Текст книги "The Jungle"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Du Brul
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

1

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND

FOUR MONTHS AGO

WILLIAM CANTOR HAD SNEEZED INTO THE MICROPHONE before he knew he was about to. The need hit him that hard, and he didn’t have the chance to turn his head away. The phlegm the sneeze had discharged into his nasal passages had to be snorted back, and that amplified sniff echoed through the nearly deserted meeting room.

“Sorry,” he said miserably and coughed, covering his mouth and turning away so as to show the ten-odd people here for his lecture that he wasn’t a complete philistine. “As an American I knew at Christ Church College said”—that’s right, you rubes, I went to Oxford —“I can shake a hand, I can shake a leg, but I sure can’t shake this cold.”

The response from the crowd might have been polite laughter or, most likely, a muted cough.

God, how he hated these lectures, the ones in annex buildings or village libraries, where the only attendees were pensioners with no interest in the subject but nothing better to do with their afternoons. Worse than those, actually, were the ones in cities such as Birmingham, so blighted that the sun never seemed to shine, and the people in the room were just here to get warmed up before heading out to panhandle or line up at soup kitchens. He had counted ten attendees before taking the lectern and no fewer than fourteen overcoats. He imagined a string of rusted shopping carts, overladened with detritus, in the library car park.

“ ‘I have not told half of what I saw.’” A much better opening line than spraying the microphone with bogies, Cantor thought ruefully. Still, he had goals, and one never knew, maybe the bundledup woman toward the back of the fluorescent-lit room was secretly J. K. Rowling in mufti. “These were the last words uttered by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo upon his deathbed.

“We know from his legendary book, The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both languished in a Genoese prison, that Polo, along with his father, Niccolò, and uncle, Maffeo”—the names tripped off Cantor’s tongue despite his head cold, this being far from the first time he had given this particular talk—“that he made many incredible discoveries and beheld many amazing sights.”

There was a disturbance at the back of the room as a newcomer entered from the library’s brutalist-style reading room. Metal folding chairs creaked as a few people turned to see who had come to hear the speech, probably assuming it was a homeless buddy coming in from Chamberlain Square.

The man wore a cashmere overcoat that nearly swept the floor over a dark suit, dark shirt, and a matching dark tie. Tall and big, he gave an apologetic wave and took a seat in back before Cantor could see his features. This looked promising, the cash-strapped scholar thought. At least this bloke was wearing clothes that hadn’t already been discarded a few times.

Cantor paused long enough for the gentleman to settle. If this was a potential financial backer, he might as well start licking the guy’s boots now.

“Even in his day, Polo’s Travels sparked debate. People simply didn’t believe he had seen and done all that he claimed. They couldn’t look past their own prejudices to believe that there was another separate civilization that could rival or even surpass the European states. Later, a glaring omission arose. Simply stated, for all his years in China, and all that he wrote of that distant land, he never once mentioned its greatest achievement, its most iconic image.

“You see, at no point in his dictations to Rustichello da Pisa did he ever mention China’s Great Wall. That would be like a modern tourist saying they’ve been to London but not seen the Eye. Wait. That hideous Ferris wheel may be something a savvy traveler would want to forget.” Cantor paused for laughter. Got more coughing. “Ah yes, then, his failure to mention the Great Wall, which is just a short distance from Beijing, where Polo spent so much time, led his detractors to discount his entire tale.

“But what if fault lies not with the dic-ta-tor but the dic-ta– tee.” Here he had planned to make a play on words and mention the despotic Genoese doge who had imprisoned Polo and the scribe, Rustichello, but decided against it. “Little is known about the man Polo dictated his story to while they served time in a Genoese prison cell following Polo’s capture at the Battle of Curzola. Rustichello himself had been captured some fourteen years earlier after the pivotal Battle of Meloria, which marked the beginning of the decline of the Pisan city-state.

“Rustichello was, to put it in today’s vernacular, a romance writer who’d gained some measure of success prior to his being taken prisoner. Think of him as the Jackie Collins of his day. That would give him a strong insight into what would capture the imagination of his reading audience and what would be seen as too fantastic to believe.

