Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

For perhaps the tenth time, he lifted the door slightly higher onto his shoulders so it would skip over the mound of debris accumulating at its base as he was dragging it along. Juan decided to shift position, lowering the door so that it glided easier across the sand but more than doubling the strain on his arms, legs, and back. His teeth ached from clenching his jaw so tightly, but he somehow managed to quicken his pace.

Sensing that his quarry was escaping after all, the sniper fired off a wild volley of shots on the fly, triggering his semiautomatic as fast as he could cycle it. Several rounds hit the door, but most peppered the ground to either side of the Chairman.

Like any race, the last leg was the hardest fought, and both men were pushing with their all. Cabrillo gave a primal shout as he towed the heavy door, his legs pistoning against the stony ground. He looked again and saw the prow of the fishing boat was a tantalizing five yards away.

He let the door drop to the ground and started sprinting. The sniper was forty yards back and running flat out and was caught off guard by Cabrillo’s sudden change in tactics. He didn’t have the time to bring his rifle up, so he fired from the hip just as Juan lunged out of view around the boat’s bow.

Juan felt a wasp sting of pain on his neck as the hastily fired shot hit the steel hull just as he crossed around it, and he was stung by flecks of dislodged metal. The truck was just a dozen paces away.

He launched himself over the UAZ’s hood just seconds before the sniper reached the boat and fired at him again. The driver’s-side window shattered. Juan hit the ground on the far side of the truck, rolled to his feet, and reached through the open passenger window, his eyes now on the gunman for the first time since the battle began. The man wore khakis from head to toe, but not the clothes of a native Uzbek or Kazakh. He looked like he’d stepped from a Beretta clothing catalog.

The man stopped less than twenty feet away and started swinging his rifle up to his shoulder for the kill shot.

Cabrillo’s hand found the familiar shape of Yusuf’s old AK-47, the weapon he insisted they bring along because smugglers used the old seabed to carry contraband into and out of the country. He pulled it out of the passenger footwell enough so that he could swing the barrel toward the sniper.

The stock of the sniper’s rifle was just six inches and a half second away from the optimum firing position when Cabrillo found the safety and trigger and loosened a twenty-round burst through the shattered driver’s window. Several of the shots never made it out of the SUV, but enough did, and his spray and pray worked.

The sniper shook as if he’d grasped a live electrical cable when eight of the erratically fired bullets raked his body from hip to head. Juan didn’t have the strength to stop the AK barrel’s inevitable rise on auto, and his last shots punctured the UAZ’s roof. He finally willed his finger off the trigger as the gunman collapsed in the sand.

He let the AK drop from his hand and he sagged to the ground, his back leaning against the truck. He gulped lungfuls of air. He had no concern about the sniper miraculously coming to get him. This wasn’t a movie. The man was clearly dead. Still, Juan gave himself only ninety seconds before levering himself back to his feet.

He rounded the SUV and then staggered to the sniper. Like his clothes, the sniper didn’t have the facial features of a native. He looked—

The explosion knocked Cabrillo off his feet, and the concussive wave blew rust scale off the old fishing boat as if it had been hit with a hurricane-force wind. The sound echoed and rolled across the desert like thunder, and, seconds later, bits of rock and stone and steel rained from the sky. Cabrillo lay on the ground, his hands clamped behind his head to protect it until the hail of debris stopped and just dust and smoke drifted over him.

He stayed on his hands and knees and crawled o

ver to the fishing boat and looked beyond. The prow of the eerie ship was simply gone. All that remained was a smoking hole in the desert floor, a crater the size of an Olympic pool. Thermite, he thought. The sniper had used thermite and a timed detonator to do this much damage. Juan realized now that the largest piece of the ship remaining was the door he himself had used.

He went to it now and gave it an affectionate pat. “Didn’t know I was saving you while you were saving me.”

