Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

The effect would have been overwhelming had the Corporation team not expected a double-cross.

A second before Abala shouted his order to attack, Cabrillo and Linc had started running. They were on the two rebels at the base of the gangplank before either had time to bring their weapons to bear. Linc bodily tossed one young soldier into the space between the freighter and the quay as Juan jammed his fingers into the other’s throat just hard enough to make him retch. As the rebel coughed, Juan ripped the AK-47 out of his hands and sank the butt into the soldier’s stomach. He fell into a fetal ball.

Cabrillo swung around and laid down a wall of cover fire as Max and Linc mounted the gangway. Juan stepped onto the sloping ramp and pressed a button under the railing. The five feet of the gangway’s leading edge snapped sharply upward. With its solid sides, and now with the tip elevated ninety degrees, the three men were shielded by the withering return fire from Abala’s men. Bullets whizzed over their heads, smacking into the side of the freighter and ricocheting off the metal skin of the gangway as the trio huddled safely in their armored cocoon.

“Like we wouldn’t see this coming,” Max said casually over the riotous din.

An operator inside the ship worked the controls of the gangplank and it lifted off the dock, allowing the men to dash into the ship’s superstructure. All pretenses aside, Juan took immediate control. He slapped the button on a wall-mounted intercom. “Sit rep, Mr. Murphy.”

Deep inside the freighter, Mark Murphy, chief weapons operator, was watching a monitor showing video from a camera mounted on one of the ship’s five cranes.

“With the gangway up, only a couple of guys are still firing. I think Abala is trying to organize an assault. He’s rallied about a hundred of them and is giving them their orders.”

“What about the container?”

“The men almost have the lines off it. Hold it. Yeah, they got it. We’re free of it.”

“Tell Mr. Stone to prepare to get us out of here.”

“Ah, Chairman?” Murphy said hesitantly. “We’re still tied to the dock bollards.”

Cabrillo fingered a trickle of blood from where a fleck of paint kicked free by a bullet had nicked his ear. “Tear ’em out. I’m on my way.”

While their ship looked right at home up against the disintegrating dock, she hid a secret of which only a few outside the crew was aware. Her rust-streaked hull with its mismatched paint, dilapidated derricks, stained deck, and generally grimy appearance was nothing but stage dressing

to disguise the vessel’s true capabilities. She was a privately funded spy ship owned by the Corporation and headed by Juan Cabrillo. The Oregon was his brainchild and his one true love.

Under her scabrous hide she bristled with some of the most advanced weapon systems on the planet—cruise missiles and torpedoes bought from a crooked Russian admiral, 30 mm Gatling guns, and a 120 mm cannon that employed the same targeting technology as an M1A2 Abrams tank, as well as servo-controlled .30-caliber machine guns to fend off boarders. All the weapons were mounted behind deck plates along the hull or disguised as junk littering her deck. The remotely operated .30 calibers were hidden in rusted barrels placed strategically along the ship’s rail. On command the lids lifted off and the weapons emerged, aided by low-light and infrared cameras.

Several decks below the ship’s bridge, where Cabrillo and Lincoln had stood when the Oregon docked, was the operations center, the brain of the vessel. From there, her crew of retired U.S. military and CIA operatives ran the entire ship, from her engines and dynamic positioning system to all her weapons. They also possessed a suite of radar and sonar gear that was among the best a considerable amount of money could buy.

It was from the op center that the Oregon’s preeminent helmsman, Eric Stone, had actually docked the vessel, using athwartship bow and stern thrusters and input from the global positioning system, all linked to a supercomputer that gauged wind speed, currents, and a dozen other factors. It was this computer that employed the exact amount of reverse thrust required to keep the Oregon in position against the flow of the Congo River.

Cabrillo and Max stepped into a utility closet that reeked of turpentine while Linc headed off to meet with Eddie Seng and the rest of the shore operations specialists in case they were needed to keep the rebels from gaining the deck. Juan spun the handles for the slop sink like the dials of a safe and the closet’s back wall opened to reveal a hallway beyond.

Unlike the cheap linoleum and peeling paint of the bridge and other sections of the superstructure, this secret interior passage was well lit, with rich mahogany paneling and plush carpets. An original Winslow painting of a whaling ship hung from a wall and a glass-encased sixteenth-century suit of armor complete with sword and mace stood at the end of the hallway.

They strode past countless cabin doors until reaching the operations center at the heart of the freighter. It was as high-tech as NASA’s mission control, with computer work stations and a wall dominated by an enormous flat panel display currently showing the chaotic scene along the pier. Mark Murphy and Eric Stone sat at the forward work stations directly below the wall monitor while Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications specialist, was to the right. Along the back wall stood a pair of damage controllers monitoring the ship’s integrated safety systems and a bank of computers where Max Hanley could watch over the Oregon’s revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines.

It was no mistake that the op center had the feel of the bridge of television’s starship Enterprise, right down to the large seat set in the middle of the room. Juan sat in what the crew called “The Kirk Chair,” looped a pin microphone over his ear, and adjusted his own small computer display.

“I’ve got a pair of inbounds,” Hali said, his dark features made a ghastly green by his radar scope. “They must have been flying nap of the earth, suggesting choppers. ETA four minutes.”

“There are no known reports that Makambo has helicopters,” Mark Murphy said, turning to the chairman. “But Hali just got a bulletin about a pair of choppers stolen from an oil exploration company. Details are sketchy but it reads like the company’s pilots were hijacked.”

Juan nodded, not sure what to make of this development.

“I’ve got movement behind us,” Eric Stone called out. He’d switched his personal view screen to show the view from a stern-mounted camera.

A pair of patrol boats had rounded a bend in the river. Lights atop their pilothouses made it difficult to tell how they were armed, but Mark Murphy at the weapons station called up a database of Congolese military craft.

“They’re American-built Swift boats.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Max said. He’d served aboard Swift boats for two tours in Vietnam.

Murph continued as if Hanley hadn’t spoken. “Displaces twelve tons, has a crew of twelve, and comes armed with six fifty-caliber machine guns. Top speed is twenty-five knots. Note here says that Congo’s riverine forces have also added mortars and they might be carrying shoulder-fired missiles.”

With the situation worsening by the second, Cabrillo made his decisions. “Hali, get me Benjamin Isaka.” Isaka was their contact in the government. “Tell him that elements of his military might have found out about our mission and don’t realize we’re on their side. Or that two of his Swift boats have been taken by Makambo’s men. Eric, get us the hell out of here. Murph, keep an eye on, well, everything, but do not fire without my say-so. If we give away our capabilities, Abala’s going to know he’s being set up and will leave the guns where they are. Speaking of that. Hali?”