Текст книги "Skeleton Coast"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“Perfected what, Geoff? What did Susan perfect? Dr. Merrick?”

“An organic gel that turns water into pudding.”

“Why?” Juan asked desperately, fearing Merrick was slipping away. “What is it used for?”

Merrick said nothing for nearly twenty seconds. “Heat,” he finally whispered. “It gives off a lot of heat.”

And there was the connection Cabrillo had been looking for. Hurricanes need heat and Singer was going to give one a boost. If he released the contents of a vessel laden with Susan Donleavy’s gel into the ocean, probably at the epicenter of a forming storm, the heat would give the weather system a kick start exactly when and where he wanted. That was how he knew when to attack the Petromax terminal. The prevailing winds would carry the oil vapors northward into the hurricane he had helped generate.

Juan knew the seas off Africa’s west coast were the logical place Singer would dump the gel, but the area was vast and there wasn’t enough time to conduct a search. He had to narrow the parameters.

“What kind of ship is Singer using?” A tanker was the most likely candidate, but Juan wouldn’t lead the semiconscious man with his suspicions.

Merrick remained mute, his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted. Julia was watching his monitor, and Juan knew the look on her face. She didn’t like what she was seeing.

He shook Merrick’s shoulder. “Geoff, what kind of ship?”

“Juan,” Julia said in a warning tone.

Merrick’s head rolled to face him but he couldn’t open his eyes. “A tanker. He bought an oil tanker.”

The monitor started to wail as his heart rate slowed dangerously. Julia pushed Juan aside, shouting,

“He’s crashing! Get the cart in here!” She threw aside the sheet covering his chest as one of her staff raced into the room with a portable defibrillator.

Through it all Merrick managed to open his eyes. They were clouded with pain. He reached out to clutch Cabrillo’s hand, his mouth forming three words he didn’t have the breath to say aloud.

The chirping alarm turned into a continuous tone.

“Clear,” Julia said, the paddles poised over Merrick’s naked torso. Juan took his hand away so Julia could apply the electrical impulse to restart Merrick’s heart. His body convulsed as the charge ran through him and the monitor showed a corresponding spike before returning to flat line.

“Eppy.” The orderly handed Julia a syringe full of epinephrine. The needle seemed impossibly long. She speared the area between two of Singer’s ribs and loaded the drug directly into his heart. “Up it to two hundred joules.”

“Charging, charging, charging,” the orderly said watching the machine. “Go.”

She applied the paddles again and for a second time Merrick’s body jerked partially off the bed. The line on the monitor peaked again.

“Come on. Come on,” Julia urged and then the beat was back, widely spaced at first but improving steadily. “Get a ventilator in here.” She shot a scathing look at Cabrillo. “Was it worth it?”

He met her gaze. “We’ll know when we find a tanker named theGulf of Sidra .”

30

THEweather was turning foul as theOregon raced northward, forcing a delicate balance between speed and the need to keep the wounded from being further injured by the ship’s motion. Julia had torn a page from the nineteenth century by slinging the worst of the wounded in hammocks so they swayed with the swells and were cushioned when the ship was hit by a particularly tall wave. She hadn’t left Merrick’s side for more than twenty minutes since getting his heart started again.

After getting the name, it had taken Murph and Eric less than a half hour to discover that a tanker called theGulf of Sidra had been anchored off the coast of Mauritania for nearly a month but had weighed anchor the day before. The ship had been owned by Libya’s state oil monopoly until a recent sale transferred her to a newly incorporated Liberian firm called CroonerCo., which Murph recognized as a thinly veiled reference to Singer’s last name.

With that information the duo had been able to calculate an ever widening arc where the vessel could be hiding, an area that would soon include a tropical depression swirling six hundred miles off the African coast. They were driving as hard as they dared for that region.

To narrow the odds further, Juan had again called upon Lang Overholt to use the United States’

government’s halo of spy satellites to search the grid coordinates for theGulf of Sidra . Now that everyone was aware of the stakes, Overholt had taken Cabrillo’s findings to the CIA’s director. The president was briefed a short while later and orders went out to the Coast Guard and Navy as well as NUMA and the National Weather Service, which was conducting regular patrols of hurricane alley. A guided missile cruiser returning from interdiction patrols in the Red Sea was diverted and a destroyer paying a courtesy call to Algiers cut short her stay and started out of the Mediterranean. There was also a pair of nuclear attack submarines close enough to the area to reach it in twenty hours.

