Текст книги "Skeleton Coast"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

He slipped into his pants and found an access hatch on top of the pipe. He opened it and saw there was a second hatch below. They’d explore later. He wedged the bag containing the satellite phone in the space between the two doors and locked the outer hatch closed.

He took Sloane’s hand so she would look him in the eye. “I can’t afford to take prisoners because I don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck out here. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You can stay here if you want, but I’m not ordering you to.”

“I’ll come with you and see how I feel when we get closer.”

“Honest enough. Let’s go.”

For the first five hundred feet they could walk in a crouch to keep from being seen from the yacht, but as they got closer Juan ordered Sloane flat, and together they crawled across the undulating pipe, clutching at its smooth surface whenever a particularly large wave caused it to snap like a whip.

Juan, who’d never suffered seasickness in his life, found the odd lurching motion nauseating. Sloane, too, looked a little worse for wear.

Fifty feet from the yacht, he had them slither forward so the crest of the pipe hid them from the boat until they were just a dozen or so feet away. They could see the yacht clearly where it was tied to a dock that itself was secured to the side of a pipe segment. Heavy duty rubber fenders flexed and creaked to keep everything separated. Lights blazed from the yacht’s windows while up on the bridge a lookout was silhouetted against the green glow of a radar monitor. They could see a tripod-mounted rocket launcher secured to the long foredeck.

Had the Corporation been running this operation Juan would have fired the entire crew for poor light discipline. The yacht could be seen from a mile away and an observer in a small boat could easily hide from the radar in the back clutter of the storm.

Though he was forced to admit they had gotten a damned good bead on him and Sloane when they approached.

They clung to the side of the pipe for nearly an hour, their bodies able to withstand their wet clothes and the cold wind because of the warm metal. Juan determined there were four men aboard the yacht and that they took turns monitoring the radar display on the bridge. For a while they took to carrying weapons with them, still hyped up after blowing apart theOregon ’s lifeboat, but soon boredom dulled their vigilance and Juan could see they no longer had their machine pistols slung across their shoulders.

With nothing but the element of surprise to overcome the four-to-one odds, Juan knew his best approach was stealth and then overwhelming savagery.

“I’d better do this alone,” he told Sloane and slowly eased himself over the top of the pipe.

The hard-edged timbre in his voice made her shudder.

Cabrillo slid across the pipe and dropped nimbly to the floating dock, all the while never taking his eyes off the bridge watch stander who was distracting himself by peering into the storm through a pair of night vision goggles. He padded across the dock and lightly stepped over the gunwale and onto the yacht’s aft deck. A sliding glass door led into the cabin while a set of stairs integrated into the boat’s fiberglass shell rose up to the bridge.

The door was tightly sealed against the wind.

Juan crouched low as he took the steps, twisting his head horizontal when he reached the top so only a sliver of his face could be seen from the bridge. The watch stander was still looking out at the sea.

Moving so slowly that he appeared to be standing still Juan inched up the rest of the way. A pistol was sitting on the dash, less than a foot from the man, who Juan noted had him by a good three inches and thirty pounds. The size difference meant strangling him silently was out of the question. He’d fight like a bull.

Cabrillo crossed the ten feet separating them when a strong gust hit the boat. The man was just reaching up to remove the goggles from around his head when Juan yanked his jaw with one hand and used the power of his shoulder to slam his forearm into the side of his skull. The paired forces torqued his spinal column past the breaking point and vertebrae separated with a discreet crack. He laid the corpse gently onto the deck.

“Three to one,” he mouthed silently, feeling nothing for the killing because two hours earlier they had blown his boat out of the water without warning.

He eased himself over the side of the bridge to a narrow catwalk that allowed access to the long forward deck from the aft section of the yacht. There were windows to his right and left. One was dark while the flicker of a television from the second cast an electric hue. He snuck a quick glance into the area where the TV was playing. One of the guards was sitting on a leather sofa watching a martial arts DVD while another stood in the dimly lit kitchenette tending a teapot on one of the gas burners. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster. Juan couldn’t tell if the other man was carrying.

He could tell from their placement in the room that he wouldn’t have a clear shot at either of them from the aft deck, and he had no idea where the fourth guard was. Presumably he was asleep, but Juan knew how easily presuming could get you killed.

