“I know. You’re right,” Overholt sighed. “Juan, just be careful, okay?”
“Count on it, my friend.”
“Do you need me to stay on the line?” the veteran CIA officer asked.
“You know where to deposit the money once we’re out,” Juan replied. “Unless you want to know specifics of our operation, I think you should hang up.”
“You got it.” The line clicked dead.
Juan addressed the assembled officers. “Okay, we’ve been at this long enough. Are there any last-minute details that need to be cleared up before we adjourn?”
“The containers on deck,” Max said. “Should we start breaking them down at nightfall or wait until you return from the navy base and we’re under way? And what about the paint and the other camouflage measures?”
The stacks of containers littering the Oregon’s deck were so much window dressing, just another way for the crew to hide the nature of their ship. They could be folded flat and stored in one of her holds, altering her silhouette. The blue paint coating her hull and the green covering her upperworks was an environmentally friendly pigment that could be washed off using the fire-suppression water cannons mounted on the superstructure. Beneath the paint her hull was a patchwork of mismatched colors that looked as though they had been applied over a couple of generations of owners. That coating, however, was a radar-absorbing compound similar to the skin of a stealth fighter.
Metal plates had also been installed around key features of the ship to further distort her shape. A fairing over her bows that gave her a racier look would be removed. The twin funnels she was currently carrying would be dismantled and a large, oval stack erected to replace them. This funnel also acted as armor to protect her main radar domes, which were currently retracted into the amidships accommodations block.
To further change her appearance, the ballast tanks would be flooded to make her look like her holds were loaded with goods.
In all, it would take four hours and the work of every crewman aboard, but, when they were done, the Norego would have vanished completely and the Oregon would be sailing innocently down the Persian Gulf, flying, ironically, the Iranian flag, because that was where the ship was actually registered.
Juan thought for a moment before answering, balancing risk versus reward. “Eric, what’s the moon tonight?”
“Only a quarter,” the ship’s navigator and de facto weather-man said. “And the meteorological report calls for cloud cover after midnight.”
“Let’s leave everything in place until midnight,” Cabrillo told his crew. “We should be back aboard by two A.M. We’ll have a two-hour head start on the conversion work, but if something goes wrong we can put everything back quickly enough. Anything else?” There were a few head shakes and a general rustling of papers as everyone got ready to leave.
“We’ll meet in the moon pool at eleven hundred hours for final equipment checks. We launch the mini no later than eleven forty-five. If we’re late, we’re going to run into trouble with the tides.” Cabrillo stood to get their attention. “I want it clear to all department heads, and especially to shore operations”—he looked pointedly at Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln—“that there can be no slipups. We’ve got a good plan. Stick to it and everything will go as smooth as silk. The situation in this part of the world is bad enough without mercenaries getting caught trying to steal a couple of rocket torpedoes.” Linc grumbled good-naturedly, “You all know I got out of Detroit to get away from my friends who were boosting stuff.”
“Out of the frying pan . . .” Eddie grinned.
“. . . and into an Iranian jail.”
CHAPTER 2
YEARS OF WORKING WITH THE CIA HAD TRAINED Juan to function on very little sleep over long periods of time. It wasn’t until he’d founded the Corporation and purchased the Oregon that he developed the mariner’s ability to fall asleep on command. After the boardroom conference, he’d returned to his cabin, an opulent suite more befitting a Manhattan apartment than a ship at sea, stripped out of his Captain Esteban costume, and fell into bed. Thoughts of the danger they’d be facing once the team was ashore kept him awake for less than a minute.
Without the need for an alarm clock, he awoke an hour before he was to report to the moon pool.
His sleep had been dreamless.
He strode into the bathroom, sat on a mahogany stool to remove his artificial leg, and hopped into the shower. With such a surplus of electricity, the Oregon’s water-heating system ensured that the lag time between turning the taps and a steaming shower was measured in seconds. Cabrillo stood under the near-scalding spray with his head bowed and water pounding his body. He’d accumulated a dozen lifetimes of scars over the years, and he vividly recalled the circumstances behind every one. It was the blunt pad of his stump that he thought the least about.
For most people, losing a limb would likely be a defining moment in their lives. And during the long months of rehab, it had been for Juan as well. But, after that, he barely gave it a moment’s consideration.
He had trained his body to accept the prosthesis and his mind to ignore it. As he’d told Dr. Huxley early on in his physical therapy, “I may be crippled, but I won’t allow myself to be handicapped.” The prosthetic leg he’d worn throughout the day was designed like a human limb, with a covering of flesh-toned rubber to match his own skin color and a foot with toes that even had nails and hair to match those of his left foot. After toweling off, and finally shaving off the itchy beard, he went to his closet to retrieve a very different limb.
There was a section on the Oregon dubbed the Magic Shop, and it was overseen by an award-winning Hollywood effects master named Kevin Nixon. It had been Nixon, working in secret, who had developed what Juan called his combat leg. Unlike the natural-looking prosthesis, this one looked like it had been left over from the Terminator movies. Constructed of titanium and carbon fiber, combat leg version 3.0 was a virtual arsenal in itself. A Kel-Tek .380 pistol was secreted in the calf, along with a perfectly balanced throwing knife. The leg also contained a wire garrote, a single-shot .50 caliber gun that fired through the heel, and storage compartments for all manner of equipment Cabrillo might need.
Just fitting it over his stump and attaching a set of reinforcing straps helped Juan prepare himself mentally for the mission.
There were two reasons he’d started the Corporation. One, of course, was as a moneymaking venture.
And, from that perspective, it had done better than his wildest dreams. Each member could retire with what they had earned in the years since joining, and Cabrillo himself could buy a small Caribbean island, if he so chose. But it was the second reason for forming his own security force that kept him at it long after a normal man would have hung up his guns. The need for such a group was so great that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to stop.
In just the past year, he and the crew of the Oregon had broken up a piracy ring that had been targeting ships carrying illegal Chinese immigrants and using them as slave labor at a remote gold mine, and they disrupted an ecoterrorist’s plan to steer a poison-laden hurricane into the United States.
It seemed that as soon as one job was complete there were two more equally deserving of the Corporation’s unique abilities. Evil was running rampant all over the globe, and the world powers were stymied to prevent its spread by the very morality that made them great. Though they worked under the guidance of Cabrillo’s own moral compass, he and his crew weren’t hampered by politicians, of any ilk, who were more concerned with reelections than results.