Corsair - Cussler Clive - Страница 31

Juan was standing on the wing bridge, overlooking the dock, with Max Hanley at his side. Fragrant smoke curled from Max’s pipe and helped mask the smell of bunker fuel and rotting fish that permeated the port. Across from their berth, a mobile crane on crawler treads was swinging a container from a coastal freighter. There were no lights on the crane, and the overhead gantry lamps were shut off. The tractor trailer waiting to take the load didn’t even have its headlights on. Only a single flashlight carried by a crewman standing near the container gave the scene any illumination. Mr. Assad had gone straight from the Oregon to oversee the unloading. Cabrillo could just make out his silhouette, standing with the ship’s captain, on the dock. It was too dark to see the envelope exchange, but Eric had reported the act after watching with the Oregon’s low-light camera.

“Looks like L’Enfant knows his men,” Max said. “Our Mr. Asssad is a busy boy.”

“What was it Claude Rains said in Casablanca, ‘I am only a poor corrupt official’?”

Cabrillo’s walkie-talkie squawked. “Chairman, we have the hatch cover off. We’re ready.”

“Roger that, Eddie. Assad said we can use our own crane to unload the Pig, so get it fired up and ready.”

“You got it.”

Like the mysterious ship tied to the opposite dock, the Oregon was completely dark. On the other side of the harbor, tall cranes mounted on rails were off-loading a massive containership under the brutal glare of sodium-vapor lights. Beyond it stretched a field of stacked containers, and past that was a security fence and a series of warehouses and towering oil-storage tanks.

One of the Oregon’s only working deck cranes started swinging across the horizon, cable paying off the crane’s drum as the crane’s arm was positioned over the open hatch. The braided-steel cable vanished into the hold for five minutes before being drawn back up through the tackle. The boom took the weight easily.

Although he couldn’t see details in the darkness, Juan recognized the shape of the Pig. The Powered Investigator Ground was Max’s brainchild. From the outside, the Pig looked like a nondescript cargo truck emblazoned with the logo of a fictitious oil-exploration company, but under its rough exterior was a Mercedes Unimog chassis, the only unmodified part on the vehicle. Its turbodiesel engine had been bored, stroked, and tuned to produce nearly eight hundred horsepower, and, with a nitrous oxide boost, could push past a thousand. The heavily lugged, self-sealing tires were on an articulating suspension that could raise the vehicle up and give it almost two feet of ground clearance, six inches more than the Army’s storied Humvee. The four-person cab squatting over the front tires was armored enough to take rifle fire at point-blank range. The boxy body was similarly protected.

When Eric and Mark first heard Max’s plans for the Pig, they had called him Q, in honor of the armorer from the James Bond franchise. A .30 caliber machine gun was hidden beneath the front bumper. It was also fitted with guided rockets that launched from hidden racks that swung down from the truck’s side, and a smoke generator could lay down a dense screen in its wake. From a seamless hatch on the roof, the Pig could fire mortar barrages, and could be mounted with another .30 cal or an automatic grenade launcher as well. The cargo area could be reconfigured to meet mission parameters—anything from a mobile surgical suite to a covert radar station to a troop carrier for ten fully kitted soldiers.

And yet, other than the larger than normal tires, not one aspect of the Pig gave away her true nature. She was the land-based version of the Oregon herself. If an inspector opened the rear doors, he would be confronted with the curved sides of six fifty-five-gallon drums stacked floor to ceiling. And if the inspector were really curious, the first row could be removed to reveal a second. The first ones were actually spare fuel tanks that gave the Pig an eight-hundred-mile range. The second row was a facade to shield the interior of the truck, so they played the odds that no one would ever ask to remove it.

“Well, Max old boy, I guess we get to see if this contraption of yours was worth the effort.”

“Ye of little faith,” Max replied dourly.

Cabrillo turned serious. “You’re set on what to do?”

“As soon as you get clear of Tripoli, I’m leaving the harbor and steaming west. We’ll take up a position in international waters due north of the crash site, with the chopper on ten-minute alert.”

“I know you’ll be at the helo’s maximum range, but it’s good to have a little insurance just in case. If things go as planned, you shadow us offshore when we make our escape into Tunisia.”

“And if things don’t go as planned?”

Juan gave him a look of mock horror. “When was the last time things didn’t go as expected?”

“A couple days ago in Somalia, a few months ago in Greece, last year in the Congo, before that in—”

“Yeah, yeah yeah . . .”

A burst of static erupted from the speaker in the wheelhouse. Juan strode in, plucked the microphone off the wall, and said, “Cabrillo.”

“Chairman, the Pig’s on the dock and we’re good to go. Latest intel puts the Libyan search-and-rescue a good three hundred miles from the crash site.”

“Okay, Linda, thanks. I’ll meet you at the gangway in five.” He went back out onto the flying bridge.

Max tapped his pipe against the rail, unleashing a shower of sparks that tumbled down the side of the ship and winked out one by one. “See you in a couple of days.”

“You got it.” Rarely would they wish each other luck before a mission.

JUAN DROVE, WITH MARK MURPHY riding shotgun and Linda Ross and Franklin Lincoln occupying the rear bench seat. All four wore khaki jumpsuits, the ubiquitous uniform of oil workers all over North Africa and the Middle East. Linda had trimmed her hair and tucked it under a baseball cap. With her slender build, she could easily pass for a young man on his first overseas job.

It was still dark by the time the lights of Tripoli faded in the rear-view mirror. Traffic on the coast road was nearly nonexistent, and after an hour they had yet to come upon any roadblocks. A police cruiser had slashed by, its dome lights flashing and its siren keening, but it passed the truck without incident and vanished into the distance.

Cabrillo was confident in their fake papers, but he preferred to remain anonymous as long as possible. He wasn’t as worried about a legitimate stop by the authorities. What concerned him were corrupt cops setting up roadblocks to shake down motorists. He had cash on hand for such a situation; however, he knew things could spiral out of control quickly.

Mark had keyed in way points on the Pig’s integrated navigation system to get them to the downed airliner, and it was just their luck that there was a roadblock less than a hundred feet from where they were supposed to leave the highway and begin their trek into the desert. Two police cars were parked so that they cut the two-lane road down to one. A cop wearing a reflective vest was leaning into a car headed in the opposite direction, his flashlight bathing the interior of the sedan. Juan could make out two more men in one of the cars. He suspected there was a fourth keeping himself out of view.

As he slowed, Juan asked, “Murph, can we pass through and turn farther down the road?”

The young weapons expert shook his head. “I mapped our route exactly from the satellite pictures. If we don’t turn here, we come up against some pretty steep cliffs. You can’t see it in the darkness, but there’s a switchback trail just to our left that will get us to the top.”

“So it’s here or never, eh?”

“ ’ Fraid so.”

Cabrillo braked the big truck far enough from the makeshift roadblock so the car could pass him once the cops were satisfied. In a concealed pocket to the right of his seat he could feel the butt of his preferred handgun, the Fabrique Nationale (FN) Five-seveN. The military-grade SS190 rounds had unbelievable penetrating power, and, because of their small size, twenty could be loaded into a comfortable grip magazine. He left it for the moment.