The British government was apprised of the situation and offered to send two vessels from Gibraltar and another from Portsmouth. They would arrive on station days after the Americans, but their help was greatly appreciated.

Juan knew, however, that even with all of these ships streaming in to search for the tanker, theOregon , with her superior speed, would be the first to reach the edge of the storm and it would fall on his shoulders to stop Daniel Singer.

SLOANE Macintyre weaved down the passageway carrying a dinner tray that Maurice had personally prepared. With her arm still in a sling it was awkward, and she found herself leaning a shoulder against the walls to keep herself steady. It was almost eleven and she didn’t see another soul as she made her way aft. She came to the door she wanted and had to use her foot to tap on it softly. When there was no reply she hit it a little louder with the same results.

She set the tray on the carpeted deck and cracked open the door. She could see dim lighting from inside.

“Juan,” she called softly and retrieved the tray. “You weren’t at dinner so I had Maurice fix you a little something.”

She stepped over the threshold, not yet feeling that she was intruding. A lamp spilled a pool of light across half of Cabrillo’s desk. The other half was blushed with the muted glow of a computer monitor.

The chair was pushed back as if Juan had just gotten up from working but he wasn’t at the file cabinet or the antique safe. The sofa tucked under a darkened porthole was empty.

She set the tray on the desk and said his name again as she approached his dim bedroom. He lay facedown on the bed and before Sloane took in the whole picture she looked away, thinking he was nude. When she peeked back shyly she saw he wore a pair of boxer shorts nearly the same color as his skin, though a crescent of pale white showed above the boxer’s waistband. Then she feared he wasn’t breathing until his chest expanded like a bellows.

For the first time she allowed herself to stare at his stump. The skin was red and puckered and looked raw, no doubt from all the fighting he’d been involved in. The muscles of his upper legs were large and even in sleep they didn’t seem relaxed. In fact, none of him did. His whole body was tensed. She held her breath to listen carefully and heard his teeth grinding together.

His back was a patchwork of old scars and new bruises. There were six identical marks that looked as though he’d taken a shotgun blast and what she hoped was a healed surgical incision and not a knife wound because it began just over his kidney and disappeared under his shorts.

His clothing had been tossed onto the floor and as she folded it, she wondered what kind of man would pay such a heavy price to do what he did. He gave no outward sign that at night his dreams gave him a case of bruxism that sounded like he was going to pulverize his teeth. And although he was barely in his forties, he had accumulated two lifetime’s worth of scars. Some force drove him to put himself in danger despite the cumulative effects it was having on his body.

It wasn’t a suicide wish, of that she was sure. She could tell by his easy banter with Max and the others that Juan Cabrillo loved life more than anyone. And maybe that was it. He had put it upon himself to make certain others had the opportunity to enjoy their lives as much as he did. He had made himself a protector even if those he looked after would never know of his efforts. She thought back to their conversation about what he would be if not the captain of theOregon . He’d said a paramedic, an unsung hero if ever there was one.

When she draped his pants over a wooden valet, his wallet fell to the floor.

Sloane looked over at Juan. He hadn’t moved a muscle. Feeling a twinge of guilt, but not enough to overcome her curiosity, she opened the wallet. All it contained was cash in a variety of currencies. No credit cards, no business cards, nothing to identify him in any way. She should have known. He wouldn’t carry around anything that could link him back to his ship or give his enemies information about who he really was.

Sloane looked over to the office, where the lighting made his desk seem to dominate the space. She padded silently to it, glancing in his direction again before gently tugging open the middle drawer. This is where Cabrillo kept himself. She found a gold and onyx Dunhill lighter and an ornate cigar cutter. She found his American passport and saw nearly every page had been stamped. She preferred his hair short like he kept it now versus the photo taken six years earlier. There were two more U.S. passports, one with the picture of a great slob of a man named Jeddediah Smith, and it took her a moment to realize it was Juan in disguise. There were others from various countries and under different aliases, as well as matching credit cards for all the personas, and shipmaster’s licenses for both Juan and his Smith character. She found a gold pocket watch inscribed to Hector Cabrillo from Rosa and suspected it belonged to his grandfather. Amid the bric-a-brac were a few letters from his parents, his old CIA ID

tag, a small four-barreled antique pistol like a riverboat gambler might carry, an ivory-handled magnifying glass, and a rusted Cub Scout pocketknife.

