Skeleton Coast

He climbed out of the minisub and clipped a line to the eyehole welded to the hull. There was a barnacle-encrusted platform ringing the nearby support leg and he leapt over to it, tying off the line to the integrated ladder. Set equidistant between the four towering legs, the riser pipe dropped down off the platform and into the ocean. Inside it would be the drill string for when the rig was exploring for oil and pipes to allow oil to flow back up to be pumped to shore. Unlike some other fields, the crude was under enough pressure that it didn’t need to be coaxed out of the earth. It gushed freely. And now that the terrorists had either destroyed pipeworks on the platform or opened some valves, it came tumbling back down in a waterfall of shimmering obsidian that twisted and scintillated in the clear morning sunlight. The sound of it striking the slick was like thunder.

Juan tore his eyes away from the mesmerizing sight and glanced out to sea as the men started emerging from the Nomad. TheOregon was driving toward the coastline. Though she was an ugly industrial ship, more function than form, with a deck resembling a denuded forest of cranes and her hull a patchwork of mismatched paint, she had never looked better to him. Max was headed for the third platform, where Petromax employees were still holding off the terrorists but were reporting that they were getting ready to abandon the rig in her lifeboats. The men defending the fourth platform were calling over the airwaves that they would never give up.

After sealing the minisub’s hatch, Linda was the last to jump from the Nomad to the platform. “Let’s go,” she shouted over the tumbling oil. “The air down here is going to play havoc with my skin. I can already feel oil clogging my pores.” She then added with a saucy grin, “You can best believe the Corporation is going to pay for whatever spa I go to.”

27

WHENtheOregon emerged over the horizon none of the rebels in the swift outboard boats dancing around the legs of the third platform paid it any attention. Their sole focus was clambering up the ladder to take over the rig. So far their efforts had been thwarted by the workers above training water ca

Seated at the weapons station in the op center, Mark Murphy simultaneously watched a half dozen camera feeds as well as the status boards for theOregon ’s integrated arsenal. Eric Stone sat in the next station over, one hand on the joystick that controlled the rudder and directional pump jets, the other resting lightly on the throttles.

“Mr. Stone, lay us in five hundred yards off the platform,” Max said from the master’s chair. “And clear the bow to bring the Gatling to bear. Wepps, open the hull plates covering the Gatling’s redoubt and prepare to fire on my order.”

Tiny Gunderson flew the UAV in a loose circle around the rig so Mark could pick his targets. Murph designated the four boats swarming under the rig as Tangos One through Four and once they were entered into the computer the ship’s electronic brain kept them under constant surveillance. High in the bow, the six-barreled GE M61A1 spun up, its rotating barrels dipping and turning as the computer compensated for theOregon ’s motion through the water, the waves that gently shook her hull, and the speed of the distant outboard.

“Nomad toOregon , we’ve reached the platform.” Juan’s voice filled the room from hidden speakers.

“About time, Nomad,” Max teased. “Discovery’s been waiting for two minutes.”

“We stopped for coffee and Danish on the way up. Are you in position?”

“Just waiting for your word and we’ll launch the lifeboat. Then it’s go time.”

“We’re ready.”

Max changed cha

“We’re ready,” Trono replied. His voice had the emotionless timbre of total concentration.

“Lifeboat away and good luck.”

Out on deck and hidden from the oil platform by the ship’s hull, the lifeboat carrying sixty freedom fighters practically sitting on one another’s laps was lifted off its cradle and swung over the rail. The davits slowly lowered the boat to the sea and as soon as it had settled Mike had the lines released and the engine spooled up.

When Trono had left the Air Force after six years as a para-rescue jumper, with five successful downed pilot rescues to his credit, he’d done a stint as a professional power boat racer. The thrill of flying across the water at more than a hundred miles an hour had tempered some of his adrenaline addiction, but he had jumped at the chance to join the Corporation, bringing with him the experience of being one of the elite boat drivers in the world.

He had the lifeboat on plane in no time. Then he extended the foils and poured on the power. The ugly looking craft skimmed across the water like a flying fish, keeping well out of any terrorist’s range as he waited for the order to turn east and make landfall near the Petromax terminal’s tank farm. From there he’d lead the counterattack to wrest control back from Makambo’s men.

There was an unexpected explosion on the rig theOregon had targeted. Tiny zoomed in with the camera to show a pair of rebels in one of the aluminum outboards reloading a rocket launcher. Flames and dense smoke coiled from a catwalk where moments before two oil employees had been shooting hundreds of gallons of seawater at the attackers. The men were gone and the water ca

“I’m getting another call from the rig to Petromax headquarters in Delaware,” Hali said, holding up a finger as he listened. “They’re abandoning the platform.”

“No they’re not,” Max said savagely. “Wepps?”

“I got ’em.”

Mark loosened the safeties on the Gatling and gave the computer permission to fire. Capable of throwing a stream of 20-mm depleted uranium slugs at six thousand rounds per minute, Murph had dialed back the barrels’ rotation speed, so in the two seconds that ammunition blurred through the loading feeds, only eighty rounds erupted from the weapon with a sound like an industrial buzz saw.

Under the platform the cheering terrorists never knew what hit them. One moment the four boats jinked and juked and the next two of them had vanished in a pall of shredded aluminum and vaporized flesh.

The Gatling had destroyed Tangos Two and Four. The driver of Tango One must have seen where the fire had originated because he shot his boat around the far side of one of the columns and didn’t reemerge into theOregon ’s sights. The computer waited for the boat a moment longer than Murph would have liked, so as he flipped a toggle to override the Gatling’s automatic fire controls he made a mental note to check the system’s programming.

On his main flat panel display a reticle appeared where the barrel was currently aiming, the curved gray side of the support leg. He tracked back the camera’s zoom and found the fourth outboard speeding off for the next oil rig. A tiny movement of a joystick centered the sight on the fleeing craft and a second’s long touch of the trigger blew it to oblivion.

He reset the weapon to automatic and the multibarrel gun pivoted back to the platform for the last boat.

A sliver of the outboard’s stern appeared from around the column, a target that was less than a square foot. Even at five hundred yards from an unstable ship it was more than enough. The Gatling shrieked again. The outboard’s motor exploded, blowing the boat out of the water, sending its eight occupants flying in every direction. Some were launched into the sea, others were slammed into the column, and two of them seemed to have simply vanished in the blast.