The RHIB reached them just moments before the Hercules succumbed to the inevitable and rolled ponderously onto her side, her barnacle-scaled bottom exposed to the sun for the first time in her long career. Air trapped in the hull burst out through portholes and vents, spewing and sputtering as though the old ship was fighting her fate.
And then he remembered that this wasn’t the end of the affair but the very beginning, and all thoughts of humor vanished.
“Gomez, get us back to the ship ASAP.”
MacD Lawless had betrayed them from that very first night in Pakistan, and Cabrillo wanted answers.
No sooner were they down and the RHIB back up the ramp in the boat garage than he ordered the Oregon to stand off the platform and rake its waterline with the ship’s 20mm Gatling gun. The depth here wasn’t optimal—the Hercules’s crew must have been rushed after all—but they were over the continental slope, and, with luck, the J-61 would tumble down the undersea cliff and end up in the crushing depths of the abyssal plane.
Juan wanted no evidence that this act of sabotage hadn’t gone off as planned. The heavy-lifter wouldn’t last another ten minutes on the surface, and once they’d peppered the rig’s floats with a couple thousand holes it would join the ship on the bottom.
Because he was covered in gooey oil from his search for Linda, Cabrillo went to his cabin first, while the two women were escorted to the infirmary for a checkup. As much as he longed for a shower, he simply stripped out of the clothes he’d been wearing, balling them up for the trash rather than tossing them into a hamper, and threw on a navy blue jumpsuit and clean boots.
He was down in medical seven minutes after Adams got them safely home.
Max was there waiting, a look of concern on his bulldog face. “First off, glad you’re okay. Second, what the hell is going on?”
“We’re both about to find out,” Juan said, and led him through the door.
“About time I get some answers,” Dr. Huxley said with mild irritation. “Why is my patient under guard?”
“How are Soleil and Linda?”
“They’re fine. Soleil is a little wrung out from her ordeal, but up until they moved the oil platform she was cared for. How about it, Juan?”
“Croissard was duped the same way we were and by the same person.”
“MacD?”
“Nope. But let’s go have a chat with him.”
Juan could see that the guard had taken the added precaution of securing MacD’s wrists to the frame of his hospital bed. Cabrillo dismissed him with a wave and spent several seconds eyeing their newest member turned prisoner.
Cabrillo started, “I’m going to tell a story and I want you to correct me where I get it wrong. If I’m satisfied when we’re finished, I’ll untie you myself. Deal?”
MacD nodded.
“At some time during your most recent posting to Afghanistan when you worked for Fortran, you befriended a local, probably someone younger than yourself.”
“His name was Atash.”
“You told him all about your daughter back home in New Orleans, never considering the kid was part of a terrorist cell and that the information you gave him would be used against you.”
Shame washed over Lawless’s face.
“When they were ready, the cell sent a team to the United States to kidnap her. Proof of her abduction was somehow provided, and you were told that if you didn’t do exactly what they said, she would be killed. You had no choice. They set up a bogus ambush to get you across the border into Pakistan, where you were roughed up a little to make your capture appear legit. On a night they knew we were watching that village you were paraded around, setting us up to rescue you at the same time we nabbed the little boy, Setiawan.
“I always figured our escape out of that town was too easy,” Cabrillo said. “Not the ambush on the road later. That was a separate group that had no idea what was going on. But the people in the village were under orders to let us go with minimum fuss.”
“Hold on,” Max said. “I thought you said they opened fire on the bus.”
“Oh, a couple of Johnny Jihadis shot at us, but they either missed entirely or fired up at the roof so as not to hit anyone. It was a show to convince us that we’d made the greatest escape in history. All hat and no cattle, as the old saying goes. Later, after we escaped the roadblock, we had a Predator launch a missile at us. I never even saw it, but MacD here did, and moved faster than an Olympic sprinter. He saved our lives. It was an impressive feat for someone supposedly beaten half to death by the Taliban and stuffed into the trunk of a car for a few days. No way would you have been able to move like that. Your injuries were mostly faked.”
Lawless didn’t deny it.
“I don’t get this,” Hanley persisted. “How did they know when we were going to rescue that kid?”
“You don’t see it yet?” Juan asked. “That kid didn’t need rescuing because his father had sent him to Pakistan in order to lure us to that village.”
“I must be dense or something. Why lure us there?”
“The whole thing was set up so that we would take MacD into the fold. Gunawan Bahar is the mastermind of everything we’ve been through these past couple of weeks. He wanted to plant a spy on the Oregon, so he hired us to ‘rescue’ his son from the Taliban while he also planted a man whose daughter’s life he controls in place for us to rescue too.
“It was a brilliant piece of misdirection. As soon as we were double-crossed by Smith in Myanmar, all suspicion automatically went to Croissard. No one ever considered there was another layer to this onion and that Croissard was no more in control of his actions than MacD.”
That last statement wasn’t entirely true. Since his time at Insein, Cabrillo had harbored a nagging doubt about something. He did not know what, but he sensed that some piece of information he’d been given was off in some way. It was instinct, but that was a feeling he’d learned to trust over the years, so when he saw Soleil on the rig he knew what had eluded him for so long.
“What gave it away,” he continued, “was the timing of the rig being sunk. Bahar knew from Lawless that we’d escaped Insein Prison and had Linda’s location because of the tracker chip. That pushed up his deadline to deep-six the J-61 platform by a few days or weeks. The clincher was when MacD came up to the bridge this morning. He’d been told we were steaming hard but had no idea the speeds the Oregon is capable of. As soon as he left me he called his handler, Smith, I assume, because of the way he seemed to get under your skin when we were back in the jungle. He told Smith that we were just hours away rather than days. The Hercules still wasn’t over the Palawan Trough, but they were out of time. They immediately opened the sea cocks and hit the lifeboats. To not only kill Linda and Soleil but also to hide the fact that the platform was home to perhaps one of the largest collections of interlinked computers outside a government lab. How’d I do?” He directed that last question to MacD.
Before Lawless could reply, a searing blast of sound made conversation impossible. It was the buzz-saw clamor of the Gatling raking the sides of the oil rig’s ponderous floats. It went on in staccato bursts for a full minute so that by the time the weapon was withdrawn back into the ship and its redoubt cover slid back into position, three thousand fist-sized holes had been blown through the floats, above and below the water. It would slip beneath the waves within the hour.
“How about it?” Juan prompted when it was clear Mark Murphy had finished the job.