Toward the back of the drawer was an inlaid Turkish box and inside she made a discovery she never expected—a gold wedding band. It was a simple pipe-cut ring, and judging by how little it was scratched, Sloane thought it hadn’t been worn much. She wondered what stupid woman had let a man like Juan get away. They were one in a million and if you were lucky enough to find one you did whatever it took to make it work. She looked more carefully into the box and saw a piece of paper folded so it completely covered the bottom.

She was on the cusp between snooping and prying and glanced over her shoulder to where Juan was sleeping before reaching for the slip of paper. It was a police report of a single-car accident in Falls Church, Virginia, that had claimed the life of Amy Cabrillo. Tears pricked Sloane’s eyes. As she read through the dry report she learned that Juan’s wife’s blood alcohol level was nearly three times the legal limit.

A man like Juan would marry once in his life, to the woman he felt certain he could grow old with. The fact that this woman had taken that from him made Sloane hate her all the more. She wiped at her cheek and carefully refolded the report and set everything back into the drawer the way she’d found it. She picked up the tray of food and retreated from the cabin.

Linda Ross rounded a corner just as Sloane got the door closed.

“Hi, roomie,” Sloane said quickly to cover her embarrassment. “I didn’t see Juan at dinner so I brought him some food. He’s asleep.”

“Is that why you’re crying?”

“I…” Sloane could say nothing more.

Linda smiled warmly. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be our secret. For what it’s worth he’s probably the best man I’ve ever met.”

“Have you and he?”

“I’ll admit he’s as handsome as the devil and the thought crossed my mind when I first came aboard; but no we haven’t and never will. He’s my commander and my friend and both are too important to screw up with an affair.”

“But that’s all it’ll ever be, isn’t it? I sense he’s a one-woman man and any opportunity has passed.”

“You know about Amy?”

“I was snooping and saw the police report.”

“Don’t tell Juan you saw that. He doesn’t think any of the crew knows he’s a widower. Max made the mistake of telling Maurice once and, well, Maurice gossips like an old woman. And yeah, it would probably only be a short-term thing but not because he’s in mourning over Amy. He’s got another love, one no woman can compete with.”

“TheOregon .”

Linda nodded. “So think through what you want to do before you do anything.”

“Thanks.”

As they walked away Juan’s cabin door opened slowly and he peered down the corridor. The sound of his desk drawer opening had wakened him but he’d feigned sleep so as not to embarrass Sloane. He would have to talk to Max about his inability to keep a secret and Maurice, too, for that matter. He closed the door again, thinking that what he overheard made a decision he’d been contemplating a bit more difficult.

JUAN was in the living room of the guest cabin talking with Moses Ndebele. His men were resigned to their beds, nearly incapacitated by seasickness. He enjoyed Ndebele’s intellect and his ability to forgive considering how harshly he’d been treated by his government. Unlike some men, who when they gain power trample freedoms and impoverish their people in a quest for wealth and personal glory, Ndebele really did want what was best for Zimbabwe. He spoke of economic reforms, of getting the country’s once thriving agriculture sector back to its former capacity. He talked about power sharing among the tribes and an end to the nepotism that ruined many African nations.

More than anything else he wanted his people to no longer fear their own government.

Cabrillo was more convinced than ever that making his bargain with Moses had been the right call. They had the chance to restore what had once been a shining beacon in sub-Saharan Africa and make it again the envy of the continent. Of course, all it would take was to find a boat lost for a century that had sunk somewhere in about a thousand square miles of ocean.

He felt the ship suddenly veer. He judged the turn to be at least fifteen degrees and was getting to his feet when his phone chimed.

“Someone found her,” he said, knowing it was Max with the news they’d been waiting thirty hours to hear. He mouthed an apology to M oses as he strode from the room.

“She was detected by something called Mag-Star,” Hanley said. “Apparently it’s a new military satellite that can detect the distortion a large steel-hulled ship has on the earth’s magnetic field.”

Juan was familiar with the technology. “How far are we from her?”

“Another hundred and fifty miles and, to answer your next question, we’re still the closest of all the vessels vectoring in.”

Calculating speed and distances Juan said, “That’ll put us on her about sunset, not that we’ve seen the sun in a while.”

