The Emperor's Revenge (Oregon Files 11)

“How is he?” she asked without looking up.

Golov was amused. His daughter seldom asked about anyone’s health besides his. “Why should you care?” She fell into lockstep with him as they walked toward the aft deck.

“I ask purely from a business standpoint. We’ll need our employer coherent when the time comes.”

“He’s responding to the medication as the doctor expected. Nothing to worry about.”

“Good. I mean, what is he? A hundred and fifty?”

“Sixty-eight.”

“Might as well be,” she mumbled.

Golov smiled. He didn’t need to ask her if she thought her old man was over the hill for being in his late forties.

“There was an incident at the Maltese Oceanic Museum yes

terday,” Ivana said. “Did you hear?”

“Yes, some kind of attack. We’ll find out more about that soon enough. What did you find out about Whyvern?”

“Not good. According to police reports, there was a gun battle at Simaku’s castle last night. The Mafia leader was killed, along with more than half his men.”

“And Erion Kula?”

“He wasn’t included in the report, so we have to assume he got away.”

“Do they know who conducted the assault?”

Ivana shook her head. “No one on the strike team was listed as a casualty, and none of them were captured. But the report does indicate that it was a highly sophisticated two-pronged attack. Apparently, they escaped by boat before the coast guard could get there.”

“So we’re not dealing with amateurs.”

“It sounds like these were top-of-the-line pros.”

Golov had mixed feelings about that. He liked to test himself by going up against the best, but he also saw the appeal of a resounding victory against an overmatched opponent.

“What did Whyvern know?”

Ivana grimaced. She didn’t like admitting the fact that Pavel Mitkin had exposed some of her computer files to the world. “Very little. But whoever took him may know about our interest in Napoleon’s Diary.”

The discovery of the diary’s potential sale a month ago, and the worry that it could lead to Napoleon’s treasure, had nearly caused Golov to put off the Dynamo operation. But the plans had been in motion for nearly a year. They might not get another chance, especially if another party acquired the diary and the Jaffa Column and used them to find the spoils of war Napoleon had hauled away from Moscow more than two hundred years before.

His main adversaries in the hunt had been two Dutch brothers named Dijkstra, the owners of a shipping and industrial conglomerate. They had already conducted an operation to steal the Jaffa Column, and they had planned to outbid anyone else for the diary. They were the only others who knew that the diary had a value far outstripping its importance as an historical relic of Napoleon’s captivity.

Thanks to the unique capabilities of Antonovich’s Achilles, the Dijkstras were no longer a threat.

Antonovich had become increasingly paranoid as his wealth grew, and the Achilles was designed to be his unassailable bastion from which he could conduct all his business. As soon as the main construction of the superyacht was completed in an Italian shipyard, it sailed to the Primorskiy Kray Naval Base in Vladivostok. Among elite circles, it was known that, for the right price, the admiral in command would use the naval shipyard’s resources to modify ships with new propulsion and weapons systems under the guise of building spy vessels for the Russian fleet. Antonovich opened his wallet and spared no expense on the project to refit his luxury catamaran.

The diesel engines were replaced with high-output turbines linked to a new propulsion system based on the Russian Shkval torpedo, which used a rocket to propel it through the water. The torpedo could reach velocities of 200 mph underwater because the nose emitted a string of bubbles and the torpedo flew through them.

Although it wasn’t rocket-propelled, the Achilles itself used this technique to achieve straight-line speeds never before seen in a 400-foot-long vessel. Along the length of both catamaran pods were rings below the waterline that pumped out bubbles to surround the hull with air. Instead of mounting the propellers on the stern of the yacht where they would be fouled by the bubbles, they were placed on the front of each catamaran like the engines on a prop-driven airplane, pulling the Achilles to fantastical speeds.

To complement the ability to outpace any warship on the water, the Achilles was equipped with some of the most advanced weapons on the planet, courtesy of a newly revitalized Russian military-industrial complex that was rapidly devising new arms to keep up with the Chinese and Americans.

Defense of the vessel was paramount. To counter underwater threats, the Achilles could deploy mini-torpedoes designed to intercept incoming torpedoes fired from submarines and surface ships. To bring down aircraft and missiles, the yacht had something few other ships could boast: a high-energy laser.

Less costly to fire than million-dollar anti-aircraft missiles, and more accurate than Gatling guns, the 30,000-kilowatt solid-state laser had the power equivalent of six welding lasers used by the automobile industry. It could be fired in a lower-energy state to dazzle homing electronics or in a high-energy state to overheat warheads and fuel tanks of drones, missiles, and airplanes—just like it had when it caused the Dijkstras’ private jet to explode during landing at Gibraltar.