Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

Cocooned in a bubble of high-pressure compressed air, the twenty-one-foot torpedo shot from the tube and put nearly twenty yards between itself and its mother ship before the silver-zinc batteries engaged its electric motor. It took just a few seconds for the Test-71 to ramp up to its ope

rational speed of forty knots.

On Mark’s screen he could see the torpedo streaking toward the tanker, tiny filaments representing her wire guidance cables trailing in its wake. For now he let the fish run free, but he had a joystick control for when he needed to steer the weapon.

“Fire two.”

Murph launched the second torpedo, the sound of its discharge ringing through the ship like a hollow cough. After moment he said, “Both torpedoes away and running true.”

“Juan,” Max called, “you’ve got a pair of fish on the way so now’s the time to get out of Dodge.”

“Working on it,” Cabrillo replied.

He was looking up into the storm as George brought the Robinson lower and lower. It was his third attempt to put the chopper on the deck. The shrieking winds had aborted the first two when the helo was still fifty feet above the ship. A gust hit the helicopter and George compensated instantly, crabbing the aircraft to keep pace with the Sidra’s seventeen-knot forward speed.

“Come on, Georgie boy,” Eddie said, lifting his feet to keep the soles from searing. “You can do it.”

The Robinson came lower still, its rotor wash whipping the rain off the deck in a circular pattern. They could see Adams behind the Plexiglas windscreen. His movie star–handsome face was taut with concentration, his eyes unblinking. The skids hovered a tantalizing ten feet above the deck and as the Sidra rose on another swell the gap shrank. Eddie and Juan got into position so they could open the chopper’s rear doors and dive in as quickly as possible.

Adams managed to keep the helicopter exactly on station for nearly fifteen seconds waiting for the tanker to reach the top of the wave. When it started to drop again, he let the Robinson fall the last couple of feet. Cabrillo and Seng whipped open their doors and dove inside headfirst even as the helo bounced back into the sky. Adams twisted the throttle sharply and they lifted away from the supertanker.

“That was one fancy piece of flying,” Juan said, getting himself settled and his safety belt fastened.

“Don’t congratulate me yet. I still have to land on the Oregon,” Adams replied. Then he grinned. “But that was damned smooth if I do say so myself. Oh, just so you know, that crack amidships has gotten bigger. The deck’s starting to split, too.”

“Won’t make much of a difference now,” Juan said and keyed his radio. “Max, we’re away. Where are the torpedoes?”

“Two thousand yards and closing. Call it four minutes to impact.”

The Atlantic was too rough to see the weapons’ tracks as they moved through the water, though the three men in the chopper hovering at eight hundred feet were going to have a spectacular view of their detonation.

“I’ll trigger the Hypertherm ten seconds before impact,” Juan said. “Hitting her on both port and starboard will shear everything below her waterline and the explosives will burn through everything above. The bow will come off like a piece of sliced bread.”

Murph came on the tactical net. “I’ll call out the ranges. At fifty yards go ahead and blow it.”

A tense three minutes passed as Mark guided the torpedoes so they would slam into both sides of the Gulf of Sidra in the exact spots below where Juan and Eddie had laid the Hypertherm. Juan had the remote detonator in his hand, his thumb poised.

“One hundred yards,” Mark reported.

As the torpedoes converged on the tanker they drew closer to the surface, so it was possible to see the faint line of their wakes. Murph was vectoring them in perfectly.

“Seventy-five.”

With his keener vision Adams was the first to spot it. “What the hell is that?” he suddenly shouted.

“What? Where?”

“Movement on the deck.”

Cabrillo saw it then, a tiny figure running from the Gulf of Sidra’s bows. He was wearing a rain suit that was nearly the same shade of red as the tanker’s deck, the perfect camouflage to stalk the maze of pipes in order to reach the bow unseen. “It’s Singer! Look away!”

He mashed the detonator button and turned his head to shield his eyes from the intensity of the burning Hypertherm. When he didn’t see the sun-bright luminescence in his peripheral vision he stared at the ship. The Hypertherm was still in place but hadn’t cooked off.

“Wepps, abort! Abort! Abort!”

Mark Murphy could have triggered the torpedoes to self-destruct but instead he sent a signal to slow the hurtling weapons and used both joysticks to send them diving. On his screen he watched their descent. The angle looked all wrong for them to pass below the tanker’s tremendous draft but there was nothing more he could do. They were close enough now that an autodestruct order would stave in the Sidra’s hull and consign her to a lingering death that would allow her entire load of gel to escape.

“Dive, baby, dive,” Eric Stone said from his station next to Murph’s.