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Just then, a high-pitched hiss sounded from the Oregon’s water line. They peered over the rail. Special tanks along her outer hull were filling with seawater to ballast down the tramp freighter and make her look like her holds were full. Juan looked along her wake line and detected a subtle change in course. The long line of white on the otherwise empty sea arced ever so slightly to the east.
“Murph and Stone must have found the spot of ocean for us to play staked goat,” Max said offhandedly and checked the time on an old pocket watch looped with a chain to his coveralls.
Cabrillo thought about the awesome arsenal of weapons secreted about the Oregon and the men and women trained to use them. “Staked tiger, my old friend, staked tiger.”
A day later the Oregon reached the grid that Mark Murphy and Eric Stone had calculated would be the most likely to attract the pirates. Hiro Katsui had agreed to Cabrillo’s negotiations, replying, “It takes a pirate to catch a pirate. Good hunting.” And he had transmitted everything his consortium had on the recent attacks. Murphy and Stone had dissected the information, finding commonalties in the attacks overlooked until now. They cross-referenced weather, the phases of the moon, size of the ships, cargo manifests, crew numbers, and a dozen other factors to find a spot in the Sea of Japan where it was most likely the pirates would attack the Oregon.
A legend had been created concerning the ship and her cargo and was hacked into various databases in case that was how the pirates found their marks. The ship was purportedly carrying a mixed cargo of timber and electronics from Pusan to Nigata, Japan, but what made her a tempting target was the presence of a passenger on her manifest, an eccentric American author who wrote while tramping around the globe on cargo ships.
Richard Hildebrand was a real person, and his fondness for working at sea was well documented in the media. He was currently working on his next bestseller aboard a supertanker deadheading back to the Persian Gulf from Rotterdam, a detail the Corporation doubted the pirates would verify. Between book royalties and the price his books commanded in Hollywood, Hildebrand was one of the wealthiest writers in the world and ripe for kidnapping. While the pirates had yet to attempt such an act, Murph and Stone, with Juan agreeing, believed snatching Hildebrand was a logical escalation of their criminal activities.
In case they wouldn’t risk ransoming a hostage, Murph and Stone had also listed the Oregon’s complement at fifty-seven, large by the standards of modern merchantmen, and to the pirates she’d be a tempting target because of the correspondingly large payroll in the ship’s safe.
The sunset’s palette of reds and rose and purple had been made even more spectacular by the volcanic ash pumped into the atmosphere by an erupting volcano far to the north on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Now the blood-red moon cast a hellish reflection off the calm sea while the stars had dimmed to pricks. The crew was at battle stations. Julia Huxley and her staff were ready in the medical bay to treat anything from a wood sliver to multiple gunshot wounds. The ship’s armaments were primed and ready in their concealed redoubts. Like the German K-boats of World War One, plates along each side of the Oregon’s hull could be lowered to reveal 120mm cannons utilizing the same fire control and ranging system as found on the M-1A1 Abrams tank. She also carried three 20mm radar-controlled multibarrel Gatling guns. Each weapon could pump out three thousand rounds per minute. While primarily an antimissile system, the Gatlings could also take out aircraft, and a barrage against the waterline of an unarmored ship would punch enough holes in its hull to send it to the bottom.
The Oregon also sported concealed machine guns on her decks with thermal and IR sights. Gunners with video displays controlled these remotely from the operations center. One of her forward hatches could be blown off to launch four Exocet ship-to-ship missiles, and another hatch hid a pair of Russian-made land-attack cruise missiles. Although Langston Overholt at the CIA had paved the way for the Corporation to acquire some American military hardware, he’d drawn the line at missiles, thus forcing Juan to search elsewhere. Overholt had also vetoed the Corporation from getting Mark-48 ADCAP torpedoes. No other nation on earth used them, so they could be too easily traced back to the United States. The fish in the pair of forward-facing tubes had also been bought with hard currency from the same corrupt Russian admiral who’d procured the cruise missiles and supplied the end user certificates for the French Exocets.
It was nearly midnight when Juan entered
the operations center. He regarded his people under the red glow of battle lights and the muted shine from their display screens.
