Marauder (Oregon Files 15)

“I don’t understand.”

His eyes flicked to the desk that he was sitting in front of. Sylvia followed his gaze and saw his phone.

“You want me to pick up your phone?” she asked.

She got an affirmative response, and she realized why he wanted her to use it. She picked it up and held it up to his face to unlock it. Then she searched for the word “Morse” on his phone. It didn’t have an internet connection, but she found an application that could translate audible Morse code into letters.

She held it close to Mark’s hand and wrote each letter onto a notepad as it was translated. After a few mistranslations, she finally got it down correctly.

SATELLITE PHONE

“Of course,” she said, feeling stupid for not thinking of it herself. “The satellite phone in your cabin.”

She could make a call with it once she found it in the mess of his room. But who could she trust? The fact that they’d been found out in the middle of the ocean made it possible that the attack was an inside job. But why? What was the purpose?

The one thing she was sure of was that someone had discovered where they were and targeted them specifically. This couldn’t have been a random attack, not when it had been carried out so precisely with such advanced weaponry.

“Who should we call?” she wondered aloud.

Mark began tapping again. When he was done, Sylvia looked at what she’d written and said, “Are you sure?”

Mark nodded.

Although Mark had never mentioned a name to her, there was a man her brother had spoken of reverently on several occasions, so Sylvia had faith in Mark’s judgment to trust him with their lives. She scrolled through the list of contacts on his cell phone until she found the entry, which had just a phone number and one word for the name. It matched the one in Mark’s last message that she had scrawled on the notepad.

CALL CHAIRMAN

NINETEEN

BALI

To meet the tiltrotor at the midship hangar bay, Juan used a transportation option not available on the previous Oregon. A broad corridor ran in an oval loop nearly the length of the ship. The corridor was divided into two halves by a yellow line. One side was dedicated to pedestrians, while the other side was reserved for an electric tram system. Each of the four open-air vehicles was large enough for passengers and cargo, and they were equipped with sensors that prevented them from colliding with anyone who might step into their path. They all moved in the same direction around the oval unless an override command told the vehicles to move in the opposite direction during an emergency.

Juan pressed the CALL button, and he didn’t have to wait long for a tram to arrive. It was already carrying a gurney and two of Julia’s medical staff. He nodded to them and got on. The battery-powered cart accelerated smoothly with a soft whine from its motor and a hum from its rubber tires.

When they stopped next to the hangar bay, all three of them exited the vehicle and entered the large space originally designed as one of the cargo ship holds. Maintenance equipment, fuel hoses, and spare parts were neatly stowed along the periphery. The tiltrotor was resting on the descending helipad platform, its propellers pointed into the sky and lazily winding down. The plane’s clamshell doors were already open, and Linc and Eddie were carrying Oliver Muñoz out through the doorway on the backboard, guided by Julia.

Before it had even finished lowering, Juan jumped onto the helipad and walked over to them. Julia’s scrubs were stained with blood. Muñoz was barely conscious.

“How is he?” Juan asked.

Julia nodded, a positive sign. “It’s good we didn’t wait for the ambulance. He nearly coded on me. He has a tension pneumothorax—basically, a punctured lung—so I had to relieve the pressure with a needle during the flight over. Luckily, Gomez was able to give me a few seconds of gentle flying to do it.” She waved the gurney over as soon as the platform was down.

“What happens now?”

“I get him to the infirmary and put a chest tube in. I’ll give him a CT scan to look at the rest of the damage, but I think he’ll require a cardiothoracic surgeon to remove the shrapnel and maybe put some broken ribs back into place. There are some excellent hospitals on Bali. I’d say the prognosis is good.”

“How long do you need?” Juan asked as they loaded Muñoz onto the stretcher.

“It’ll take me less than an hour to get him stabilized,” Julia said, “assuming I don’t find anything surprising.”

Juan nodded. “We can be at a dock in Denpasar by then.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

Julia and her medical team wheeled Muñoz back to the cart. Juan was confident in Julia’s assessment.

He took out his phone and called Hali.