TheOregon had been steaming under a roiling veil of cloud cover since before dawn, while the seas had built to fifteen-foot waves that pounded her hull. The ship had no problem shouldering aside the swells; she was designed to absorb much worse and at speeds greater than she was making, but the wounded were taking a beating despite Hux’s best efforts. The wind hovered around thirty knots with gusts edging Force Eight on the Beaufort Scale. Although the rain hadn’t started yet, the forecasts predicted it would hit within a couple of hours.

“Taking down theGulf of Sidra in this storm’s going to be tough enough,” Max remarked. “Darkness is only going to make it worse.”

“Tell me about it,” Juan said. “I’ll be there in a second.”

Moments later he strode into the operations center. The regular watch standers were being replaced by the Corporation’s best team. It was difficult because the ship was pitching violently and the crew had to keep one hand continuously braced against a counter or bulkhead. Eric Stone was already at the helm; Mark Murphy, sporting a shirt that advocated nuking the whales, was sliding into the weapons station while Hali was jacking into the communications systems. Linda Ross arrived while Eddie and Linc stood against the back wall, as different as Mutt and Jeff in every aspect but competence.

Max came over from where he was monitoring his beloved engines as soon as Juan got into the center chair. On the main monitor was a satellite picture of the Atlantic. The clouds were beginning to curl into the familiar pattern of a burgeoning hurricane. The image shifted every few seconds to show the past several hours of the growing storm. The eye was just beginning to form.

“Okay, where are we and where’s theSidra ?” Juan asked.

Stone tapped at his computer and two flashing icons appeared on the monitor. TheGulf of Sidra was positioned right at the edge of where the eye was growing, with theOregon driving in hard from the southeast.

They watched the screen for more than an hour as it was updated by the National Reconnaissance Office, the secretive government agency that oversaw nearly all U.S. spy satellites. The more the storm took on a hurricane’s distinctive shape, the tighter Singer’s tanker turned, keeping just inside the strengthening eye wall.

“I’m getting some more information from Overholt,” Hali said, staring at his computer. “Says here the NRO has some additional data on the target. Checking back through their logs they’ve been able to re-create her course for the two hours before they ID’d her. Eric, I’m sending this over to you.”

When he received the e-mail from across the room Eric typed in the coordinates. “Coming up now,” he said and hit Enter.

The icon for theSidra bounced back a couple of inches on the screen then tracked forward. It looked as if the eye was forming along her course rather than her running along its edge.

“What the hell?” Juan muttered.

“I was right!” Eric cried.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius,” Mark said, then turned to face Cabrillo. “He and I were back in my cabin brainstorming. Well, we also did a little hacking into Merrick/Singer’s mainframe. Susan Donleavy didn’t keep notes on the computer. She either had a stand alone or just wrote stuff out longhand.

Anyway, all we found about her project was her original proposal and even that was pretty thin. Her idea was to create an organic flocculent.”

“A what?”

“It’s a compound that causes soils and other solids suspended in water to form into clumps,” Eric answered. “It’s used in sewage treatment plants, for example, to settle out the waste.”

“She wanted to find a way to bind the organic material found in seawater in order to turn water into a gel.”

“What for?” Max asked bluntly.

“Didn’t say,” Mark replied, “and apparently no one on the peer review committee cared because she got the go-ahead without explaining the need for something like this.”

Stone continued, “We know from your talk with Merrick that the reaction is exothermic and, from what I can guess, it probably isn’t sustainable. The heat will eventually kill off the organics and the gel will dissolve back into ordinary seawater.”

“I’m following you,” Juan said, “but I don’t see a point to all this.”

“If Singer lays down a line of flocculent it will spread for a while and then just fizzle out.” Mark blew a raspberry to emphasize his point. “The hurricane would absorb some of its heat as it passes over it but not really enough to make any major changes to its severity or direction.”

Eric butted in, “My idea is that if he spreads it in a circle just as the hurricane begins to revolve he will be able to dictate where and when the eye will form—and most important, how big it will be.”

“And the tighter the eye, the faster the wind can whip around it,” Max added.

“Andrew’s was eleven miles across when he came ashore in Miami,” Murph said. “Natural processes limit how small it can be, but Singer can push that so the hurricane goes above five on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. He might also be able to control where the storm tracks as it heads across the Atlantic, in essence pointing it like a gun at whatever coastal region he chooses.”

