Текст книги "Golden Buddha"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Clive Cussler
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

“Lieutenant Gabriel Sanchez, sir.”

“And the name of the other guard on duty in the cells?”

“Sergeant Ignez Macco.”

“Please check the documents so we can get on with it.”

The guard sat down at the desk and pulled some paper out of the envelope. Seng moved behind and removed a small gun from his pocket as Sanchez stared blankly at a pair of comic books. He looked up. “Colonel, I don’t under—”

That was as far as he got before Seng shot a tiny dart filled with a tranquilizer into the nape of his neck. Sanchez looked at Seng oddly before slumping unconscious over the table.

Seng threw a roll of duct tape to one of his team. Every move was so well rehearsed that he did not have to give orders. Two men took the tape, bound the unconscious guard, searched his pockets—finding an unusual round key—and then stuffed him in a closet. Another man went to work carefully rendering the security alarms and communications equipment inoperable.

As they rushed through the passageways and tunnels and down stone steps to the cells below, Seng knew where he was within a foot, thanks to the holographic image of the fortress that he had committed to memory.

There was no desperate hurry, but they could not afford to throw away time. He could see now why only a few men guarded the entire facility. The walls were massively thick, and there was only one entrance in and out of the dungeon cells far below street level. The only way a prisoner could escape was the way the team from the Oregonhad come—from the outside. A string of lightbulbs lit the passageway. The ceiling was very high, but the space between the walls was very narrow. The steps finally ended at an enormous steel door with the thickness of a bank vault. A TV camera stared ominously at Seng and his men. This was the tricky part, he thought, as he inserted the odd-looking key into the steel lock. Seng prayed that the key would do the job without a code being demanded.

His fear was confirmed when he turned the key and a buzzer could be heard from the other side of the door. A minute later a voice called through a nearby loudspeaker, “Who goes there?”

“Colonel Antonio Yarayo, State Security, with an interrogation team to question the traitors.”

There was a pause. Seng didn’t wait for a reply.

“Open up. I have the authority and necessary documents. Lieutenant Sanchez would have accompanied us, but he said he was not allowed to leave the front gate unguarded. Sergeant Ignez Macco, is it?” Seng held up the envelope. “If you have any questions, I have your service record in my hands.”

“But sir,” the voice of Macco pleaded, “if the door is opened before eight o’clock in the morning, alarms will go off in the state security office at Fort Canovar.”

“I ordered Lieutenant Sanchez to turn off the dungeon alarm,” Seng bluffed.

“But sir, he cannot do that. The door is on a separate system that is wired to the security commandant’s office in the city. It cannot be opened until eight o’clock in the morning.”

It was one more obstacle to overcome, but not totally unexpected. Seng was betting that the security officers would think the alarms were malfunctioning and call the fort to check it out before sending a squad of security police.

Macco fell for it. A few seconds later, the big steel lock clacked and the bolts that extended from the door into the framework could be heard withdrawing from their slots. Then the massive door swung open silently and smoothly. Sergeant Macco stood at attention and snapped a salute.

Seng wasted no more time on niceties. He aimed the tranquilizer gun at Macco’s throat and squeezed the tiny trigger. The guard’s eyes rolled back in his head and he dropped to the stone floor like a sack of sand.

The dungeon was not a state-of-the-art prison. The rusting iron cell doors had been hung in the late nineteenth century and still required the large antique key chained to Macco’s belt. Seng ripped the key and its ring from the guard’s belt and began opening the first doors. As soon as the door was swung ajar, Julia Huxley rushed into the cell to check the condition of its inhabitant. Seng’s team helped by assisting the shocked prisoners, who feared the worst, into the dungeon’s passageway.

“Five are in no condition to walk up the stairs and onto the street,” said Julia. “They’ll have to be carried out on stretchers.”

“Then we’ll haul them on our backs,” replied Seng. “We don’t have enough bodies to carry five stretchers.”

“These poor devils think we’re going to execute them,” said a tall, ruggedly built team member with red hair in a buzz cut.

