The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

The pier was almost a thousand feet long, half its width shielded by a corrugated-metal roof on an open I-beam framework. Juan wrestled the car down its length. He didn’t look over when Linda tapped him on the shoulder and handed him an object about the size of a water canteen but with a hose and mouthpiece attached to one end. He clamped the mouthpiece between his teeth.

Keeping his foot to the floo

r, he raced them to the edge of the pier. There was no need to shout a warning. Everyone could see what was coming up.

The car hit the end of the dock and shot off into the darkness, arcing nose-first because of the weight of its engine. It hit the water in an explosion of white froth, the impact no worse than any of the others they had been put through tonight. Because all the windows were open and the rear window gone, the car filled quickly with frigid water.

“Wait,” Juan cautioned.

Not until the roof had gone under did he lever himself out his window. He hovered at the passenger’s door, holding on with one hand and helping Tamara out after she had crawled over Linc. It was too dark to see anything, but he gave her hand a squeeze, and she squeezed back. He could feel bubbles from her regulator rise past his face. Her breathing was a bit elevated, but, given the circumstances, so was Juan’s. Remarkable woman, he thought.

The pony bottle contained enough air for just a few minutes, so when the others struggled out of the sinking car Juan led them back under the pier, where a tiny speck of light beckoned.

It was a penlight attached to a pair of scuba tanks with multiple regulators. The tanks themselves were strapped to the top of the Nomad 1000 submersible. Had things gone smoothly, they would have met the minisub a couple miles from shore in the Zodiak, but there was always the contingency that the raid wouldn’t go as planned so Juan had come up with an alternative. He had ordered Mike Trono to waypoint Beta—under the pier where they had tied the inflatable.

As soon as the group of swimmers reached the sub, Juan placed one of the regulators in Tamara’s hand and motioned for her to switch off from the pony bottle. Given her ease in the water, he rightly assumed she’d been diving before. There was just enough light for him to indicate that Linda should cycle through the air lock and into the Nomad with Tamara.

As he waited for his turn, Juan could see flashlights playing across the surface of the water where air continued to escape their dauntless Mitsubishi. He wondered how long before the cops sent in divers, then decided it didn’t mater. They would be long gone.

Ten minutes later, with the sub creeping away with the current, Cabrillo released the inner hatch on the minisub’s cramped air lock and stepped over the coaming. Everyone was lined up on the benches huddled in foil blankets. Tamara and Linda had toweled off their hair and somehow managed to tame it.

“Sorry about that,” Juan said to the professor. “We had hoped it would go a lot smoother. Just bad luck the General showed up when he did.”

“Mr. Cabrillo—”

“Juan, please.”

“All right, Juan. Just so long as you got me away from those”—she paused because the invective she was about to use wasn’t for polite company—“horrible people I wouldn’t have cared if we had to crawl our way over hot coals.”

“They didn’t hurt you?” he asked.

“I was telling Linda that I didn’t give them a reason. I answered everything they asked me. What was the point of holding back information about a five-hundred-year-old ship?”

Juan’s face turned grim. “You probably hadn’t heard, but Argentina annexed the Antarctic Peninsula, and China is backing them. If they can find that shipwreck it will further solidify their territorial rights. This is also a bid for oil, and I’m guessing the reserves are substantial for such a big risk. Once that starts flowing, they can use the revenue to buy up votes in the United Nations. It’ll take some time, but I bet within a couple of years their seizure of the peninsula will be legitimized.”

“I didn’t tell them where the ship sank,” Tamara said. “Because I don’t know. They believed me.”

“There are other ways. I guarantee they’re looking for it as we speak.”

“What are we going to do?”

The question was almost pro forma, asked without really thinking. Just something a person says when faced with an obstacle. But to Juan, it was loaded with meaning. What were they going to do? He’d been wrestling with that since Overholt told him the White House refused to get involved.

This wasn’t their fight. As Max would say, “This dog don’t hunt.”

However, there was his sense of right and wrong. He certainly didn’t feel a responsibility to help out, that was never his motivator. Instead, he was bound by a code of ethics that he would never compromise, and it was telling him the right thing was to get involved—to take the Oregon down into those icy waters and take back what had been stolen.

The rest of his crew was looking at him as expectantly as Tamara Wright. Mark cocked an eyebrow, as if to say “So?”

“I guess we’re going to make sure they don’t find that ship.”

TWENTY-TWO

Welcome to the Crystal Palace, Major. I’m Luis Laretta, the director.”

Jorge Espinoza stepped off the rear ramp of a big C-130 Hercules cargo plane and grasped the man’s outstretched glove. Laretta was so heavily swaddled, it was impossible to see his features or discern his stature.

Espinoza had made the mistake of not lowering his goggles before moving into the frigid air and he could feel the cold trying to solidify his eyeballs. The pain was like the worst migraine imaginable, and he quickly pushed the goggles into place. Behind him his men stood at attention, all of them kitted out for cold-weather combat.