Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

Cabrillo had his own helmet on and spoke. “Have you seen the video?”

“Hali just showed it to me. You go get her, Juan.”

They would have reacted just the same had Linda not been on the Sakir, but her presence there made this rescue especially poignant.

“Don’t you worry about that. Anything on the radar plot?”

“Nothing to be concerned with.”

“Keep an eye out. Kenin had to use either a ship or another submarine to pull that off. Ping active as you follow us, and watch for surface contacts. You know about L’Enfant?” Juan asked.

“Hali told me the little rat sold us out.”

“True, but he didn’t spill that we could track Kenin’s sub and had the capability to sink it. I don’t think Kenin knows we have a chopper or that the Oregon’s the fastest ship in the world for her size.”

“Good point.”

“Kenin underestimated us once. Let’s pray he does it again.”

“Understood. We’ll keep an eye out.”

“We’ll do the same.”

The crew never wished one another luck before a mission, so Max repeated his earlier plaint. “You bring her back.”

“Roger.”

Juan curled his fingers in frustration while they waited for temperatures in the single turbine to reach the correct levels. Only then did Adams engage the transmission, and the rotor began to turn, lazily, at first, and then it vanished in a blur of motion. At the tail of the craft, rather than a second, smaller rotor, the chopper vented its exhaust through ducted ports for gyroscopic stability.

“Max,” Adams radioed, “how we looking on winds across the deck?”

“You’re clear,” Hanley replied.

“Then we’re out of here.” He applied more power and eased up on the collective so that the angle of the rotor blades changed and they began to bite into the air.

The chopper lifted from the deck and barely cleared the fantail railing while the Oregon pulled away from under it. They adopted a nose-down attitude to pick up some speed and then rose steadily into the sky. Occasional patters of rain pelted the windshield as they clawed their way up to a thousand feet and continued to accelerate southward.

“You did the calculations, right?” Juan asked.

“Yes. I put us over the target with fumes left in the tank if we maintain a speed of one hundred thirty knots.” Gomez glanced over his shoulder to look at Cabrillo for a second. “Not to be the Negative Nelly of the group, but what happens if the yacht isn’t there anymore?”

“We ditch and wait for the Oregon in this life raft here, and when we’re saved, I deduct the price of the chopper

from your stake in the Corporation.”

“I can follow you on the first two, but number three doesn’t seem too fair to me.”

“He’s pulling your leg,” Linc said. “Otherwise, he’d have to deduct the cost of replacing the Nomad from his own share. Eddie told me the emergency ascent was the Chairman’s idea.”

Juan grinned, thankful for the banter to keep him from dwelling on Linda’s predicament. “How’s this. If we ditch, we’ll call it square.”

“Sounds good.”

Linc spent most of the flight studying the ocean through a pair of powerful binoculars that even his massive hands could barely fit around. He would watch individual ships plying the Atlantic seaboard until he was certain they were no threat. Then something caught his eye, and he kept watching it far longer than any other target. He finally passed the binoculars over his shoulder and pointed to a spot about forty degrees off their route. “Juan, what do you make of that?”

Cabrillo adjusted the glasses and looked to where Linc indicated. He thumbed the focus wheel until the image became clear. He saw a ship’s wake where it was widening and flattening into the choppy sea. He followed its trail, but it vanished before he saw the ship making it. Confused, he scanned again. The wake was a white-foaming wedge on the ocean’s surface culminating in absolutely nothing at all and yet its leading edge continued to move away from them.

The impossibility of what he was witnessing dulled his cognitive reasoning, and he continued to stare without comprehension or the ability to accept the reality of it.