As soon as Juan’s boots hit the deck, Max pulled the big freighter away from the stricken frigate and opened the throttles as far as they would go. The warship was also desperately trying to get clear of the maelstrom. Smoke belched from her stack and her props beat the water frantically, and yet she lost more ground with every passing moment.
The Oregon’s revolutionary engines gave her ten times the power, and once water was humming through the tubes her lateral motion checked and she started to pull away. Max even eased back on the controls a touch, never wanting to push his babies harder than he had to.
The Sidra’s hull slammed into the open sluice intake at a perfect broadside. Water continued to rush under her keel, but half the floodwaters were suddenly contained once again. Balanced precariously, with the sea pressing in on the hull so her steel moaned at the strain, the crew could do nothing as the ship that had foiled their perfect plan steamed serenely away.
On the Oregon’s deck, the Corporation operators who’d been blown back by the RPG clustered around the Chairman and his guest. So little time had elapsed since that fateful moment that medical staff hadn’t even arrived, but it looked as if Doc Huxley and her team weren’t going to be busy after all. The injuries appeared minor.
Juan stuck out a hand to formally introduce himself to Fiona. “I want to say it is an honor to meet you. My name’s Cabrillo, Juan Cabrillo. Welcome aboard the Oregon.”
She brushed aside his hands and hugged him tightly, repeating her thanks into his ear over and over again. The thing about adrenaline heightening one’s senses was that it had that effect on all of them, so before Fiona realized how much Juan was enjoying the contact he gently untangled himself from her willowy arms.
“I know you’re a woman of many accomplishments, but I wonder if acting is among them?”
She looked at him askance. “Acting? After what we just went through you’re talking about acting. You call me nuts.”
He slipped an arm around her waist to lead her into the ship’s interior. “Don’t worry, you get to play yourself, and we just practiced the scene I want to reproduce for Ali Ghami.”
“You know?”
“I even know how he got leverage on Qaddafi. His grandson was in Switzerland on vacation when he was killed in a car crash. The crash was staged and the boy kidnapped. If Qaddafi ever wanted to see the kid alive again, he had to make Ghami Foreign Minister, not knowing that he had just made one of the worst terrorists in the world a senior government official and given him access to everything he needed to pull off his little caper.”
“And you?” Fiona asked. “How do you fit in with all of this?”
He gave her a squeeze. “Just lucky, I guess.”
EPILOGUE
THE SENIOR STAFF WAS ASSEMBLED ON THE AFT HELICOPTER pad when George Adams brought Hali Kasim back to the ship from a Tripoli hospital. Hux had a wheelchair standing by, and she turned away from the chopper as it flared in over the Oregon’s fantail.
The skids kissed dead center. Gomez killed the turbines. Everyone rushed forward under the spinning blades to pound on the rear door glass, laughing and aping for Hali as he sat strapped in, a johnny pulled loosely over his heavily bandaged chest. He’d undergone five hours of surgery to repair the damage Assad’s bullet had done to his internal organs and endured a week of hospital food before his doctors would allow him to leave.
But he was the last of them home after what had been perhaps the toughest mission the Corporation had ever undertaken. At dawn, they had rendezvoused with their two wandering lifeboats full of ex-prisoners. The Foreign Minister already had his old job back and was at the conference. Adams had picked up Linda and the others from the desert cave not long afterward. When they had emerged from the cavern, they discovered Professor Emile Bumford bound and gagged at the entrance. The two gundogs who’d gone into the drink during the attack on the Sidra had been picked up, half-drowned, by the rescue Zodiac with nothing worse than flash burns on their hands and faces. Hux and her staff had patched them up, tended Alana’s hands and Eric’s shoulder, and removed what seemed like a pound of stone shrapnel from the group Mark dubbed the “Fantastic Four.”
Alana had remained on the Oregon for just a night. She was anxious to return to Arizona and her son. Unfortunately, without any kind of provenance and with its crystal ruined, no one would risk their career by saying definitively if the necklace she’d found was indeed the fabled Jewel of Jerusalem. The real team of archaeologists who’d been excavating the Roman villa had been sent into the caverns after the pall of smoke had been extracted. The Saqr had been reduced to ashes, and only the gold remained in the side chamber. But it in itself was a numismatist’s wildest dream come true. The gold was mostly in the form of coins from every nation of Europe and every corner of the old Ottoman Empire, stretching back hundreds of years. It was the accumulated hoard of generations of the Al-Jama family, and even the most conservative estimate put the coins’ worth ten times higher than the value of the gold alone.
The delegates at the Tripoli Accords had already declared that the proceeds of the sale of so many perfectly preserved and diverse coins would help fund antipoverty programs across the Muslim world. And that was only the beginning of the sweeping reforms the leaders had on the table.
A half dozen helping hands eased Hali Kasim out of the chopper and into the waiting wheelchair.
“You don’t look so bad to me,” Max said, wiping at his eyes.
“I’m still on pain meds, so I don’t feel so bad either,” Hali replied with a grin.
“Welcome back.” Juan shook his hand. “You sure took one for the team this time.”
“I’ll tell you, Chairman, I don’t know what was worse: getting shot or getting so completely bamboozled. Mossad agent, my brown butt. I just hope he suffered in the end.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Linc said. “Lung shot’s about the worst way to go.”
The bright note about the archaeological finds from the tomb were the three books Alana had managed to save. One was Henry Lafayette’s Bible, which he’d left with his mentor, and another was Suleiman Al-Jama’s personal Koran. The third was a detailed treatise on ways the two great religions could and should coexist if all of the faithful were strong enough to live up to the moral standards set down in the sacred texts. The writing had already been authenticated, and while some of the diehards called it a forgery and a Western trick, others—many, many others—were heeding the Imam turned pirate turned peacenik’s words.
No one kidded themselves, least of all Juan Cabrillo, th
at terrorism was about to end, but he was optimistic that it was on the wane. He’d have no problem with that, even if it meant that the Oregon would head for the breaker’s yard and he would light out for a tropical retirement.
Everyone followed Hali as he was wheeled into the ship except for Max and Juan. They lingered over the fantail next to the Iranian flag their ship sported. Water churned in the big freighter’s wake as she started to get under way again.
Max took out his pipe and jammed it between his teeth. The fantail was too windy and exposed to light it. “Couple pieces of good news for you. A team of NATO commandoes raided the new base Ghami’s people were building in the Sudan. With their leader imprisoned, they put up only token resistance. Not so, however, the ones still in Libya. The last of them tried to storm the prison where he’s being held.”