“With that in mind, I see him not only as the man wielding the pen that put Polo’s story to paper but as his editor as well, a man who could perhaps blunt some of Polo’s more controversial discoveries in order to give the manuscript more mass appeal. Medieval noblemen—and that’s almost exclusively who writers wrote for at the time—wouldn’t appreciate that China rivaled them and in many cases surpassed their achievements in the fields of medicine, engineering, social administration, and especially warfare.”

Cantor paused a moment. Expressions on the faces of his audience ranged from asleep to slack-jawed indifference. So long as they were out of the freezing rain pounding the central English city, they didn’t much care what he said. He wished he could see the man in the dark suit, but he was hidden behind a tall homeless fellow who slept in an almost perfectly erect posture.

“It was with this thought in mind—that perhaps Rustichello took notes during their long confinement that were edited out of the final draft of Travelsand that those notes would account for some of the lapses in Polo’s story that have vexed future scholars and made them question the validity of the entire book—that I come to you today.” The line sounded clunky to Cantor’s ear too, but he was trying to come off as learned, and all his dons at Oxford spoke in run-on sentences that could fill a page or more.

“I believe,” he continued, “that somewhere in the world exist those notes, those bits of Polo’s story that couldn’t get past the medieval censor—that was the Vatican—and would have raised too much doubt among the contemporary readership. Since leaving Christ Church”—no sense admitting that he hadn’t graduated—“I have searched across Italy and into France for a hint of such a book. And finally, six months ago, I believe I found it.”

Did Black Suit stir at this news? It seemed to Cantor that the shadow at the back of the room shifted position slightly. He felt like a fisherman who senses that first nibble on the end of his line. Now he had to set the hook before reeling in his prize.

“I was given access to the sales records of a small antiquarian bookshop in an even smaller town in Italy that has been in business since 1884. They have a record of selling a copy of Rustichello’s seminal work, Roman de Roi Artus, in 1908. Included with the book of Arthurian legend was a folio of loose pages.

“At this time, Edwardian English families were exploring Italy in order to broaden themselves. Think of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View.” To most of this lot it should be Cardboard Box with a Cellophane Window, but Cantor knew he was really playing to an audience of one. “Like any tourist, these travelers brought back souvenirs. Furniture, statuary, just about anything they could get their hands on that would remind them of Lombardy or Tuscany. One particular family fancied books and returned with veritable trunkloads of them, enough to fill a library about the size of this room floor to ceiling. Some of the volumes dated back to a century before Polo was even born. It is this family who acquired the Rustichello works.

“For a fee, I was granted limited access to their library.” Five hundred pounds for an afternoon, Cantor recalled bitterly. He recalled most things bitterly these days. The current library’s owner was a right miserable git who, knowing Cantor’s desperation to see the library, wasn’t above capitalizing on the scholarly interest of a thirty-year-old researcher.

Cantor had scraped together only enough for a single visit, but it had been enough. And that was what he was really doing here today, and for the past few months. He had no interest in enlightening dowagers and the homeless. He was hoping to find a patron who would help him fund his research. The folio’s owner had expressed in no uncertain terms that he would not sell it, but he would be willing to allow Cantor access, at five hundred pounds per day.

The young academic was sure that once he published his research, pressure from historical societies would force the owner to, if not donate, at least let a major university authenticate Rustichello’s work and thus cement Cantor’s reputation and hopefully his fortune as well.

“The text is written in typical medieval French, my specialty along with Italian from the same era. I managed to translate only a small portion since I only discovered it toward the end of my sojourn in the library, but what I read is mind-boggling. It is the description of a battle Polo witnessed in 1281 where a general named Khenbish obliterated his enemies using gunpowder, which Polo had never seen used in such a way, and a most remarkable device that utilized a special crystal to channel sunlight into a focused beam, much like a modern laser.”

Cantor paused once again. Dark Suit had gotten to his feet and skulked from the library annex room, his long overcoat dancing around his ankles like an obsidian cape. Cantor cursed under his breath. He’d failed to set the hook, had in fact scared the fish out of the water entirely. He looked dejectedly at the unshaven and sullen faces arrayed against him. What was the point of continuing? They no more wanted to hear his nasal monotone than he wanted to deliver it.

“Ah, thank you very much. Were there any questions?” He was taken aback when a spidery hand went up. The woman had the scrunched face of one of those dolls made of nylon stockings. “Yes?”

“Can you spare some change?”