Cabrillo leaned back over the polished aluminum railing to give himself a little room on the narrow walkway and opened fire. He put two rounds into the guy at the stove, the impact lifting his body up onto the lit burners. His shirt caught fire instantly.

The guard on the couch had reflexes like a cat. By the time Juan swiveled the barrel and triggered off two more rounds he was off the couch and rolling across the plush carpet. The bullets tore through the sofa and blew wads of ticking into the air.

Juan adjusted his aim, but the guard had found cover behind a wet bar set against the far wall. He didn’t have enough ammunition to blast away randomly and was already angry at himself for the two bullets he wasted on the couch. When the second guard emerged from behind the bar he had his machine pistol ready and triggered off half a magazine in an uncontrolled burst.

Cabrillo dove flat as glass shattered and bullets screamed above him. The spray of rounds ricocheted off the massive steel pipe behind him, zinging harmlessly into the night. He scrambled aft and fought the natural urge to roll off the boat and onto the dock. Instead he gripped a stanchion that supported a retractable awning and whipped his body around it so that he was on the stairs again. He climbed as quickly as he could and leaned over the railing above the shattered window.

The stubby barrel of the guard’s machine pistol appeared, tracking back and forth as he sought his prey.

When he couldn’t see Cabrillo’s body lying dead on the catwalk, his head and upper back emerged. He looked fore and aft and when he still didn’t see Cabrillo he leaned out further so he could look down on the dock.

“Wrong direction, pal.”

The guard twisted his shoulders, trying to raise the Skorpion. Juan stopped him with one round through the temple. The machine pistol dropped into the gap between the boat and the dock.

The Glock’s sharp report gave his position away to the final guard. The bridge floor erupted with ragged holes as the gunman below sprayed the cabin ceiling.

Juan tried to throw himself onto the dash but staggered when a bullet blew his artificial foot in half. The kinetic force of the impact, plus his own momentum, vaulted him over the low windscreen and he rolled down the sloping wall of glass that fronted the lower cabin spaces.

His back slammed into the foredeck, forcing the air from his lungs in an explosive whoosh. He levered himself onto his knees, but when he tried to stand the mechanisms that controlled his foot refused to respond. His state-of-the-art prosthesis was now no more than a wooden peg leg.

Inside one of the yacht’s beautifully appointed cabins he could see the fourth gunman silhouetted against the raging fire burning in the main salon. The propane line that fed the stove had burned through and a roaring jet of liquid fire blasted upward, spreading flames across the ceiling from corner to corner.

Molten plastic dripped onto the carpet, starting numerous smaller blazes.

The guard had heard Juan’s tumble over the roar of the inferno. He shifted his aim from his cabin’s ceiling to the main window and stitched the safety glass with bullets. A dozen crazed spiderwebs appeared in the wide pane and chips rained down on Cabrillo like fistfuls of diamonds.

Juan waited a beat and started to rise in order to fire back, and as he did the guard burst through the weakened glass, slamming into his chest and knocking him flat once again. He managed to wrap an arm around the man’s leg as they tumbled across the deck. The guard ended up on top of Cabrillo but couldn’t maneuver his machine pistol for a shot. He had Juan’s gun hand pinned. The guard tried to smash his forehead against Juan’s nose but Cabrillo ducked his chin at the last second and their skulls collided hard enough to make Juan’s eyelids flutter.

The guard then tried to ram his knee into Cabrillo’s groin. He deflected the blow by twisting his lower body and absorbing the impact on his thigh. When the guard tried it again, Juan wedged a knee between the two of them and thrust upward with every ounce of his strength. He managed to lift the man off of him momentarily, but the guard was just as strong and tried to crush Cabrillo as he came back down.

Juan had managed to lever his prosthetic limb up just enough so the dagger-sharp remains of his carbon fiber foot sliced into the taut muscles of his opponent’s abdomen. Juan grabbed his attacker’s shoulders, drawing the guard toward him at the same time he kicked hard with the leg.

The sensation of the artificial limb sinking into the guard’s stomach would haunt the chairman’s nightmares for years to come. Juan pushed the guard aside as his screams gave way to wet gurgles, and finally silence.

He staggered to his feet. The back half of the yacht was engulfed in fire, flames torn almost horizontal by the powerful wind. There was no way to battle the conflagration so Juan stepped to the side of the boat.

He eased over the railing and lowered himself to the deck. He knelt and quickly rinsed his prosthesis in the sea.

