Plague Ship

embarrassed about. “Five years ago, I could have done at least fifteen more laps.”

“And five years ago, I didn’t have crow’s-feet. Get over it,” she said with a smile that revealed the tiny lines at the corners of her eyes were laugh lines and not a sign of impending dotage.

“What do they say, ‘youth is wasted on the young’?”

“I have a feeling you didn’t waste much of yours, Juan Cabrillo.” He chuckled but didn’t deny it. “You aren’t dressed for a swim, so you didn’t come down here to work off that excellent beef Wellington we had for dinner. What gives?” A look of concern darkened Huxley’s face. “We have a little problem. Well, it’s actually Max’s problem, but I think it should affect all of us.”

Julia wasn’t a trained psychologist, but her medical background and calming demeanor made her the ship’s de facto counselor.

Cabrillo draped the damp towel over his shoulders and gave Hux his undivided attention. “Talk to me.”

“He got a call this evening from his ex-wife.”

Juan interrupted, “There are three to choose from. Which one was it?”

“Lisa. Number two. The one in Los Angeles he had the kids with. He didn’t give me all the details, but his ex thinks their son has been kidnapped.”

Juan didn’t react for a couple of seconds. None of Max’s wives knew what he did for a living. Like most of the crew, Hanley told his family that he was a sailor working for a small shipping company, so Cabrillo didn’t think the abduction could connect back to his work for the Corporation, but he couldn’t discount the idea. They had made a lot of powerful enemies over the years. He finally asked, “Have there been any ransom demands?”

“No, not yet. She thinks she knows who’s behind the kidnapping but has gotten nowhere with the LAPD

or FBI. She wants his help getting the kid back.”

Max’s son would be about twenty-two or twenty-three by now, Juan recalled. His daughter was a few years older, a newbie attorney doing environmental law. Kyle Hanley hadn’t lasted a year in college and had been drifting around L.A.’s counterculture scene ever since. He’d been busted a couple of times for minor drug possession, but Juan thought he’d done a stint in rehab two years ago and had remained clean. Though they’d been divorced for a few years before Juan had founded the Corporation, he remembered meeting Max’s second wife on a couple of occasions. Max had assured Cabrillo that she had once been a loving, wonderful woman, but something had changed her into a shrewish paranoid who accused him of infidelity while it was she who was having affairs.

Max had done the best he could with their children’s upbringing, paying far above what the divorce decree called for in terms of alimony and child support. Their daughter had turned out to be a bright, ambitious woman but their son, Kyle, was one of those people who believed life owed him, and no matter how he was approached he rebuffed any offers to help him find his way.

Juan knew that Max would do anything to help the kid, and he suspected why his second-in-command hadn’t come to him directly with his problem. Had he done so, Juan would have offered the full services of the Corporation to rescue Kyle, and Max would never ask for that kind of favor. “God, he can be stubborn.”

“He said the same about you,” Hux replied. “He wouldn’t even consider coming to you with this because he was sure you’d demand he take your help. He told me in no uncertain terms that this was his problem, not the Corporation’s, and that he’d handle it on his own.” Cabrillo expected no less, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t frustrated by Hanley’s pigheadedness. “What’s his plan?”

“As soon as we transfer the torpedo, he’s going to ask you to divert the Oregon to Karachi, the nearest city with an international airport where he can catch a flight to Los Angeles. After that, he wasn’t too sure.”

Juan checked his watch. They were due at the rendezvous coordinates in two hours. Once they finished up, they could reach Karachi in about twenty hours. The Corporation’s Gulfstream jet was in Monaco in preparation for their next mission. Although he could get the plane to Pakistan’s largest city in time, he believed flying commercial would be faster. It would mean leaving behind weapons and other contraband that wouldn’t make it through airport security, but he had enough contacts in L.A. to get what they might need so he wasn’t too concerned about that.

He had a mental list of questions, but he would wait to talk to Max directly.

