“The ratio of a stone’s weight verses the volume of water it displaces. For diamond it is exactly three point five two.” Max fiddled with his scale for a moment, calibrating it with a set of brass weights carried in a velvet-lined case. Once the scale had been zeroed he set the largest stone on the pan. “Point two two five grams. Eleven and a half carats.” He opened one of the plastic graduated cylinders and dropped the stone inside, noting how much water the gem displaced in his notebook. He then tapped the numbers into the calculator. When he saw the resulting number he glared at Raif Abala.
Abala’s eyes went wide with indignant anger. His troopers tightened their cordon. A gun was pressed against Juan’s back.
Unperturbed by the sudden show of aggression, Max let his expression go neutral and then allowed a smile to creep across his face. “Three point five two. This, gentlemen, is a real diamond.”
Colonel Abala slowly lowered himself into his seat and fingers that had been ounces away from squeezing triggers were relaxed. Juan could have killed Hanley for playing his role a little too well.
Max tested eight more random stones and each time the results were the same.
“I have held up my end of the bargain,” Abala said. “A quarter pound of diamonds for the weapons.”
While Hanley tested more stones, Linc led Abala to the open container, signaling to a crewman on the freighter to lower it to the quay. The wooden piers holding up the jetty creaked under the weight. Five rebel soldiers went with them. By the glare of a flashlight, Abala and his men grabbed ten AK-47s from different racks and about a hundred rounds of ammunition, using a machete to cut open the wax-coated paper blocks of bullets.
Making sure he stood close by Abala in case the troops tried something, Linc watched as the men laboriously loaded the shiny brass cartridges into the AK’s distinctive banana magazines. Juan, who was wearing a lightweight flak jacket under his bulky sweatshirt, stuck to Max for the very same reason. Each assault rifle was fired ten times, two three-round bursts and four single shots aimed carefully at a target stapled to the side of the disused warehouse. The gunfire echoed across the broad reach of the river and sent dozens of birds winging into the night. A soldier ran to the warehouse to inspect the damage, shouting an encouragement. Abala grunted at Linc, “Good. Very good.”
Back at the table Hanley carried on his inspection, setting the empty sack on the scale and noting its weight in his notebook. Then, under the watchful eye of one of Abala’s officers, he used a long-handled spoon to coax the rough stones back into the bag. Once he had them all, he weighed the bag again. On the calculator he subtracted the bag’s weight from the total. He looked over his shoulder at Cabrillo and whispered, “We are eight carats short.”
Depending on the stones, those eight carats could translate into tens of thousands of dollars. Juan shrugged. “I’ll just be happy to get out of here alive. Let it go.” Cabrillo called over to Linc, who was going over one of the RPGs with Abala and a rebel who had the professional look of a sergeant,
“Captain Lincoln, the port authorities won’t hold our berth in Boma. We should get going.”
Linc turned to him. “Of course, Mr. Cabrillo. Thank you.” He looked back to Abala. “I wish I had more weapons to offer you, Colonel, but coming across this shipment was a surprise to me and my crew.”
“If you, ah, ever get such a surprise again, you know how to contact us.”
They had reached the table. Linc asked Max, “Everything all set?”
“Yes, Captain, everything’s in order.”
Abala’s smile took on an even oilier sheen. He’d intentionally shorted them on the deal, knowing that his overwhelming number of armed men would intimidate them into accepting fewer stones than agreed. The missing diamonds were in his uniform blouse pocket and would go a long way in fattening his Swiss bank account.
“Let’s go then, gentlemen.” Linc took the bag of diamonds from Max and strode toward the gangplank, Cabrillo and Hanley hurrying to match his long strides. The moment before they reached the gangway Abala’s men swung into action. The two closest to the ramp stepped forward to block it while dozens of rebels rushed out of the jungle firing into the air and screaming like banshees. At least a dozen men swarmed the container, trying to unhook the cargo derrick.
The effect would have been overwhelming had the Corporation team not expected a double-cross.
A second before Abala shouted his order to attack, Cabrillo and Linc had started running. They were on the two rebels at the base of the gangplank before either had time to bring their weapons to bear. Linc bodily tossed one young soldier into the space between the freighter and the quay as Juan jammed his fingers into the other’s throat just hard enough to make him retch. As the rebel coughed, Juan ripped the AK-47 out of his hands and sank the butt into the soldier’s stomach. He fell into a fetal ball.
Cabrillo swung around and laid down a wall of cover fire as Max and Linc mounted the gangway. Juan stepped onto the sloping ramp and pressed a button under the railing. The five feet of the gangway’s leading edge snapped sharply upward. With its solid sides, and now with the tip elevated ninety degrees, the three men were shielded by the withering return fire from Abala’s men. Bullets whizzed over their heads, smacking into the side of the freighter and ricocheting off the metal skin of the gangway as the trio huddled safely in their armored cocoon.