“Sloane,” he shouted into the night. “You can come out now.”

Her face emerged over the top of the immense pipe, a pale oval against the dark night. Slowly, she rose from a crouch and came toward him. Juan hobbled across the deck to meet her. They were two feet apart when he saw her eyes go wide. Her mouth began to open but Juan had already anticipated her warning. He whirled, his damaged leg kicking out from under him on the slick dock yet still he raised the Glock as a fifth guard appeared on the yacht’s foredeck, carrying a pistol in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He was also a second faster than Cabrillo.

His weapon cracked once as Juan continued to lose his balance, falling as if in slow motion. Juan triggered off two rounds as his backside connected with the dock. The first missed but the second impacted center mass. The guard’s gun flew from his lifeless fingers and the case clattered onto the floating pier.

He turned to look at Sloane.

She was on her knees, her hand pressed into her underarm. Her face was a mask of silent agony.

Juan slithered to her side.

“Hold on, Sloane, hold on,” he soothed. “Let me see.”

He gently raised her arm, causing her to suck air through her teeth. Tears leaked from her eyes. Her blood was hot and slick as Juan felt for the wound and when he accidentally touched the torn flesh Sloane cried out.

“Sorry.”

He pulled her blouse away from her skin, wedged his fingers into the rent torn by the bullet, and ripped the fabric apart so he could see the entry point. He used a flap of cloth to softly wipe away some of the blood. The light from the burning yacht was wavering and erratic but he could see that the bullet had gouged a two-inch trench along the rib cage under her arm.

He looked into her eyes. “You’re going to be okay. I don’t think it penetrated. It just grazed you.”

“It hurts, Juan, oh sweet God, it hurts.”

He held her awkwardly, mindful of her wound. “I know it does. I know.”

“I bet you do,” she said, stifling her pain. “I’m crying like baby over this when you had a leg shot off by the Chinese Navy.”

“According to Max, when the shock finally wore off I sounded like a whole nursery full of colicky infants. Wait here for a second.”

“Not like I’m going to go for a swim or anything.”

Juan went back to the yacht. The fire was too advanced for him to recover anything from the cabins but he managed to strip the guard he hadn’t expected of a sports coat. The fact that he was wearing a thousand-dollar Armani blazer told him this guy wasn’t a guard but was most likely the head of this operation. A suspicion confirmed when the briefcase turned out to be a laptop computer.

“If it was important enough to save,” Juan said, holding up the ThinkPad when he returned to Sloane’s side, “it’s important enough to retrieve. We have to put some distance between us and that boat. When its twin exploded against the side of theOregon she made one hell of a fireworks show.”

It was almost as if they needed each other to move, Juan with his damaged prosthesis and Sloan with her wounded chest, but somehow they managed to stagger back to where Juan had stashed the satellite phone. He laid Slone down onto the warm metal pipe and sat next to her so she could rest her head on his thigh. He covered her with the sports coat and stroked her hair until her body overcame the pain and she slipped into unconsciousness.

Cabrillo opened the laptop and began to scan the files. It took him an hour to figure out what the thousand-foot-long machine did and another to discover that there were thirty-nine more just like it nearby arranged in four long rows. Although he still had no idea as to its purpose, dawn was an hour away when he finally figured out how to shut it down by plugging the laptop into a service portal under the access hatch where he’d hidden the phone.

When the indicator light on the slim monitor showed that the machine was no longer generating electricity even though its mechanisms were still responding to the action of the waves passing down its length Juan checked his sat phone. He got a signal immediately.

It was the massive electrical field created by the wave-driven generator and its clones that had played havoc with the electronics on the lifeboat, knocked out the phone, and made the compass needle spin out of control. With the generators offline the field collapsed, and his telephone worked fine. He assumed the laptop had been hardened against the powerful EM pulses.

He dialed a number and the phone on the other end was picked up after the fourth ring.

“This is the front desk, Mr. Hanley. You wanted a four-thirty wakeup call.”

“Juan? Juan!”

“Hiya, Max.”

“Where the hell are you? We couldn’t reach you on the lifeboat. You wouldn’t pick up your phone.

Even your transdermal locator wasn’t broadcasting.”

“Would you believe we’re stuck in the middle of the ocean on the back of Papa Heinrick’s giant metal snake? And have we stumbled into something weird.”

