The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

Linc cursed, and brought his assault rifle to his shoulder.

He couldn’t see what the driver was doing because of the glare of its headlamp, but the crack of a shot carried over the engine’s beat. The shot went wild because the snowmobile was racing over rough terrain. The snowmobile was almost on them. Linc fumbled in his oversized mittens to flick off the safety, and when he realized he wouldn’t have time he lurched to his feet and swung the rifle like a baseball bat.

The gun hit the driver in the neck, and the kinetic energy of his forward motion coming against Linc’s tremendous strength ripped him off the back of the machine and sent him sprawling across the ice.

Without its driver, the snowmobile’s engine automatically cut out when the safety key, which was tethered to the man’s wrist, was ripped from the dash

. It rolled onward for a few feet and came to a stop, its headlight reflecting flakes of snow drifting on the wind.

Linda ran to the downed Argentine. He lay completely still. She peeled off his helmet. The way his head flopped when she did it told her his neck had been broken by the brutal impact. She stood.

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

“Him, her, us,” Linc said with a career soldier’s fatalism.

He lifted the body and brought it closer to the snowmobile. He set the corpse gently on the ice and took hold of the handlebars. Bracing his legs, he flexed his muscles and threw the five-hundred-pound machine on its side as if it were no more than a toy. He adjusted the body to fit what would look like a tragic accident.

“Wish we could take it and ride it back to the snowcat,” Linda said, although she knew they couldn’t.

“Walk will do you good,” Franklin Lincoln grinned.

“First, I need meat on my bones, and now you say I need exercise. Which one is it?”

Linc knew that answering that was a trap, even if she was teasing, so he wisely said nothing and continued the long slog to Murph and their warm ride back to Wilson/George.

SIXTEEN

In Bremerton, Washington, the only requirement Juan and Max had for their hotel was that it have an Internet connection because Cabrillo wanted to transmit the pictures he’d taken in the pit to Eddie Seng aboard the Oregon and get a translation as quickly as possible.

By the time they’d finished stuffing themselves on Wallapa Bay oysters and Dungeness crab at a nearby restaurant, Eddie had a preliminary report for them.

Seng was another former CIA agent and had been with the Corporation almost since its inception. Ironically, though they had served at the same time, he and Cabrillo had never met in the halls of Langley. Born in New York’s Chinatown, Eddie was fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

He regarded the world through heavy-lidded dark eyes, and in them Juan could see Eddie had discovered something interesting. Behind the Corporation’s chief of shore operations, Juan could see the back of the op center, so he figured his image was on the main display above the helm and weapons stations.

“You were right, it is Mandarin, but an older form. It reminded me of having to read Shakespeare back in high school.”

“So what is it?”

“Are you familiar with Admiral Zheng He?”

“Some kind of Chinese explorer in the 1400s. He sailed as far west as Africa and as far south as Australia.”

“New Zealand, actually. He went on seven voyages between 1405 and 1433 in what would be the largest ships built until the eighteenth century. He had over two hundred of them in what they called the Treasure Fleet, and twenty-eight thousand men.”

“Are you saying that the Chinese discovered America seventy years before Columbus?”

“No. Zheng didn’t place that writing in the pit. But the Admiral who did had been inspired by Zheng and embarked on a remarkable voyage of his own. There were three ships, and they left China in 1495 headed east. In command was Tsai Song. Admiral Tsai had been commissioned by the Emperor to trade as far and wide as he could. And because Zheng had found a continent to the west, Africa, he was convinced the earth had symmetry and there would be another to the east.”

“So they reached North America, but it was already a couple of years after Columbus did,” Max said, relieved that they wouldn’t have to rewrite the history books.

“Actually, from what I can tell, they landed in South America first. But there was a problem. As Tsai writes, one of the ships was cursed while they were in a ‘hellishly cold cove.’ I assume Tierra del Fuego.”

“What happened?”

“The crew was overcome by evil. That’s what Tsai writes. An evil so powerful that he felt it necessary to order the vessel destroyed and the stricken crew left to die. They sank it with an explosive charge placed against the hull.”