Juan could hear that someone had cut the power to the ship saw, for the building no longer echoed. He counted to ten in his head, promising his punished body that at the end of the count he would surface for air, but when he reached the magic number, he forced himself to count another slow ten and then another. It was Tory who first needed air, and they surfaced together as close to the hull as they could. Juan gulped a lungful and forced them under again, not knowing if they’d been spotted.

When they surfaced for the second time, he took a moment to get his bearings. They were less than twenty yards from the railing where he’d tied off the Draeger set. Bullets began to stitch the water around them, shooting little jets of white water into the air. The pair ducked back under without getting their breath but somehow managed to cover the distance.

Juan’s mind was too fogged with the pain radiating from his leg and head to attempt untying the simple knot he’d fastened. Instead, he reached into his shattered prosthesis for a flat throwing knife. The ship saw had shredded one side of the blade, but the other still retained its keen edge. He sliced through the lines and fed the regulator to Tory as he made them both sink deeper. Because the rebreather didn’t produce bubbles, the gunmen above couldn’t see where they lurked ten feet below the surface. The Sikh fighters fired indiscriminant volleys into the water, hoping to get lucky but mostly just venting their anger that two of their comrades were dead and a third would limp for the rest of his life. Juan held no sympathy for any of them.

He took the mouthpiece from Tory, careful not to let water enter the system where it would cause a caustic reaction in the CO₂ scrubbers. Despite the polluted salt water, he could taste her on the rubber. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and then maneuvered the Draeger pack over his shoulders. The mechanical parts of his artificial limb were completely destroyed, so he fitted his fin onto his good leg, giving the other fin to Tory.

Once he had cleared water from his mask and they were both settled, he became aware of another sound: gunfire. And not the maddened fusillades fired by the guards. It was the rhythmic pulse of a weapon he knew well. He couldn’t suppress a smile. Singh’s men were attempting to board the Oregon, and he could imagine Mark Murphy ensconced behind his video screens as he opened up with the ship’s Bofors 40mm autocannon.

That’s when the men above him must have seen their motion through the water, because suddenly bullets were striking all around them, cutting cavitation trails that looked like white arrows.

21

MAX Hanley ordered Franklin Lincoln and his SEAL assault team to launch their Zodiac as soon as he heard the ship saw whining from inside the shed across the bay. Max hurried from the boat garage to the operations center buried below the Oregon’s superstructure. The red battle lights were on, which blended with the blue computer screens to make the room glow an awful shade of purple. Why Max had never noticed this detail before was just one of the million things swirling through his mind.

With the rest of the breaker’s yard quiet so late at night, Max was certain that Shere Singh had fired up the ship saw because he had caught the chairman. Eric Stone was at the helm, Murph had the weapons station, and Hali Kasim and Linda Ross were watching the threat board. Max settled in the command chair, hooking a hands-free microphone over his balding head.

“Linc, you on the net?”

“Roger, Oregon. We’re approaching in stealth mode. ETA seven minutes.”

Max was about to ask why they didn’t open up the Zodiac’s big outboard, because the sound of the saw would surely mask the engine’s throaty roar, but then remembered that in the moonlight the Zodiac’s wake would show as a white crescent on the otherwise black sea.

Lincoln continued, “Oregon, be advised that there is a lot of traffic pulling away from the beach. I count four, repeat, four utility boats. Thermal scan shows they’re loaded to the gunnels with men.”

“I have ’em,” Mark Murphy called from the weapons station. His screen showed the feed from the thermal/IR/ low-light camera mounted on the Oregon’s main mast. “I estimate fifty soldiers in total, armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.” He typed commands into his computer to call up the ship’s vast arsenal. His screen split so that each forty-foot boat approaching from the beach was on its own display. A sight reticle appeared over each dark-hulled craft. “Targets designated tango one through four. I have tracking on all inbound.”

“Where’s the Zodiac?” When the Oregon’s batteries opened up, the last thing he needed to worry about was a friendly fire accident.

“Linc’s angling out of the way, but he’s moving slow.”

Max brought up a wide-angle camera shot on his screen. Singh’s men were coming straight for the Oregon as the Zodiac slowly motored off to the starboard. The ex-SEAL couldn’t gun his engine because the guards would open fire as soon as they saw his wake. Max was forced into a waiting game between Linc’s progress out of the line of fire and the speed of the approaching utility boats.

“Incoming!” Linda Ross called out from her station. “Missile launch from the beach.”

In the two seconds it took her to shout the warning, the RPG had covered half the distance to the Oregon, and before anyone could react, it finished the other half. The five-pound missile struck the anchor fairlead high on the bow and exploded. The Soviet-made RPG mangled a good-sized chunk of steel and blew a hole up through the deck but didn’t damage the anchor chains or machinery.

“We’ve got more. Multiple launches!”

Wallowing this close to the beach, the range was too short for the ship’s automated defensive systems to engage the incoming missiles.

Max had no other choice. “Helm, all back full!”

Eric Stone had anticipated the order, and his hands were already drawing back the dual throttle controls. Deep within the ship the four massive magnetohydrodynamic engines came to life. Like flicking a light switch, the revolutionary engines were running at full power in an instant, drawing seawater’s naturally occurring electric charge, amplifying it through the cryo-cooled magnets, and creating a force wave that pumped water though her drive tubes with unimaginable power.

The backward acceleration was enough to send dishes tumbling in the galley and toss a batch of files on Cabrillo’s desk into the air. But they weren’t quick enough to avoid the incoming volley of RPGs.

Six of the notoriously inaccurate missiles fizzled harmlessly into the sea. Another impacted one of the Oregon’s dummy cargo derricks, dropping it like a felled tree. The heavy steel mast crashed against the deck hard enough to make the eleven-thousand-ton vessel shudder. The eighth missile slammed into the superstructure below the bridge. The shaped high-explosive warhead was designed to punch through a tank’s thick armor, so when it exploded through the half-inch steel, much of its force remained. Two of the mock-up cabins the Corporation used during harbor inspections were gutted by the kinetic force of the explosion, but the damage was mostly cosmetic. The damage control computer activated the fire suppression system without need for human intervention, and it also directed damage control teams to the area.