“You don’t know the half of it, my friend. You don’t know the half of it.”

18

DR.Julia Huxley, theOregon ’s medical officer, had flown out to the wave generation station aboard the Robinson R44 so by the time the nimble little chopper touched down on the freighter’s deck Sloane Macintyre was already hooked up to an IV that was flooding her veins with painkillers, antibiotics, and saline solution for her dehydration. Julia had stripped away her sodden clothes and wrapped her in a thermal blanket. She’d cleaned and dressed the gunshot wound as best she could with the kit she’d brought, but was eager to tend her properly.

Two orderlies were waiting with a gurney when the retractable helipad was lowered into the hold and Sloane was whisked to sick bay, an infirmary that rivaled a metropolitan level-one trauma center.

Hux’s treatment of Juan had been a quick pronouncement that he was fine, a liter bottle of a vile-tasting sports drink, and a couple aspirin. At least Max was in the hangar with one of Cabrillo’s spare legs.

Juan dropped onto a work bench to unseat his mangled prosthesis. TheOregon had slowed her mad dash from Cape Town in order for George Adams to land the helicopter, and now, as he accepted the artificial limb from his second in command, he could feel the ship begin to accelerate again.

He angrily yanked down his pants cuff and started walking quickly, calling over his shoulder, “Senior staff in the boardroom in fifteen minutes.”

His team was assembled by the time he finished a quick shower and a shave that left his face raw from the straight razor he used. Maurice had prepared a coffee service and had a steaming cup at the head of the cherry conference table for him. The armored covers for the boardroom’s windows were opened so the room was brightly lit, contrasting sharply with the dark look of the men and women seated around him.

Juan took a sip of his coffee and bluntly said, “Okay, what the hell happened?”

As chief intelligence officer, Linda Ross took point. She hastily swallowed a mouthful of Danish.

“Yesterday morning members of the Kinshasa police raided a house outside the city, believing it was a drug distribution center. They made several arrests and found a cache of arms as well as a small amount of drugs. They also found a heap of documents linking the dealers to Samuel Makambo and his Congolese Army of Revolution.”

“The guy that bought our weapons,” Mark Murphy reminded unnecessarily. He didn’t look up from his work on the laptop Juan had taken from the wave-powered generator.

Linda continued. “It turns out that Makambo was using the proceeds from the drug sales to further finance his activities, which isn’t a big stretch. What caught the police off guard was how Makambo had managed to use bribery to infiltrate the upper echelons of the government. He had a ton of bureaucrats on his payroll, including Benjamin Isaka in the Defense Ministry. For fifty thousand Euros a year paid into a Swiss bank account, Isaka fed information to Makambo about the government’s attempts to locate his secret base of operations. He continually tipped off the rebel leader so Makambo’s army was always one step ahead of government troops.”

Max was seated at the opposite end of the burnished table, his bulldog face more dour than normal.

“Makambo knew from the moment we first made contact pretending to be arms merchants that he was being set up. Isaka told him about how the weapons had been fitted with radio direction tags. His first step after we made our escape was to dismantle the AKs and RPGs and toss the tags into the river.”

“Isaka has admitted to this?”

“Not publicly,” Max said. “But I’ve been on the phone with a couple of people in their government.

Once I explained who I am and all, they told me the team sent to track the arms reported they never left the dock before they simply stopped transmitting.”

“And when they reached the dock,” Juan said, coming to the same conclusion as the others, “there was no sign of the rebels or the guns.” He looked at Mark Murphy. “How about it, Murph, are our tags still working?”

“They should be for another twenty-four to thirty-six hours. If I can get up to the Congo in time I have a shot of finding them from a chopper or a plane.”

“Has Tiny reached Swakopmund with our Citation?” Juan asked, his mind calculating distances, speeds, and time.

“He should be there by about one.”

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. As soon as we’re in range Murph will chopper to the coast and Tiny’ll fly him up to Kinshasa. From there, Mark, it will be up to you to charter any aircraft you need because Tiny has to fly back for tonight’s parachute drop.”

“I’ll need a hand,” Murph said.

“Take Eric. Max can act as captain and helmsman when we make our rescue attempt.”

Eddie Seng spoke up for the first time. “Chairman, there’s no reason to believe those arms haven’t been spread all over the Congo by now.”

