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The hijackers twenty feet below them were so preoccupied with their task that they never looked up. Juan gave a signal to Hali that he would take the man on the right while Hali shot the one on the left.
They aimed through the catwalk railing. Juan fired. His dart hit the terrorist in the back of the neck. He turned at the same time that Hali’s dart hit the other one in the back. Within three seconds, they both collapsed to the deck.
Edging around the catwalk, Juan and Hali scanned the rest of the engine room. No one else was there.
They went down the stairs to find the two terrorists huddled on the floor, mumbling to themselves. According to the man in the boat, there should have been two teams planting bombs in the engine room. He couldn’t have been lying, so either he hadn’t understood the plan or he hadn’t been told the truth about it.
While Hali inspected the bomb, Juan spoke to the Indonesians.
“Where are your comrades?” he demanded in Arabic.
Both of them responded in a dialect of Indonesian. Juan was fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and Russian, but Indonesian wasn’t in his wheelhouse. He took out a small tablet computer loaded with translation software, chose Indonesian, and repeated his question.
The tablet spit out the audible translation. After a pause, the men responded, but the tablet flashed an error message.
Language not recognized.
He read it to Hali, who didn’t look up from his examination of the bomb.
“Must be some unusual dialect that the computer can’t interpret.”
“Then we have a problem,” Juan said. “Assuming there’s a bomb at the bow, that still leaves one bomb missing.” He checked his watch. “And now we have just ten minutes left to find it.”
Hali stood. “I think we have a bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I can’t deactivate the bomb. It’s a sophisticated design, and it’s riveted shut, so cutting wires isn’t an option. And if we start typing in random codes in an attempt to disarm it, that might set it off.”
Juan bent over to look at the device. It was far more complicated than a typical pipe bomb, with a transparent polycarbonate casing and a digital keypad. There was no countdown timer on it, just a set of blinking bars, like the battery-strength meter on a cell phone. There were currently four out of five bars left.
“Can we move it?”
“I’m no explosives expert, but I don’t see any mercury switches. I think it’s okay to move, but I’d like a second opinion.”
“We’ll get one soon. You stay here until we know we can move it. I’ll start searching for the other bomb team.” He took one last look at the device and saw it tick down to three blinking bars. “If it goes down to one bar, get out of here, and put the crew on the lifeboat.”
Hali nodded as he warily eyed the bomb. “If you insist.”
As Juan bounded up to the stairs to exit the engine room, he clicked his molar mic. “Linda, we’ve got a more complicated situation than we previously thought.”
Nothing.
“Linda, do you copy?” he repeated.
The silence in Juan’s ear was ominous, but he had to keep his mind on his task to find the third bomb. The team at the Dahar’s bow was three football fields away from him. If they were in trouble, there was nothing he could do to help them.
FIVE
It wasn’t that Linda Ross couldn’t hear Juan. It was that she couldn’t say a word. Even breathing might get her and Eric Stone killed.
The two of them were crouched in the shadow of a huge pipe, staring directly down the barrel of an AK-47. The terrorist with the gun didn’t see them at the moment, but one move—one sound—and he’d realize someone was there and pull the trigger.
Linda was the Vice President of the Corporation and a Navy veteran. She’d seen more combat since joining the Oregon crew than during her entire time in the service, but she still didn’t like having a gun pointed at her.
She was currently kneeling next to Eric beside the oil pumping unit closest to the bow. Neither of them had a clear shot at the man, whose attention had been drawn by the random clank of a metal chain behind them. A collection of pipes shielded his body, making a shot from one of their dart guns iffy at best.
The terrorist swept the area with his assault rifle, and when he was satisfied that he’d heard nothing unusual, he went back inside the shed to his comrade planting the bomb on one of the main release valves.
