Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

. She lay against the transom, panting with fear tinged with exhilaration—the same sense of defiance that had put her in the predicament in the first place.

Back aboard the Oregon Juan and Max watched the two small craft coming closer. The Pinguin’s skipper was keeping her on track to race down the starboard side with the yacht actually running a bit further to the right and fast approaching the range where the gunners would have their quarry dead to rights.

“Wait for it,” Max said to no one in particular. Had he been in charge of this situation he would have told Sloane to stand by the radio and given the order to turn himself. Then he realized Juan had been right to let the skipper make the call. He knew his boat’s capabilities and would know when to make the cut.

The Pinguin was thirty yards from the Oregon, so close that the mast camera could no longer track her. The weapons officer switched to the gun camera on the bow thirty caliber.

The little boat was raked with yet another burst of fire from the yacht and had they been further away Juan would have abandoned his plan and blown the luxury craft out of the water with either the thirty caliber or the Gatling gun that was still tracking the target even hidden behind her steel plating.

“Now,” he whispered.

Though Cabrillo hadn’t activated his microphone it was as if the Pinguin’s captain heard him. He cut the wheel hard to the left just fifteen yards from the knife-edge prow of the Oregon, riding up on the swell that curled away from her hull like a surfer catching a wave.

The helmsman on the yacht jerked the wheel as if to follow, then corrected his course when he realized they were going too fast to stay on the Pinguin’s tail. He’d pass the freighter down her starboard side and using his superior speed reach the stern abreast of his target.

“Helm,” Juan said calmly, “on my mark I want bow thrusters to starboard at full power and give me right full rudder. Increase speed to forty knots.” Juan clicked through camera angles until he caught a glimpse of the Pinguin. He had to make sure she didn’t get crushed as he made his turn. He expertly judged speeds and angles, knowing he was risking lives to preserve his ship’s secrets. The yacht was almost in position, the Pinguin almost out of danger, but time had run out.

“Mark.”

With just the click of a few keys and a subtle twist of a joystick, the eleven-thousand-ton ship did something no other vessel its size was capable of. The athwartship thrusters came to life, forcing the Oregon’s bow laterally through the water, fighting the inertia of her own speed and the increased thrust of her magnetohydrodynamic engines as they ramped up even faster.

One second the yacht and the freighter were running parallel if opposite courses, and the next the Oregon had turned forty-five degrees and rather than racing down her long flank, the yacht was headed directly for her bow at a combined closing speed of sixty knots. Like a whale protecting its young, Juan had put his ship between the yacht and the charter boat. He glanced at the screen showing the Pinguin. The Oregon had turned just past her, cutting through her wake and sending her bobbing on the rollers peeling off his ship.

As if racing to cross train tracks ahead of a locomotive, the yacht’s driver tried to beat the surging bow of the Oregon by turning to port and outrunning what he believed to be a relatively slow ship. Had he seen the boil of water erupting under her fantail he would have cut his own engines and prayed he survived the impact with her hull.

The vectors in place were a matter of simple mathematics. The Oregon continued her turn, cutting across the bow of the yacht even as it desperately tried to turn a tighter circle than the freighter.

At the last moment one of the gunmen on the yacht lunged forward to yank back the throttles but the gesture was too little too late.

The gleaming prow of the yacht slammed into the Oregon’s scaly hull a hundred feet from her bow. Fiberglass and aluminum were no match for the old ship’s tough hide and the luxury boat accordioned like a beer can hit with a sledgehammer. Her twin turbo diesels were ripped from their mounts and tore through her hull, shattering the structural ribs that held the boat together. In a burst of glass and plastic shards the vessel’s upper-works came apart as if she’d exploded. The four men who were confident moments earlier that they would complete their mission died instantly, crushed into oblivion by the tremendous force of the crash.

One of her fuel tanks exploded in a rising ball of dirty orange flame that licked the Oregon’s rail as she continued to turn, as unaffected by the impact as if she were a shark being charged by a goldfish. A spreading pool of burning diesel coated the ocean, giving off clouds of greasy smoke that obscured the remains of the yacht in her final moments before she slipped below the waves.

“All stop,” Cabrillo ordered and felt the instant deceleration as the pump jets were disengaged.

“Like swatting flies,” Max said and patted Juan’s shoulder.

“Let’s just hope all that wasn’t to protect a hornet.” He hit his microphone switch. “Oregon calling Pinguin, do you copy?”

“Oregon, this is the Pinguin.” They could almost hear Sloane’s relieved smile over the comm. link. “I don’t know how you did that, but you’ve got three very grateful people here.”

“It would be my pleasure to have you and your shipmates aboard for a late lunch to talk about what just happened.”

“Ah, wait one minute, please, Oregon.”

Juan needed to know what had just occurred and wasn’t going to give her the time to come up with a cover story. “If you don’t accept my invitation I will have no choice but to file a formal report with the maritime authorities at Walvis Bay.”

He had no such intention but Sloane didn’t know that.

“Um, in that case we would love to accept your offer.”

“Very well. My boarding ladder is extended on the port side. A crewman will escort you to the bridge.” Juan looked at Max. “Well, let’s go see what another fine mess I’ve gotten us in, Ollie.”

10

FIGHTING to stay in the warm embrace of unconsciousness, Geoffrey Merrick moaned aloud as the numbing effects of the Tazer shock wore off. His extremities tingled down to his fingers and toes and the spot on his chest where the electrodes had struck burned as if he’d been splashed with acid.

“He is coming around,” a disembodied voice said as if from a great distance away, but Merrick somehow knew the person was close by and it was his own addled brain that had drifted so far.