Cabrillo nodded. “I know, but we have to try. If the ten guns we put our tags on are bunched together it stands to reason all the other weapons are there, too.”

“Do you think Makambo’s planning an assault of some kind?” Linda asked.

“We won’t know until Mark and Eric locate them.”

“Gotcha!” Mark exclaimed, looking up from the ThinkPad.

“What have you got?”

“There were some encrypted files on this computer. I just cracked them.”

“What’s on them?”

“Give me a minute.”

Juan sipped his coffee while Linda demolished another piece of pastry. Doc Huxley suddenly appeared at the conference room door. She only stood five foot three but had the commanding presence endemic in the medical profession. Her dark hair was tied in its customary ponytail and under her lab coat she wore green scrubs that did little to flatter her curvaceous figure.

“How’s our patient?” Juan asked as soon as he spotted her.

“She’s going to be fine. She was a little dehydrated but she’s over that. The wound required twenty stitches and she also has two cracked ribs. I’ve got her sedated for now and she’ll be on painkillers for a while.”

“Great job.”

“Are you kidding? After patching up this group of pirates for a couple of years I could have tended her in my sleep.” Julia helped herself to coffee.

“Is she going to be okay until you get back, or should you stick with her?”

Hux gave the question a moment’s thought. “As long as she doesn’t show any signs of infection, like fever or an elevated white count, she won’t need me hovering around. But if the kidnappers have injured Geoffrey Merrick or any of you…well, you know. You’re going to want me on our Citation for immediate treatment. I’ll make my final determination just before I leave, but my gut’s telling me she’ll be okay.”

As always Juan left all medical decisions to Dr. Huxley. “That’s your call.”

“I will be damned,” Mark said in awe. Eric Stone was leaning over his best friend’s shoulder, the text from the laptop reflecting in his newly required glasses.

All heads turned to the young weapon’s specialist.

He continued to read unaware for a moment until Juan cleared his throat and he looked up. “Oh, sorry.

As you know, what you found out there is a wave-powered generator, but on a scale I can’t believe. As far as I knew this technology was in its infancy, with just a couple machines off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland undergoing sea trials.

“What it does is use the power of the waves bending its joints to push hydraulic rams. These rams, in turn, force oil through a motor using a smoothing accumulator to even the flow. The motor then turns a generator and you’ve got electricity.”

As an engineer Max Hanley was the most impressed. “Damned ingenious,” he said. “How much can these things produce?”

“Each one could power a town of two thousand people. And there are forty of them, so we’re talking some serious juice.”

“What are they for?” Juan asked. “Where’s all that electricity going?”

“That’s what was encrypted.” Mark told him. “Each generator is anchored to the seafloor with retractable cables, which is why George didn’t see them when he did his flyby a couple days ago. When the water’s calm or radar on the guard boats spots an approaching vessel they are lowered about thirty feet. A separate cable feeds the electricity to a series of heaters spaced along the length of the generators.”

“Did you say heaters?” Eddie asked.

“Yup. Someone thinks the water around here is a bit cool and decided to heat it up.”

Cabrillo took another sip of coffee and helped himself to a Danish before Linda polished off the plate.

“Can you tell how long they’ve been in operation?”

“They came online in early 2004.”

“And what’s been the effect?”

“That data isn’t on the computer,” Mark replied. “I’m no oceanographer or anything, but I can’t imagine even this much heat having much of an effect on the entire ocean. I know the waste heat from a nuclear reactor can warm a river a few degrees. But that’s pretty localized.”

Juan leaned back again, drumming his fingers against his jaw. His eyes swam in and out of focus. The senior staff continued to talk around him, throwing out ideas and conjecture, but he heard none of their chatter. In his mind he could see the huge generator stations sawing away on the crests of waves while below them radiant heaters glowed cherry red and warmed the waters flowing northward along the African coast.

“If it weren’t for the gun-toting goons cropping up left and right,” Mark was saying when Juan snapped back to the present, “I’d guess this was an art project by, what’s that guy? You know the one who wraps islands in fabric and built those gates in Central Park. Crisco?”

“Christo,” Max replied absently.

“Mark, you’re a genius.” Cabrillo said.

“What? You think this is some messed-up art project?”

