“We’ll be careful.”
An hour later George radioed back to the Oregon that they had reached their first waypoint on the flight. It was time to clear the Gulf of Sidra of her crew.
“This is the Oregon calling Captain Cassedine.” Max said over the radio.
“This is Cassedine, go ahead Oregon.”
“We are ten miles from your position. Are you prepared to abandon ship?” Max asked.
“I do not want to argue, Captain,” Cassedine replied, “but my radar shows you are nearly thirty miles from us.”
“You’re trusting ra
dar in twenty-foot seas?” Max scoffed. “My radar doesn’t even show you. I’m relying on my GPS and by our estimates you’re ten miles from us.” Hanley rattled off the longitude and latitude numbers of a spot ten miles due east of the Gulf of Sidra. “That is our current location.”
“Ah, yes. I see that you are correct and are within the ten miles.”
“We can come in closer if you’ve made repairs to your rudder.”
“No, we have not, but the supernumerary has volunteered to stay aboard to keep working on it.”
“The rest of you are abandoning him?” Max asked, playing the part of a concerned mariner.
“He is the vessel’s owner and understands the risk,” Cassedine told him.
“Understood,” Max said with mock unease. “After you launch the boat and get clear of the tanker steer a heading of two seventy degrees and transmit a tone on the EPIRB emergency frequency so we can home in on you.”
“A heading of two seventy degrees and a tone on 121.5 megahertz. We will launch in a couple of minutes.”
“Good luck, Captain. May God go with you,” Max said seriously. Even if Cassedine and his crew were knowingly helping Singer, the sailor in him understood the dangers of getting into a lifeboat in this sea state.
A quarter hour later, Hali Kasim put the 121.5 MHz marine distress band on the op center speakers so everyone could hear the high-pitched directional tone.
“Got that, Juan?”
“I hear it. We’re heading in.”
Even flying at five hundred feet they only broke through the clouds when they were less than a mile from the supertanker. At ninety thousand tons heavier than the Oregon she rode the waves much more smoothly with only occasional spray breaking over her blunt bows. They could just make out a tiny yellow speck motoring away from the red-decked behemoth. It was her lifeboat and, like he’d been ordered, Cassedine was heading due west, well away from the Oregon so there would be no chance he could interfere. They could also tell that the tanker was picking up steam again after slowing to send the lifeboat down its rails.
“Check that out,” George said and pointed.
Near the Gulf of Sidra’s stern a jet of fluid arced from her side about eight feet below her rail. It was discharge from her sea-suction intake, a system of pipes and pumps that allowed her to take on or expel ballast water.
Only she wasn’t pumping water. The fluid gushing from the three-foot-diameter hole was thick and viscous, like the oil that had contaminated the bay around the Petromax terminal in Angola. Only this was clear and seemed to spread across the ocean faster than the pump was ejecting it from the ship.
“It’s growing on its own,” Eddie said from the backseat. Next to him were the thick ropes of Hypertherm. “The organics within the gel are contaminating the surrounding water and turning it into goo.”
They circled the supertanker to take a look at that damage on her port side. There was a gash in the hull rising up from her waterline and extending to her railing. As the hull flexed with the waves the rend opened and closed like a vertical mouth. The sea around the tear was coated with a growing skin of gelatin-thick flocculent.
“Where do you want me to drop you?” George asked.
“As close as you can to the bow,” Juan said.
“I don’t want to risk getting doused by spray so it’ll have to be at least a hundred feet back.”
“We won’t have the time to hunt for Singer, so make sure when you come back to grab us you can do it quickly.”
“Trust me, Chairman, I don’t want to hover over anything in this wind one microsecond longer than necessary.”