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The affable captain tipped his baseball cap back at Cabrillo, grinning broadly because of the thick sheaf of money he’d been paid for the simple job of ferrying Juan’s party to where the freighter loitered just outside Namibia’s twelve-mile limit. As soon as his boat had motored a good distance from the Oregon, the massive freighter began accelerating northward, ersatz smoke pouring from her single funnel.
Geoffrey Merrick had been hoisted onto the deck in a medical basket. Julia Huxley was already hunched over him, her lab coat dragging in a hardened pool of oil. Under it she wore blood-smeared scrubs. She’d been patching together wounded men since the first moment the container Max had used to transfer the soldiers to the ship had been opened. With her were two orderlies standing by to bring Merrick down to surgery, but she wanted to do an assessment as quickly as possible.
A blindfolded Susan Donleavy had been escorted to the ship’s brig by Mike, Ski, and Eddie as soon as she’d set foot on the Oregon. It was plain to see that the fact that no one had said a word to her since Juan had nabbed her in the desert was wearing on her mind. Though not yet defeated, her façade was cracking.
“What do you think, Doc?” Juan asked when Julia pulled her stethoscope from Merrick’s bare chest.
“Lungs are clear but his heartbeat’s weak.” She glanced at the saline drip bag one of her people was holding above Merrick’s prone form. “That’s the third unit of saline he’s taken. I want to get some blood in him to get his pressure up before I go after the bullet that’s still in the wound. I don’t like that he’s unconscious.”
“Could it be the heroin they gave him back at the Devil’s Oasis?”
“It should be out of his system by now. It’s something else. He’s also spiking a fever and the wound looks infected. I need to get him on antibiotics.”
“What about the others? Moses Ndebele?”
Her eyes clouded over. “I lost two of them. I’ve got one more that’s touch-and-go. The others were mainly flesh wounds. So long as no one shows an infection they should be fine. Moses is a bloody mess. The human foot has twenty-six bones. I counted fifty-eight separate pieces of bone on his X-ray before I gave up. If he’s going to keep it we need to get him to an orthopedic specialist within a couple of days.”
Cabrillo nodded, but said nothing.
“How are you doing?” Hux asked him.
“I feel worse than I look,” Juan said with a tired smile.
“Then you must feel like crap, because you look like hell.”
“Is that your official medical diagnosis?”
Julia pressed her palm to his forehead like a mother checking a child for a fever. “Yup.” She motioned for her people to lift Merrick’s stretcher and started for the nearest hatch. “I’ll be below if you need me.”
Cabrillo suddenly called out to her, having remembered something he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. “Julia, how’s Sloane doing?”
“She’s great. I kicked her out of medical, and then out of the guest cabin because I needed it as a recovery room. I even put her to work as a candy striper. She’s bunking with Linda. She wanted to be up here to meet you but I ordered her to bed. We’ve had a busy few hours and she’s still weak.”
“Thanks,” Juan said with relief as Julia and her team vanished into the ship.
Max sidled up next to him, his pipe emitting a fragrant blend of apple and cedar. “That was a hell of a premonition, getting me to contact Langston and tapping into Echelon.”
One of Juan’s first acts when he learned that Geoffrey Merrick’s rescue had fallen apart was to get Max to lean on Overholt in order to utilize the NSA’s Echelon program. At any given second there were hundreds of millions of electronic data transfers taking place over the globe: cell phones, regular phones, faxes, sat phones, radios, e-mails, and Web postings.
There were acres of linked computers at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that trawled the bandwidths looking for specific phrases or words that might be of interest to American intelligence. Though not designed to be a real-time eavesdropping tool, with the right parameters programmed into the system—like a call originating at the Devil’s Oasis’ geographic location and containing such terms as Merrick, Singer, hostage, rescue, Donleavy—Echelon could find that needle in the cyber haystack. A transcript of Nina Visser’s conversation to Daniel Singer was e-mailed to Max aboard the Oregon three minutes after the call had ended.
“I had a feeling that after our boys were caught whoever Singer had left in charge at the prison would want to let him know what was going on and get some new marching orders.” Juan ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to try to relieve some of the fatigue. “They’re a bunch of amateurs. They wouldn’t have contingency plans in place.”
“What did you do with the rest of the kidnappers?” Max asked. His pipe had gone out and there was too much of a breeze to relight it.
Juan started walking toward a hatchway, his mind already in his glass-enclosed shower with the heat cranked as high as he could stand it. Max kept pace. “Left them out there with enough water to last a week. I’ll have Lang contact Interpol. They can coordinate with Namibian authorities to pick them up and return them to Switzerland to face kidnap charges, with a charge of attempted murder for Susan Donleavy.”
“Why bring her back here? Why not let her rot with the rest of them?”
Cabrillo stopped walking and turned to his old friend. “Because the NSA couldn’t pinpoint Singer’s location and I know she has it and because this isn’t over yet. Not by a long shot. Kidnapping Merrick was only the opening gambit to whatever his former partner has planned. She and I are going to have a nice long talk.”
A moment later they reached Juan’s cabin and kept talking as Juan stripped out of his filthy uniform and tossed the clothes in a hamper. He threw his boots into the trash but first poured out a quarter cup of sand that had entered the shoe through the .44 caliber bullet hole. “Good thing I couldn’t feel that,” he remarked casually. He unhooked his combat leg and set it aside, planning on giving it to the Magic Shop staff so they could reload the gun and clean the grit out of the mechanicals.
“Mark and Eric checked in about an hour ago,” Max said. He sat on the edge of the copper Jacuzzi tub while Juan climbed though the banks of steam erupting from the shower. “They’ve covered about a thousand square miles, but there’s still no sign of the guns or Samuel Makambo’s Congolese Army of Revolution.”
“What about the CIA?” Juan called over the sound of water beating against his skin. “Any of their assets in the Congo have a bead on Makambo?”
“Nothing. It’s like the guy vanishes into thin air whenever he wants to.”
