“Mike, you’re about eighty feet from the first ambush,” Tiny Gunderson said over the radio.
“What are they doing? My Softscreen’s down again.”
“If I were a betting man I’d say talking about giving up. No, wait, my mistake. I think one’s trying to rally them. No, wait again. He’s down. Nice shot, Ski.”
“That was me,” Linc said.
“And courage has left the building,” Tiny crowed. “They’ve dropped their weapons and are reaching for the sky.”
That first sign of capitulation broke the dam for the rest. All along the causeway and on the loading dock men were laying down their arms. Only Abala seemed interested in fighting on. He waved his pistol like a madman. Linc watched him level it at a young guerrilla, screaming at him, presumably, to pick up his AK-47. He shot off half of Abala’s foot before the colonel could murder the unarmed man.
Trono’s team swept through the defeated rebels, tossing their captured AKs into a pile and patting down each man for additional weapons.
Linc and Ski remained in their sniper nest, making sure there were no holdouts until the entire area had been secured.
“That’s the last of them,” Mike announced. He was standing over Colonel Abala, who was on the dock writhing in pain. “Who missed on this guy?”
“That was no miss, son,” Linc said. “Once he gets out of the hospital that’s the cat that’s going to lay this whole thing on Makambo and Singer.”
It took ten minutes for Linc and Ski to get down to the dock. Linc approached Abala and squatted next to him. The rebel colonel was nearly in shock and didn’t acknowledge his presence, so Linc lightly slapped his face until he looked over. Spittle bubbled from Abala’s lips and he had a deathly pallor under his dark skin.
“Remember me, numb nuts?” Linc asked. Abala’s eyes went wide. “That’s right. Congo River, about a week or so ago. You thought you could double-cross us. Well, this is what happens.” Linc leaned close.
“Never, and I mean never, mess with the Corporation.”
WHEN the Angolan army finally arrived at the Petromax terminal, theOregon —with her equipment, her crew, and all of Moses Ndeble’s men, alive or dead—was well over the horizon.
The Angolan forces found that the oil flowing to the loading pier had been shut off and crews had capped the two offshore wells. They also discovered eighty-six corpses laid out next to an administrative building and over four hundred frightened men roped together and locked inside, many of them wounded.
One of them, who had a bloody bandage wrapped around his truncated foot, had a sign draped over his neck that read:
MY NAME IS RAIF ABALA. I AM A COLONEL IN SAMUEL MAKAMBO’S CONGOLESE
ARMY OF REVOLUTION AND WAS HIRED TO PERPETRATE THIS ACT OF TERRORISM
BY DANIEL SINGER, FORMERLY OF MERRICK/SINGER. I UNDERSTAND THAT IF I DO
NOT COOPERATE THE PEOPLE WHO STOPPED US TODAY WILL FIND ME.
HAVE A NICE DAY.
29
THEshabby appearance of theOregon was expertly applied camouflage to make her look neglected, but the dilapidation of theGulf of Sidra was the real thing. For twenty years she’d tracked back and forth across the Mediterranean carrying her loads of oil while her owners eked every penny of profit they could. If something broke it was replaced with a used part, hastily repaired with duct tape and bailing wire, or discarded altogether. When her sewage treatment plant went down it was bypassed and repiped to dump directly into the sea. Her air-conditioning system merely moved hot air around the superstructure rather than cooled it. And with the galley’s walk-in cooler not working, the chefs had to balance taking food out of the freezer and letting it thaw but not spoil.
Her black hull was streaked with rust while bare metal showed on her superstructure, and her single funnel was so streaked with exhaust that it was impossible to tell it had once been painted green and yellow. The only modern piece of equipment aboard her was the new escape pod hanging over her stern, put there at the insistence of her captain once he learned where they were sailing.
With a beam of a hundred and twenty feet and the length of three football fields, theGulf of Sidra was a huge ship, though small in comparison to the 350,000-ton tanker that had been berthed at the Petromax terminal. Her outdated design left her seven holds capable of carrying only 104,000 tons of crude.
Though she had become a fixture lying at anchor outside the Mauritanian port of Nouakchott, a hazy silhouette against the western horizon that had been there for weeks, her departure went largely ignored.
She’d steamed from the city as soon as Daniel Singer had arrived from Angola and had put more than two hundred miles between herself and the coast.
She was chasing a tropical depression moving across the Atlantic that had the potential to build into a hurricane. It was the storm Singer had been waiting for, the perfect conditions to test what the world’s brightest meteorological minds and the most sophisticated computer models said would happen.
With the temperature in his cabin hovering above a hundred degrees, Singer had taken to spending as much time as he could on the wing bridge, where at least the ship’s seventeen-knot speed created a breeze.
He’d just gotten word over the BBC wireless service that Samuel Makambo’s attack had been foiled by Angolan troops. Nearly a hundred guerillas had been killed in the swift counterattack and four hundred captured. Singer wondered briefly if Colonel Abala, the only rebel who could identify him, was among the living or the dead and decided it didn’t matter. If he was linked to the assault the publicity of a court appearance would only spread the word. He’d hire the flashiest lawyers he could find and get his case shifted to the World Court in The Hague. There he would use the opportunity to put humanity’s treatment of the earth on trial.
What truly bothered him about the failed attack was that estimates put the amount of oil spilled at about twelve thousand tons. Though an environmental catastrophe, it was far short of the million tons he’d been planning on. There would be no cloud of benzene arsonic acid lacing the storm and spreading its poison across the southeastern United States. It would be a punishing storm, the worst hurricane to hit America in recorded history, but without the noxious contamination he feared it wouldn’t touch off the panic he’d expected.
He knew he would have to contact the media and explain once the storm was over—or better yet, when it was about to make landfall—how a chance battle in a remote part of the world had prevented a catastrophe. It would be one more example of how interconnected the earth was, how we were leaving our future to the vagaries of chance.
Adonis Cassedine, the ship’s master, stepped out from the bridge. Unlike his handsome mythological namesake, Cassedine was a sour-looking man with an unshaven face and rodent-sharp eyes. His nose was askew from being poorly set after a break, so the smudged glasses he wore tilted off one of his cauliflower ears.
“I just got a report from a container ship a hundred miles in front of us.” Sunset was still hours away and already his breath smelled of the cheap gin he swilled. To his credit, however, he didn’t slur his words and his body only swayed a little. “They are encountering Force Four conditions with winds out of the northeast.”
“The storm is forming,” Singer said. “And just where we need it to be. Not too far out that it has settled on its course, but not too close that it could fail to coalesce.”
“I can get you there,” Cassedine said, “but I don’t like it.”
Here we go again. Singer was already angered over Makambo’s failure. He didn’t want to hear another complaint from this washed-up rummy.