Skeleton Coast

“That was one fancy piece of flying,” Juan said, getting himself settled and his safety belt fastened.

“Don’t congratulate me yet. I still have to land on theOregon ,” Adams replied. Then he gri

“Won’t make much of a difference now,” Juan said and keyed his radio. “Max, we’re away. Where are the torpedoes?”

“Two thousand yards and closing. Call it four minutes to impact.”

The Atlantic was too rough to see the weapons’ tracks as they moved through the water, though the three men in the chopper hovering at eight hundred feet were going to have a spectacular view of their detonation.

“I’ll trigger the Hypertherm ten seconds before impact,” Juan said. “Hitting her on both port and starboard will shear everything below her waterline and the explosives will burn through everything above. The bow will come off like a piece of sliced bread.”

Murph came on the tactical net. “I’ll call out the ranges. At fifty yards go ahead and blow it.”

A tense three minutes passed as Mark guided the torpedoes so they would slam into both sides of the Gulf of Sidra in the exact spots below where Juan and Eddie had laid the Hypertherm. Juan had the remote detonator in his hand, his thumb poised.

“One hundred yards,” Mark reported.

As the torpedoes converged on the tanker they drew closer to the surface, so it was possible to see the faint line of their wakes. Murph was vectoring them in perfectly.

“Seventy-five.”

With his keener vision Adams was the first to spot it. “What the hell is that?” he suddenly shouted.

“What? Where?”

“Movement on the deck.”

Cabrillo saw it then, a tiny figure ru

He mashed the detonator button and turned his head to shield his eyes from the intensity of the burning Hypertherm. When he didn’t see the sun-bright luminescence in his peripheral vision he stared at the ship.

The Hypertherm was still in place but hadn’t cooked off.

“Wepps, abort! Abort! Abort!”

Mark Murphy could have triggered the torpedoes to self-destruct but instead he sent a signal to slow the hurtling weapons and used both joysticks to send them diving. On his screen he watched their descent.

The angle looked all wrong for them to pass below the tanker’s tremendous draft but there was nothing more he could do. They were close enough now that an autodestruct order would stave in theSidra ’s hull and consign her to a lingering death that would allow her entire load of gel to escape.

“Dive, baby, dive,” Eric Stone said from his station next to Murph’s.

Max was holding his breath watching the main monitor where it displayed the torpedoes’ paths. They passed within six feet of the tanker’s flat bottom and within eleven feet of each other. Everyone in the op center let out a collective breath.

“GET me down there,” Juan shouted, pointing at the tanker.

Adams threw the chopper in a steep dive before saying, “I can’t guarantee I can pick you up again.

We’re low on fuel.”

“Doesn’t matter.” There was fury in Cabrillo’s voice.

The Robinson rushed over the tanker’s bow like a hawk coming out of a stoop, its skids no more than ten feet off the deck as Adams chased Singer down the length of the ship. Juan already had his safety belt off and was ready with his shoulder braced against his door. He unslung his MP-5 and dumped it on the seat. When he’d jumped the first time the machine pistol had gouged painfully into his back. This leap was going to be even tougher.

Singer must have heard the chopper because he looked up over his shoulder. His eyes went wide and he started ru

Juan forced open his door. The drop was ten feet and the chopper was moving at least ten miles per hour, but he leapt anyway.

He hit hard, tumbling across the hot steel plates until he crashed into a pipe support. He hauled himself to his feet, his body feeling the collective result of so much punishment. He took off at a dead sprint, his pistol out of its holster and clutched tightly in his fist.

Singer had seen him jump from the chopper and redoubled his pace, his long strides eating distance like a gazelle. But no matter how badly he wanted to toss the battery overboard and complete his mission the man behind him was driven even harder. He glanced over his shoulder again to see Cabrillo gaining ground, his face a mask of rage.

A fresh waved surged under the tanker, making her hull moan with the stress. The tear along her port side slammed closed as the swell buckled the keel. Then, as it passed by, the split opened again, tearing wider than before. Singer had seen the gap and was far enough from the rail to avoid it when it closed but when it yawned opened he never thought it would rip the deck so easily.

Singer tried to avoid it, and was awkwardly shifting his weight when his foot fell through, shredding his rain pants and the flesh of his leg against the jagged edge. The paperback-sized battery pack went skittering. He screamed at the pain and his other leg fell into the hole, dangling above the slick surface of the flocculent still sloshing in the tank. The searing metal blistered his hands as he struggled to pull himself free before the gap slammed shut.

Cabrillo dove into him at full speed just as the tanker shifted again and the two sides of the tear scissored closed. He tumbled with Singer amid a spray of warm liquid and a keening cry that pierced his brain.

When he recovered from the fall he looked at Singer. Everything below the top of his thighs had been cut off and had dropped into the tank. Blood spilled from the clean slices in torrents that turned pink in the rain.

He crawled to Singer and turned him faceup. He was ghostly pale and his lips had already turned blue.

His scream suddenly ended as his brain refused to feel anymore pain. He was slipping into shock.

“Why?” Juan demanded before the man succumbed to the trauma.

“I had to,” Singer whispered. “People have to act before it’s too late.”

“Haven’t you figured out that the future takes care of itself? A hundred years ago you never saw the sun in London because of the industrial pollution. Technology evolved and the pall went away. Today you say the problem is cars causing global warming. In ten or twenty years something will come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete.”

“We can’t wait that long.”

“Then you should have spent your millions on inventing it sooner rather than squandering it on a demonstration that can’t possibly change anything. That’s the problem with your movement, Singer.

You’re all about propaganda and press releases, not concrete solutions.”

“The people would have demanded action,” he said weakly.

“For a day or a week. To effect change you need alternatives, not ultimatums.”

Singer said nothing, but as he died it was his defiance that was the last thing to fade from his eyes.

Fanatics like him would never understand the nature of compromise and Juan knew he shouldn’t have bothered. He lurched to his feet to recover the battery pack and started ru

“Talk to me, Max.”

“You’ve got three minutes before the torpedoes run out their charges.”