Cabrillo opened his mouth to reply, but Max continued speaking. “Actually seeing that we’ve got enough money to retire to a private island someplace and live the good life has made you understand just how much we risk every day. You and I have always put our lives on the line. It’s what makes us who we are. Only now we both know our lives are worth a little more than we thought.”

“And our mission?”

“You have to ask? We’re the last line of defense, my boy. We agree to the jobs Langley and the E-ringers need done but can’t touch. The gloves have come off in the twenty-first century, and we’ve become the iron fist.”

Cabrillo absorbed the words before asking with a smirk, “When did you become such a poet?”

Hanley grinned as if he’d been caught. “That actually just sort of came out. Sounded damn impressive, if you ask me.” He turned serious once again. “Listen, Juan, what we do is important, and I for one am not going to feel guilty because we’re getting rich doing it. There’s no shame in profit, only in failure.

“And as for doubting Dick Truitt, you can forget about it. Dick put a lot of sweat and blood into the Corporation. He was there at the beginning and believed just as strongly as you and I. But he’d reached his limit. He’d had enough. Him leaving wasn’t about the money; it was about Dick listening to that little voice inside his head that we all have, and it was saying he’d run his course with us. You can best believe, though, that Dick Truitt hasn’t given up the fight. I wouldn’t be surprised if he poured his money and expertise into a security company or intelligence think tank. I bet —”

Max stopped in midsentence. He’d noticed the spark in Cabrillo’s eye and the crooked, almost piratical smile that played along his lips. As always, Juan Cabrillo had been one step head of his corporate president. Juan had been testing Max, getting a sense of how he felt about Truitt’s leaving. Cabrillo had never doubted his mission or himself, but this was a pivotal time for the Corporation, and Juan needed to make certain Hanley was still 100 percent behind their goals. Juan had set the trap perfectly by acting unsure, and Max had wandered blindly in. This was why no one played poker with the chairman.

“You’re a crafty one.” Max said with a throaty chuckle.

Just then, a high-pitched hiss sounded from the Oregon’s water line. They peered over the rail. Special tanks along her outer hull were filling with seawater to ballast down the tramp freighter and make her look like her holds were full. Juan looked along her wake line and detected a subtle change in course. The long line of white on the otherwise empty sea arced ever so slightly to the east.

“Murph and Stone must have found the spot of ocean for us to play staked goat,” Max said offhandedly and checked the time on an old pocket watch looped with a chain to his coveralls.

Cabrillo thought about the awesome arsenal of weapons secreted about the Oregon and the men and women trained to use them. “Staked tiger, my old friend, staked tiger.”

A day later the Oregon reached the grid that Mark Murphy and Eric Stone had calculated would be the most likely to attract the pirates. Hiro Katsui had agreed to Cabrillo’s negotiations, replying, “It takes a pirate to catch a pirate. Good hunting.” And he had transmitted everything his consortium had on the recent attacks. Murphy and Stone had dissected the information, finding commonalties in the attacks overlooked until now. They cross-referenced weather, the phases of the moon, size of the ships, cargo manifests, crew numbers, and a dozen other factors to find a spot in the Sea of Japan where it was most likely the pirates would attack the Oregon.

A legend had been created concerning the ship and her cargo and was hacked into various databases in case that was how the pirates found their marks. The ship was purportedly carrying a mixed cargo of timber and electronics from Pusan to Nigata, Japan, but what made her a tempting target was the presence of a passenger on her manifest, an eccentric American author who wrote while tramping around the globe on cargo ships.

Richard Hildebrand was a real person, and his fondness for working at sea was well documented in the media. He was currently working on his next bestseller aboard a supertanker deadheading back to the Persian Gulf from Rotterdam, a detail the Corporation doubted the pirates would verify. Between book royalties and the price his books commanded in Hollywood, Hildebrand was one of the wealthiest writers in the world and ripe for kidnapping. While the pirates had yet to attempt such an act, Murph and Stone, with Juan agreeing, believed snatching Hildebrand was a logical escalation of their criminal activities.

In case they wouldn’t risk ransoming a hostage, Murph and Stone had also listed the Oregon’s complement at fifty-seven, large by the standards of modern merchantmen, and to the pirates she’d be a tempting target because of the correspondingly large payroll in the ship’s safe.

The sunset’s palette of reds and rose and purple had been made even more spectacular by the volcanic ash pumped into the atmosphere by an erupting volcano far to the north on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Now the blood-red moon cast a hellish reflection off the calm sea while the stars had dimmed to pricks. The crew was at battle stations. Julia Huxley and her staff were ready in the medical bay to treat anything from a wood sliver to multiple gunshot wounds. The ship’s armaments were primed and ready in their concealed redoubts. Like the German K-boats of World War One, plates along each side of the Oregon’s hull could be lowered to reveal 120mm cannons utilizing the same fire control and ranging system as found on the M-1A1 Abrams tank. She also carried three 20mm radar-controlled multibarrel Gatling guns. Each weapon could pump out three thousand rounds per minute. While primarily an antimissile system, the Gatlings could also take out aircraft, and a barrage against the waterline of an unarmored ship would punch enough holes in its hull to send it to the bottom.

The Oregon also sported concealed machine guns on her decks with thermal and IR sights. Gunners with video displays controlled these remotely from the operations center. One of her forward hatches could be blown off to launch four Exocet ship-to-ship missiles, and another hatch hid a pair of Russian-made land-attack cruise missiles. Although Langston Overholt at the CIA had paved the way for the Corporation to acquire some American military hardware, he’d drawn the line at missiles, thus forcing Juan to search elsewhere. Overholt had also vetoed the Corporation from getting Mark-48 ADCAP torpedoes. No other nation on earth used them, so they could be too easily traced back to the United States. The fish in the pair of forward-facing tubes had also been bought with hard currency from the same corrupt Russian admiral who’d procured the cruise missiles and supplied the end user certificates for the French Exocets.

It was nearly midnight when Juan entered the operations center. He regarded his people under the red glow of battle lights and the muted shine from their display screens.

Mark Murphy and Eric Stone occupied the workstations closest to the forward bulkhead. Stone had come to the Corporation from the navy, while Murphy had never spent time in the military. The young prodigy had earned a Ph.D. by the time he was twenty and joined the Corporation straight from private industry, where he’d designed weapons systems. Juan had been suspicious of him at first, fearing he lacked the mettle to cut it as a mercenary. In truth, his fear was that Murphy would turn out to be a psychopath who thrived on killing, but a battery of tests and psychological profiles showed that Murphy would have excelled in the military, provided the people around him were on the same intellectual level. Because Juan recruited only the best and brightest, Murph had settled in perfectly, even if no one else shared his joy of punk rock and skateboarding.