Piranha

Juan readied the final bottle, but he wouldn’t be needing it. The hijacker must have realized the odds were now even instead of in his favor. The Oceanaire veered away and made a beeline for the closest beach. He’d be lucky to make it to shore before he could put the fire out or the boat sank.

The Cast Away wasn’t in shape for much more of a fight anyway. The engine was sputtering in fits and starts. A few of the rounds must have penetrated the hull and damaged the engines or nicked a fuel line. They’d be lucky to limp back into Montego Bay themselves.

Juan climbed back up to the bridge.

“Nice shootin’, pardner,” Max said.

“Are you all right?”

“The back of my chair sacrificed itself for me.” The thick leather had absorbed three rounds. “How about you?”

“Not a scratch.”

Juan bent down and saw that Reed had lost consciousness during the battle.

“How does he look?” Max asked.

“Not good.”

“I’m giving it all she’s got, but if the engines seize up, we’ll have to wait for rescue.”

“Reed doesn’t have that much time. Try the radio again.”

The whine was gone. They were out of range of the jammer. Max sent a distress call out on the emergency band. The reply surprised both of them.

“Max, it’s Linda. Are you guys okay?”

“Juan and I are fine, but we’ve got a serious injury on board.”

“We left port fifteen minutes ago to come get you.” She didn’t have to say that the Oregon located them by homing in on their subdermal tracking beacons, which were inserted into the thigh of every crew member. “I’ve got the RHIB in the water. You should see it any minute.”

Juan and Max looked at each other with concern. If the Oregon had left port so abruptly, there must be more going on than they were being told, but there could be no discussion about it on an open line.

“Copy, Linda. We’ll fill each other in when we see you. Tell Julia to be ready for the casualty.”

“Understood. Over and out.”

The rigid-hulled inflatable boat raced toward them, closing the distance in a hurry. When it pulled alongside, Max shut down the Cast Away’s coughing engines.

MacD and Trono vaulted onto the fishing charter.

“Looks like you saw some action, Chairman,” MacD said as he surveyed the damage.

“We did, but you should see the other guys.”

“I think we can,” Trono said, pointing at a trail of smoke nearing the shore. “Is that them?”

Juan nodded. “Is Gomez getting the chopper ready?”

“Since we were in port, he was doing routine maintenance on it this morning. It’ll take another half hour before he can take off. You want us to go after them ourselves?”

“No, we need to get the boat’s captain back to the Oregon ASAP. He’s been shot.”

As gently as they could, the four of them lifted Reed into the RHIB.

When he was settled, Juan said, “MacD, stay with the Cast Away. We’ll send a couple of technicians back to get it moving again. Then we’ll figure out what to do with it.”

The RHIB took off, skipping across the waves.

“I can’t wait to hear how you took on someone who plastered your boat with that many bullet holes,” Trono said as he tended to Reed.

“I want to know why the Oregon departed early,” Max said.

“You two weren’t the only ones to be attacked today.”

“Any casualties?” Juan asked.

“Just Mark Murphy. He took a bullet to his leg. Hux said he’ll be fine, though he won’t be skateboarding for a while.”

“Who else was attacked?”

“Everyone who went ashore.”

Juan and Max exchanged worried looks. The crew had been specifically targeted with detailed knowledge of their whereabouts. That led to only one conclusion.

Someone had breached the Oregon’s security.

Hector Bazin jumped from the burning Oceanaire and swam to shore two minutes before it exploded and sank with the bodies of his men still on board. Armed with his SIG Sauer pistol, he carjacked the first vehicle that came along, a rusted-out pickup driven by a barely coherent Rastafarian who reeked of marijuana. One shot to the head and Bazin had transportation. He stashed the corpse in the trees and sped toward Montego Bay’s Sangster International Airport.

His waterlogged phone was useless, and he couldn’t risk using the dead man’s to instruct his pilot to have the Gulfstream fueled and ready to take off. He didn’t want to leave a co

As he drove, Bazin stewed over the missed opportunity. With so many simultaneous targets, he wasn’t able to get real-time intelligence from the Doctor or he might have anticipated Juan Cabrillo’s defensive strategy. But that was no excuse. Bazin had known the Chairman would be on that boat unarmed and that should have been enough.

Bazin wasn’t used to setbacks like this. From an early age, in the slums of Port-au-Prince, he’d shown a knack for thriving in trying circumstances. If Bazin needed something—whether it was food, education, or money—he found a way to get it. Like hundreds of thousands of other poor children in Haiti, Bazin had been a restavec, a child sent to be a servant for a richer host family.

Despite the access to education and enough food to grow strong, Bazin despised his new home with a high-ranking government bureaucrat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Beatings were a regular occurrence for even the slightest offense. The other restavec in the household, an orphan a year older than he named Jacques Duval, was never subjected to the same abuse because he was the favored one, the adopted son the minister could never have fathered.

The physical punishment only got worse when they were all transferred to the plum posting of the Haitian embassy in Paris. After a particularly bad beating put him in hospital with a broken jaw, arm, and ribs, Bazin took the chance to seek asylum in France. Without any other skills, he joined the French Foreign Legion and went into its elite commando team.

Bazin loved the training and action of the military, but he chafed at the authority, which only served to remind him of his childhood as a restavec. He wanted control over his own destiny once and for all, so he left the military after a ten-year stint to hire himself out as a mercenary, eventually building up a vast network of contacts and training his own soldiers from the vast pool of young poverty-stricken men back in Haiti.

He knew that Cabrillo and his crew were mercenaries as well. But they seemed to have the mistaken notion that there was some noble calling to their missions. Bazin was in it for the money, pure and simple. He would take any job that paid well no matter what the operation called for. He only hired men who shared the same ruthlessness, some because they enjoyed it and others because they knew what Bazin would do if they failed or betrayed him.

His reputation brought him to the attention of the Doctor, who had contacted him through various intermediaries. The money flowed from the begi

Bazin’s debut mission for the Doctor had been to act as the go-between for the sale of stolen U.S. military technology to a Venezuelan admiral named Dayana Ruiz. It was for underwater drone hardware from the U.S. Navy, a project called Piranha. Bazin didn’t know what the admiral pla