Mark Murphy and Eric Stone occupied the workstations closest to the forward bulkhead. Stone had come to the Corporation from the navy, while Murphy had never spent time in the military. The young prodigy had earned a Ph.D. by the time he was twenty and joined the Corporation straight from private industry, where he’d designed weapons systems. Juan had been suspicious of him at first, fearing he lacked the mettle to cut it as a mercenary. In truth, his fear was that Murphy would turn out to be a psychopath who thrived on killing, but a battery of tests and psychological profiles showed that Murphy would have excelled in the military, provided the people around him were on the same intellectual level. Because Juan recruited only the best and brightest, Murph had settled in perfectly, even if no one else shared his joy of punk rock and skateboarding.
Behind and off to the sides of their stations were Hali Kasim monitoring the communications gear and Linda Ross on the radar and the waterfall sonar display. Along the back wall of the op center were stations for the remote deck guns, as well as fire and damage control coordinators. The rest of the crew had their positions, some suited up to fight fires, others to act as corpsmen, and still others who made sure the rapacious guns had enough ammo. Eddie Seng was in charge of the tactical troops on deck, ready to repel boarders. Juan could hear Max on a comm link from the engine room talking to Eric, announcing that the ship’s propulsion system was green across the board.
What had brought everyone to battle stations was an announcement from Linda that a contact thirty miles from the Oregon had suddenly changed course and was heading for the ship. In the world of maritime operations, efficiency was the name of the game. A deviation of a degree or two could add hundreds of miles to a journey and thus cost more money. Unless there was an emergency, and with the radios quiet there wasn’t, the approaching vessel was up to something. And because they’d been warned what to expect, the crew of the Oregon knew what was coming.
Cabrillo took his command station in the middle of the room and surveyed the high-tech equipment around him. He believed when he’d designed the op center he’d been subconsciously influenced by the bridge on the old TV show Star Trek, right down to the large flat-screen monitor above Stone’s and Murph’s heads. But it wasn’t the weapons or the sensors or the computers that made the Oregon such a formidable opponent. It was the people in this room and those supporting them throughout the ship. That had been Juan’s greatest accomplishment, not the steel and electronics and guns, but assembling the finest crew he’d ever had the pleasure of knowing.
“Sit rep,” he called, turning on the computer screens near his centrally placed chair. The Kirk Seat, as Murph called it.
“Contact bearing oh-seventeen degrees and closing at twenty knots. Range is twenty-one miles.” Linda Ross answered without looking up from her screen. Like the others, she was dressed in black battle fatigues, a SIG Sauer pistol belted around her waist.
“What do you make of her?”
“Approximate size is seventy feet, and I can tell she has a single screw. She’d been running at four knots, as though she were trolling, before turning on us. It sounds like one of the fishing boats the pirates are using.”
“Anything on the radios, Hali?”
“Nothing from the target, Chairman. I’ve got regular chatter from a pair of bulk carriers well outside our grid.”
Juan dialed in the Oregon’s hangar bay. “This is Cabrillo. I want the pilot suited and the Robinson on five-minute alert for takeoff.” He then punched up the ship-wide channel. “This is the chairman speaking. We have a target closing in that looks like the real thing. It’s unlikely that the men aboard her are very high on the food chain, so we need prisoners not corpses if we’re to cut off the head of the organization. Don’t, I repeat: Do not take unnecessary risks, but if it’s a choice between a kill or a capture, try to take them alive. Good luck to all.”
His eyes swept the room once again. There was neither grim fatalism nor any expectant gleams in the faces around him. The next move belonged to the pirates, and the crew waited with cool efficiency.
“Conn, slow us to eight knots. Let’s make us too tempting to ignore, but have the ballast pumps ready in case we have to lighten up and run.”
“Aye.”
“Range?”
“Ten miles,” Linda answered crisply, then her voice took on an odd tone. “What the…?”
“What have you got?”
“Damn! Sonar contact directly below the ship, depth seventy feet.” She looked up from her display, catching Juan’s eye. “They have a submarine.”
5
