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“Oh, sorry. Ah didn’t . . .”
“Don’t sweat it. Now you know and you won’t spook the others.”
“How’s this? See you later.”
Cabrillo nodded. “You got it. See you later.”
On Juan’s orders the Oregon’s engines were reversed when they were at the absolute limit of their chopper’s range. They would have very little time over the target area, but he wanted to find the Hercules as quickly as possible. If he had miscalculated and the FLO-FLO heavy-lift ship wasn’t transiting toward the Palawan Trough, there was virtually no chance they’d spot it from the helicopter no matter how much time they had on target. The ship, and its cargo, would be long gone.
The impeller blades inside the gleaming drive tubes had their pitch reversed, and the water that had been blasting through the stern was suddenly jetting out the forward intakes. It looked for a moment like two torpedoes had struck the ship, with frothing water exploding up and over the bows. The deceleration was enough to buckle knees. As soon as her speed dropped below ten knots, the rear hatch cover rolled forward, and a hydraulic lift pushed the black chopper into the daylight. Cabrillo was already buckled into the front passenger seat, a large pair of binoculars over his shoulder. Max Hanley sat in back to act as a second spotter.
Technicians locked the five folding rotor blades into place as soon as they cleared the ship’s rail, and Gomez fired the souped-up turbine. When he had greens across the boards, he engaged the transmission, and the big overhead rotor began to beat the sultry air. Because of her NOTAR configuration, the 520 was a much quieter and steadier helicopter as the blades reached takeoff velocities. Adams fed her more power and gave the collective a slight twist. The skids lifted off the deck, and then he goosed her hard, pulling up and away from the Oregon in a blinding climb that kept them well aft of her forest of derrick cranes.
They had to loop far to the east so that they would approach the search area from behind the Hercules. They did this for two reasons. One, they would be coming out of the rising sun, effectively making them invisible to any lookouts. Second, with the big oil platform straddling her cargo deck, the ship’s forward-mounted radar would have a huge blind spot back over her fantail. They would never see them coming.
The flight was tedious, as any flight over water tended to be. No one was in the mood for conversation. Usually there would be banter between the men, a way to alleviate the tension gripping them all, but cracking jokes while Linda Ross’s life hung in the balance wasn’t appealing to any of them. So they flew on in silence. Juan would occasionally scan the sea through his binoculars, even when they were still far outside their target area.
It was only when they were about forty miles out that he and Max started studying the ocean surface in earnest. They worked in tandem, Max looking forward and left, Cabrillo forward and right, both men sweeping the binoculars back and forth, never allowing themselves to be mesmerized by the sun glinting off the shallow waves. They were ten miles from where Cabrillo estimated the ship would be, and just shy of where the continental shelf plunges into the Palawan Trough, when Juan spotted something ahead and off to starboard. He pointed it out to Adams, and the pilot banked around slightly to keep their backs to the sun.
Cabrillo was instantly concerned. They should have found the ship by first spotting her miles-long wake and following it in. There was no wake. The Hercules was dead in the water.
It was an otherworldly sight. The ship itself was nearly twice the length of the Oregon, but what was so remarkable was the towering drill rig sitting astride her open deck. Her four legs were as big around as aboveground swimming pools. The floats beneath them, covered in red antifouling paint, cantilevered a good seventy feet over the Hercules’s rails and were the size of barges. The platform itself was easily several acres in area, far larger than Cabrillo’s initial estimate, and the distance from the deck to the top of the drill tower was more than two hundred feet. All told, the combination of ship and rig weighed in at well over a hundred thousand tons.
“What do you think?” Adams asked. Their plan was to find the rig and immediately return to the Oregon. But with her lying at idle, he was unsure.
Cabrillo wasn’t. “Get in closer. I want to check something.”
Adams dropped them lower until the skids were dancing over the waves. Unless a lookout was stationed at the fantail, they would still be pretty much invisible. It was when they were within a half mile that Juan realized the Hercules had developed a list to port. He wondered briefly if they had miscalculated the load and stopped to adjust it.
But when they came around the back of the ship, he saw heavy steel cables dangling off the superstructure’s boat deck, and the metal arches of her davits were extended. The lifeboat had been launched. At the waterline he could see roiling bubbles caused by water filling her ballast tanks and expelling air. They weren’t readjusting the load—they had abandoned ship because they were scuttling her.
15
SWING US AROUND THE OTHER SIDE,” CABRILLO CALLED urgently.
As nimbly as a dragonfly, Adams maneuvered the chopper around the heavy-lifter’s bow and along her starboard rail. Like on the opposite side of the ship, the davits were swung out and the lifeboat long gone. However, here there was no indication that the pumps had been activated. They were filling the tanks on only one side so that the Hercules would capsize under the tremendous weight of the J-61 rig.
“Get us down there as fast as you can! We have to stop those pumps.”
“Juan,” Max said, “what if they took Linda with them?”
Cabrillo called the Oregon. Hali Kasim answered right away. “Go ahead, Chairman.”
“Hali, have we received a signal from Linda’s tracker chip in the past hour or so?”
“No, and I’ve got one of my screens dedicated to her frequency.”
“Wait one.” Cabrillo flipped back to the internal helicopter comms channel. “There’s your answer, Max. She’s still aboard. Gomez, get us down there. Hali, you still with me?”
“Right here.”
“We’ve found the Hercules, but it looks like they’re scuttling her. You have our location, yes?”
“I show you eighty-two miles out at a bearing of forty-six degrees.”
“Get here as fast as you can. Bust the guts out of the Oregon, if you have to.” Juan killed the connection. “Change of plans. Gomez, put me on top of the rig, then you and Max try to find a way of disabling the pumps.”
“You’re going to look for Linda?” Hanley asked.
