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One of the guards opened a door on the lowest deck. They entered a large space where ten other men were gathered. Some of them were additional guards, while four of them, dressed in technicians’ overalls, were huddled around what looked like a torpedo. A man dressed in a thousand-dollar suit was overseeing the operations.
Ferreira waved the man over to him. “Mr. González, Mr. Chen, this is Roberto Espinoza. He’s been a key player in the Slipstream Project.”
When they shook hands, Juan looked at him coolly. The man’s five-o’clock shadow was expertly detailed, and his slicked-back hair made him look like an extra from Scarface. Juan would be convinced he was a drug dealer if he didn’t know that Espinoza was actually Luis Machado, the compromised CIA agent.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Espinoza,” Juan said for the benefit of the rest of his extraction team, who were listening to everything being said via a molar mic lodged at the back of Juan’s teeth. The responses from the other end were sent to his ears via bone conduction, which made it sound like the voices were coming from inside his head.
“Now, can we see the equipment?” Eddie asked. “We have other plans after this.”
“I hope you aren’t planning to go anywhere near Maracanã Stadium,” Ferreira said. “The traffic will be a nightmare when the Peru–Mexico match is over.”
With tourists streaming in from all over the continent for the Copa América, it was the perfect time for the various trafficking organizations to get together and make deals without drawing undue attention.
Juan shook his head. “Our next meeting is by Ipanema Beach. But we are looking forward to seeing Colombia take on Brazil tomorrow.”
Ferreira grinned. “I hope you won’t hold it against me if your team loses.”
“Not if you can solve our shipping problems.”
“That I can do. The Slipstream can evade any detection equipment the U.S. or Chinese Coast Guards have in place. I guarantee you won’t lose another shipment.” He gestured to the technicians. “Step aside so they can see it.”
The technicians complied and stood back from the object Juan and Eddie had come to see.
It wasn’t a torpedo, though it was shaped like one and was approximately twenty feet long. Its top was split down the middle by two doors that swung up and out, revealing a watertight storage area.
Juan did a quick mental calculation. Based on the volume and the current street value of pure cocaine, it could hold over a hundred million dollars’ worth of product.
Ferreira walked over to it proudly. “The Slipstream is the Holy Grail of drug smuggling, my friends. A totally reusable, undetectable submersible drone.”
5
Linda Ross watched the Dragão from only two hundred yards away. The submersible she was piloting hovered covertly six feet below the surface of Guanabara Bay. The Gator was operating on battery power, so the snorkel that supplied air to its diesel engines didn’t need to protrude above the water, which might have attracted unwanted attention.
When she heard Juan mention Luis Machado’s alias, Linda set course to inch them closer to the yacht in preparation for the extraction. Even though she was a Navy veteran, Linda had never piloted a sub until she joined the Corporation. Her postings had always been on surface ships. Now she was the most proficient sub driver on the Oregon besides the Chairman, and the Gator was her baby.
The submersible was a versatile craft intended for stealth operations. It could maneuver for extended periods on batteries alone for
undetectable incursions into ports and naval bases and carry up to ten fully outfitted operatives. The forty-foot-long deck was flat and sleek, and only the cockpit’s cupola of slim windows poked into the air when it was on the surface, making the Gator virtually invisible during night raids. If a fast escape was called for, Linda could fire up the thousand-horsepower diesels, rise out of the water, its profile looking like a cigarette boat, and rocket away at fifty knots.
She was prepared for any of those eventualities. As the Corporation’s vice president, Linda was closely involved in prepping missions, and this one was especially complex with lots of moving parts. She thought they’d come up with a solid plan, but she was well aware of Juan’s tendency for going off script when unexpected difficulties developed. His famous “Plan C’s,” as they’d come to be called, arose because his Plan B’s usually weren’t enough for the crazy spots he had to extricate himself from. It had taken her a long time to get used to the improvisations required for this job because the Navy had such a rigid structure, one of the main reasons she’d left.
“Machado is with them,” she said over her shoulder, her high-pitched voice deadened in the confined space. She couldn’t imagine how someone as tall as the Chairman endured the cramped quarters of the cockpit when he was piloting the Gator, but she was quite comfortable. Her petite size had been a liability in the Navy, where her authority as an officer seemed to be constantly tested. But once she joined the Corporation, size didn’t matter anymore. Here, her tiny frame fit perfectly.
“We’re just about ready back here,” Mark Murphy replied as he tapped on a laptop keyboard with one hand while he shotgunned a can of Red Bull with the other.
“Easy on those things,” Linda said. “Remember, we don’t have a bathroom on board. After the last mission, I had to throw away two full water bottles I found. And it wasn’t lemonade they were holding.”
“Couldn’t have been me,” Murph said. “I have a bladder like a camel. I once played Call of Duty for six straight hours without once getting up to hit the can. But, man, once I got in there, it was like Niagara Falls.”
Linda shook her head, grinning. “Both not surprising. And more than I needed to know.”
She felt a kinship with Murph, even though he was one of the few Oregon crew members who was not a veteran. He’d been a civilian weapons designer for the military before being recruited by the Chairman, and he was so brilliant, with multiple Ph.D.s earned before most kids were out of college, that he got away with a style that would never pass muster on any other ship but the Oregon.
An avid skateboarder, Murph looked the part. The unkempt shock of unruly brown hair and wispy mustache and beard complemented the all-black clothing he preferred. Today it was jeans, Converse All Stars, and a baggy T-shirt that had the name of one of his favorite heavy metal bands, Nuclear Lobotomy, who, according to the bloody lettering on the shirt, toured with another band called Hate Gorgon.
Linda could understand his desire to rebel against arbitrary dress codes. For him, it was clothes. For her, it was hair. Freed from the restrictions in the Navy, she now changed her hairstyle and color on a regular basis. Currently, she had wavy electric blue curls that cascaded to her shoulders.
“Don’t blame me, either,” said Gomez Adams, the Gator’s only other passenger. “I’ve flown missions longer than that without a break.”
