The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

The soldier thought for another second, then a look of compassion crossed his face. “All right, go ahead inside. But five minutes, and if Espinoza or Jimenez shows up I’m gong to tell them you’ve been hiding in there since before I came on duty.”

“Five minutes. Promise.”

Juan moved past the guard and walked into the overheated facility. He had to pull back his hood and unzip his parka. Machinery hummed as it processed the natural gas flowing in from the offshore pipes, while, on the other side of the yawning space, the blast furnaces were hard at work keeping the bay from freezing over. Cabrillo was again amazed at the size and complexity of the Argentine facility.

“Max, I’m in. Go for it.”

Juan found one of the main trunk lines for incoming gas. He pulled out a small explosive and set the motion sensor. It wasn’t particularly sensitive, but for what was coming it didn’t need to be.

He turned to go just as four men entered from the vestibule. They had removed their arctic coats, and at once Cabrillo recognized Major Espinoza. With him was the Sergeant who’d been aboard the Oregon and two other NCOs. Juan moved behind a piece of machinery before they spotted him.

“We saw you come in here,” Espinoza shouted above the industrial din. “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Come out now, and I won’t charge you with desertion.”

Cabrillo looked at the bomb, then back at the burly soldiers staying by the door while Espinoza and Sergeant Lugones started fanning out to find him.

“Max,” he whispered urgently. “I might be blown, but don’t stop. You read? I’ll get out somehow.”

“Roger,” Max said tersely, knowing full well that the Chairman was lying about the last part.

HANLEY STARED INTO SPACE for a moment and then forced himself into action. “Mr. Stone, bring us up to five percent, and set some tension on the cable, if you please.”

“Aye.” Eric dialed up the Oregon’s unrivaled engines and moved her forward at a quarter knot.

A tech stationed in the fantail locker where the cable drum was located called out when the line started showing stress.

Even with wind and waves pummeling the ship, Eric didn’t need to be told when she was pulling against her tether. He knew how she responded in almost any circumstance.

/>

“Tension on, Mr. Hanley,” he said with customary op center formality when a mission was under way.

“Okay, steady acceleration. One hundred feet per minute. Don’t jerk the thing, lad.”

“Aye, sir.”

A mile astern of them, the cable looped around the pier and back to the bow of the Admiral Brown became as rigid as a steel girder when the magnetohydrodynamics encountered the cruiser’s deadweight. The forces in play were massive. Imperceptibly at first, the big cruiser started to move, but not so much that her crew thought it was anything other than a swing of the wind pushing against her stern.

One foot became two, then ten. And then she came up hard against her anchor.

Eric kept piling on more power, causing the Oregon’s stern to dig deep as water rocketed through her drive tubes. But the stubborn lynchpin that Juan had so carefully sabotaged refused to give that last fraction of an inch.

One of his welds holding a pad eye popped, increasing the strain on those remaining. The Oregon pulled harder still, and a second pad eye popped off the hull, leaving only six. Metal ground against metal as the stubborn anchor pin struggled to do its job.

It released, and the energy stored in the carbon fiber during that frantic tug-of-war was suddenly discharged. The Admiral Guillermo Brown went from a virtual standstill to six knots, fast enough to knock crewmen to their knees. The captain happened to be on the bridge at this early hour, and he looked up from the report he was perusing. He knew immediately what had happened, while his less experienced crew looked confused.

“Good God, the anchor chain’s snapped. Helm, give me power. All back one third.”

“All back one third, aye.”

With a pair of gas turbine engines capable of a combined twenty thousand shaft horsepower, he felt confident he could best whatever wind was thrown at him. But when he checked the gauge of their speed over the bottom, it wasn’t slowing but rather accelerating.

“Helm, all back one half. Quickly, man!” The dock was only a half mile away, and it looked as though they were headed toward one of the processing plants. In seconds, he realized that the wind was stronger than anything he’d ever experienced. “Full power!”

The Oregon could handle the cruiser’s twenty thousand horses without breaking a sweat. Eric had them up to eighty percent and noted with satisfaction that they were now pulling the Admiral Brown at sixteen knots. Over the distance and the storm, he could hear a klaxon begin to scream out a collision warning.

The cruiser was as helpless as an unmasted schooner as she arrowed straight for the gas plant. Her captain was at a loss to explain it. He’d ordered left full rudder to sheer them away from a direct collision, and the boat responded by simply crabbing sideways in the wind. Fate or destiny was going to slam her where she wanted to go, and to him it seemed the desires of man counted for nothing. A moment before impact, he looked again at their speed over the bottom and was aghast at how wind could push his warship at almost twenty knots.

FOR CABRILLO, THERE WAS NO TIME for subtlety. Whatever happened in this building and the evidence it left behind would be incinerated when the Admiral Brown came barreling through the front wall. He deftly fitted a silencer on his FN Five-seveN and waited until Espinoza and the Sergeant were out of view.