altogether.

With only two magazines left in his ammo pouches, this was his last gambit.

“Okay, Juan, we’re in position,” Linda said. “I can see four of them. They’re behind that big storage tank. There’s another one angling to get close to the crane.”

“Tell me when he’s a yard from the crawler tread. I’ll take him. You guys take the four you can see. I think a couple more are hanging off the side of the rig holding on to the safety net. I don’t know if they’ve given up or what, so keep an eye out for them.”

“Roger that. Your guy’s got ten more yards to go.”

Juan waited with his back pressed to the warm pipes. Through all the chaos and adrenaline, part of his mind remained focused on the problem of Daniel Singer’s timing. No matter how far-fetched the idea, he was convinced that Singer had found a way to make a hurricane do his bidding. Singer was an engineering genius after all. His invention had made him a millionaire a hundred times over while he was still in his twenties. As Max would say: The man might have a screw loose, but the machine was still humming.

“Five yards,” Linda radioed.

Whatever Singer had planned had to be on a large scale, but Juan didn’t know what it could be. He knew of nothing that could affect a hurricane’s formation, severity, or the path it takes. A new anger hit him. If Singer had developed such a technology, why use it like this? Hurricanes and their Pacific and Indian Ocean cousins, typhoons and tsunamis, caused billions of dollars in damage, killed untold thousands of people every year, and left untold numbers of ruined lives in their wake. If Singer wanted to save the planet, ending such misery would be a fantastic first step, in Juan’s opinion. It was the senseless waste that angered him. Like this attack here, like Samuel Makambo’s revolution of personal self-aggrandizement, like the corruption that plagued Moses Ndebele’s homeland. All of it sickened him.

“Two yards.”

God, how he was tired of the fight. When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed his superiors at the CIA sat around and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. Juan had known the worst was yet to come as the world splintered on religious and tribal lines and the fighting emerged from the shadows.

He hated being right.

“Take him.”

Cabrillo’s concentration returned to the fighting without a moment’s hesitation. He burst over the top of the drill pipes and loosed a three-round burst that hit the crawling gunman across the side and back. A barrage of fire erupted off to his left as more rebels targeted him. They were cut down by Linda and her team. Juan sprinted from behind the pipes, intentionally drawing fire to get the attackers to show themselves. His remaining people were prepared for this and for the second time since the battle started autofire blazed across the platform as though the gates of hell had opened.

It was the most intense close-quarter combat he had ever experienced. Bullets filled the air, some passing close enough for him to feel their heat. He dove over an oil barrel that had been knocked flat and had it pushed into him by a stuttering burst from at least two AKs stitching its side.

Linda saw one of the men firing at Juan but her snap shot missed as he vanished around a knot of pipes.

She ran from her position and chased after him. It was like running into a forest of metal trees. The way the pipes crisscrossed and doubled back on themselves gave the gunman the advantage; no matter where she looked, down low or up high, her view was constantly blocked.

Realizing she could walk into a trap at any second, she started to retreat out of the maze, her eyes never lingering on a single spot for more than a second in case the gunman had outflanked her.

She rounded a vertical pipe as thick as a culvert and a hand reached out and yanked her machine pistol’s barrel, sending her sprawling. She wished something profound would pop into her head in the second she had remaining, but her last thought was how she’d gotten herself killed by a rookie mistake.

The gun sounded like a cannon. The rebel who’d been standing over her had his head stretched like a Halloween mask before it simply vanished. She looked up to see Jim Gibson standing a few feet away in his size 13 Tony Lama’s holding a huge revolver with its barrel pointing skyward and smoking.

“Strictly speaking, I’m not allowed to have my leg iron on the platform, but I always figured rules are for suckers.” He reached down a big hand and hauled Linda to her feet. “You okay, darling?”

“Saved by a real live cowboy. How much better can I be?”

Knowing every rivet, screw, and weld on the rig, Gibson led her unerringly out of the labyrinth. When they got close to where Linda had first entered she realized she could no longer hear any gunfire.

She looked out cautiously. Five of the terrorists were standing up, their arms thrust so high they might have been standing on tiptoe. Two more emerged from where they’d been hiding in the safety net.

“Juan, I think it’s over,” she said into her throat mike.

Juan slid around the barrel and got to his feet, his aim never wavering from the marauders. He ran to them, shouting, “Down! Get down! Everybody down!”

Linda raced over to help cover them as they dropped flat. The Zimbabweans began to check the injured and dead while Juan cuffed the survivors. When he was finished he called his ship.

“Nomad toOregon , target is secure. Repeat, target is secure.”

“Heard you the first time,” Max drawled. “I may be older than you but I’m not deaf.” Then he added,

“Good job. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.”

“Thanks. What’s the situation?”

“Mike’s shut down the power plant. Oil’s still flowing from the loading gantries but nowhere near as hard without the pumps. It’s just gravity forcing crude through the lines from the tank farm.”