“We haven’t got time to explain!” snapped Seng. He knew that the security officials downtown were wondering why the dungeon alarm in Santa Ursula had been triggered at this time of night. They were certain to call and find the phones down. How soon they would send a squad of men to check was anybody’s guess. “Julia, you round up those who can move on their own two feet. The rest of you men carry the ones too weak to walk.”

They moved off, almost having to drag the poor, suffering Cubans out of the dungeon and up the stairs, every team member with a Cuban over one shoulder, their free arms braced around other prisoners who could barely manage the steps. Julia brought up the rear, supporting two women and whispering encouraging words whose meanings could only come through in her soothing tone—she knew only enough Spanish to order a margarita.

Climbing the winding stone steps was a torturous exertion for the weakened prisoners, but there could be no turning back. Any capture now meant certain execution. They struggled up the steps, chests rising and falling, lungs gasping for air, hearts pounding. Men and women who had long ago given up hope now saw an opportunity to live normal lives again, thanks to these crazy people who were risking death to rescue them.

Seng could not afford the time to sympathize with their plight, or look into their gaunt faces. Any thoughts of compassion were fleeting. Sympathy could come once they reached the safety of the Oregon.

He concentrated on pushing them all toward the main gate, keeping his mind cold and logical.

At last the front of the column reached the guard’s office at the gate. Seng stepped cautiously out onto the brick street. There was no whisper of sound or any sign of vehicles or people. The truck was right where they’d left it.

The team carrying those too weak to walk were huffing and puffing now and soaked in sweat from the tropical humidity. Warily, Seng studied the darkened street and buildings through his laser night binoculars. The area was clear. Satisfied, he hustled everyone through the gate and shoved them roughly in the direction of the truck.

He rushed back into the office and checked the guard. He was still unconscious. He also spotted a red light on a console beside the desk. The alarm had indeed been activated when they’d opened the dungeon door. The phone began to ring, and he picked it up and snapped in Spanish, “Uno momento!”

Then he set the receiver down and dashed out the door.

The rescue team and the freed prisoners were crammed into the cargo bed of the truck like Japanese workers during rush hour. The driver shifted the weary old transmission into gear with a brief metallic grind, and the truck leaped forward. The streets were as before, the auto traffic thin, while Cubans were enjoying a balmy evening outside on their balconies, sitting at chairs and tables on the sidewalks or drinking in the cantinas, dancing and singing.

Seng cocked his ear out the window and listened for any sound of alarms or sirens. There came only the strains of music in the night air. The harshest sound came from the truck’s muffler, which seemed to be coming loose from the engine header pipe. The rattle of the exhaust soon drowned out the city noise. He saw Cubans glance at the truck and then turn away. Loose exhaust pipes and rusted-out mufflers were common on the old cars that traveled the streets of Santiago. The city’s inhabitants had more entertaining thoughts on their minds.

The truck driver drove maddeningly slow, but Seng knew better than to push him. A truck casually taking its time through town would arouse no suspicion. After what seemed an hour, but was only fifteen minutes, the driver pulled up alongside a warehouse dock and stopped. A quick look up and down the deserted dock and Seng began goading everyone toward the maintenance shed. The five-minute journey to the shed was uneventful.

Their luck still held. The only activity was centered on the two cargo ships unloading their big containers. Though still apprehensive, Seng finally began to relax. He motioned them through the door of the maintenance shed and down the wooden stairs. In the darkness he saw the vague shape of the Nomad sub’s pilot, standing on the floating dock and helping the Cubans on board. The other pilot was down below, packing them tightly inside the narrow confines of the Nomad’s main cabin.

When Seng and Julia Huxley, the last to board, climbed onto the sub’s upper deck, the pilot quickly cast off the mooring lines, looked up briefly and said, “You made good time.”

“Get to the ship as fast as this craft can take us,” Seng replied. “We couldn’t help setting off an alarm. I’m surprised Cuban security forces aren’t already breathing down our neck.”

“If they haven’t tracked you here,” said the pilot confidently as he closed and sealed the hatch, “they’ll never guess where you came from.”

“At least not until the Oregon’s found missing from her assigned anchorage.”