Cabrillo studied at the monitor again. It looked as though theGulf of Sidra was doing exactly what Eric and Murph predicted. She was in the beginning of a spiraling turn, using the heat generated by Susan Donleavy’s gel, which she was doubtlessly discharging as fast as her pumps could go, to tease the storm tighter and tighter. Singer would make the eye smaller and thus the hurricane more powerful than anything nature was able to create.

“If he finishes that turn there won’t be a damned thing we can do,” Eric concluded. “The eye will be formed and no force on earth will be able to stop it.”

“Any idea where he’s sending it?”

“If it were me I’d take out New Orleans again,” Murph said, “but I don’t know if he’ll have that level of control. Safest bet would be to slam it into Florida where the warm coastal waters won’t weaken it.

Miami or Jacksonville are the highest profile cities. Andrew caused something like nine billion in damages and that was Category Four. Hit either city with a Category Six and it’ll topple skyscrapers.”

“Max,” Juan said without looking at him, “what’s our speed?”

“Just a tick under thirty-five knots.”

“Helm, take us to forty.”

“The doc ain’t gonna like that,” Max chided.

“I’m already in Dutch for making her wake Merrick,” Juan said humorlessly.

Eric followed the order, ramping up the magnetohydrodynamics to eke more electricity from the sea to feed into the pump jets. TheOregon began to ride even rougher as she cut across the waves. An external camera showed her bow almost being swamped as she slammed into the swells. Water sheeted across the deck in a three-foot-deep surge when she lifted free.

Cabrillo tapped at his communications console to dial up the hangar. A technician answered and went to get George Adams per Juan’s request. “I don’t like that you’re calling me,” Adams said by way of greeting.

“Can you do it, George?”

“It’ll be a nightmare,” the pilot replied, “but yeah I think I can as long as the rains don’t hit. And I don’t want to hear any grief if I damage the Robinson’s landing struts.”

“I won’t say a word. Place yourself on ten-minute standby and wait to hear from me.”

“You got it.”

Juan killed the connection. “Wepps, what’s the status on our fish?”

On each side of theOregon ’s prow below her waterline was a tube capable of launching a Russian Test-71 torpedo. Each of the two-ton weapons were wire guided, with a range of nearly ten miles, a maximum speed of forty knots, and four hundred and fifty pounds of high explosives loaded into its nose.

When he’d designed theOregon Cabrillo had wanted American-made MK-48 ADCAP torpedoes, but no amount of sweet-talking would budge Langston’s refusal. As it was, the surplus Soviet torpedoes were powerful enough to sink any but the most heavily armored ships.

“You’re not considering torpedoing theSidra , are you?” Mark asked. “That’ll dump her entire load of gel in one concentrated spot. At this stage that much heat could have nearly the same effect as if the ship had completed her circle.”

“I’m just covering all my options,” Juan reassured him.

“Okay, good.” Mark called up a diagnostic on the torpedoes. “They were pulled from the tubes three days ago for routine inspection. A battery on the fish in Tube One was replaced. Both are showing full charge now.”

“So what’s your play?” Max asked Juan.

“Simplest solution is to chopper a team over there, take control of the tanker, and shut off her discharge pumps.”

“You know, Chairman,” Eric said, “if we sail her far enough away from the eye and start dumping the gel again, the heat should generate excess evaporation and create another powerful low pressure zone. It would disrupt the storm and literally tear it apart.”

“Oh, God!” Hali exclaimed suddenly. He hit a switch on his panel and a strident voice filled the control room.

“I repeat, this is Adonis Cassedine, master of the VLCCGulf of Sidra . A storm has cracked our hull.

We are under ballast so there is no oil spill but we must abandon ship if she breaks up any more.” He gave his coordinates. “I am declaring an emergency. Please, can anyone hear my signal? Mayday, mayday, mayday.”

“Under ballast, my eye,” Max grumbled. “What do you want to do?”

Cabrillo sat motionless, his hand cupped around his chin. “Let ’em sweat. He’ll keep making reports even if nobody answers him. Eric, what’s our ETA now?”

“Still looking at about three hours.”

“TheSidra won’t last that long in these seas with a cracked hull,” Max said. “Especially if her keel’s affected. Hell, she could break apart in three minutes.”

Juan couldn’t argue the point. They had to do something but his options were limited. Letting the tanker break up on her own was the worst of them and it seemed Eric’s idea of using her to defuse the storm was out. The best he could hope for was to put the ship on the bottom with the least amount of spilled gel. The Test-71 torpedoes could do the job, but it might take hours for the hull to finally disappear under the waves, which meant hours of her continuing to disgorge her cargo.