Cantor grabbed up his briefcase, tossed his worn mackintosh over his arm, and strode out to a chorus of hoarse cackles.

Darkness had fallen completely when he stepped through the library’s doors. The impersonal expanse of Chamberlain Square was hemmed in by the concrete monstrosity of the library on one side, the three-story classical Counsel House on another, and by the Greek temple-like Town Hall on a third. In the middle was the monument to Joseph Chamberlain, who’d been someone or another in this dreary city. To Cantor, the structure looked like thieves had made off with an entire Gothic cathedral and left behind the top sixty or so feet of one of its spires.

If the city fathers had intended to design a less harmonious space architecturally, he couldn’t see how.

Maybe throw in the odd zeppelin shed, he thought uncharitably, or an Eastern Orthodox onion-domed church.

The rain had slowed to a cold drizzle, and though Cantor raised his collar, icy water found its way down the back of his neck. He longed for a warm shower and a hot toddy, and for his sore nose to stop leaking.

His battered Volkswagen was parked over on Newhall Street, and he had just turned onto Colmore Row when the driver’s-side window of a sleek Jaguar sedan whispered down.

“Dr. Cantor, might I have a word?” The voice was cultured, with a continental accent—French, German, maybe Swiss, which to Cantor sounded like a combination of the two.

“Ah, I don’t have my doctorate yet,” he stammered when he recognized the black shirt and tie of Dark Suit sitting behind the wheel of the luxury sedan.

“No matter, you gave a compelling speech. I would have stayed for the rest, but I received a call I couldn’t ignore. Please, just a few moments, is all I ask.”

“It’s raining.” Bending to peer into the car sent a spike of pain through Cantor’s strained sinuses.

“Not in here.” The man smiled, or at least his lips parted and his teeth were revealed. “I can drive you to your car.”

Cantor looked up the street. There was no one about and his car wasfive blocks away. “Okay.”

He stepped around the long sloping bonnet and heard the electronic lock disengage for the passenger seat. He slid into the supple leather. In the glow of the dash lights, the sedan’s considerable woodwork shimmered.

The stranger slipped the car into gear and eased it from its parking space. The Jag was so smooth that Cantor hadn’t realized the engine had been running.

“An associate of mine heard the lecture you gave last week in Coventry and was intrigued enough to tell me about it. I had to hear for myself.”

“I’m sorry, you are?”

“Oh. My apologies. Tony Forsythe.” They shook hands awkwardly since Forsythe had to reach under his left arm so as to not release the steering wheel.

“And what’s your interest in Marco Polo, Mr. Forsythe?” Cantor asked.

He got an odd vibe from the man. He was around forty and had plain, unexceptional features, yet thick dark hair that was so dense it could have been a toupee. Still, there was something else. Cantor realized what it was. His hands had been large and callused. His grip hadn’t been overly forceful, but Forsythe’s hand had practically swallowed Cantor’s. In his experience, men in £1,000 overcoats and £60,000 cars didn’t have calluses.

“I’m a dabbler in history, you might say, and I’m interested in this folio and its contents.”

William Cantor had looked for a fish, but he had the sudden feeling he’d nabbed a shark. “Um, I’m down Newhall.”

“Yes, I know,” Forsythe said, which rather bothered Cantor, but the stranger added, “Have you there in a jiff. You mentioned the folio’s owner had no interest in selling, correct?”

“Yes, the man’s loaded. I think he asked me to pay to see his library just to get under my skin.”

“But no price was discussed?”

“Ah, no. It was all I could do to come up with the five hundred quid to see the damned thing for a day.”

“Pity,” Forsythe said almost to himself. “A simple cash transaction would have been preferable.”

To Cantor’s relief, the Jag made the left-hand turn onto Newhall.

Forsythe glanced at him for a second. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to tell me the gentleman’s name?”

“I, ah, I don’t think that would be in my best interest, now would it?”

“Oh, but it would, friend William. It is most certainly in your best interest.”

The Jaguar suddenly leapt forward under hard acceleration. Cantor got a fleeting glimpse of his blue VW Polo as they raced past. “What the bloody hell do you—”

The arm of a person who’d been lying flat and unseen in the spacious rear seat snaked around Cantor’s neck with the strength of an anaconda, choking the words in his throat. A sharp jab to the neck, a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and three seconds later William Cantor slumped over in drug-induced unconsciousness.