“No. What you said about a river.” Juan glanced around the table. “This isn’t about warming the entire ocean, only one very specific part of it. We’re smack in the middle of the Benguela Current, one of the tightest currents in the world. It runs just like a river with clearly demarked boundaries. And right around here it splits in two. One branch continues northward along the coast while the other veers west to become part of the South Atlantic subtropical gyre. The gyre carries water along South America where it is heated several degrees higher than the current that stuck close to Africa.”

“With you so far,” Mark said.

“The two currents meet up again near the equator and as they mix they act as a buffer zone between Northern Hemisphere currents and those of the Southern.”

“I don’t see the big deal here, Chairman. Sorry.”

“If the two currents are closer in temperature when they come together their buffering ability is going to be diminished, possibly enough to overcome the Coriolis effect that drives the prevailing winds and thus these shallow currents.”

Eddie Seng paused from taking a sip of coffee to say, his face alight in comprehension, “This could alter the very direction of the ocean’s currents altogether.”

“Exactly. The earth’s rotation determines prevailing wind direction, which is why hurricanes in the north rotate counterclockwise and cyclones in the south move in a clockwise direction. It’s also the reason the warm gulfstream current that runs along the east coast of the United States moves north and then eastward so that Europe enjoys the weather it does. By rights most of Europe shouldn’t be habitable.

Scotland is more northerly than the Canadian Arctic, for God’s sake.”

“So what happens if southern water flows past the equator near Africa?” Linda asked.

“It’s going to enter the breeding grounds of Atlantic hurricanes,” Eric Stone, who acted as theOregon ’s unofficial meteorologist, replied. “The warmer waters mean more evaporation and more evaporation means stronger storms. A tropical depression needs a surface temperature above eighty degrees to gain enough strength to become a hurricane. Once it has that, it absorbs around two billion tons of water a day.”

“Two billiontons ?” Linda exclaimed.

“And when they hit land they drop anywhere between ten and twenty billion tons a day. What causes the variation between a category one storm and a massive category five is the amount of time they spend sucking up water off the African coast.”

Mark Murphy, usually the smartest person in the room, brightened as he finally understood. “With the Benguela being artificially heated and some of that water escaping north the storms can intensify much faster.”

“And there can be more of them,” Juan concluded. “Anyone thinking what I am?”

“That the severe storms the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of years have been given a little help.”

“Hurricane experts all agree that we’re entering a natural cycle of increased storm intensity,” Eric said, countering Murph’s point.

“That doesn’t mean the generators and heaters aren’t amplifying the cycle,” Mark shot back.

“Gentlemen,” Juan said soothingly, “it is up to better minds than ours to figure out the effects of those things. For now it’s enough they’re turned off. After this meeting I’ll call Overholt and lay out what we’ve found. He’ll more than likely turn it over to NUMA and it will be their problem. Murph, have the computer ready so I can send him all the files.”

“No prob.”

“For right now,” Juan continued, “I want us to concentrate on rescuing Geoffrey Merrick. Then we can think about going after whoever installed the generators in the first place.”

“Do you think there’s a connection?” Max asked from the opposite end of the long table.

“Not at first. But now I’m convinced. The guy Sloane and I chased with the lifeboat intentionally killed himself rather than risk me getting my hands on him. He wasn’t trying to avoid an African jail. He was a fanatic willing to martyr himself so we didn’t discover the heaters. And we know Merrick’s kidnapping isn’t about ransom, its political—i.e., he’s pissed off somebody bad enough to snatch him.”

“Environmentalists,” Linda stated flatly.

“Has to be,” Juan said. “We’ve stumbled into a two-pronged attack of some kind. On the one side they want Merrick, for some reason, and on the other they’re trying to disrupt ocean currents with those big generators.”

Eddie cleared his throat. “I don’t get it, Chairman. If these people care about the environment, why would they mess with the ocean like this?”

“We’re going to find out tonight when we rescue Merrick and grab us a couple of kidnappers.”

RIGGERS had laid out the insertion team’s parachutes in one of theOregon ’s empty holds. The shiny black nylon looked like spilled oil on the deck plates. When Juan entered after a twenty-minute conversation with Langston Overholt at the CIA, Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski were already there, carefully folding their parachutes so when they deployed twenty-five thousand feet above the Namib Desert they wouldn’t foul. Mike was a former para-rescue jumper from the Air Force while Ski had come to the Corporation after fifteen years as a recon Marine. Max was chatting with Eddie and Linc as they checked equipment and weapons arranged on trestle tables set up along one wall of the hold.