Mirage

“I tell her already,” Dullah went on, “that I will pay her ten times what you give her to be my personal bodyguard. While my men wandered in a daze, she was saving our lives. I say it again, a true lioness. In all my life I have never seen one so brave, one so strong, one so…”

Dullah finally ran out of praise, so Linda said, “You forgot the part where I turned water into wine.”

“I believe you could,” the Emir rejoined.

Juan looked at her. “Linda, are you sure there’s enough room in here for us and your ego?”

“Plenty,” she shot back saucily.

Good job, he mouthed to her, and then addressed the crowd: “I need to speak with an engineer.”

One of the men stepped forward. “Heinz-Erik Vogel, chief engineer.”

He was Teutonic, from the top of his blond head to the soles of his work boots, and stood as if at attention. Juan shook his hand.

“I’m Juan Cabrillo, Linda’s boss.” He went on to explain his theory as to why the ship hadn’t sunk yet, and the engineer heartily agreed, having come to the same conclusion himself. They agreed the best way to get everyone out was to breach the hull plates over the anteroom through which Juan had first entered the bilge. They could better prevent the air from escaping by using its access hatch like an air lock, opening it just long enough to get a group of people inside and then closing it up again while they were helped outside by Cabrillo’s people.

A second hole would need to be drilled into the bilge and air pumped in at high pressure to make up for the expected losses when the hatch was opened.

They worked out the precise location of the antechamber as it related to the ship’s propeller shafts, the only reference point Cabrillo would have on the otherwise bare hull bottom.

When they had settled all the details, Juan turned to Linda. “I’ve got enough air for us to buddy-breathe back to the surface.”

She didn’t consider his offer for a second. “These are my people now. I’m responsible for them and I’m not leaving them until they’re all safe.”

He bent and kissed her forehead. “I knew you wouldn’t. Close the hatch behind me. This should take about an hour to set in motion. We can start cutting now, and once the Oregon arrives, Max’ll rig the air hose. When I tap on the hatch three times, that means I’m going to open it. Send through the first five people. Worst injured first, but they need to be quick, so have healthy people help them.”

“Got it.”

“Then we’ll lever the hatch closed, clear the antechamber, let the pressure build back up inside here, and do it again.”

“Sounds good.”

“Okay, hotshot. See you later.”

It took Juan just ten minutes of quick swimming and a few minutes of decompression to reach the surface and drag himself back onto the Sakir’s hull. Linc was there in an instant to help him off with his gear. “Well?”

“Linda saved all but a couple of them,” Juan said with a proud smile.

“Booyah!” Linc whooped. “I knew my girl would pull through. What happened?”

“She got everyone down into the bilge after the Sakir rolled but before it completely filled with water. They’re in there now, inside a bubble of pressurized air. I worked out with the ship’s engineer how to rescue them and not have this tub sink from under our feet. What about the Oregon?”

“Launched MacD and Eddie twenty minutes ago, and, if you could see past the rudder, you’d know she’s about ten minutes from pulling alongside of us.”

“Perfect.” Juan strode over to the chopper to open a line to Hanley. He laid out what they would need, and Max promised to have it ready by the time they arrived.

While Linc got the cutting torch ready, Juan changed out of his scuba suit, dried himself with a rag Gomez promised was clean, and threw on the outdoor clothes he’d grabbed from his cabin, complete with rubber boots that went up to his knees.

As soon as the Oregon was in position on the windward side of the Sakir so that her massive bulk shielded the work crew from the worst of the storm, a Zodiac shot out of the boat garage, trailing a thick rubber hose. Max was at the controls, and with him were some of his boys from the engineering staff.

There was no time for small talk. The storm was intensifying. Soon waves would sweep clear across the hulk and suspend any attempt at getting the survivors out. From the measurements Vogel had given him, Cabrillo marked out a three-by-three-foot spot on the hull, and Linc got busy with the torch. Molten metal was soon drizzling through the cuts he made as the torch slowly ate the inch-and-a-half-thick plate. Hanley had brought over a second plasma torch, and he was at Linc’s side cutting with abandon. Farther along the hull, the Oregon’s engineers were preparing to drill a hole to insert the air hose. They had tubes of industrial contact glue ready to seal the hose into place once the nozzle was inside the bilge. Gomez Adams was warming the chopper for the short hop back to the hangar.

In all, Cabrillo’s people were working like the well-oiled machine he knew them to be.

Juan had told Linda that they’d be ready in an hour. He missed that deadline by only two minutes and that’s because he didn’t factor in the time it would take Max to set up a hydraulic ram down in the antechamber. They would need its power to close the hatch against the pressure of air gushing out. Fortunately, it wasn’t high enough to warrant decompression for those trapped inside.

Cabrillo gave her the signal, she tapped back that she was ready, and Juan opened the hatch. In the explosive blast of air, five people tumbled into the antechamber, sprawling on the ground in a tangle of limbs. One woman screamed when her already-broken leg was smashed against the far wall. Max activated the ram and it slammed the door closed, as promised.

“What do you think?” Cabrillo asked. The ship didn’t feel like it had settled any deeper.

“How should I know? You didn’t leave a barometer in there. Gu

Juan gri

By being patient and cycling air back into the bilge space, it took forty minutes for the last group, including Linda, Vogel, and the Emir, who had insisted despite everyone’s entreaties not to wait, to emerge from the bowels of the ship. Max dogged down the hatch while the last survivors picked themselves up.

Dullah shook Juan’s hand again. “Now we are, as you say, out of the forest?”

“Close enough, my friend, close enough.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

In an idealized, fictional world, the Oregon would have been over the horizon as soon as the passengers were rescued and on their way in pursuit of the stealth ship. But this was reality. And the reality was that the Atlantic is considered “our pond” by both the U.S. Navy and by the Coast Guard.

No more than a minute after the Emir crawled out of the bilge, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter painted in the Coastie’s traditional orange-and-white thundered over the hulk at fifty feet, filling the already-stormy air with water kicked up by the rotor wash.

Juan had known this was coming and had already shut down the Oregon’s military-grade radar suite and had been tracking the inbound bird on the far weaker civilian equipment. If the chopper didn’t have the gear to detect the differences, the cutter streaming in after her surely would, and that would raise questions the Chairman didn’t want to answer. Another question he wanted to avoid was how a ship that had been seen loitering off Philadelphia had gotten this far south so quickly.

Max’s latest invention would take care of that. He had recently replaced the steel plating on the Oregon’s fantail, where the ship’s name is traditionally emblazoned, with a highly sophisticated variable electromagnet microgrid. A computer controlled which of the tiny magnets that made up the array were energized. In this way, when a mist of iron filings was sprayed onto the plates by a retractable nozzle, any name Hanley devised would be spelled out. When he cut power, the old name and flag nation — in this case, Wanderstar, out of Panama — blew away on the wind. He’d typed in a new name, for which they had all the proper documentation, into the system and activated the nozzle. The magnets attracted the minute filings and spelled out Xanadu, from Cyprus, while the excess metal fell into the Atlantic. The system was so precise that from even a few feet away, it looked like paint that was flaking off in places, in keeping with the general shabbiness of the rest of the ship.