Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

“I’ll make you a deal. Once we check out the area where Papa Heinrick saw his metal snakes and determine for ourselves what’s going on, I’ll tell you my whole life story.”

“You’re on.”

They soon crossed Namibia’s twelve-mile territorial border, according to the boat’s GPS and Juan throttled down the engine to take the hydrofoil off plane.

“This old girl drinks fuel at an awful rate when she’s up on her wings,” he explained. “If we’re going to make it out and back we have to keep her to about fifteen knots. I’ll stand the first watch, why don’t you head below? I can’t offer you a bath but we have plenty of water to freshen up and you can get some sleep. I’ll wake you in six hours.”

She lightly brushed her lips against his cheek. “Thank you. For everything.”

TWELVE hours later, they were approaching the region where the metal snakes reportedly lurked. The wind was picking up as a storm swept across the desert and slammed into the moist, cold air above the ocean. Cabrillo wasn’t concerned about weathering a storm in the lifeboat. What bothered him was a reduction in visibility making their search that much more difficult. And to top it off, static electricity building in the atmosphere was playing havoc on the craft’s electronics. He couldn’t get a tone on his sat phone and the radio received nothing but static across all the bands. And the last time he checked the GPS it wasn’t receiving enough signals from the orbiting satellites to properly fix their position. The depth meter was reading zero feet, which was impossible, and even the compass was acting up, slowly revolving in its liquid gimbals as though magnetic north was swirling all around them.

“How bad do you think it’s going to get?” Sloane asked, jerking her chin in the direction of the storm.

“Hard to tell. It doesn’t look like any rain is falling, but that could change.”

Cabrillo settled a pair of binoculars to his eyes and slowly scanned the horizon, timing his movements with the slow undulation of the waves so he had maximum height as he scouted each direction. “Nothing but empty water,” he reported. “I hate to say this but without the GPS I can’t set up a proper search grid, so we’re just blundering around out here.”

“What do you want to do?”

“The wind’s holding steady from due east. I can use it to keep my bearings so we can hold a course. I guess we can search until it gets dark. Hopefully the storm will blow over by dawn and the GPS will come back online.”

By rough estimate, Juan piloted the lifeboat in mile-wide lanes, tracking back and forth across the vast ocean like he was mowing a lawn. The seas built steadily as they searched, so the waves were topping seven feet while the wind freshened, carrying the taste of the desert so far from land.

With each lane searched both became more convinced that everyone had been right about crazy old Papa Heinrick and that his metal snakes were nothing more than a raging bout of the DTs.

When Cabrillo saw a glint of white in the distance he dismissed it as the spume riding atop a wave. But he kept his eye on the spot and when they crested another swell, the speck was still there. He snatched the binoculars from their holder. His sudden movements after so many monotonous hours grabbed Sloane’s attention.

“What is it?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.”

He waited until another surge bore the lifeboat up the face of a wave before putting the glass on the distant glimmer. It took him long seconds to fully comprehend what he was seeing. The scope of it defied belief.

“I will be damned,” he muttered, drawing out each word.

“What?” Sloane cried excitedly.

He handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself.”

As she adjusted the eyepieces to fit to her smaller face, Juan kept an eye on the object. He was trying to judge scale and found it next to impossible. With nothing to compare it to it could easily be a thousand feet long. He wondered how George Adams could have missed it during his aerial reconnaissance of the area.

Then from the white object came an intense burst of light that flashed against the scudding clouds. The range was two kilometers, perhaps a little more, but at a thousand miles per hour the Israeli-made Rafael Spike-MR antitank missile ate the distance so fast it gave Juan just seconds to react.

“Incoming!” he roared.

17

JUAN’S Glock was still secured at the small of his back, so he grabbed the satellite phone in its waterproof bag and tackled Sloane around the waist, throwing them bodily over the rail and into the dark water. They began to swim frantically from the lifeboat, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the impending explosion.

The rocket’s dual electro-optic and infrared seeker stayed homed in on its target as it streaked across the sea, arrowing in on the plume of scorching exhaust from the lifeboat’s engine. It slammed into the hull moments after being launched, punching a hole through the side and detonating just fore of the engine block. Designed to core through a foot of armor, the shaped charge sliced the keel, breaking the lifeboat’s back as debris was blown thirty feet into the air.

The smoking, smoldering ruin folded almost in half as she sank, a gout of steam erupting when the sea made contact with the red-hot engine and manifolds.

The overpressure wave was magnitudes greater than when Cabrillo blew up the truck’s tank back at Walvis Bay and had he not tossed himself and Sloane off the boat they would have been crushed by its force. They floundered in the chaotic waves radiating from the blast site, spitting and sputtering water that they had inadvertently swallowed.

Bicycling his feet to stay afloat, he reached for her to make sure she wasn’t injured.

“Don’t ask me if I’m okay,” she managed to say. “You’ve already asked me that a dozen times since yesterday.”