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This was where his instincts and experience as a pilot paid off. They needed to remain below the target’s radar coverage, lost in the acoustical backscatter of heaving waves. There was no finer pilot aboard than Adams, so no one on the mystery ship knew they were being stalked. The drone’s camera showed the dark ocean seemingly inches below the little plane’s landing gear, while ahead the setting sun was a pale blaze of yellow against the horizon.
“There!” Juan called when he spotted a boxy silhouette sitting on the line dividing sky from sea.
Adams, with his superior eyesight, had already seen it and had slightly altered the UAV’s course to intercept.
It took just a few more minutes for expectation to turn into disappointment. This wasn’t the stealth ship. This ship was nearly nine hundred feet long and shaped like a box. Only at her flared bows near the waterline was there any attempt at streamlining the vessel. Forward was a little pillbox of a bridge to break up the monotony of her flat upper deck, while aft her twin funnels were blunt fins clustered on her starboard aft quarter. There was a large, garage-style door amidships, and another on her flat transom. The whole vessel was painted a dull green.
Juan recognized the class of ship immediately. She was a car carrier, a floating, multilevel parking garage that could transport a month’s worth of automobiles from a factory and ship them anywhere in the world. They were common in these waters, as both China and Japan were major car exporters. Why she was going so slowly was something of a mystery, but not today.
The feed suddenly cut out. Gomez cursed. Juan knew what had happened, and it wasn’t the first time. The UAV had been flying so low that a rogue wave had plucked her out of the sky. Such were the accepted dangers of approaching at wave-top altitude.
“And that, my friends,” Adams said, “is why we use unmanned planes and don’t put my backside at risk in the chopper for routine recons.”
“Nothing routine about that.” Cabrillo was out of his chair and standing below the main view screen. “Gomez, run the last few seconds of tape again.”
The chief pilot brought up the final twenty seconds of drone footage. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, but Cabrillo made a gesture behind his back to play it a third time. Then a fourth. Finally, on the fifth viewing, just seconds before the wave smashed the UAV into the sea, Juan shouted, “Stop!” He studied the screen shot. “Advance slowly.” The picture turned choppy as it ran. “Stop! What do you see?”
Adams saw the big car carrier at a ninety-degree angle as it was quickly filling the camera lens’s angle. There was barely any wake at her stern and no frothing water at the bows, which meant she wasn’t moving very quickly, but that was something they already knew. Again, he couldn’t see what had so piqued the Chairman’s interest. No one else on duty seemed to see anything either because the crew remained silent.
As if sensing the collective confusion, Juan said, “Look about five feet up from her waterline. Does anyone else see a faint white line?” His question was greeted with a chorus of assents. “Any thoughts on what it is?”
This question was greeted by silence. Finally, it was Gomez Adams who figured out what the Chairman had understood immediately. He leapt from his seat. “I’ll have the bird warmed up by the time you’re ready.”
“People,” Juan said, “that isn’t a car hauler. It’s a floating dry dock. That white band is a line of salt rime from the last time she was under ballast.” He keyed on the shipwide intercom. “This is Cabrillo. Battle stations. Battle stations. We’ve found the at-sea base of operations for the Chinese stealth ship. Linc, Eddie, and MacD to report to the chopper pad in full combat gear. We’re going in black.” He issued several other orders and then followed the pilot out of the op center. Max was on his way to relieve his post in command of the ship.
Juan ran to his cabin, yelling for crewmen to make way as he hurried by. Any remnants of his deep exhaustion had fallen away. He switched prosthetics to what he termed his “combat leg.” This was a veritable Swiss Army knife of weaponry. It had a built-in .44 caliber single-shot gun tha
t fired out of his heel, and a place to secrete a Kel-Tec .380 pistol, a small amount of explosives, and a knife. Next, he drew on a black tactical uniform, made of a flame-resistant cloth, and black combat boots. He kept his personal weapons in an old safe that had once sat in a station of a long-defunct southwestern railroad. He spun the dials to open it, and ignored the stacks of currency and gold coins he kept in case of emergencies. They used to have a nice cache of diamonds, but the market had been right to convert those into cash.
The bottom of the safe was a virtual armory. He slipped into a combat vest and rammed a new FN Five-seveN into the holster. He clipped on a tear gas grenade as well as two flashbangs. His main weapon for this op was a Kriss Arms Super V. It was the most compact submachine gun ever built and resembled something out of science fiction, with its stubby foregrip and skeletal butt stock. Its revolutionary design allowed it to chamber the massive .45 caliber ACP round and gave the shooter unparalleled control over a notoriously difficult bullet to fire on automatic. Normally fed with a standard thirteen-round Glock magazine, Juan’s was fitted with a thirty-round extender. He slipped spare magazines into the appropriate pockets.
Had this been an extended mission he would have carried weapons of the same caliber in case he needed more rounds for the Super V, but this was going to be a quick-and-dirty takedown, not a protracted gun battle. The combat harness was already fitted with a throwing knife, garrote wire, a med kit, and a radio, so all he had left to take was a black ski mask and he was ready to go.
He threw open his cabin door and almost knocked Maurice to the deck. As it was, he had to steady the old Englishman to keep him from dropping his silver tray. “You pad around as silent as a cat,” Cabrillo admonished.
“Sorry, Captain. I was just about to knock. I brought you some sustenance.”
Juan was about to tell him that he wasn’t hungry, but suddenly he was famished. “I don’t have a whole lot of time.”
“Take it and go,” Maurice said, pulling the domed cover off the tray. Inside was a steaming burrito, the perfect food to walk and eat. “Shredded beef and pork, and very, very mild.”
Juan grabbed the burrito and put the bottle of electrolyte-infused sports drink into the thigh pocket of his pants. He took off at a jog, calling over his shoulder before taking a monstrous bite, “You’re a good man, no matter what anyone says about you.”
“They actually say I’m a great man,” Maurice called back.
The Oregon had already slowed enough to launch the chopper. Gomez was at the controls when Juan strode out onto the aft deck and started for the aft-most hatch that was the ship’s retractable helipad. The turbine’s whine filled the air, so Juan didn’t hear MacD Lawless run up behind him to tap him on the shoulder. Behind the cockpit, Cabrillo saw Eddie and Linc were already strapped in. Lawless threw him a big toothy grin. Around his neck hung a venerable Uzi, a gun little changed since it first appeared in 1950.
Juan nodded back.
MacD took the last rear seat while Cabrillo swung into the cockpit next to Gomez. The aircraft shook like an unbalanced washing machine as the rotors whipped faster and faster. The noise died somewhat when the two open doors were closed. Juan put on a set of earphones, Adams threw a thumbs-up to the deck worker to pull the restraining chalks that prevented the helicopter from sliding across the deck in rougher seas, and the MD 520N lurched into the sky.
That initial launch was the highest altitude they reached for the entire flight. Gomez kept them at wave-top height, though now he had peripheral vision to keep from being battered by a crossing wave like the one that took out the UAV. They were so low that the rotor kicked up spume that the windshield wipers could barely clear.
“How we looking, Max?” Cabrillo radioed.
“Looking good. There’s not much traffic out here right now. I can’t see anything within twenty miles of your target unless there’s some small fisherman in her lee.”
“Okay.”
