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Tate nodded at the guards, who pushed Juan down into a chair, the same one Overholt had been sitting in during the video chat.
“You’ll get to watch the whole thing,” Tate went on. “I’ve even equipped the assault team with GoPro cameras so we can watch them take over your ship in real time. Won’t that be fun?”
Juan sneered at Tate but said nothing. Tate had underestimated his ability to save Overholt, but it looked like Juan had made the same mistake of underestimating his old CIA colleague. Now his crew might pay the price, and Juan would have to see it all happen live. This was Tate’s idea of torture.
With a flourish, he pressed a button on his armrest.
“Yes, Commander?” came a voice over the intercom.
“Are you in position?” Tate asked.
“Yes, sir. The disruptor is ready. Helicopter standing by.”
“Good.” Tate threw a smug glance at Juan. “Commence the hijacking operation.”
29
SOUTHEAST OF MONTEVIDEO
Linda was doing her best to help prep the Gator for the upcoming dive, but she still couldn’t hear more than a muffled rumble. Doc Huxley said it might be a few more days before she got some partial hearing back, but Linda was worried that it would never return to normal. In the meantime, she wanted to show she was useful no matter what her condition was. Doing nothing but paperwork for the last few days in her role as the Corporation’s VP had bored her to death.
She had Mark Murphy hastily whip up a special speech-to-text app to use in conjunction with his old Google Glass headset. She felt like a geek while wearing it, but now she could understand what someone was saying to her by reading the words projected on the small lens. It wasn’t a perfect solution. Background noise was a problem and multiple voices speaking at once could be difficult to decipher. The translation was even worse than when she was dictating a text message to her phone, but it was good enough for her purposes. It allowed her to assist with the checklist of the Gator’s cockpit functions before it was launched for the nuclear sub search.
From her seat, Linda had a good view of the technicians in the Oregon’s moon pool going over the equipment and MacD doing the final check of the dive gear. Raven was behind Linda in the submersible’s main cabin, reading each item off a tablet.
Oil press her? it read on the glasses.
“Oil pressure nominal,” Linda replied. She wished she would actually be piloting the sub, but Mark Murphy was going to be coming down from the op center soon to take her position for the dive.
Buttery powder?
“Battery power
one hundred percent and delicious.”
What?
Linda turned to see Raven’s confused expression and smiled. “The speech recognition software on this device is a tad obsolete.”
What did hit say I said?
“Buttery powder.”
Raven looked down at the tablet and shook her head with a deadpan look.
No, that’s write.
Linda laughed and turned back to the instruments.
There was a pause. When it went on for a few more beats, Linda said, “Ready for the next item.”
They’re here. It’s buzzing.
“Now, that one I didn’t get,” Linda said. “Come again?”
As she waited for the correction, she glanced out the window and was puzzled to see that everyone had stopped moving. She thought perhaps they were listening to a shipwide message that her headset wasn’t picking up until she saw MacD abruptly lean down and pick up one of the scuba tanks, raising it high over his head.
“What is he doing?” she asked herself aloud.