“Like we wouldn’t see this coming,” Max said casually over the riotous din.
An operator inside the ship worked the controls of the gangplank and it lifted off the dock, allowing the men to dash into the ship’s superstructure. All pretenses aside, Juan took immediate control. He slapped the button on a wall-mounted intercom. “Sit rep, Mr. Murphy.”
Deep inside the freighter, Mark Murphy, chief weapons operator, was watching a monitor showing video from a camera mounted on one of the ship’s five cranes.
“With the gangway up, only a couple of guys are still firing. I think Abala is trying to organize an assault.
He’s rallied about a hundred of them and is giving them their orders.”
“What about the container?”
“The men almost have the lines off it. Hold it. Yeah, they got it. We’re free of it.”
“Tell Mr. Stone to prepare to get us out of here.”
“Ah, Chairman?” Murphy said hesitantly. “We’re still tied to the dock bollards.”
Cabrillo fingered a trickle of blood from where a fleck of paint kicked free by a bullet had nicked his ear. “Tear ’em out. I’m on my way.”
While their ship looked right at home up against the disintegrating dock, she hid a secret of which only a few outside the crew was aware. Her rust-streaked hull with its mismatched paint, dilapidated derricks, stained deck, and generally grimy appearance was nothing but stage dressing to disguise the vessel’s true capabilities. She was a privately funded spy ship owned by the Corporation and headed by Juan Cabrillo. TheOregon was his brainchild and his one true love.
Under her scabrous hide she bristled with some of the most advanced weapon systems on the planet—cruise missiles and torpedoes bought from a crooked Russian admiral, 30 mm Gatling guns, and a 120 mm cannon that employed the same targeting technology as an M1A2 Abrams tank, as well as servo-controlled .30-caliber machine guns to fend off boarders. All the weapons were mounted behind deck plates along the hull or disguised as junk littering her deck. The remotely operated .30 calibers were hidden in rusted barrels placed strategically along the ship’s rail. On command the lids lifted off and the weapons emerged, aided by low-light and infrared cameras.
Several decks below the ship’s bridge, where Cabrillo and Lincoln had stood when theOregon docked, was the operations center, the brain of the vessel. From there, her crew of retired U.S. military and CIA operatives ran the entire ship, from her engines and dynamic positioning system to all her weapons. They also possessed a suite of radar and sonar gear that was among the best a considerable amount of money could buy.
It was from the op center that theOregon ’s preeminent helmsman, Eric Stone, had actually docked the vessel, using athwartship bow and stern thrusters and input from the global positioning system, all linked to a supercomputer that gauged wind speed, currents, and a dozen other factors. It was this computer that employed the exact amount of reverse thrust required to keep theOregon in position against the flow of the Congo River.
Cabrillo and Max stepped into a utility closet that reeked of turpentine while Linc headed off to meet with Eddie Seng and the rest of the shore operations specialists in case they were needed to keep the rebels from gaining the deck. Juan spun the handles for the slop sink like the dials of a safe and the closet’s back wall opened to reveal a hallway beyond.
Unlike the cheap linoleum and peeling paint of the bridge and other sections of the superstructure, this secret interior passage was well lit, with rich mahogany paneling and plush carpets. An original Winslow painting of a whaling ship hung from a wall and a glass-encased sixteenth-century suit of armor complete with sword and mace stood at the end of the hallway.
They strode past countless cabin doors until reaching the operations center at the heart of the freighter. It was as high-tech as NASA’s mission control, with computer work stations and a wall dominated by an enormous flat panel display currently showing the chaotic scene along the pier. Mark Murphy and Eric Stone sat at the forward work stations directly below the wall monitor while Hali Kasim, the ship’s chief communications specialist, was to the right. Along the back wall stood a pair of damage controllers monitoring the ship’s integrated safety systems and a bank of computers where Max Hanley could watch over theOregon ’s revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines.
It was no mistake that the op center had the feel of the bridge of television’s starshipEnterprise , right down to the large seat set in the middle of the room. Juan sat in what the crew called “The Kirk Chair,”
looped a pin microphone over his ear, and adjusted his own small computer display.
“I’ve got a pair of inbounds,” Hali said, his dark features made a ghastly green by his radar scope. “They must have been flying nap of the earth, suggesting choppers. ETA four minutes.”
“There are no known reports that Makambo has helicopters,” Mark Murphy said, turning to the chairman. “But Hali just got a bulletin about a pair of choppers stolen from an oil exploration company.
Details are sketchy but it reads like the company’s pilots were hijacked.”
