“I don’t understand.”

Cabrillo got to his feet and extended a hand to Alana. “You don’t need to. You just have to trust me.”

AFTER A NIGHT OF moving by moonlight across the valley toward the construction site, gaining access to the facility had been simplicity itself. The guards had orders to keep people in. There was nothing about keeping men dressed like themselves out.

When Juan had been questioned about his presence, as he stood casually in line for breakfast with the other guards after sunrise prayer, he’d replied that he had been sent from the other camp as punishment for failing on the obstacle course. The young man who’d questioned him had judged the answer adequate and said nothing more.

Just like that, Cabrillo was part of the landscape—another Arab in desert fatigues, with half his face hidden by a checkered scarf. He had to be careful. During his tumble down the mountain, he had lost one of his brown contact lenses. The other he washed as best he could in his mouth, but it was ingrained with grit, and every time he blinked it felt like he was scratching his cornea with sandpaper. The eye streamed a constant flow of tears.

He spent the morning wandering the workings, staying close enough to other guards that he didn’t attract anyone’s attention. He quickly grasped that this was a forced-labor camp, and, judging by the prisoners’ condition, it had either been here for a long time or they hadn’t been in the best shape when they arrived. He believed more in the latter than the former, because it didn’t look like a great amount of work had been accomplished.

And that was the point, he realized after a couple of hours.

These people weren’t meant to accomplish anything at all. The holes they had excavated at the bottom of the valley appeared random, with no oversight by a mining engineer. As best he could tell, reopening the facility was make-work, something to keep them tired and hungry and grateful for the meager meals they were given. But whoever sent them here didn’t want them dead. At least not yet.

It made him think about Secretary Katamora and how she, too, currently existed in limbo. Neither dead nor alive, at least by any official designation.

By listening to the other guards, Juan built up a picture of the place, not what it was about—no one talked about that—but who staffed it. He heard Arabic in every accent imaginable, from the worst gutter talk of a Moroccan slum to the urbane polish of a university-educated Saudi. His belief that these were terrorists recruited from the far corners of the Middle East was confirmed by listening to the Babel of inflections and dialects.

At one point during the day, he’d gotten close enough to the command tent to hear who he believed to be the guard captain speaking into either a radio or, most likely, a satellite phone. Juan paused to tie his boot, watched by a guard stationed outside the tent’s sealed flap, and was pretty sure he heard Suleiman Al-Jama’s name. He knew better than to linger and moved away before the guard became suspicious.

It was during the noontime meal that he realized not all of the prisoners were Arabs. He spotted a fair-skinned man with thin blond hair among the detainees. The sun had burned him cruelly. And when one of the guards struck a serving woman, he saw that she, too, wasn’t native to the region. She was petite, with closely cropped bangs peeking out from the headscarf she had been given, and her eyes were a brilliant green. She could have been Turkish, he guessed, but there was a girl-next-door, all-American wholesomeness to her that made him think otherwise.

He had kept an eye on her afterward and was in position when her attacker returned to avenge his humiliation at being dressed down by the guard captain in front of everyone.

Cabrillo was wearing what he dubbed his combat leg, a prosthetic crafted by Kevin Nixon in the Magic Shop with the help of the Oregon’s chief armorer. In its plastic-encased calf had been hidden a wire garrote, which he could have used but wanted to avoid the blood, as well as a compact Kel-Tec .380 pistol. The weapon didn’t have a silencer, so it stayed in his pocket, and he’d resorted to snapping the man’s neck.

“I GUESS I don’t have a choice,” Alana said as she took Juan’s proffered hand.

The shed was far enough away from the rest of the compound that none of the guards could see it directly. They knew what was supposed to be taking place within, so none made an effort to watch it overtly. Juan was able to lead Alana from the building to a low ridge beyond. Once over the ridge, they lay flat against the hot stone and waited, Cabrillo watching the camp for any sign they’d been seen.

Everything appeared to be normal.

After a few minutes, Juan judged it safe to move, and he and his new charge slid down the face of the ridge and started for the open desert, moving away from the distant terrorist training camp and deeper into the barren wastes.

He estimated they had at least an hour before anyone thought to look for the missing guard, and when they performed a head count of male prisoners capable of breaking another man’s neck they would discover everyone accounted for. The confusion would add to the delay if they chose to send out patrols. However, once clear of the camp, he wasn’t worried about pursuit. He’d seen the performance with the escapee during lunch and understood that the guards let the desert do the work for them and waited for the buzzards to lead them to their quarry.

Most likely, they would send out a patrol car in a day or two to search for circling vultures.

By then, he fully expected to be lounging in the copper tub in his cabin aboard the Oregon, with a drink in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. And because he’d lost his sat phone, there would be a blood-soaked bandage on his leg.

TWENTY

A N UNFAMILIAR ALARM WOKE DR. JULIA HUXLEY. HER cabin was located next to her office, with the door perpetually open. The alarm was coming from her computer, and when she glanced over she could see the screen coming to life, a milky glow that spilled across her tidy desk and glinted off the stainless steel arms of her rolling chair.

Julia threw aside her covers, her hands automatically bunching her hair into a ponytail and binding it with the elastic band sitting on her nightstand. In her one major, although secret, feminine conceit, she wore a hand-laced white satin nightgown that clung to her curves like a second skin. If she knew there would be a chance of a middle-of-the-night emergency, usually when the Oregon was gearing up for combat, she slept in an oversized T-shirt, but when things were quiet she had a whole closetful of clingy sleepwear. She’d nearly been found out a couple of times, but with a pair of clean scrubs folded at the foot of her bed she could change in seconds and no one was the wiser.

Julia padded in bare feet across her cabin and plopped herself in front of her computer. By the time she’d flicked on the articulated light clamped to her desk, she knew what the alarm was. One of the biometric tracking chips implanted in all shore operators’ legs had failed. There were several tones the computer generated, depending on the nature of the failure. Most commonly, it was a dying electric charge, but what she heard sent a chill down her spine. The sharp electronic wail meant that either the chip in question had been removed or the owner was dead.

The story was writ across her computer screen.

Juan Cabrillo’s tracking chip was no longer transmitting its location to the constellation of orbiting GPS satellites. She scrolled back to check his movements over the past several hours and saw he had left the general area of the terrorist camp and old mine, striking out to the south at a steady four miles per hour. He’d covered almost twenty-five miles. He had then stopped ten minutes earlier, and, without warning, the chip had ceased functioning.

She reached for the phone to call Max when the alarm stopped. The chip was transmitting once again. Julia typed in a command to run a system diagnostic, noting the Chairman hadn’t moved. The tracking chips were still a new technology, and while they hadn’t had too many problems, she understood they weren’t infallible. According to the system, Cabrillo had either been dead for thirty-eight seconds or the chip had been pulled from his body and then returned to it, recontacting with pumping, oxygenated blood, completing the circuit it needed to transmit.

Just as suddenly as the alarm went silent, it started up again, keening for thirty or so seconds. And then it started dropping in and out, seemingly random.

Blip, beep beep. Blip, beep. Beep, blip, beep. Blip.

Tags: Clive Cussler Oregon Files Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net