It was only then he noticed the small brass plate that had been affixed near the door’s lower side. He hadn’t seen it when he was unpinning the hinges because the passageway was so dark, and the inside of the door had faced the sniper the entire time he’d used it as a shield. He had to wipe away a smudge of dirt to read what had been etched on the old identification tag.

Stamped into the little piece of brass were just a couple of words. It would be days before he understood the implications of what he read, and a few weeks for the ramifications to be felt, but in those first few seconds all he had to go on was his own confusion.

C. KRAFT & SONS SHIPYARD

ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA

Manhattan had once been ringed by piers, like spokes projecting from the axle of a bicycle tire, and nearly every inch of the island’s coast was given over to maritime commerce. The advent of containerization and the booming value of the city’s property had closed all but a few anchorages, and those were reserved mostly for cruise ships. So for the Oregon, there was no triumphant trip up the East or Hudson rivers to dock before the most famous skyline in the world.

Instead, after passing under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, she found herself berthed in Newark, New Jersey, amid acres of metal containers and rows of cars that had been off-loaded from the factories of Europe. By today’s commercial standards, she was a wilting flower amid oceangoing behemoths. At 550 feet, she was dwarfed by the panamax and super panamax ships that lined the docks, and her appearance was that of a hag next to a group of beauty queens.

Her hull was a mismatch of paint colors that was peeling so badly it looked like the ship had some hideous skin condition. Her decks were littered with trash and old machinery that no longer worked. She had a central superstructure, with a large funnel, just aft of amidships. Bridge wings thrust out port and starboard from it. The pilothouse’s glass was filthy with dried salt, and one small pane had been patched over with a piece of delaminating plywood. Three cranes serviced her forward six cargo hatches while another pair of cranes aft could load and unload her remaining two holds. There was just a trace of champagne-glass grace to her fantail, while her bow was a blunt blade that looked as if it fought the sea more than thrust it aside. From outward appearances, she looked like an old tramp steamer that should have been scrapped many years ago.

As Cabrillo made his way across the quay following a taxi ride from JFK, he couldn’t imagine a more beautiful vessel in the world. He knew that her dilapidation was artful window dressing, a ruse that gave her such anonymity that she went unnoticed in any of the Third World ports she frequently called upon.

The Oregon’s papers were in order, and a customs inspection turned up nothing suspicious. Her bills of lading said she was carrying rolls of paper from Germany to various ports in the Caribbean, and when the hatches were popped, the inspectors did see the curving tops of enormous paper drums, each weighing more than eight tons.

Of course, the paper drums, like the ship’s rough façade, was just that: a façade. The rolls were only a foot thick and covered over the top of the hold like the false bottom of a spy’s briefcase and weighed less than a thousand pounds.

He climbed up the ship’s gangplank and looked aft, as was his ritual. The ship normally flew the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran, one more ruse on top of all the others, and it was his tradition to give it the one-fingered salute. To make their stay here less problematic, the Oregon carried Panamanian registry, and that nation’s quartered and starred white, blue, and red standard hung from the jackstaff.

The interior of the ship’s superstructure matched that of her exterior, with gloomy passages, peeling paint, and enough dust to fill a child’s sandbox. The floors were mostly bare metal or cheap vinyl tiles. Only the captain’s cabin had carpet, but this was an indoor/outdoor variety that was about as plush as burlap. Secreted throughout the accommodations block were doors that led to the hidden and much more opulent spaces where the crew actually lived and worked.

Juan went to one such door, passing through the grease-laden galley and seedy mess area. The secret door opened using a retinal scanner hidden in the belly button of a bikini-clad beauty adorning a travel poster plastered to the wall with other cheap decorations that would be seen to amuse a crew of misogynist seamen.

As the door slid open seamlessly, Juan entered the luxurious interior of the Oregon proper. Here, the carpets were plush, the lighting discreet and pleasing, and the artwork the labor of some of the world’s masters. This was the secret her outer disguises masked—this, and the fact that the ship was armed to the teeth.