Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

“Brace yourselves!”

Juan hit the collision alarm as he saw the wave on both the radar screen in the corner of the big monitor as well as the feed from the stern cameras. The surge stretched from bank to bank. Rearing up more than ten feet and easily traveling at twenty knots, the roiling wall of water bore down on them relentlessly. One of the Swift boats tried to twist away and race ahead of the swell, but was caught midway through its turn. The wave hit the vessel broadside. The patrol craft flipped instantly, tossing men into the maelstrom where they were crushed by the rolling hull of their boat.

Pirogues simply vanished with nothing to mark their passing, and the rebels lining the shore taking potshots at the Oregon fled for high ground as water washed away everything in its path.

Juan took his hands away from the controls a moment before the wave slammed into the Oregon, flexed his fingers like a pianist about to perform an impossible overture, and lightly rested them back on the keys and joystick that would maneuver his ship.

He brought the unclogged drive tube up to twenty percent just as the swell lifted the stern of the Oregon out of the mud. Like being caught in a tsunami the vessel lurched from a dead stop to twenty knots in an instant as a pair of mortar shells exploded in her wake, shots that would have blown through her rear cargo hatches and destroyed the Robinson R44 helicopter stored on a retractable elevator.

Juan scanned engine readouts, pump temperatures, speed over the bottom, speed through the water, and his position and course, his gaze darting from one screen to the next in an unending cycle. The ship was actually making only three knots through the water but was racing down the river at closer to twenty-five, borne onward by the tremendous pressure of water escaping over the Inga Dam.

“Max, tell me the instant that second tube clears,” he called out. “I don’t have enough steerage speed.”

He edged the throttle higher, fighting the current as it tried to slam the Oregon into an island that had reared up in the middle of the channel. His fingers danced over his keyboard. He called up the bow and stern thrusters as needed to keep the ship straight and more or less centered as the dark jungle blurred passed.

They careened around a tight bend in the river, the flow pushing them hard for the opposite shore, where a small cargo ship that had been headed upriver had been pushed into the riverbank, its stern thrust far out into the Congo. Juan slammed on full power to the thrusters, laterally shoving the Oregon as far to starboard as he could. The hull scraped against the coastal freighter with an ear-splitting shriek and then they were clear.

“That’s going to leave a mark,” Eric quipped even though he was awed by Juan’s handling of the vessel. He knew he wouldn’t have made the turn and avoided the ship.

With the river boiling all around them they were swept further downstream, carried along like a leaf in a gutter, barely able to control their course until Juan could eke more power out of her engines. Time and again he had to fight the river to keep the Oregon from grounding or plowing into the riverbank, each escape seemingly closer than the last. They did hit a shoal at one point, the ship decelerating hard as it gouged a furrow through the muddy riverbed. For a moment, Juan feared the freighter would grind to a halt again because the computer had shut off the pulse jet, but the current was strong enough to drag them over, and as soon as the bottom was free the ship picked up speed like a sprinter out of the blocks.

Despite the danger, or maybe because of it, Cabrillo found he was enjoying the challenge. It was a test of his skills and the capabilities of his ship against the vagaries of the raging flood—the epic struggle of man versus nature. He was the type of man who never backed away from anything because he knew his limitations and had yet to meet a situation he didn’t think he could handle. In others this trait would come off as cockiness. In Juan Cabrillo it was simply supreme confidence.

“Scouring action has cleared the second tube,” Max announced. “Just be gentle on her until I get a team into it to check for damage.”

Juan dialed up the second tube and immediately felt his ship respond. She was no longer sluggish coming about and he had to use the thrusters less and less. He checked their speed—twenty-eight knots over the bottom and eight through the water. He had more than enough speed to control the freighter, and now that they’d covered several miles the once-turbulent flow had started to even out. Colonel Abala’s forces were either dead on the river or left far behind and the two choppers he’d stolen had peeled off soon after the wave hit.

“Eric, I think you can take her from here on down to Boma.”

“Aye, Chairman,” Stone replied. “I have the helm.”

Juan sat back in his chair. Max Hanley placed a hand on his shoulder. “Hell of a piece of driving if I say so myself.”

“Thanks. Don’t think I want to do that again anytime soon.”

“I’d love to say we’re out of the woods, but we aren’t. Battery charge is down to thirty percent. Even with the current at our backs we’re going to run out of juice a good ten miles from the sea.”

“Do you have any faith in me at all?” Juan asked, pained. “Weren’t you here when Eric said mean high tide is in…” Juan checked his watch. “An hour and a half? Ocean’s going to run fifteen or twenty miles inland and turn the Congo brackish. Might be like running regular gasoline in a race car engine but there’s enough salinity to spool up the magnetohydrodynamics.”

Max cursed. “Why didn’t I think about that?”

“For the same reason I get paid more than you. I’m smarter, more clever by half, and much better looking.”

“And you wear your humility like a well-tailored suit.” Max then turned serious. “Soon as we get to Boma I’ll get some of my engineers into the tubes, but from what I could tell from the computer I think they’re okay. May not be at hundred percent, but my gut tells me they don’t need to be re-lined.”

Though he carried the title of president within the Corporation and was tasked with a lot of the day-to-day affairs of running a successful company, Max most enjoyed his role as the Oregon’s chief engineer, and her state-of-the-art engines were his pride and joy.

“Thank God.” Replacing the lining of the drive tubes was a multimillion-dollar job. “But I don’t want to be in Boma any longer than necessary. Once we pick up Linc and Eddie I want us in international waters just in case Minister Isaka can’t keep the heat off us for opening their dam,” Juan said.

“Good thinking. We can check the tubes in the open ocean about as easily as tied to a dock.”

“Anything else from the damage reports you’ve gotten?”

“Other than a broken X-ray machine down in medical and Maurice squawking about a whole lot of broken dishes and glassware, we came through okay.” Maurice was the Oregon’s chief steward, the only member of the crew older than Max. Better suited to the Victorian age, Maurice was also the only non-American aboard. He’d served in the British Navy, overseeing the mess on a number of flagships before being cashiered out because of his age. In his year with the Corporation he’d quickly become a crew favorite, throwing the perfect parties for everyone’s birthdays and knowing which delicacies they preferred from the ship’s highly trained cooking staff.

“Tell him to go easy on what he orders this time. When we lost all those dishes racing to save Eddie a few months back Maurice replaced them with Royal Doulton to the tune of six hundred dollars a place setting.”

Max arched an eyebrow. “Quibbling over a few pennies?”