In seconds the sub was dropping beneath the surface of the dark water. Fifteen minutes later it surfaced inside the moon pool of the Oregon. Divers attached the hook and cable of the big overhead crane, and the Nomad was lifted delicately until it was even with the second deck and moored to the balcony. Huxley’s medical team was waiting along with several members of the ship’s crew to help the Cubans to the Oregon’s well-equipped hospital.

The time was three minutes past eleven.

A thin man, his hair white before his time, recognized Cabrillo as an officer and walked unsteadily up to him. “Sir, my name is Juan Tural. Can you tell me who you people are and why you rescued my friends and me from Santa Ursula?”

“We are a corporation, and we were contracted to do this job.”

“Who hired you?”

“Friends of yours in the United States,” answered Cabrillo. “That’s all that I can say.”

“Then you had no idealistic purpose, no political cause?”

Cabrillo smiled slightly. “We always have a purpose.”

Tural sighed. “I had hoped that salvation, when it came, would come from another quarter.”

“Your people did not have the means to do it. It’s that simple. That is why they came to us.”

“It’s a great pity your only motivation was money.”

“It wasn’t. Money is simply the vehicle,” said Cabrillo. “It allows our corporation to pick its fights and to fund our charity projects. It’s a liberty none of us had when we were employed by our respective governments.” He glanced at his chronograph. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we’re not out of the woods just yet.”

Then he turned and left Tural staring after him as he walked away.

ELEVEN seventeen. If they were going to make a run for it, now was the time, thought Cabrillo. The alarm had long been answered at the prison, and by now patrols were certainly roaming the city and the countryside in search of the escaped prisoners and their rescuers. Their only link was the truck driver, but he could not provide any information to the Cuban security forces, even if he was captured and tortured. His original contact had made no mention of the Oregon. As far as the driver knew, the rescue team had come from a landing party on another part of the island.

Cabrillo lifted a phone and called down to the Corporation’s president in the engine room. “Max?”

Hanley answered almost immediately. “Juan.”

“Have the ballast tanks been pumped dry?”

“Tanks are dry and the hull is raised for speed.”

“The tide is about to turn and will swing us around. We’d better leave while our bow is still aimed toward the main channel. As soon as the anchor comes free, I’ll set the engines very slow. No sense in alerting any observers on the shore to a sudden departure. At the first alarm or when we reach the main channel, whichever comes first, I’ll enter the program for full speed. We’ll need every ounce of power your engines can give.”

“You think you can get us through a narrow channel in the dead of night at full speed without a pilot?”

“The ship’s computer system read every inch of the channel and the buoy markers on the way in. Our escape course is plotted and programmed into the automatic pilot. We’ll leave it to Otis to take us out.” Otis was the crew’s name for the ship’s automated control systems. It could steer the Oregonwithin inches of the intended route.

“Computerized automated controls or not, it won’t be an easy matter to race through a tight channel at sixty knots.”

“We can do it.” Cabrillo punched off and hit another code. “Mark, give me a status on our defense systems.”

Mark Murphy, the Oregon’s weapons specialist, replied in his west Texas drawl, “If any of them Cuban missile launchers so much as hiccups, we’ll take them out.”

“You can expect aircraft once we’re in the open sea.”

“Nuthin’ we cain’t handle.”

He turned to Linda Ross. “Linda?”

“All systems are online,” she replied calmly.

Cabrillo set the phone in its cradle and relaxed, lighting up a thin Cuban cigar. He looked around at the ship’s crew, standing in the control center. They were all staring at him, waiting expectantly.

“Well,” he said slowly, before taking a deep breath, “I guess we might as well go.”

He gave a voice command to the computer, the winch was set in motion, and the anchor slowly, quietly—through Teflon sleeves the team had inserted inside the hawsehole, which deadened the clank of the chain—rose from the bottom of the harbor. Another command and the Oregonbegan to inch slowly ahead.