With his parents long dead from an accident on the M1 and no siblings or a girlfriend, it wasn’t until his landlord knocked on the door to his tiny one-room flat a month later that anyone knew Cantor had gone missing. The handful of presentations he’d planned had been courteously postponed by a person claiming his identity. It would be another several days before a missing persons report was matched with the headless and handless corpse found floating in the North Sea of the fishing town of Grimsby about that same time.

There were two things on which all the police involved agreed. The DNA found in Cantor’s apartment matched that of the body fished from the water. The second was that before the man died he’d been tortured so severely that death would have been a blessed relief.

Because Cantor kept all his notes on the Rustichello Folio in his briefcase, which was never recovered, there was one more crime the authorities never realized was related to his disappearance. There had been a botched break-in of a Hampshire estate down in the southern part of the country near a town called Beaulieu. It happened two days after the last confirmed Cantor appearance. Forensic reconstruction showed that the burglars had been surprised by the widower owner during the robbery, bashed him over the head with a jimmy bar left on the scene—no prints—and fled in panic, not even bothering to take the pillowcases stuffed with sterling silverware they’d already gathered.

None of the police gave a second look at the slim gap in the rank upon rank of books that lined the estate’s paneled library.

2

TRIBAL REGION

NORTHERN WAZIRISTAN

TODAY

THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGE HADN’T CHANGED IN TWO HUNDRED years. Except for the guns, of course. They had long been around, that wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was the typeof weapon that had changed. Centuries ago, the bearded men toted bugle-throated blunderbusses. Then came the Tower muskets, followed by the Lee-Enfield rifles, and finally the ubiquitous AK-47s, which flooded into the region thanks to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the north. And so good were these guns that most were older than the men who carried them. Didn’t matter if he was defending the region from a rival faction or heading off to the outhouse, a man without an AK at the ready was no man.

All this ran through Cabrillo’s mind as he watched two Pashtun youths from the north, kids barely out of their teens, their beards just shadowy stubble on chin and cheek, try to wrestle a pair of goats onto an open-bed truck. All the while the assault rifles slung around their shoulders would slip and go across their chests, hitting the animals hard enough to make them fight the manhandling.

Each time a gun slipped, the boy would have to pause and redirect it back over his shoulder and then try to calm the satyr-eyed goat. The distance was too great to hear, but Cabrillo could imagine the goats’ frightened bleats and the young men’s earnest pleas to Allah for easier ways to handle livestock. It never occurred to them to rest their rifles against the rickety stockade fence for the sixty seconds it would take to load the animals unencumbered.

Take away the forty or so other armed men in the village encampment and he would have found it comical.

He had to admire the kids for one thing. Though he was ensconced in the latest arctic gear, he was still freezing his butt off while they cavorted in a couple of layers of homespun woolen clothing.

Of course Cabrillo hadn’t moved more than his eyelids in the past fifteen hours. And neither had the rest of his team.

In Northern Waziristan, it was traditional that villages were built like citadels on the tops of hills. What grazing and farming was available was accomplished on the slopes leading to the town. In order for him and his people to find a suitable observation post that let them look down on the Taliban encampment, they had to find cover on an adjacent mountain. The distance across the steep valley was only a mile, but it forced them up a snow-and-glacial-ice peak and left them struggling to draw breath at almost ten thousand feet. Through his stabilized binoculars, he could see a couple of old men smoking a never-ending chain of cigarettes.

Cabrillo rued the last cigar he’d smoked, while his lungs felt as if they were drawing on the metallic dregs of an exhausted scuba tank.

A deep baritone came through his earpiece, “They wrangling them goats or getting ready to have their way with them?”

Another voice chimed in, “Since the goats aren’t wearing burkas, at least these boys know what they’re getting.”

“Radio silence,” Cabrillo said. He wasn’t worried about his people losing operational awareness. What concerned him was that the next comment would come from his second-in-command here, Linda Ross. Knowing her sense of humor as he did, whatever she joked about was sure to make him laugh out loud.

