Golden Buddha

Cabrillo started sketching on a yellow pad with a black Magic Marker. When he finished, he handed the pad to Hanley. “Make sense to you?”

“Yep,” Hanley said.

“Okay then,” Cabrillo said forcefully, “hard a’ starboard. We’re going back toward land.”

33

ADAMS eased the cyclic to the left and banked the R-44. A few seconds earlier he had passed to port of the Chinese corvette and had just picked up a glimpse of the vessel through the fog. It was a wonder the Chinese vessel had not fired on him—surely they had detected the helicopter as it flew toward land. The frigate was fast approaching and Adams planned to give it a wide berth.

He was keeping the Robinson five to ten feet above the tops of the waves—maybe that was shielding him from detection, but Adams doubted it. To avoid radar detection, he needed to be closer to the wave tops—two, three feet maximum. With the weapons pods hanging from each side of his skids and seawater detrimental to their correct operation, Adams was taking no chances. If he had to trade avoiding fire from the Chinese ships to arriving too high to help his team members, he’d do it.

Adams eased forward on the cyclic and watched as the governor adjusted his rotor speed. He was doing 130 miles an hour, and according to his calculations he should be seeing the first Zodiac one minute forty-five seconds after he passed the frigate. He strained his eyes to catch sight of the Chinese vessel, while at the same time watching the dash-mounted storm scope, which was sending a radar signal into the weather.

HUXLEY pointed to the dash of the Zodiac but said nothing.

Seng nodded, then bent down and shouted into her ear. “If I was to guess,” he screamed, “I’d say we have something partially blocking the raw water intake holes on the drive. Might be something as simple as a piece of soaked paper or part of a plastic bag—the problem is, we need to stop and raise the outboard out of the water to check.”

“It doesn’t seem to be getting any worse,” Julia Huxley said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Seng said. “We are in the low red and staying there. If the engine can run at those temperatures for a little longer, we might just make it out of here alive.”

Huxley scanned the water through the fog as they raced along. She turned and caught a quick glimpse of the Zodiac being piloted by Kasim off the starboard stern. The pair of diesel cruisers had yet to get close enough to catch sight of either vessel, and if they maintained their speed they never would.

“Too bad we can’t ask for a time out,” Huxley said, “so I can clean the water intake.”

Eddie Seng strained to hear Huxley’s voice over the noise of his racing outboard motor. Something else was causing his ears to perk up—a slight thumping coming from the bow. Then, through the fog, he caught a glimpse of the R-44. And a voice came over the radio.

THE command bridge on the Gale Force was a buzz of shouted instructions. Messages were repeated more than once as the news that the Oregon was starting a turn back to land was relayed from radar operator to captain, captain to helmsman, then around to the other officers. The event was relayed to the captains of the corvette and the frigate, who immediately began to slow.

Captain Ching figured it would take the Oregon close to a nautical mile to complete the turn.

Once again, Ching would underestimate.

WITH magnetohydrodynamics engines powering the Oregon, there was no need to slow down to change directions on the drives. There were no shafts to twist, no props to bend, no gears to strip. The water jets from the stern came out of a rectangular shaft with a scoop on the end that could be diverted like the thrust of a Harrier jet engine to the fore or to the rear. With the push of a few buttons, one of the propulsion engineers could divert the flow of one engine forward and one back and the Oregon would almost pivot on her keel, so long as the speeds were kept below thirty knots. Such an abrupt maneuver made for a rough ride—the ship would kneel over and the gunwales would dip almost into the water—but the Corporation had done it more than once. Other than a few broken dishes and other objects being tossed around, the Oregon had been none the worse for the wear.

The engineer plotted in a turn-radius profile on the computer that resembled a U-turn. Then he alerted the control room that they were ready. Once the ship commander gave the order, the engineer simply pushed a button and held on to a nearby table as the Oregon threaded herself across the surface of the water as if she were on rails. Down in the engine room, Sam Pryor glanced over at Gunther Reinholt, who had just disconnected his IV and was sipping from a cup of strong coffee after inputting the command for the turn.

“Elementary, Mr. Reinholt,” Pryor said, smiling.

“Indubitably, Mr. Pryor,” Reinholt said.

Both men stared at the lying-down U-shaped track on the computer screen for a second.

“Mr. Chairman,” Reinholt said over the intercom, “we’re ready when you are.”

“WE’RE going to do a fast turn and bunch up the three ships chasing us,” Cabrillo said over a scrambled radio link. “You will need to take out the pair of cruisers fast so the Zodiacs can slow before they run up on the stern of the frigate.”

“Understand,” Adams said.

“We’ll alert Seng and Kasim to slow as soon as the cruisers are disabled.”

“I’ll blow all the ordnance of the port pod on the lead cruiser,” Adams said, “and the starboard on the following craft. That should stop them cold.”

“Do your best to hit them in the sterns,” Cabrillo said. “If possible, we want to keep casualties to a minimum.”

AT almost the same instant that the lead harbor police patrol boat caught sight of Kasim’s Zodiac in the lessening fog, the lookout also reported a helicopter approaching from out to sea. Adams had turned and looped the R-44 around to intercept the lead boat straight on her rear quarter. Placing the crosshairs on the firing screen on the rear third of the forty-six-foot aluminum ship, Adams flipped a switch so all the missiles were targeted to the same spot just above the waterline.

Then he took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.