Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

They flew hard for the sun as it continued to radiate over the skyline. True darkness in this part of the world was at least a half hour away. There was no need to talk about a plan. These men had fought and bled together enough to have an almost telepathic connection with one another. While MacD was the newest team member, he’d more than earned the trust of his teammates.

Gomez had swung them south so they would approach the ship from the rear, its blind spot. And with a shocking suddenness, the dot on the horizon blossomed into the ugly, truncated stern of the car carrier/dry dock, if Cabrillo’s theory was correct. If not, they were about to perform an inadvertent act of piracy on the high seas.

The chopper stayed low until the last possible second. The ship’s stern completely filled their field of vision. Juan studied the rear car ramp. It sure looked legitimate, and the white band he thought was salt was much less convincing in person. He felt a tickle of doubt.

It wasn’t too late to abort the mission.

He pulled down his ski mask.

He stayed with his intuition and said nothing as Adams heaved the chopper over the boxy fantail, its skids clearing the rail by inches. He raced up the length of the ship and threw the helo into a hover just feet from the back of the antennae-studded pilothouse. The men opened their doors and jumped to the deck. No sooner were they clear than Gomez reversed course and quickly sank back over the rear of the ship, where he would await word for extraction.

Juan led the team over the railing that protected the path out to the ship’s stubby flying bridges. He could see inside the bridge. There was a helmsman at a traditional ship’s wheel. An officer and another crewman were heading out to investigate the thunder of the helicopter’s rotors. All the men were Chinese. The officer finally noticed the armed men rushing toward the pilothouse and shouted to his companion. Cabrillo opened fire, deliberately shooting over the men’s heads. The bridge door’s glass inset disintegrated, and heavy slugs ricocheted off the ceiling and peppered the far wall.

MacD dove through the opening, shoulder-rolling up to his knees, and kept his weapon trained on the officer. Eddie came next. He covered the helmsman. Cabrillo was the third man, while Linc remained outside covering their rear.

The third crewman had bolted. Everyone was shouting—the ship’s crew in fear and the Corporation team telling them to drop flat.

Juan went after the third man who had fled the bridge via an open stairwell at the back of the room. Cabrillo made it down a couple of steps before someone started firing up at him. At least one bullet hit his artificial leg with a kick like a mule. He quickly climbed back out of the shooter’s line of sight and sent a flashbang tumbling down to the next deck. He turned away and covered his ears, and still the effects were almost paralyzing.

This time, he put his hands on the shiny railings flanking the steps and slid submariner style down to the top deck. The gunman was fast. He was just vanishing through another door, his hands over his ears. Juan triggered off a couple of rounds but didn’t think he’d hit anything. This told him that the sailor recognized a flashbang and knew how to abate its noise and intense light show. Another crewman was still there in what was the chart room/radio shack. He was seated behind an old marine transceiver, clutching at his head as the grenade continued to echo in his skull. Juan clipped him behind the ear with the Super V and the man’s struggles ceased. He slid down to the floor. MacD would be mopping up after him, so he didn’t waste time cuffing the man.

The shooter was headed someplace, and Cabrillo needed to find out where. But, so far, nothing made him certain he was right about this situation. Armed crewmen were rare but not unheard of. And maybe the guy watched a lot of action movies and recognized the grenade.

The exit led to a corridor lined with doors on one side. These would be cabins for the officers. One door flew open, the occupant no doubt alarmed by the noise. The guy was dressed in boxers, and he too had a weapon. Juan didn’t give him the oppor

tunity to use it. He put a round in each of the Chinese officer’s shoulders. It was enough to take him out of the fight but not enough to kill him. Cabrillo refused to use lethal force until he was positive.

He came to another staircase and used his last flashbang, rushing down even as the thunderbolt reverberated off the ship. He’d seen blood drips on the floor. He’d winged his man, and now the trail would lead him straight to his quarry.

At the bottom of the stairs was another gray metal passageway, with cables and pipes running along the ceiling. The blood looked black in the inadequate lighting, but it was enough to follow. Cabrillo went through the door to his right and stopped short, his mind reeling.

He was wrong. Way wrong.

Ranks upon ranks of sedans were lined up as tidily as cars in an airport’s parking garage. They ran as far as the eye could see. All the colors of the rainbow were represented, and although they were dusty, they shone like jewels in the otherwise dank confines of the legitimate car carrier’s hold. They had hijacked an innocent ship, and Juan had shot two simple sailors. The defeat and guilt were crushing.

He was reaching for his throat mic to tell the others that they had been mistaken when he recognized the decorative badge on all the cars’ hoods. For an instant, he was back in Uzbekistan with old Yusuf, and they were looking at the car in which his brother had died when the ferry he was riding on sank. Like that rusted-out wreck, these cars had the distinctive Viking-ship-silhouette hood badge that Juan had looked up upon his return from the Aral Sea. These were Russian cars. Ladas. And all their tires were flat. The meaning behind this discovery was immediate, and his respect for Russian war planners went up a couple of notches.

Cabrillo started running after the wounded sailor again.

In order for the Soviet stealth ships to be used in case of a war with the United States, they needed to stay close to the carrier battle groups at all times. The carriers were deployed all over the globe, and to shadow them without raising suspicion, the Russians disguised their support ships as car haulers, bolstering this camouflage by going so far as to load them with the iconic Russian car, the ubiquitous Lada. This was in case the ship was ever boarded by customs inspectors. The cars here were dusty and all the tires flat because they’d been locked in the hold since the demise of the Soviet Union. Neither Kenin nor the Chinese had bothered to unload them.

The blood trail led Cabrillo down a spiraling car ramp. He slowed at the bottom to peer out onto this next cargo deck. More Ladas, more flat tires, and so many years in the salt air had covered many of them with lesions of rust. A pistol shot pounded off a fitting next to his head, and a sliver of metal nicked him at the temple. Blood trickled down his jaw. He fired off the rest of his clip, blowing glass and bits of metal into the air, while the shooter crouched behind a Lada wagon. The onslaught was enough to make him break cover and run.

Cabrillo didn’t want to kill the man. He wanted him to keep running and show him how to enter the secret parts of the ship, the ones, like on the Oregon, that customs men never saw. He changed magazines at a run, listening over the comm net to MacD and Eddie coordinate rounding up the rest of the crew.

The shooter descended one more level before making a beeline aft. Juan stayed on him like a scent hound, letting the man get far enough ahead that he didn’t bother taking delaying shots at his pursuer. Finally, Juan saw him come to a door that looked as though it was in the ship’s aft-most bulkhead. They should be directly over the propeller, and Juan should have been able to feel its vibrations through the soles of his boots. He quickly glanced toward the bow.

Cabrillo had an excellent sense of spatiality and knew immediately that the distant gloom of the forward part of the hold was considerably less than the nine-hundred-foot length of the ship. The closet was built into a false wall.

He looked back and could see over the man’s shoulder that it was a storage closet. This was it. The Oregon had the exact same setup. Cabrillo ran, cutting the distance, dodging and weaving around cars, until he accidentally knocked a wing mirror off one of the rustier ones. The noise alerted the gunman. He had been fumbling with something on the closet’s back wall. He whirled and raised his pistol.

Cabrillo already had the Super V tucked hard against his shoulder and cut him down with a quick pull of the trigger that unleashed a half dozen big .45 caliber slugs.

“Eddie, you there?” Juan said. Operational security demanded he not take his eyes off the body, but he knew the gunman was dead.

“Roger.”

“You guys secure?”