Inspiration came from his experience on theOr Death with Sloane, when the boat was hit by a missile fired from the yacht guarding the wave-powered generators. She’d sunk in an instant because her bow had been ripped off while she was at speed. Cabrillo didn’t consider the countless pitfalls in his crazy idea, he just set about getting it organized.

“Linc, Eddie, go down to the stores and get me two hundred feet of Hypertherm, the stuff with the electromagnets on the casings.” The plastic explosive–like material was a magnesium-based compound capable of burning at nearly two thousand degrees Celsius and was used in salvage operations to cut steel underwater. “Meet me in the hangar. Eddie, kit up on your way. I can’t guarantee what kind of reception we’re going to get on theSidra .”

“What about me?” Linc asked.

“Sorry, but we’ve got weight limitations.”

Max touched Juan’s shoulder. “Obviously you’ve come up with something devious and underhanded.

Care to enlighten us?” After Cabrillo explained his plan, Hanley nodded. “Like I said, devious and underhanded.”

“Is there any other way?”

31

GEORGEAdams’s face was a mask of concentration, his fingers curled tightly around the Robinson’s controls. Wind and the furiously spinning main rotor blades made the small chopper jittery on the raised helipad, but he wouldn’t take off until the timing was just right.

TheOregon dropped down the back of a large swell and a wall of water suddenly loomed up over the deck, its crest curled and threatened to swamp the helicopter and its three occupants.

“Talk to me, Eric,” he said as the ship started to climb the next wave.

“Hold on, the camera’s almost reached the top. Okay, yeah, there’s a large trough on the other side.

You’ve got plenty of time.”

The instant the ship reached the apogee of its ascent Adams gave the Robinson a bit more power, knowing that when they took off theOregon would drop from under them rather than rise up on a hidden wave and crash into the chopper. As they took to the air the tramp freighter plummeted. George dipped the nose to gain airspeed and then lifted out of the reach of the surging sea and into a maelstrom of wind.

He had to turn with the wind to gain more speed and altitude before swinging back into the gale.

Hammered by a fifty-knot headwind, the Robinson was making only sixty knots over the ocean, not much faster than theOregon herself, but Juan had wanted to get to theGulf of Sidra as quickly as possible.

If the plan held, his ship would be in torpedo range by the time he and Eddie had finished laying the Hypertherm charges.

“I calculate our flight time to be an hour and twenty minutes,” George said after settling in for the difficult flight.

“Juan?” It was Max over the radio.

“Go ahead.”

“Cassedine’s sending another SOS.”

“Okay, go ahead and answer it just like we talked about.”

“You got it.” Max left the channel open so Cabrillo could hear the conversation. “Gulf of Sidra, this is the MVOregon , Captain Max Hanley. I have heard your distress call and am making all possible speed to your location but we’re still two hours away.”

“Oregon, thank God!”

“Captain Cassedine, please advise on your situation.”

“There’s a split in the hull amidships port side and we’re taking on water. My pumps are going at full capacity and we don’t appear to be sinking, but if the tear gets any worse we will have to abandon ship.”

“Has the hole gotten any bigger since it first occurred?”

“Negative. A rogue wave running across the wind hit us and tore the plating. It has been stable since.”

“If you turn due east we can reach you quicker.” This wasn’t true but if theGulf of Sidra turned as she spewed her poison it would distort the hurricane’s eye somewhat. Basically it was a test to see who had control on the ship, its master or Daniel Singer.

Static filled the airwaves for almost a minute. When Cassedine came back there was a new current of fear in his voice. “Ah, that isn’t possible,Oregon . My engineer reports damage to our steering gear.”

“Most likely a gun to his head,” Juan said to Max.

They had considered this scenario, so Max went on as if it wasn’t a big deal. “Understood damage to your steering. In that case, Captain, we can’t risk a collision in these conditions. When we are ten miles from you I will request that you man your lifeboats.”

“What, so you can put a line on my ship afterward and claim her for salvage?”

Juan chuckled. “This guy’s facing death and he’s worried we’ll steal his vessel.”

“Captain, theOregon is a thousand-ton commercial fishing boat,” Max lied smoothly. “We couldn’t tow a tanker on a millpond let alone in the teeth of a hurricane. I am just unwilling to risk a runaway derelict ramming us in the middle of this storm.”