Juan nodded, not sure what to make of this development.
“I’ve got movement behind us,” Eric Stone called out. He’d switched his personal view screen to show the view from a stern-mounted camera.
A pair of patrol boats had rounded a bend in the river. Lights atop their pilothouses made it difficult to tell how they were armed, but Mark Murphy at the weapons station called up a database of Congolese military craft.
“They’re American-built Swift boats.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Max said. He’d served aboard Swift boats for two tours in Vietnam.
Murph continued as if Hanley hadn’t spoken. “Displaces twelve tons, has a crew of twelve, and comes armed with six fifty-caliber machine guns. Top speed is twenty-five knots. Note here says that Congo’s riverine forces have also added mortars and they might be carrying shoulder-fired missiles.”
With the situation worsening by the second, Cabrillo made his decisions. “Hali, get me Benjamin Isaka.”
Isaka was their contact in the government. “Tell him that elements of his military might have found out about our mission and don’t realize we’re on their side. Or that two of his Swift boats have been taken by Makambo’s men. Eric, get us the hell out of here. Murph, keep an eye on, well, everything, but do not fire without my say-so. If we give away our capabilities, Abala’s going to know he’s being set up and will leave the guns where they are. Speaking of that. Hali?”
Hali Kasim pushed a shock of curly black hair off his forehead and typed some keystrokes into his computer. “RDF tags are activated and broadcasting five-by-five.”
“Excellent.” Cabrillo spun in his chair to look at Max Hanley. “How about it, old boy?”
“You know we’re only on battery backup,” Max Hanley told him. “I can’t give you more than twenty knots.”
TheOregon had the most sophisticated marine propulsion system ever built. Her magnetohydrodynamic engines used superconductive coils cooled by liquid helium to strip free electrons from seawater. The electricity was then used to power four massive pump jets through two vector nozzles at the ship’s stern.
The engines could move the eleven-thousand-ton ship at speeds approaching that of an offshore race boat, and since she used seawater for fuel she possessed an infinite range. Because of a fire two years earlier on a cruise ship powered by magnetohydrodynamics, most of the world’s maritime safety boards had banned their use until they could be further tested, which was why theOregon flew the flag of Iran on her jack staff, a nation with a decidedly cavalier attitude toward maritime law.
Tied to a dock eighty miles up the Congo River from the Atlantic Ocean, theOregon was surrounded by freshwater and thus couldn’t power up her engines. She had to rely on energy stored in ranks of silver-zinc deep cycle batteries to force water through her pump jets.
Having worked so closely with the navel architects and engineers when the ship was converted from a conventional lumber carrier, Cabrillo knew that even with the current running in their favor the batteries wouldn’t last more than sixty miles at full speed, twenty miles short of where the river discharged into the sea.
“Mr. Stone, what are the tidal conditions going to be in about three hours?” Cabrillo asked his helmsman.
“Mean high tide is in two hours thirty minutes,” Eric Stone replied without having to access the database.
As part of his job he kept track of tidal charts and weather forecasts five days out with the diligence of an accountant chasing a penny across a spreadsheet.
“This is going to be close,” Juan said to no one in particular. “Okay, Eric let’s get out of here before Abala’s men launch their assault.”
“Aye, Chairman.”
With a deft hand, Eric Stone ramped up the pulse jets. Without the whine of the cryopumps and ancillary equipment for the magnetohydrodynamic engines, the sound of water being forced through the tubes was a deep rumble that reverberated through the entire vessel. He dialed up the bow and stern thrusters and the massive ship moved laterally away from the dock at the same time she started straining against her mooring hawsers.
Sensing their quarry was about to escape, the rebels lining the quay opened fire with long sustained bursts from their automatic weapons. Bullets raked the ship from stem to stern. Windows lining the bridge exploded under the onslaught and portholes winked out in cascades of glass. Sparks flew from the Oregon ’s hull as hundreds of rounds were deflected by her armored belts. While it was a spectacular sight, the rebels did nothing but mar paint and destroy a few pieces of easily replaceable glass.
From astern, the approaching patrol boats added the pounding rhythm of their fifty calibers. In order to reach the rendezvous, theOregon rode high in the water, the special ballast tanks running along her flanks used to simulate her carrying a load of goods pumped dry. This afforded the gunners racing down the river a clear view of her rudder. They concentrated their fire on the rudder post, hoping to dislodge it from the steering gear and render the big ship helpless to the whims of the current. On a normal vessel their strategy was sound; theOregon ’s rudder could turn the ship when necessary, like in a port under the watchful eye of harbor officials, but she got most of her maneuverability from the vectored nuzzles of her drive tubes, which were well protected below the waterline.