One of the young shepherds finally set his wire-stock AK aside, and they got the animals into the truck. By the time the rear gate was closed, the kid had his weapon back over his shoulder. The engine fired with a burst of blue exhaust, and soon the vehicle was chugging anemically away from the mountaintop village. This was an al-Qaeda stronghold, and yet life in the rugged mountains went on. Crops had to be raised, animals grazed, and goods bought and sold. The dirty secret of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban was that while their followers were fanatics, they still needed to be paid. With the money long spent from last fall’s lucrative poppy harvest, traditional means of support were necessary to keep the fighters operational.

There were roughly two dozen buildings in the town. Six or so fronted the dirt road that led down to the valley below, while the others rose behind them on the hill, connected by little more than footpaths. All were made of stone that blended in with the bleak surroundings, with low flat roofs and few windows. The largest was a mosque with a minaret that looked ready to topple.

The few women Cabrillo and his team had seen all wore dark burkas while the men sported baggy pants under jackets called chapansand either turbans or flattened wool caps known as pakols.

“Juan.” Linda Ross’s voice had an elfin lilt that went with her pixielike appearance. “Check out the mosque.”

Careful so as not to draw attention, Cabrillo swung his binoculars a few arc degrees and zoomed in on the mosque’s door. Like the other three members of his team, he was dug into the side of the mountain, with a dirt-covered tarp over the foxhole. They were all invisible from just a few yards away.

He adjusted the focus. Three people were coming out of the mosque. The one with the long gray beard had to be the imam, while the other two were much younger. They walked flanking the man, their expressions solemn as they listened to whatever the holy man imparted to them.

Juan tightened the focus. Both of them had Asiatic features and no facial hair of any kind. Their clothing was out of place for this impoverished region. Their parkas, though of muted colors, were top quality, and they both wore new hiking boots. He looked closer at the smaller of the two. He’d studied that face for hours before beginning the operation, committing it to memory for this precise moment.

“Bingo,” he said softly over their secure communications equipment. “That’s Setiawan Bahar. Everyone keep an eye on him. We need to know where they’re putting him up.”

The odd trio wandered up behind the main road, walking slowly because the imam had a pronounced limp. Intel said he got that limp when Kandahar fell back in 2001. They eventually reached one of the indistinguishable houses. A bearded man greeted them. They spoke at the doorstep for a few minutes and then the homeowner invited the two boys, both Indonesian, into his home. The imam turned to head back to his mosque.

“Okay, we got it,” Juan said. “From now on all eyes on that house so we know he hasn’t left.”

Cabrillo received a quiet chorus of “Roger that.”

Then, against his own orders, Juan swept his binoculars back to the main road as a white Toyota sedan that probably had a couple hundred thousand miles on the odometer swung into town. No sooner had it stopped than the four doors were thrown open and armed men leapt out. Their faces were buried behind the tails of their turbans. They brought their weapons to their shoulders as they circled around to the car’s trunk. One leaned forward and keyed open the lock. The door raised slowly on its hydraulics, and three of the gunmen leaned in with the barrels of their AKs.

Juan couldn’t see what was in the trunk, or most likely who, and waited expectantly as one of the fighters lowered his gun so it hung under his arm and reached into the trunk. He hauled a fifth man from where he’d been lying in a fetal position. Their prisoner wore what looked like standard American-issue BDUs. The boots looked military too. His mouth was gagged, and a blindfold had been cinched over his eyes. His hair was a little longer than Army regulation and blond. He was too weak to stand and collapsed into the dirt as soon as he was free from the car.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cabrillo muttered. He turned his binoculars back to the house where Setiawan Bahar was sequestered and told his people to turn their attention to what passed for the town’s square.

Eddie Seng said nothing, while Linda Ross gasped and Franklin Lincoln cursed.

“Have we heard anything about a captured soldier?” Seng then asked.

“No. Nothing,” Linda replied, her voice tightening as one of the Taliban kicked the captured soldier in the ribs.

In his basso voice, Linc said, “Could have happened in the thirty hours it took us to hump our butts into position. No reason Max would have passed on news like that to us.”

Without taking his eyes off the house, Cabrillo switched radio frequencies. “ Oregon, Oregon, do you copy?”

From the port city of Karachi more than five hundred miles to the south came the immediate reply, “This is the Oregon. Hali here, Chairman.”

“Hali, has anything come over the transom since we started this op about an American or NATO soldier kidnapped in Afghanistan?”

