Corsair (Oregon Files 6)

But nothing happened for long seconds. Of the seven surviving terrorists, only one or two were firing into the cave now. They were waiting us out, Linda thought, knowing the smoke will force us to them, or hoping we die in the fire.

Lying prone to get out of the worst of it, Linda took tiny sips of the fouled air, but each breath seared her lungs. Assad’s men were going to get their wish, she thought grimly. They couldn’t stay here much longer. She looked over at Eric and Mark, her eyes questioning. They seemed to read her mind and both nodded their assent. Linda scrambled to her knees and launched herself onto her feet, her shipmates at her side.

“Let’s go, Sundance,” Mark shouted as they charged into the mouths of the waiting guns.

They sprinted past the burning drapery over the cave’s entrance and made a good five feet and still hadn’t drawn fire. Linda searched for a target in the wavering light of the ship burning in the distance but spotted no one standing to face them. There was a terrorist sprawled on the ground a few paces from her, a neatly drilled hole between his shoulder blades. Then she saw others they had somehow managed to hit. The cavern floor was littered with them. Her headlong rush slackened until she stood stock-still with a total of eight bodies at her feet.

She felt a superstitious tingle run the length of her spine.

One of the men moved weakly, clawing at the sand and gasping for air. Like the first, he’d been hit in the back. Mark kicked the AK out of the man’s reach and rolled him over. Frothy blood from his ruptured lung bubbled from his lips. Linda had never seen Tariq Assad, so she didn’t recognize his distinctive unibrow.

“How?” he gasped.

“Your guess is as good as ours, pal,” Mark told him.

And then over the crackling of the burning Saqr and through the ringing in their ears came a rich melodious baritone singing, “From the hall of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli, / We will fight our country’s battles / In the air, on land and sea.”

“Linc?” Linda cried.

“How you doing, sweet stuff?” He emerged from his cover position with his rifle cocked on his hip and a pair of night vision goggles pulled down around his neck. “Got here as fast as I could, but this bod wasn’t made for running across the damned desert.”

Linda threw her arms around the big man, sobbing into his chest, the depth of determination to face her enemies in a suicidal charge dissolving into profound relief at being alive. Mark and Eric pounded his back, laughing and choking on the smoke at the same time.

“Looks like you guys made a good show for yourselves.” Which, from Linc, was his greatest sign of respect.

Alana staggered from the cave, her torso bare and once-white bra blackened with soot. She was holding a couple of books as gingerly as she could. Their pages smoldered. When one started burning, Mark took it from her, dropped it on the ground, and kicked sand over it to snuff the flames.

“I wanted to save more,” she managed between coughs, “but the smoke. I couldn’t. I did get this, though.”

“What’s that?” Linc asked.

Dangling from a crudely fashioned chain of silver was a small crystal nestled in a rudimentary setting. The piece of jewelry wasn’t particularly attractive; in fact, it looked almost like a child’s attempt at making a Mother’s Day present out of pipe cleaners and paste. But there was something compelling about it beyond its obvious antiquity, an aura as if it were a presence there in the cave with them.

A bullet had shattered the stone, so it lay in its cradle in tiny shards no bigger than grains of sugar, and from it oozed a single claret drop.

“Holy God,” Mark said, dropping to his knees to scoop up the soaked spot of sand. From a shirt pocket, he pulled out a power bar and ripped away its wrapping. He threw the food aside and carefully placed the tiny bit of mud on the paper and twisted it closed. There was a red streak on his palm that mingled with the blood from a deep cut he’d received at some point during the battle.

“When the covers burned away,” Alana explained, “I realized there was a mummy on the bed, placed on his side facing Mecca as a good Muslim should. This was around his neck. Henry Lafayette must have placed Al-Jama like that when the old man died and left him with his greatest treasure. That is the Jewel of Jerusalem, isn’t it? And that was His blood, preserved for two thousand years in a vacuum within that crystal.”

“His blood?” Linc asked. “Who His?”

“Stuffed in that candy wrapper in Mark’s hands may be the blood of Jesus Christ.”

THE TIDAL STATION’S MASSIVE steel gate stretched for more than a hundred feet above the generating plant set in the desert depression. When the facility was operating at full capacity, the gate could be lowered more than thirty feet to allow water to flow into large-diameter pipes down into the long turbine room more than a hundred feet below sea level. With the sun setting rapidly to the west, the gate had been closed and the turbines idled so crews could remove excess salt left over by the sun’s evaporation, the key to the zero-emissions facility.

The missile off the Oregon hit the exposed machinery that operated the gate dead center, blowing apart the hydraulic systems and smashing the gears that acted as a mechanical brake. Even the pressure of the ocean it was designed to withstand couldn’t keep the heavy door pinned in place, and it started to lower on its own accord into a recess built into the artificial dike.

Water spilled over the top of the gate, first in thin erratic sheets tossed by waves lapping against the structure, and then in a solid curtain when it fell below the surface. With less surface exposed to the titanic forces holding back the Mediterranean, the gate accelerated downward. The curtain turned into a gu

sh, and then into a torrent more powerful than the worst levee break on the Mississippi River. Millions of tons of seawater poured though the gap. The pipes to carry the water into the powerhouse were closed, saving the delicate turbines, so the deluge flowed wild and uncontained down the dike into the desert.

Even when the plant wasn’t active, there was a two-mile exclusion zone around the facility for all shipping. It was a rule Max Hanley had gladly ignored. He’d been shepherding the Gulf of Sidra into the exact right position for when the missile hit. Up on the main view screen, he watched the ocean disappearing into the gap on the far side of the frigate, but, more important, he could feel the pull of the current in the way his beloved ship responded to his controls.

The Sidra had sheered away from the Oregon as soon as they were in the gravity-induced vortex, sucked toward the opening as surely as if she’d been aimed at it. Max goosed the directional thrusters and closed the gap, keeping one eye on the camera feed showing where Juan would appear.

“Come on, buddy. We don’t have all day.”

The Chairman suddenly burst through the frigate’s hatchway, holding the hand of Secretary Katamora. Max steepened his angle and closed the gap, so the two ships brushed just enough to scrape a little paint off her hull. Juan was on the Sidra’s railing at that exact moment. He lifted Fiona off the deck and hurled her onto the Oregon, where she fell into the waiting arms of a still-woozy Mike Trono.