Corsair (Oregon Files 6)

“Chairman,” Mark Murphy said to get Juan’s attention. Murph was the ship’s defenses operator. From his workstation next to the helm, he could unleash the awesome array of weapons built into the former lumber carrier. He could launch torpedoes, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, fire any number of .30 caliber machine guns hidden aboard as well as the radar-guided 20mm Vulcan cannons, the 40mm Orlikon, and the big 120mm gun in its bow redoubt.

Cabrillo looked past Murphy and saw on the screen that the boarding stairs were down and Mohammad Didi was moving toward them.

“ ‘ Come into my web,’ said the spider to the fly.”

FOUR

BAHIRET EL BIBANE, TUNISIA

ALANA DIDN’T MIND THE Sand or THE TREMENDOUS HEAT that blasted out of the desert in unending waves. What got to her were the flies. No matter how much cream she slathered onto her skin or how often she checked her tent’s mosquito netting at night, there seemed to be no relief from the winged devils. After nearly two months on the dig, she couldn’t tell where one welt ended and its neighbor began. To her dismay, the local workers didn’t seem to even notice the biting insects. To make herself feel a little better, she’d tried to think up some discomfort in her native Arizona that these people couldn’t handle but couldn’t come up with anything worse than traffic congestion.

There were eleven Americans and nearly fifty hired laborers on the archaeological dig, all under the leadership of Professor William Galt. Six of the eleven were postdocs like Alana Shepard. The other five were still in grad school at the University of Arizona. Men outnumbered women eight to three, but so far that hadn’t become an issue.

Ostensibly, they were here digging at a Roman site a half mile inland from the Mediterranean. Long believed to be a summer retreat for Claudius Sabinus, the regional governor, the complex of crumbling buildings was turning out to be far more interesting. There appeared to be a large temple of some kind completely unknown before. The buzz around the camp among the archaeologists is that Sabinus was the head of a sect, and, given the time he ruled the area, there was speculation he might have become a Christian.

Professor Bill, as Galt liked to be called, frowned on conjecture, but he couldn’t stop his people from discussing it around meals.

But that was just for cover. Alana and her small team of three were here for something quite different. And while it had an archaeological component, their mission wasn’t about discovering the past but rather saving the future.

So far, things were not going well. Seven weeks of searching had turned up nothing, and she and the others were beginning to think they had been sent on a fool’s errand.

She recalled being excited about the project when she’d first been approached by Christie Valero from the State Department, but the desert had burned away any remaining enthusiasm long ago.

Standing just five foot four, Alana Shepard was often confused for one of her students though she was a year shy of her fortieth birthday. Twice divorced—the first was a big mistake she made when she was eighteen, the second an even bigger mistake she made in her late twenties—she had one son, Josh, who stayed with her mother when Alana was in the field.

Because it was easier to maintain short hair in the desert, her dark bangs were cut across her forehead, and the hair at the back of her head barely covered the nape of her neck. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, but Alana was so petite that she was universally considered cute—a term she professed to hate but secretly loved. She had a double doctorate from the University of Arizona in geology and archaeology, which made her particularly suited to the job, but no number of sheepskins hanging on her office wall in Phoenix would help her find something that wasn’t even there.

She and her team had combed the dried-up riverbed for miles inland without seeing any sort of anomaly. The sandstone canyon carved by the river millions of years ago was as featureless as a utility corridor until it reached what once had been a waterfall.

There had been no need to search farther upstream than that. When the river was flowing two hundred years ago, the falls would have been an insurmountable obstacle.

The sound of a rock drill broke Alana from her reverie. The machine was mounted on the back of a truck and positioned horizontally so it could bore into the cliff face. The diamond-tipped bit chewed through the friable sandstone with ease. Mike Duncan, a geologist from Texas with oil-field experience, manned the controls at the rear corner of the rig. They used the cutter head to probe old landslides to see if they hid any sort of cavern or cave. After more than a hundred such holes, they had nothing to show but a half dozen worn-out bits.

She watched for several minutes, pausing to wipe perspiration from her throat. When forty feet of the drill had been rammed into the ground, Mike killed the diesel engine. Its roar faded until Alana could hear the wind again.

“Nothing,” he spat.

“I still say we should have shot a few more holes in that rock slide about a mile downstream.” This from Greg Chaffee. He was their government minder. Alana suspected CIA but didn’t want to know if she was right. Chaffee had no academic or professional qualifications to be with them, so his opinion was generally ignored. At least he did his share of whatever job she set out for him, and he spoke Arabic like a native.

Emile Bumford was the fourth member of the little group. Bumford was an expert on the Ottoma

n Empire, with a particular focus on the Barbary States. He was a prissy lout, in Alana’s estimation. He refused to leave the camp set up near the Roman ruins, saying that his expertise wasn’t needed until they actually found something.

This was true, but back in Washington, D.C., when they had met Undersecretary Valero, he had boasted of vast field experience, saying he “loved the feel of dirt under his fingernails.” So far, he hadn’t lifted one of those manicured nails to do anything other than constantly straighten the safari jacket he wore as an affectation.

“Another one of your feelings?” Mike asked Chaffee. They shared a common interest in horse racing and trusted their guts with the ponies as much as the information they read in the racing forms.

“Can’t hurt.” Chaffee shrugged.

“Won’t help either,” Alana said a little harsher than she intended. She lowered herself to the ground in the truck’s shadow. “Sorry, that sounded worse than I wanted it to. But the cliffs are too tall and steep there. It wouldn’t have been possible to lead camels down to unload a ship.”

“Are we sure this is even the right old riverbed?” Mike asked. “You don’t find too many large caverns in sandstone. It’s too soft. The roof would collapse before erosion could make it large enough to hide a boat.”

Alana had thought the same thing. They should be looking for limestone, which is perfect for caverns because it was soft enough to erode but tough enough to withstand the aeons. The problem was they hadn’t found anything other than the sandstone and a few basalt outcroppings.

“The Charles Stewart letter was pretty clear as to the location of Al-Jama’s secret base,” she said. “Remember, Henry Lafayette stayed there for two years before the old pirate’s death. Satellite imagery shows this to be the only possible riverbed within a hundred miles of where Lafayette said they lived.”

“Hey, at least it’s on this side of the Libyan border,” Greg added. His blond hair and fair skin made him especially susceptible to the sun, so he wore long sleeves and a big straw hat. His shirts were always stained at the collar and under the arms and had to be washed out every night. “Despite the upcoming summit in Tripoli, I don’t think old Muammar Qaddafi would like us digging around in his backyard.”