“Nothing over the news wires and nothing from official channels, but as you know we’re a bit out of the Pentagon’s loop right now.”

Cabrillo knew that last fact all too well. A few months back, after spending nearly a decade enjoying high-level access to military intelligence through his old mentor at the CIA, Langston Overholt, Cabrillo’s private security company, known as the Corporation and based on a tramp freighter called the Oregon, had become a pariah. They had pulled off an operation in Antarctica to thwart a joint Argentine/Chinese bid to annex and exploit a massive new oil field off the pristine coast of the southern continent. Fearing the geopolitical risks involved, the U.S. government had told them in no uncertain terms not to attempt the mission.

It didn’t matter that they had succeeded spectacularly. They were seen as rogue by the new president, and Overholt was ordered not to use the unique services the Corporation provided. Ever again. It had taken all of Langston’s considerable influence in the corridors of Washington to keep his job following that episode. He’d confessed privately to Juan that the president had chewed off so much of his butt he hadn’t been able to sit for a week.

And that is what brought Cabrillo and this small team here, to one of the few places on earth never to be occupied by a foreign army. Even Alexander the Great had the sense to avoid Waziristan and the rest of the Northern Tribal Regions. They were here because a wealthy Indonesian businessman, Gunawan Bahar, had a son who ran away to join the Taliban, in much the same way youths of a few generations ago back in the United States ran off to join the circus. Only difference was that young Setiawan hadn’t developed mentally past the age of seven, and the cousin who’d brought him here had told the recruiter in Jakarta that Seti wanted to be a martyr.

American runaways became carnies. Setiawan’s fate was that of a suicide bomber.

Hali continued, “Stoney and Murph have been trolling every database they can lay their hands on since you left.” Eric Stone and Mark Murphy were the Corporation’s IT experts, along with their other duties. “Nothing much by way of news out of any of the ’stans.”

“Tell them to keep an eye out. I’m looking at a blond guy in NATO gear who looks like he’s in a world of hurt.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications officer, said.

Cabrillo switched back to the tactical net. “Recommendations?”

Linda Ross spoke up immediately. “We can’t leave him here. We all know that in a day or two he’s going to be the star of a jihadist beheading video.”

“Eddie?” Juan asked, knowing the answer.

“Save him.”

“Don’t even ask,” Linc rumbled.

“I didn’t need to.” Juan still had the target house under observation and wouldn’t shift his focus. “What are they doing now?”

“They have him up on his feet,” Linda replied. “His hands are tied behind his back. A couple of the village kids have come out to see him. One of them just spit on him. The other kicked him in the shin. Hold on. The captors are shooing the kids away. Okay, they’re leading him up behind the square, heading in the same direction as our target house. And they’re walking, and walking, and . . . Here we go. Three houses left of where Seti’s staying.”

“Linc, take the target,” Juan ordered. He paused a beat for the big former SEAL to get his binocs fixated and then switched his own to where the four terrorists were pushing their blond captive into a mud and stone house that was indistinguishable from all the others.

Two of the Afghans took up guard duty outside the simple wooden door. Juan tried to peer through the open window next to it, but the inside of the humble house was too dark to discern more than vague movement.

The Corporation had been hired to get Gunawan Bahar’s son away from al-Qaeda, not rescue a foreign soldier, but as was the case in the operation in Antarctica, Cabrillo’s moral compass was the primary force behind their actions. Saving that stranger, while not getting paid the million dollars Bahar had already forked over with the promise of another four when his son was on a plane back to Jakarta, was just as imperative in his mind.

Juan recalled the tears in Bahar’s eyes when he had explained during their only meeting about how his son idolized an elder cousin and how this boy had been secretly radicalized in a Jakarta mosque. Because of the mental challenges Seti faced, Gunawan had told him, the boy couldn’t rationally join a terrorist organization, so in effect he’d been kidnapped and brought here to this al-Qaeda mountain retreat.

Cabrillo had seen the undying love in the man’s tormented expression and heard it in his voice. He had no children of his own, but he was president of the Corporation and captain of its ship, Oregon. He loved his crewmates the way a father must, so he could well imagine the anguish Bahar was suffering. If one of his own had been kidnapped, he would move much more than heaven and earth to see them returned.