Julia intervened, “You can start your biker gang later. Right now, I’m taking you back to medical.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lawless said, making his voice sulky like a recalcitrant child and throwing Cabrillo a wink.
Just then Eric Stone and Mark Murphy burst into the room. “Chairman, we got it,” they said in unison. Neither looked like he’d slept much in the past thirty hours.
“What did you get?”
“Good night, y’all,” MacD said as Hux wheeled him out of the room.
“There was an oil rig there,” Eric said.
He had an open laptop in his arms, which he set down at a spare workstation. In seconds he had an overhead image of an oil production platform on the main viewer. Details were hazy because the shot was so tight, but Juan could see a chopper pad hanging off the side of the rig and make out the shadow of her tall derrick falling across the deck. If he had to guess, he’d say the platform was easily a square acre.
“It’s designated the J-61 and hasn’t been in use for two years.”
“Who owns it?”
“Dummy front companies. Mark and I are still working on piercing the corporate veil.”
“Is it self-propelled in any way?”
“No. She’s a semisubmersible with no propulsion whatsoever. If they moved her, they had to tow her.”
“We know damned well they moved her,” Juan said, staring at the screen as if a satellite picture could give him answers. “The only question is, when?”
Mark helped himself to coffee from the urn. “A rig that size would need at least two tugs. We’re checking all the big firms to see where their largest boats are now. So far we haven’t turned up any in the area recently.”
“Does Croissard have any connection to oceangoing-tug operators?”
“I don’t think so,” Mark replied. “I know he has no dealings in oil or gas exploration.”
“Double-check,” Juan said. He thought about everything that moving a structure of that size would entail. If Linda was on it just a couple of days ago and now it was gone, Croissard would be moving quickly. Coordinating multiple ships in a tight space and then building up enough speed from a dead stop would take how long? he wondered. Four days? Five? That’s if everything ran smoothly, and how often did that happen?
If he was in charge of the operation, he’d want something more efficient. How would he do it? How would he transport twenty thousand tons of steel quickly and quietly out of an anchorage it had occupied for years?”
“Wait,” he said aloud as the answer hit him. “Not a tugboat. A FLO-FLO.”
“A what?”
“FLO-FLO. Float-on/float-off. A heavy-lift ship.”
“A heavy-lift . . . ? Damn, you’re right,” Mark said. He took Eric’s laptop and typed into a search engine.
The picture that flashed up on the view screen was of a ship unlike any other in the world. Her superstructure was pressed well forward over her bows, with two boxy stacks and bridge wings that extended over her rails. The rest of the nearly eight-hundred-foot-long vessel was open deck space that barely rose above her waterline. This particular picture was of the MV
This extraordinary class of vessel had ballast tanks that could sink the ship to a predetermined depth. It would then maneuver itself under its load, be it a bomb-damaged guided missile destroyer or an oil platform. Once in position, the ballast tanks were pumped dry, and the entire vessel rose up once again, its cargo piggybacked atop one hundred and twenty thousand square feet of deck space. When the load was secured with chains, or even welded to the deck, the FLO-FLO could cruise comfortably at around fifteen knots, far faster than a traditional tow, which rarely exceeded five with a load as cumbersome as an oil rig.
Eric took back the laptop, his fingers blurring across the keys, as he searched databases and company records. After four minutes, in which the only sounds in the Op Center were the background thrum of the ship’s engines and the whoosh of air through the vents, he looked up. “There are only five heavy-lift ships in the world big enough to carry a rig like the J-61. Two are under contract to the U.S. Navy, ferrying combat ships so they don’t waste engine time and needless maintenance while in transit. Another one is approaching the North Sea, carrying a rig to the gas fields from its builders in Korea, and one just delivered another oil platform to Angola. The fifth is ferrying a bunch of luxury yachts from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. Seems the cruising season’s about to change over. Sorry, Juan, but your idea doesn’t pan out.”
A look of bitter disappointment clouded Cabrillo’s face. He was sure that he’d been onto something.
“Not so fast,” Mark Murphy said. While Stone had been busy with his laptop, Murph had been working with his iPad, which also linked wirelessly to the ship’s Cray supercomputer. “Croissard maintains a series of dummy shell companies all incorporated in the Channel Islands. None of them have been active until about a week ago. Since this is obviously a long-range plan, I merely skimmed the file. The company’s called Vantage Partners PLC, and it was funded by an offshore bank in the Caymans. Its sole act as an incorporated entity was to sell itself to a Brazilian company. I stopped looking, figuring this was a legitimate business deal that had nothing to do with Croissard’s plans in Myanmar.”
“I take it you just dug a little further,” Juan said.
“Yup. The Brazilian company has a division in Indonesia that operates a ship-breaking yard. No financial figures for the deals have been disclosed, but I think what Croissard did was to sell Vantage Partners for significantly less than he funded it for as a way to buy the breaker yard and all the ships they’re under contract to dismantle.”
“Is one of them a heavy-lift ship?”
“Give me a second, my hacking into their computer system’s almost complete.” Even as he said it, his eyes glued to the iPad, he started grinning. “Got it. They’re taking apart three ships right now. Two commercial fishermen and a bulk carrier. The next job is the MV
“Bingo,” Cabrillo shouted in triumph. “That’s how they’re moving the rig. Croissard bought himself a heavy- lifter.”
“This brings up the next question,” Eric said. “Why? Why move the rig at all?”
“It’s not because Linda’s aboard,” Juan replied, “so there’s something else on it Croissard doesn’t want found.”
“It has to be something pretty big,” Murph pointed out. “Otherwise they would just take it off the rig and go.”
Cabrillo stayed silent, thinking. Why? wasn’t the question that interested him. He wanted to know where Croissard was taking the rig. He tapped at the integrated keyboard built into the arm of his chair and called up a map of the South China Sea. There were the big Indonesian islands of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, where Brunei was located, and literally thousands of others, most of which were uninhabited. Any one of those would make a perfect hiding spot. The problem was the volume of shipping passing through the region. A vessel as unusual as the
Just as in his first meeting with Croissard in Singapore, Juan felt like he was missing something. Maybe Eric’s question was more pertinent after all. Why risk moving the rig? Murph had said that there was something aboard it the Swiss financier didn’t want found. But you can’t really hide an entire platform. Not easily anyway.
And then Cabrillo saw it. He typed at the keyboard again, and the water of the South China Sea seemed to evaporate off the map projected on the big video screen. Less than a hundred miles from Brunei the continental shelf fell away sharply into the Palawan Trough, a fifteen-thousand-foot chasm that split the seafloor like an ax stroke.
“That’s where they’re heading,” he said. “They’re going to deep-six the rig with Linda aboard her. Navigator, plot us a course to a point on the trough’s rim closest to the rig’s last-known location.”
Eric Stone, who was the ship’s chief helmsman, took over the navigation workstation and made the calculations himself. It took the
“If we increase to thirty-five knots, we’ll thread right through them,” he announced.
“Do it, and once we’re clear of all traffic, put the hammer down.”
