“Linc?” Linda cried.
“How you doing, sweet stuff?” He emerged from his cover position with his rifle cocked on his hip and a pair of night vision goggles pulled down around his neck. “Got here as fast as I could, but this bod wasn’t made for running across the damned desert.”
Linda threw her arms around the big man, sobbing into his chest, the depth of determination to face her enemies in a suicidal charge dissolving into profound relief at being alive. Mark and Eric pounded his back, laughing and choking on the smoke at the same time.
“Looks like you guys made a good show for yourselves.” Which, from Linc, was his greatest sign of respect.
Alana staggered from the cave, her torso bare and once-white bra blackened with soot. She was holding a couple of books as gingerly as she could. Their pages smoldered. When one started burning, Mark took it from her, dropped it on the ground, and kicked sand over it to snuff the flames.
“I wanted to save more,” she managed between coughs, “but the smoke. I couldn’t. I did get this, though.”
“What’s that?” Linc asked.
Dangling from a crudely fashioned chain of silver was a small crystal nestled in a rudimentary setting. The piece of jewelry wasn’t particularly attractive; in fact, it looked almost like a child’s attempt at making a Mother’s Day present out of pipe cleaners and paste. But there was something compelling about it beyond its obvious antiquity, an aura as if it were a presence there in the cave with them.
A bullet had shattered the stone, so it lay in its cradle in tiny shards no bigger than grains of sugar, and from it oozed a single claret drop.
“Holy God,” Mark said, dropping to his knees to scoop up the soaked spot of sand. From a shirt pocket, he pulled out a power bar and ripped away its wrapping. He threw the food aside and carefully placed the tiny bit of mud on the paper and twisted it closed. There was a red streak on his palm that mingled with the blood from a deep cut he’d received at some point during the battle.
“When the covers burned away,” Alana explained, “I realized there was a mummy on the bed, placed on his side facing Mecca as a good Muslim should. This was around his neck. Henry Lafayette must have placed Al-Jama like that when the old man died and left him with his greatest treasure. That is the Jewel of Jerusalem, isn’t it? And that was His blood, preserved for two thousand years in a vacuum within that crystal.”
“His blood?” Linc asked. “Who His?”
“Stuffed in that candy wrapper in Mark’s hands may be the blood of Jesus Christ.”
THE TIDAL STATION’S MASSIVE steel gate stretched for more than a hundred feet above the generating plant set in the desert depression. When the facility was operating at full capacity, the gate could be lowered more than thirty feet to allow water to flow into large-diameter pipes down into the long turbine room more than a hundred feet below sea level. With the sun setting rapidly to the west, the gate had been closed and the turbines idled so crews could remove excess salt left over by the sun’s evaporation, the key to the zero-emissions facility.
The missile off the Oregonhit the exposed machinery that operated the gate dead center, blowing apart the hydraulic systems and smashing the gears that acted as a mechanical brake. Even the pressure of the ocean it was designed to withstand couldn’t keep the heavy door pinned in place, and it started to lower on its own accord into a recess built into the artificial dike.
Water spilled over the top of the gate, first in thin erratic sheets tossed by waves lapping against the structure, and then in a solid curtain when it fell below the surface. With less surface exposed to the titanic forces holding back the Mediterranean, the gate accelerated downward. The curtain turned into a gush, and then into a torrent more powerful than the worst levee break on the Mississippi River. Millions of tons of seawater poured though the gap. The pipes to carry the water into the powerhouse were closed, saving the delicate turbines, so the deluge flowed wild and uncontained down the dike into the desert.
Even when the plant wasn’t active, there was a two-mile exclusion zone around the facility for all shipping. It was a rule Max Hanley had gladly ignored. He’d been shepherding the Gulf of Sidrainto the exact right position for when the missile hit. Up on the main view screen, he watched the ocean disappearing into the gap on the far side of the frigate, but, more important, he could feel the pull of the current in the way his beloved ship responded to his controls.
The Sidrahad sheered away from the Oregonas soon as they were in the gravity-induced vortex, sucked toward the opening as surely as if she’d been aimed at it. Max goosed the directional thrusters and closed the gap, keeping one eye on the camera feed showing where Juan would appear.
“Come on, buddy. We don’t have all day.”
The Chairman suddenly burst through the frigate’s hatchway, holding the hand of Secretary Katamora. Max steepened his angle and closed the gap, so the two ships brushed just enough to scrape a little paint off her hull. Juan was on the Sidra’s railing at that exact moment. He lifted Fiona off the deck and hurled her onto the Oregon, where she fell into the waiting arms of a still-woozy Mike Trono.
As soon as Juan’s boots hit the deck, Max pulled the big freighter away from the stricken frigate and opened the throttles as far as they would go. The warship was also desperately trying to get clear of the maelstrom. Smoke belched from her stack and her props beat the water frantically, and yet she lost more ground with every passing moment.
The Oregon’s revolutionary engines gave her ten times the power, and once water was humming through the tubes her lateral motion checked and she started to pull away. Max even eased back on the controls a touch, never wanting to push his babies harder than he had to.
The Sidra’s hull slammed into the open sluice intake at a perfect broadside. Water continued to rush under her keel, but half the floodwaters were suddenly contained once again. Balanced precariously, with the sea pressing in on the hull so her steel moaned at the strain, the crew could do nothing as the ship that had foiled their perfect plan steamed serenely away.
On the Oregon’s deck, the Corporation operators who’d been blown back by the RPG clustered around the Chairman and his guest. So little time had elapsed since that fateful moment that medical staff hadn’t even arrived, but it looked as if Doc Huxley and her team weren’t going to be busy after all. The injuries appeared minor.
Juan stuck out a hand to formally introduce himself to Fiona. “I want to say it is an honor to meet you. My name’s Cabrillo, Juan Cabrillo. Welcome aboard the Oregon.”
She brushed aside his hands and hugged him tightly, repeating her thanks into his ear over and over again. The thing about adrenaline heightening one’s senses was that it had that effect on allof them, so before Fiona realized how much Juan was enjoying the contact he gently untangled himself from her willowy arms.
“I know you’re a woman of many accomplishments, but I wonder if acting is among them?”
She looked at him askance. “Acting? After what we just went through you’re talking about acting. You call menuts.”
He slipped an arm around her waist to lead her into the ship’s interior. “Don’t worry, you get to play yourself, and we just practiced the scene I want to reproduce for Ali Ghami.”
“You know?”
“I even know how he got leverage on Qaddafi. His grandson was in Switzerland on vacation when he was killed in a car crash. The crash was staged and the boy kidnapped. If Qaddafi ever wanted to see the kid alive again, he had to make Ghami Foreign Minister, not knowing that he had just made one of the worst terrorists in the world a senior government official and given him access to everything he needed to pull off his little caper.”