Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

Juan grinned. “Me too.”

By being patient and cycling air back into the bilge space, it took forty minutes for the last group, including Linda, Vogel, and the Emir, who had insisted despite everyone’s entreaties not to wait, to emerge from the bowels of the ship. Max dogged down the hatch while the last survivors picked themselves up.

Dullah shook Juan’s hand again. “Now we are, as you say, out of the forest?”

“Close enough, my friend, close enough.”

In an idealized, fictional world, the Oregon would have been over the horizon as soon as the passengers were rescued and on their way in pursuit of the stealth ship. But this was reality. And the reality was that the Atlantic is considered “our pond” by both the U.S. Navy and by the Coast Guard.

No more than a minute after the Emir crawled out of the bilge, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter painted in the Coastie’s traditional orange-and-white thundered over the hulk at fifty feet, filling the already-

stormy air with water kicked up by the rotor wash.

Juan had known this was coming and had already shut down the Oregon’s military-grade radar suite and had been tracking the inbound bird on the far weaker civilian equipment. If the chopper didn’t have the gear to detect the differences, the cutter streaming in after her surely would, and that would raise questions the Chairman didn’t want to answer. Another question he wanted to avoid was how a ship that had been seen loitering off Philadelphia had gotten this far south so quickly.

Max’s latest invention would take care of that. He had recently replaced the steel plating on the Oregon’s fantail, where the ship’s name is traditionally emblazoned, with a highly sophisticated variable electromagnet microgrid. A computer controlled which of the tiny magnets that made up the array were energized. In this way, when a mist of iron filings was sprayed onto the plates by a retractable nozzle, any name Hanley devised would be spelled out. When he cut power, the old name and flag nation—in this case, Wanderstar, out of Panama—blew away on the wind. He’d typed in a new name, for which they had all the proper documentation, into the system and activated the nozzle. The magnets attracted the minute filings and spelled out Xanadu, from Cyprus, while the excess metal fell into the Atlantic. The system was so precise that from even a few feet away, it looked like paint that was flaking off in places, in keeping with the general shabbiness of the rest of the ship.

In the past, it took the crew up to thirty minutes to change the ship’s name. Now it took less than ten seconds.

Cabrillo fished an encrypted walkie-talkie from his back pocket when the Coast Guard chopper had backed off to assess the situation. “Talk to me, Max.”

“That bird’s off the cutter James Patke out of Norfolk. She should be here in about a half hour. The Oregon’s now the Xanadu. Eric’s up in the wheelhouse making the changes, both there and in the captain’s cabin, should they want to board us.”

“I’ll need my Captain Ramon Esteban ID,” Juan said. It was the identification that went with their Cypriot disguise.

“Stoney’s putting it in the desk in your cabin.”

“We’d better make this look good. Lower one of the life rafts as if we planned on taking the survivors with us. Then jam up the davit controls so the Coasties will have to take them off our hands.”

“Already ordered,” Max shot back, then added with mild rebuke, “Do you think this is my first time at this?”

“No. But it is our first time dealing with the U.S. Coast Guard and not some Third World facsimile more interested in bribes than rescue.”

“Roger that. We’ll be all right.”

The Coast Guard chopper approached again, this time with its side door racked open and a rescue diver seated with his legs dangling into space. When they were one hundred yards off the port beam of the wallowing derelict, and at an altitude of thirty feet, the diver slid from his perch and dropped like an arrow into the churning ocean. The helo immediately swept farther away to make the swim easier for their man. Max and his team took this opportunity to remove the hydraulic ram they’d installed and surreptitiously dump it overboard. With the air hose already retracted aboard the Oregon, this was the last bit of evidence that the rescue had been far more complicated than they were about to admit.

The diver reached the side of the Sakir, and Juan was there to give him a hand out of the water.

“Master Chief Warren Davies,” the man said as he pulled off his fins and attached them to a belt slung around his wet suit.

“Captain Ramon Esteban.”

“What’s the situation, Captain?”

“This is a luxury boat,” Juan said with a melodious Spanish accent. “I think it was hit by a rogue wave and obviously capsized. We were on our way to Nassau when we spotted the wreck. Two men had been thrown into the water, but we found them on the hulk. They told us that they heard banging from inside the hull. We used a torch from our ship to cut our way in and found all these people. We were about to move them into one of our lifeboats, but we are having trouble with the davit controls.”

Juan pointed to the Oregon. Her portside lifeboat hung halfway down her side, but was angled with its stern pointed toward the water and its bow skyward. A couple of deckhands appeared to be working on the controls.

“That shouldn’t be a problem so long as this tub stays afloat,” Davies said. “Our cutter will be here soon. What about injuries?”

“We are assessing that now. You have medical training?”

“Tons. Let’s go check on the survivors.”

For the next half hour, Cabrillo played the part of concerned captain, all the while knowing his quarry was getting farther and farther away. Via walkie-talkie he got regular updates from Max, but idling in the area was driving him nuts. Finally, the James Patke appeared out of the curtains of rain sweeping the ship. She was a sleek, modern ship with a hunter’s sharp lines. Her five-inch deck gun was mounted in a stealthy angular turret unlike the old domes of past generations. She could easily have passed for a Navy warship except for her white hull and blazing orange stripe. No sooner had she hoved to than two inflatables were launched off her stern deck and were shooting across the intervening distance ahead of rooster tails of churned water.

They quickly beached themselves on the Sakir’s slowly sinking hull—air was escaping from the bilge through the hole they had drilled—and since there was no place to tie them off, one sailor was detailed to hold their painter lines. The men aboard were medical personnel burdened with hard cases of gear, a couple of able seamen, and an officer who approached Cabrillo with an outstretched hand. “Commander Bill Taggard.”