Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

“Ghost chili?” Max asked mildly.

“Yes,” Cabrillo managed to wheeze with tears streaming from his eyes.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” Hanley breezed, placing a hand on Cabrillo’s shoulder as the Chairman tried to suck air past his tortured tongue, “but this is payback for adding salt and pepper to your meat loaf last night. Chef said it was seasoned perfectly, and if you want his food spicier, he’s more than happy to oblige. Enjoy.”

He sauntered from the op center, leaving the Chairman literally unable to reply.

An hour later, they were over the spot where the charts indicated an obstruction on the seafloor. They lowered the side-scan sonar, a towed array that hovered just above the seabed, and took acoustical pictures of its surroundings. More often than not, the obstruction, whether man-made or natural, was exactly where the charts said it would be, but ocean-floor mapping wasn’t the Oregon’s primary, secondary, or even tertiary mission. As a result, their sonar unit wasn’t up to par when compared to outfits like NOAA or NUMA, and it took time to find the target. In this case, they spent an hour running lanes north and south over a swath of the sea, much like a weekender mowing the lawn. It was this tedious back-and-forth scanning that tested Cabrillo’s patience.

Finally, after their second hour of fruitless search, the display screen showed an object that began reflecting sonar waves back to the array.

Juan felt the initial spike of adrenaline that any hunter does at the first sign of the quarry. It turned to bitter disappointment when the sonar revealed an object at least five hundred feet long and so oddly shaped that it could only be a stone outcropping on the otherwise barren continental shelf.

Another bust, he said to himself. He keyed the intercom. “Eric, to paraphrase Charlie Brown on Halloween, we got a rock. Go ahead and leave the sled deployed, our next target is only five miles away.”

The cable for the towed sonar was much stronger than the ROV’s umbilical, so they could leave it in the water as they transited to the next grid mark, but they would need to keep their speed below fifteen knots so as not to stress it too much.

“Okay.”

“Helm, next target is five miles away on two nineteen.”

“Making my course two nineteen at fifteen knots.”

Mark Murphy strolled out of the elevator wearing a seemingly blood-stained T-shirt with the words “I’m fine” written out over his chest. The young tech genius had his face buried in an iPad as he walked.

“About time,” Juan said. “You were supposed to spell me ten minutes ago.”

“You and I both know you weren’t going to leave the op center until you identified this latest target, so I monitored communications and came up when you pegged it.”

Juan frowned at being so easily read. “All right. I’ll give you this one. Just so you know, the array is still deployed.”

“Hello. Monitored communications. I knew that.”

“You’re in a mood,” Cabrillo remarked.

“Sorry, boss. I’ve been asked to peer-review an article by a friend at UC Berkeley and his conclusions are all wrong, and no matter how I try to help him see his mistakes, he’s just not getting it.”

“He doesn’t like being out-nerded?”

Murph grinned. “Nobody does.”

Juan spent the rest of the day on paperwork, had dinner with Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln, and watched a movie in his cabin before turning in for the night. They’d checked five more targets during Mark’s watch, and, like all the others before, they hadn’t found Tesla’s ship.

They had one more day before heading south for Bermuda. In the great scheme of things, a two-week hiatus guarding the Emir wasn’t a big deal, but Juan felt the specter of time looming over him. Kenin was covering his tracks, first in Kazakhstan, and again with Professor Tennyson. It followed that he would try to destroy Tesla’s experimental ship, if he knew about it, which Juan felt sure the Russian admiral did.

It was little wonder his sleep was restless.

The ringing of his bedside telephone roused him.

“H’lo,” he muttered. Cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello. This is Cabrillo.”

“Chairman, it’s Eric.”

“Yeah, Stoney. What have you got?”

“I think we found her.”

Juan noted it was five o’clock. Weak sunlight spilled around the curtains drawn over his cabin’s portholes.