Down in the engine room, Max Hanley studied the gauges and instruments on the huge console. His four big magnetohydrodynamics engines were a revolutionary design for maritime transport. They intensified and compounded the electricity found in saline seawater before running it through a magnetic core tube kept at absolute zero by liquid helium. The electrical current that was produced created an extremely high energy force that pumped the water through thrusters in the stern for propulsion.

Not only were the Oregon’s engines capable of pushing the big cargo ship at incredible speeds, but it required no fuel except the seawater that passed through its magnetic core. The source of the propulsion was inexhaustible. Another advantage was that the ship did not require huge fuel tanks, which enabled the space to be utilized for other purposes.

There were only four other ships in the world with magnetohydrodynamics engines—three cruise ships and one oil tanker. Those who had installed the engines in the Oregonhad been sworn to secrecy.

Hanley took proprietary care of the high-tech engines. They were reliable and rarely caused problems. He labored over them as if they were an extension of his own soul. He kept them finely tuned and in a constant state of readiness for extreme and extended operation. He watched now as they automatically engaged and began pushing the ship into the channel that led to the sea.

Above in the command center, armored panels slid noiselessly apart, revealing a large window on the forward bulkhead. The murmur among the men and women gazing intently at the lights of the city was quiet, as though the men manning the Cuban defense systems could hear their words.

Cabrillo spotted another ship leaving the harbor ahead of them. “What ship is that?” he asked.

One of the team pulled up the list of ship arrivals and departures on his computer monitor. “She’s a Chinese registered cargo vessel carrying sugar to Hangchou,” he reported. “She’s leaving port nearly an hour ahead of her scheduled departure time.”

“Name?” asked Cabrillo.

“In English, the Red Dawn. The shipping line is owned by the Chinese army.”

“Turn out all the outer lights, and increase speed until we are close astern of the vessel ahead,” he commanded the computer. “We’ll use her as a decoy to lead us out.” The outer deck and navigation lights blinked out, leaving the ship in darkness as she narrowed the gap between the two vessels. The lights inside the command center dimmed to a blue-green glow.

By the time the Red Dawnentered the ship’s channel and passed the first of the string of marker buoys, the darkened Oregonwas trailing only fifty yards off her stern. Cabrillo kept his ship just far enough back so that the Chinese vessel’s deck lights would not cast their beams on his bow. It was a long shot, but he was betting the silhouette of his ship would be mistaken for the shadow of the Red Dawn.

Cabrillo glanced at a large twenty-four-hour clock on the wall above the window just as the long minute hand clicked onto 11:39. Only twenty-one minutes to go before the Cubans’ defense systems test.

“Following the Red Dawnis slowing us down,” said Linda. “We’re losing precious time.”

Cabrillo nodded. “You’re right, we can’t wait any longer. She’s served her purpose.” He leaned over and spoke into the computer’s voice receiver.

“Go to full speed and pass the ship ahead!”

Like a small powerboat with big engines and a heavy hand on the throttles, the Oregondug her stern into the forbidding water and lifted her bows clear of the waves as her thrusters erupted in a cloud of froth, creating a vast crater in her wake. She leaped down the channel and swept past the Chinese cargo ship less than twenty feet away, as if she were stopped dead in the water. The Chinese sailors could be seen staring in stunned disbelief. Faster and faster with each passing second she raced through the night. Speed was the Oregon’s crowning achievement, the thoroughbred heart of the vessel. Forty knots, then fifty. By the time she passed Morro Castle at the entrance to Santiago, she was making nearly sixty-two knots. No ship in the world that size could match her speed.

The beacon lights mounted high on the bluffs were soon little more than blinking specks on a black horizon.

THE alarm spread quickly onshore that a ship was making an unauthorized departure—but the radar and fire control operators did not unleash their shore-to-surface missiles. Their officers could not believe that such a large ship was moving at such an incredible rate of speed. They assumed their radar systems were malfunctioning, and they were reluctant to unleash missiles that they did not think could lock on to such an inconceivable target.

Not until the Oregonwas twenty miles out to sea did a general in Cuban security put two and two together and deduce that the sudden departure of the ship and the escape of the Santa Ursula prisoners were somehow tied together. He ordered missiles fired at the fleeing ship, but by the time the word filtered down through the sluggish command, the Oregonwas out of acceptable range.

