As Juan was dressing, the chief steward knocked on the cabin door and entered quietly.
“Breakfast, Captain,” Maurice said in his mournful English accent.
The steward was a veteran of the Royal Navy, having been forced into retirement because of his age. A rail-thin man with a shock of pure white hair, he carried himself ramrod straight, and remained unflappable no matter the circumstances. While Cabrillo himself could be a bit of a clotheshorse, nothing compared to the dark suits and crisp, white cotton shirts Maurice wore no matter the weather. In the years he’d been aboard the ship, no one had ever seen the steward sweat or shiver.
“Just set it on my desk,” Juan called as he strode from the bedroom adjoining his office. The room was done in rich woods, with coffered mahogany ceilings and matching display cabinets for some of the curiosities he had accumulated over the years. Framed as the centerpiece on one wall was a dramatic painting of the Oregon pounding through a raging storm.
Maurice set the silver service on the desk, frowning at the affront. There was a perfectly appropriate dining table in a nook in the chairman’s cabin. He removed the covers, and the smell of an omelet, kippers, and dark-roasted coffee filled the room. Maurice knew Cabrillo poured a small measure of cream in his first coffee of the day, so the steward had it ready by the time Juan plopped himself in his chair.
“So what’s the latest on young Mr. Stone’s Internet romance with the girl from Brazil?” Juan asked, and took a huge bite of egg.
Maurice was the shipboard clearinghouse for gossip, and Eric Stone’s numerous cyberaffairs was his favorite topic.
“Mr. Stone is beginning to suspect that he and the lady in question might have more in common than he was first led to believe,” Maurice said in a conspiratorial whisper.
Juan was opening the freestanding antique safe behind his desk as he listened. “That’s not usually a bad thing.”
“I am referring to gender, Captain. He thinks the lady may in fact be a man. Mr. Murphy showed me pictures he/she sent and proved they had been, how did he put it, ‘photoshopped’ to hide certain anatomical details.”
Cabrillo chuckled. “Poor Eric. The guy can’t even get lucky in a chat room.” He eased open the heavy door emblazoned with the name and logo of a long-defunct southwestern railroad. Nearly all the small arms kept aboard the Oregon were stored in the armory next to the soundproof shooting range, but Juan preferred to keep his guns in his office. In addition to the arsenal of machine pistols, assault rifles, and handguns, Juan also kept stacks of money from various countries, a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins struck from four national mints, and several small pouches of uncut diamonds. There was a particular forty-carat stone that he kept separate from the others that had been the gift of the newly elected president of Zimbabwe in appreciation for the Corporation’s efforts in releasing him from political prison.
“Dr. Huxley seems to have confirmed Mr. Murphy’s suspicions by checking the facial ratios of the individual’s face against norms for men and women.” As Maurice continued, Cabrillo checked over a semiautomatic pistol, the only weapon he was taking with him. Unlike the rest of his team, he wasn’t going in armed to the teeth.
He slurped the rest of his coffee and had another bite of omelet. Adrenaline was beginning to course through his veins and knot his stomach, so he gave the rich kippers a pass.
“So what’s Eric going to do?” Juan asked as he got to his feet.
“Obviously, he’s postponing his vacation to Rio de Janeiro until he can verify things one way or the other.
Mr. Murphy thinks he should hire a private investigator.” Cabrillo scoffed. “I think he should drop this whole Internet thing and meet women the regular way, face-to-face, in a bar over too many drinks.”
“Hear! Hear! One can’t overstate the social lubricating abilities of a few cocktails.” Maurice tidied Cabrillo’s desk and hoisted the serving dish to his shoulder, a fresh linen napkin over his other arm.
“We’ll see you when you return.”
That was as close as the steward would say to “Good luck.”
“Not if I don’t see you first,” was Juan’s customary reply.
They left the cabin together, Maurice turning right to return to the galley, Juan left. He took an elevator down three decks. The doors opened to a cavernous room lit with ranks of floodlights and smelling strongly of the sea. An overhead crane held the larger of the two submersibles the Oregon carried, a sixty-five-foot Nomad 1000. The blunt-nosed mini-sub could carry six people, including a pilot and copilot. Clustered near her three bow portholes were armored xenon lamps and an articulated manipulator arm with a grip that could rip steel. The Nomad was rated for a thousand-foot depth, almost ten times as much as her little sister, the Discovery 1000, hanging suspended in a cradle above it, and was outfitted with a diving chamber, so swimmers could exit the craft while she was submerged.
Beneath the submersible, crewmen had already pulled the deck grating away to reveal a gaping pit that went all the way to the Oregon’s keel. The outer doors were still closed, but pumps were filling the swimming pool-sized opening in preparation for the launch.
Linc, Eddie, and Max were already sliding black wet suits over their swim trunks. Scuba equipment for all of them had already been loaded into the sub. Linda Ross stood with her arms crossed over her chest, watching Max with amusement. Hanley had served two tours in Vietnam as a Swift Boat captain and no longer cut the dashing figure he once had. He was having a hard time stretching the suit over his paunch.
He didn’t normally accompany a team on a shore excursion; however, he was the best marine engineer in the Corporation, and everyone agreed his expertise could come in handy.
“Come on, old boy,” Juan said with a grin, and patted Max’s belly. “I don’t recall you having this much trouble a few years ago.”
“It’s not the years,” he moaned, “it’s the pastries.” Cabrillo sat on a bench and, unlike the others, started to put a dry suit on over his clothes. “Linda, have you done your prelaunch checks?”
“We’re good to go.”
“And the cradle?”
“It’s secure,” Max answered for her with possessive pride. He’d designed it, and had overseen its fabrication in the Oregon’s machine shop.
Juan took a communications headset from an attending engineer and called up the Op Center. “Hali, it’s the Chairman. How’s it look out there?”
“Radar shows the normal procession of tankers heading in and out of the Gulf. There’s a containership that pulled into Bandar Abbas’s main dock about two hours ago, plus a handful of feluccas and dhows.”
“Nothing from the naval base?”
“They’re quiet. I’ve scanned all frequencies, and, other than normal blather between ships at sea, there’s not much going on.”
“I hope you’re honing your language skills.” It was a joke between the two. Hali Kasim was the son of Lebanese parents but couldn’t speak a word of Lebanese or Arabic, one of four languages in which Cabrillo was fluent.
“Sorry, boss, I’m letting the translating algorithms of the computer do the work for me.”
“Eric, Murph, you guys set to go?”
When Cabrillo was sending a team ashore, there were no better officers to have manning the ship’s navigation and weapons systems than Stone and Murphy.