Mirage

Patronov eyed him for a moment, his ugly countenance giving away nothing. He sighed as if reaching a weighty decision. “I’ve been tasked with telling you, Commander Renko, that you will never deploy as an executive officer ever again.”

Renko’s blue eyes widened in shock and his mouth gaped.

“Admiral Kenin has communicated to me that following this mission you will have a boat of your own.” Patronov stood and struck his hand across the small desk that took up a quarter of his cabin’s floor space. “Congratulations.”

Renko’s face went from ashen fear to flushed jubilation in the blink of an eye. He shook his captain’s hand, his grin widening until he could no longer contain himself, and he whooped aloud.

“I can’t believe this,” he said when he could finally speak. “I didn’t know I was even up for promotion.”

“You weren’t,” Patronov said as he retook his seat. His chilly tone cooled the room by twenty degrees, and Renko’s smile turned a little sickly.

He fumbled back into his chair. “Sir?”

“Let me tell you a story,” Patronov said in a disarming tone as if the frostiness of the past few seconds had never happened. “Eighteen months ago, before you joined this crew, we were tasked to act as a dive platform on a salvage job. It took place close to the eastern seaboard of the United States, though not in her territorial waters. We were on-station for a week, and the divers recovered items of a technical nature from a sunken ship.” He forestalled his subordinate’s obvious question by adding, “Admiral Kenin never cleared me, so I have no idea what they took off the derelict. All I know is, the wreck was about a hundred years old, and Kenin felt the reward justified the risk of discovery by America’s Coast Guard or Navy.

“I just got a message from the Admiral that he’s learned that another group is showing unusual interest in the derelict and may dive on it soon.”

“Who is this group?”

“American mercenaries,” Patronov said with obvious distaste. “It was decided the first time we were there not to destroy the wreck so we wouldn’t draw attention to it. Now Kenin wants us to blow it off the bottom with a couple of torpedoes. To do that, I need your authorization as XO to fire live shots as per procedure.”

“And if I go along with this, I get promoted?”

“Quid pro quo.”

Renko rubbed his lantern jaw. “I take it neither this act nor the original dives were authorized by the Navy High Command?”

“I’m sure a few know about it, those closest to Admiral Kenin, but, no, this operation is strictly off the books.”

“What about the mercenaries?”

“According to Kenin’s source, they aren’t capable of detecting us, let alone fighting us. We’ll sneak in low and slow, pop two USET-80s into the wreck, and be gone before they know we were there. If they happen to have divers on the bottom, well, that’s just bad luck for them. So what do you say, Paulus, do you want to be a captain at the age of thirty-one? That would, by the way, give you a two-year head start on breaking my service record.”

Renko stood and reached across the desk to shake his captain’s hand. “I’m your man, sir.”

“Very good, alert the torpedo room that we will be loading two tubes with the antisubmarine fish. We have a good three days’ sailing to get into position, but I want them prepped down there.”

“Aye, sir.”

Patronov jotted some coordinates onto a piece of scratch paper. “That’s the GPS location for the wrecked ship. Refine and plot our new course. Remain at full speed.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Renko pivoted on his heel and left the cabin.

Patronov could tell his subaltern was excited about his future prospects, but, then again, all deals with the devil promised much. It wasn’t until much later you learn the costs.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“You are the very picture of boredom,” Max said, stepping off the elevator at the rear of the op center.

Cabrillo settled his coffee cup into a holder built into the Kirk Chair, the central command platform in the middle of the electronics-packed, low-ceilinged space. On the main view screen was a murky video feed coming up from a tethered probe poking around the bottom of the Atlantic nearly three hundred feet down. Details were hard to come by as the unmanned submersible ran its cameras over the hull of an unidentified ship.

“Got that right,” he replied. “Twenty-two wrecks checked and twenty-two consecutive goose eggs.”

“So what are we looking at?” Max asked as he crossed the room with a plate of food in his hand. He set it next to Cabrillo’s elbow. “Fish tacos, by the way. Fresh pico de gallo, but the chef hid a ghost chili in there, so watch yourself.”

“Thanks. I’m starved.” Cabrillo ate half of a taco in a single bite, managing to not ruin his shirt when the shell inevitably collapsed. “What we are seeing, if my five days of experience has taught me anything, is a Boston long-liner that sank in 1960 or so.”

“Not our target?”

“Not even close. Do you know how many wrecks there are off the East Coast?”

“About thirty-five hundred,” Max replied. “And most of them are clustered between Richmond, Virginia, and Cape Cod. Less than a quarter of them are identified. Which leaves us searching a lot of haystacks for a single needle.”

“You are the paragon of the understatement.”

In the days since Cabrillo’s return to the ship after his ill-fated meeting with Wesley Tennyson, the Oregon had been scouring the seafloor with side-scan sonar looking for the mysterious mine tender that the professor said had been modified by Nikola Tesla. Murph and Stone had worked out the search parameters and overlaid it with a grid of shipwrecks in the region. There was good news. Since these waters were so heavily fished, all bottom obstructions, like boulders, outcroppings, and sunken ships, were clearly marked, though rarely identified by name.

That left them with forty possible candidates to explore with their remotely operated vehicle, named Little Geek after a similar-looking ROV from the movie The Abyss. They could safely ignore wooden-hulled ships and natural rock formations by first verifying each target with a magnetometer to detect the presence of metal. Once they did have a steel-hulled wreck, it was a laborious process of lowering the suitcase-sized robot through the moon pool to the bottom and visually inspecting each wreck. Identification was more difficult because many of the vessels were festooned with nets torn off fishing trawlers as they plied the seas. Nets that not only obscured the wrecks but made it easy for an ROV to get trapped.

Juan hit a button on the arm of his command chair. “Cabrillo to Moon Pool. This one’s a bust, Eric. Reel in Little Geek, and we’ll check out target twenty-three.”

“Roger that, Chairman.”

“Helm, as soon as the ROV’s aboard, steer one eight-five at twenty knots.” That was far below the ship’s best speed, but with the waters so busy, it wouldn’t do to show off the Oregon’s true potential. In fact, twenty knots seemed out of reach for a rust-streaked old tramp like her, but that was all part of her elaborate deception. “Next potential target is twenty miles away.”

Juan rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe Dirk Pitt did this kind of stuff for a living. Talk about boring.”

“Different strokes,” Max replied. “And you and I both know there isn’t a whole lot of boring on that man’s resume.

“By the way, how is it that the Emir isn’t screaming his head off that we’re not there to protect him?”

“We lucked out. He’s rafting with a Saudi prince and some Mexican telecommunications billionaire, if you can call three mega-yachts lashed together rafting. Linda tells me they’re trying to outdo each other on hosting lavish dinners. She says each of them has had chefs and food flown into Hamilton and choppered out to them. She Googled one of the wines and saw it sold at auction four years ago for ten grand.”