The ship’s onboard computer flipped the lights in the pool area on and off a couple of times. Juan had programmed it to alert him the rendezvous was coming and to finish up his swim. He slipped on a terry robe and a pair of flip-flops. Hux walked with him as they exited the pool. He made certain to securely dog the waterproof hatch. “I’ll talk to him tonight and make sure he sees the error of his ways,” he said.

“That’s why I brought this to you. Max can’t go it alone.” It was clear Julia was relieved, though there wasn’t much doubt Juan would help his best friend.

“Thanks, Hux. One day, Max’s obstinacy is going to get him into trouble, but not this time.” AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, a freshly showered Juan Cabrillo strode into the Operations Center. Stone and Murphy were in their chairs at the helm and weapons control. Hali sat at the communication’s station, while Linda Ross covered the sonar suite. Unlike during their escape from Bandar Abbas, there was a relaxed feeling in the room. Transferring the remaining rocket torpedo from the Oregon was going to be a relatively straightforward job. When Max entered a few minutes later, the atmosphere seemed to chill by a couple of degrees. He went straight to the engineering console without a word to anyone.

Juan slid out of his chair and approached him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Hanley said, not looking up from his computer monitor.

“We’ll lay in a course for Pakistan as soon as we’re done, and I’ll get someone on buying us plane tickets. In the morning, you and I are going to sit down together and figure out our next move.” Max glanced up at Cabrillo and was about to protest. Juan held up his hand. “Our next gig is a straightforward eavesdropping job. Linda and Eddie can handle it without us.”

“This isn’t your fight,” Max said.

“Like hell, it isn’t. Someone kidnapped a member of your family. To me, it’s the same as if they’d taken one of my parents. I would expect nothing less than your help, so don’t expect me not to be here for you.”

Max paused a beat before saying, “Thanks, Juan.”

“Don’t mention it.” He returned to the command chair, the matter settled. “Linda, anything yet?”

“Negative, but there’s still twenty minutes to go.”

“Okay. Max, everything set on your end?”

“The torpedo’s up on deck in a sling and a technician is standing by the derrick controls.”

“Hali, anything on radar or over the comm channels?”

“No, sir. We’re in about the deadest spot you can find in the Indian Ocean. I haven’t seen or heard from another ship in about eight hours.”

The rendezvous was to take place far from conventional shipping lanes to avoid detection from freighters and tankers, and, in an area devoid of much sea life, that would attract commercial fishing vessels. The timing of their operation coincided with a gap in satellite coverage, just in case anyone was looking down from above.

Fifteen minutes trickled by before Linda called out, “Contact. I’ve got machinery noises almost directly below us, four hundred feet down. Ballast tanks are being purged.” She washed the noise picked up by the passive sonar through the computer to cross-check the sound with a loop of tape provided by Overholt. “Confirmed. It’s the USS Tallahassee, making for the surface.”

“Very good,” Juan said. “Helm, keep sharp. You dent that sub, you bought it.” Another few minutes passed as the Los Angeles Class fast-attack submarine climbed up from the depths, rising so slowly that she was dead silent from more than a couple miles away. Eric Stone had split his computer display so he could watch the sonar returns as well as the Oregon’s GPS coordinates, to make certain the sub wouldn’t crash into the underside of the hull. It was the responsibility of the crew aboard the Tallahassee to hold their position stable relative to the freighter. Any corrections would come from Eric’s controls.

“One hundred feet and fifty,” Linda said. “Her ascent is slowing. Slowing. Leveling off at one hundred.”

“She’s holding about two hundred yards off the port beam,” Eric said.

“Slide us over so she’ll surface within fifty yards, please, Mr. Stone.” Eric punched up the bow and stern thrusters to shove the eleven-thousand-ton ship laterally through the water, placing her exactly on her mark, and reactivated the dynamic positioning system so the computer would hold them steady.

“She’s coming up again. Ten feet per minute.”

“Very good, Sonar. You have the conn.”