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“Which one do you want?” he asked Locsin.
“How do I know either of them work?”
“You want proof? If I push this button, that bomb lashed to the ladder will explode, and we’ll all be dead a split second after you got that proof. So, what will it be?”
Locsin looked at both of them before answering. “I’ll take the detonator you came out of the water with.”
“That’s exactly what I would have chosen.”
Brekker tossed the bomb and detonator to Locsin, who handed the bomb to one of his men and told him to hang it in the water from the stern railing of the fishing boat.
“When we’re five hundred yards apart,” Brekker said, “we’ll simultaneously lift our bombs out of the water, which will neutralize them. Fair?”
Locsin nodded. “Fair.”
“Oh, and one more thing before you go. I want six of those barrels you already took.”
“What?”
“It’s our compensation for all the work we’ve done. If you want them later, you can always pay us market value.”
Locsin hesitated, no doubt sick at the idea.
“My men and I are willing to die,” Brekker said. “Are you?”
Finally, Locsin said, “We are, but not over this. I’ll give you four since there are two more below. If that’s not satisfactory, you can kill us all.”
Brekker smiled. “You negotiate like a capitalist, Comrade Locsin. I accept your terms.”
“We’ll be watching. If you or any of your men try to remove your bomb before we reach the agreed-to distance, I’ll detonate it.”
“And I will do the same.”
As promised, Locsin’s men moved four of the barrels back to the yacht. Brekker’s team hauled up the three that were still in the water.
Before he got onto the fishing boat, Locsin nodded at the horizon behind Brekker. “We need to get out of here now, and you may not want to stick around to get those other two barrels.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
“Because that ship rushing toward us knows what we found here today, and they won’t like that you’ve taken the cargo.”
Without fully turning around in case it was a trick, he glanced sideways and saw a merchant ship coming their way at high speed, far faster than he would expect for a vessel her size.
“Who is that? The Philippine Navy?”
Locsin shook his head as he climbed into the fishing boat. “Remember that Juan Cabrillo person you said you didn’t care about, back at the fire truck warehouse? You should care about him now, because I’d bet that’s his ship. A friend of his told me the name when she was in a daze from a gunshot wound. It’s called the Oregon.”
52
Juan leaned forward in his chair in the Oregon’s op center as he watched the yacht and fishing boat separate on the big screen. They had been butted up against each other right where NUMA had reported the sunken Pearsall’s position to be. A densely forested islet, no more than a mile across, was visible in the background under dark clouds rolling toward the late-afternoon sun. The fishing boat stopped for a short time a quarter mile from the yacht, then continued toward the north end of the islet.
Juan turned to Max. “Salvador Locsin doesn’t seem to be the type to rent a fancy yacht like that.”
“Not very communistic,” Max replied. “He must be on the fishing boat.”
“Do you think they made the deal they were talking about in the warehouse?” asked Raven, who was standing next to Max.
Juan looked back at the screen and shook his head. “It seems unlikely, after the fight they had, but it does look like it, doesn’t it? And the destroyer hasn’t been blown up like Gerhard Brekker threatened to do, so either they’ve brought up all of the barrels of Typhoon or they were destroyed when it sank.”
