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“You said they were going to kill themselves!” Li shouted at Farouk. “Not us!”
Farouk shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t understand.” He never imagined that anyone would still have the capacity to take such a complex action as activating a defensive weapons system. “How do they know we should be a target?”
“What do we do?” Li shouted.
With the missile streaking toward the fishing charter at seven hundred miles per hour, there wasn’t any time to start the boat and take evasive action.
“Swim!” Farouk yelled.
Both of them dove overboard and swam for their lives.
They had gotten ten yards from the boat when the missile reached them.
And it kept going.
Farouk and Li watched in amazement as it tore past them.
“It missed!” Li said with a whoop. “But how?”
As he was treading water, Farouk thought they’d simply gotten lucky. Maybe the person who fired was as crazed as he’d expected.
He was about to say so when he saw the Exocet change course. It went into a tight arc until it had made a complete one-hundred-eighty-degree turn.
“It looks like I’m going to owe you five hundred dollars,” Farouk said.
Li looked at him in confusion. Then it dawned on him. “Our bet?”
Farouk nodded, watching the trail of smoke leading back to the disguised freighter. “The missile didn’t miss us. Its target is the Oregon.”
30
Linda had twenty seconds before the Exocet missile would hit and blow a lethal hole in the Oregon. She pushed Murph aside and knocked him to the floor to access the weapons controls and initiate the self-destruct.
She punched the ABORT button, but nothing happened. The missile continued on its course. Murph must have locked it out.
The only remaining option was to shoot it down. Linda brought the port Gatling gun online and set it for autotargeting.
The system required no further input from her. On the outside of the Oregon’s hull, the plates slid aside instantly to reveal the six-barreled cannon. Its built-in radar locked on to the incoming Exocet and spun up to firing speed.
She sensed the rapid firing of the gun in vibrations through the hull. On the main screen, at a rate of three thousand rounds per minute, tracers homed in on the missile until the tungsten shells slammed into the warhead, blowing it to pieces, while it was still a mile from the ship.
With the immediate danger passed, Linda raced back to the other workstation and found the controls for the intruder countermeasures.
The Oregon was equipped with several mechanisms to deal with enemy boarding parties. The first line of defense was a set of automated .30 caliber machine guns hidden in the barrels strewn across the deck. They would pop out and cut down any gunmen trying to gain access to the interior of the ship.
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p; But if intruders did manage to get inside and take hostages, the venting system could direct a tranquilizing gas to any compartment on the ship. It didn’t knock anyone out. Sleeping gases, on the other hand, were too unpredictable and could easily be lethal in large concentrations. But the invisible, odorless tranquilizer did cause the victims to lose any energy or ability to move, as if they’d taken a few Valium.
Linda didn’t intend to target any particular part of the Oregon. She was going to flood the whole ship with the gas.
As she typed in the commands, she saw Murph edging back to the weapons console. He was going to launch another missile.
Linda ran over and kneed him in the gut. Although she was little, she packed a punch. The wiry computer genius fell back, but she knew he wouldn’t be down for long. She snatched a power cord from a nearby laptop and hastily tied his wrists to the base of the anchored helm chair.
She ran back over to the console and switched on the dispenser for the tranquilizing gas. It would take a minute to reach its full concentration, so she kept an eye on Murph, who was tearing at the cord with his teeth to little effect.
Linda thought she was in the clear until she stared in shock at the main view screen as another Exocet missile shot from the Oregon’s deck.