He then ordered jets from the Cuban air force to intercept and sink the mystery ship before it reached the protection of a United States Coast Guard cutter. It could not possibly escape, he thought, as he sat back, lit a cigar and contentedly puffed a cloud of blue smoke toward the ceiling. Seventy miles away, two geriatric MiGs were sent aloft and set a course toward the Oregonas directed by Cuban radar.

CABRILLO didn’t need to study a chart to see that sailing around the tip of Cuba from Santiago through the Windward Passage and then northwest to Miami was little more than a suicide run. For nearly six hundred miles, the Oregonwould be less than fifty miles from the Cuban coast, a voyage in a shooting gallery. His safest option was to set a course southwest around the southern tip of Haiti and then almost due west to Puerto Rico, which was a territory under the U.S. flag. There he could unload his passengers, where they would be safe and cared for at proper medical facilities before being flown to Florida.

“Two unidentified aircraft closing,” announced Linda.

“I have them,” Murphy announced, hunched over a console with enhanced radar screens and an array of knobs and switches.

“Can you identify?” asked Linda.

“Computer reads them as a pair of MiG-27s.”

“How far out?” Cabrillo probed.

“Sixty miles and closing,” Murphy answered. “Poor beggars don’t know what they’re in for.”

Cabrillo turned to his communications expert, Hali Kasim. “Try and raise them in Spanish. Warn them we have surface-to-air missiles on board and will knock them out of the sky if they show any sign of hostility.”

Kasim didn’t have to speak Spanish to deliver the warning. He merely ordered the computer to translate his message over his radio, which was tuned to twenty different frequencies.

After a couple of minutes he shook his head. “They are receiving, but not responding.”

“They think we’re bluffing,” said Linda.

“Keep trying.” Then to Murphy: “What’s the range of their missiles?”

“According to specs, they’re carrying short-range rockets with a range of ten miles.”

Cabrillo looked solemn. “If they don’t break off within thirty miles, take them out. Better yet, launch one of ours. Then manually guide it for a close flyby.”

Murphy made the necessary calculations and pressed a red button. “Missile on its way.”

An audible swoosh swept the command center as a rocket lifted from an opening in the foredeck and swept into the sky. They all watched on the monitors as it raced to the northwest and soon disappeared.

“Four minutes to flyby,” said Murphy.

Every eye turned to the big clock above the window. No one spoke, all waiting in anticipation. Time dragged as the second hand on the clock seemed to take forever to make a sweep. Finally, Murphy spoke mechanically. “Missile passed two hundred yards over and between the hostiles.”

“Did they get the message?” asked Cabrillo, a slight tone of apprehension in his voice.

There was a long pause, and then, “They’re turning for home,” Murphy reported happily. “Two Cubans who are very lucky men indeed.”

“Also smart enough to recognize a no-win situation.”

“Indeed,” Linda said with a broad smile.

“No blood on our hands this day,” Cabrillo said with an obvious sigh of relief. He leaned over in his chair and spoke to the computer. “Slow to cruise speed.”

The clandestine operation was almost complete, the contract fulfilled. The Oregonand her crew of executives did not consider themselves lucky. Their achievement had come from a combination of special skills, expertise, intelligence and precise planning. Now, except for a technician to watch over the command center and the navigation systems, everyone could relax; some headed for their state-rooms for well-deserved sleep, while others congregated in the ship’s dining room to snack and wind down.

Cabrillo retired to his teak-paneled cabin and removed a packet from a safe under the carpet mounted in the deck. It was their next contract. He pulled out the contents, studied them for nearly an hour, and then began planning the initial levels of tactics and strategy.

Two and a half days later, the Oregonsailed into the port of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and discharged the Cuban exiles. Before the sun set, the remarkable ship and its strange crew of corporate officials were once again at sea on a course toward their next assignment. Before it was through, they would steal a priceless artifact, return a divine leader to power and free a nation. But when the Oregonleft port, Cabrillo was not on board. He was winging his way east against a rising sun.