Piranha (Oregon Files 10)

The payload was here, all right, but it wasn’t what the Corporation had been led to expect. The Venezuelans were suspected of shipping Russian technology to the North Koreans.

Instead, Juan counted twenty American Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a dozen of the latest M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks.

They didn’t have time to snap even one photo. Without warning, the tanker’s steel hull reverberated with the sound of a klaxon.

Someone had pulled the alarm.

Like a crocodile lying in wait for its prey, the submarine drifted at periscope depth as the supertanker cruised toward it. Two freighters had already passed by less than a thousand yards away. Few cargo vessels carried active sonar, so the sub remained undetected. As long as Linda Ross kept the Discovery 1000 below the surface, the oncoming 113,000-ton Sorocaima would have no way of knowing it was there.

The Discovery had been on-station for the past four hours since the Oregon had lowered it into the Caribbean fifty miles north of the Venezuelan coast. The shipping lane curved around the island of Nueva Esparta before turning east. The spot was chosen because it was along a well-traveled route for tankers from Puerto La Cruz heading to the Mediterranean.

The mini-sub was large enough to carry eight passengers to a depth of one hundred feet, but it currently held only Linda and the two men playing cards behind her. This would be a quick in and out mission, and more than two men infiltrating the tanker would increase the risk of them being seen.

Linda, a Navy vet who’d served aboard a guided-missile cruiser and as a Pentagon staffer before she was hired by the Corporation to be vice president of operations, was beneath only Juan and Max in the crew hierarchy. Her petite figure, upturned nose, and soft voice had once been a hindrance in her career, preventing her from being taken seriously enough to ever warrant command of her own ship. But she’d earned the respect and trust of everyone on the Oregon, to the point that she was tagged to lead some of its toughest missions. She had a habit of changing her hair color often and tonight her long ponytail was a fiery red.

Linda peered at the monitor showing the feed from the periscope camera. The full moon and starlight enhancement turned night to day, and the outline of an approaching tanker was unmistakable. Though she couldn’t read the name on the side of the ship from this distance, there was no doubt it was their target. The tracking device Linc had planted on the vessel during his visit to Puerto La Cruz pinged strongly. The Sorocaima was right on schedule, only a mile off their stern.

“Here she comes, guys,” she said.

Marion MacDougal “MacD” Lawless and Mike Trono looked up from their cards. The two gundogs, as Max called members of the shore operations team, had been playing gin rummy, and from the Cajun-inflected whoops of triumph she’d been hearing from MacD for the past two hours she guessed he was trouncing Mike.

“It’s just as well,” Mike said, and tossed his hand on the pile. “I was about to find out how this grunt was cheating.”

As VP of operations, Linda knew the files of every crew member backward and forward. Sporting thin brown hair atop a slender frame, Mike had been an elite pararescue jumper for the Air Force, dropping behind enemy lines multiple times in Iraq and Afghanistan to save downed pilots. He left the military and got his kicks racing offshore powerboats before joining the Corporation when he realized the adrenaline surge of real-world operations was the only thing that would do the trick.

“Cheatin’?” MacD retorted in his molasses-thick Louisiana drawl. “Why would Ah have to cheat against a wing nut like you? Ah’m just good.”

“Because that would make life really unfair. You can’t be good at cards and look like an underwear model.”

Linda had to agree with Mike on that. While Mike was cute and lean, former Army Ranger MacD had a physique sculpted in marble and a face fit for a movie star. He was one of the newest members of the crew, and his down-home New Orleans charisma and quick thinking in battle had charmed everyone on the Oregon.

“Now Mike, you and Ah are two sides of the same coin,” MacD said.

“How’s that?”

“Neither of us was stupid enough to become a swabbie.”

They both turned toward Linda, the lone Navy person on the mini-sub, and pointedly stared before laughing heartily. Mike and MacD were the butts of good-natured ribbing on the Oregon for being the only two non–Navy vets on the ship, but now she was the one outnumbered.

She stared back at them stoically but with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s it. I order the both of you to walk the plank.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they said in unison, and started donning their black night gear—sweaters, pants, gloves, boots, and hats. The final touch was black greasepaint smeared on their faces.

While they were preparing for their excursion, Linda engaged the motor and aimed the Discovery directly into the path of the oncoming Sorocaima, which was on its way to the North Korean port of Wonsan.

The tanker held ten million gallons of refined diesel, ready for use by the North Korean Army for almost every vehicle in their arsenal. With fuel embargoed by most other nations and having few refineries of their own, the increasingly belligerent North Koreans depended on regular diesel shipments from Venezuela, whose president was a personal friend of their leader. Without the fuel, the North’s armed forces would grind to a halt.

The Oregon could easily sink a ship of even the Sorocaima’s size with the weapons at its disposal, but the mission was more subtle than that. Not only did the Corporation refuse to sink unarmed vessels but there was no shortage of tankers or Venezuelan oil, so at best the shipment would only be delayed. Instead, Linda, MacD, and Mike were going to ruin the fuel on board the tanker, laying waste to a huge swath of vehicles in the North Korean military.

At the back of Discovery were six thermos-sized canisters, one meant for each hold on the tanker. The canisters were loaded with bacteria developed in secret by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Mutated from a strain of the anaerobic bacteria clostridium and dubbed Corrodium by the biologists who created it, the microbe multiplied easily in diesel, contaminating an entire tank once it was introduced. It was colorless and odorless, so the contamination was undetectable without laboratory testing.

The bacteria changed the composition of the diesel so that it would burn much hotter. When the tainted diesel was ignited in engines, it would cause them to overheat and seize up, resulting in a total loss. Wi

th luck, the Corrodium that they had injected into the holds of the Sorocaima would go on to infect the entire North Korean supply, rendering it unusable and destroying the engines of any vehicles into which the diesel had been loaded.

The hard part was getting the Corrodium into the fuel without being detected. If there was any suspicion that the diesel had been tampered with, the Sorocaima crew would test it and find out the problem long before it reached Wonsan. Once the North Koreans knew about the potential for bacterial infection, they would have every delivery of diesel tested for it. Linda and her team had to get the mission right the first time because there wouldn’t be a second.

The delicacy of the operation was also the reason for conducting it simultaneously with the Chairman’s recon mission. If they were done separately and the initial one in the sequence failed, success with the other operation would be in jeopardy.