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  Juan let her stew.

  Over the military net, he listened in while O’Connell discussed options with the battle group’s CO, Admiral Roy Giddings. In the end, the F-18 was ordered back around for a reconnoiter to see if there was anyone on the bridge. So the plane closed in, now flying at just above stall speed.

  “Negative,” Viper 7 radioed. “I didn’t see anyone up there.”

  “They’ve come close enough,” Giddings said. “Viper Seven, strafe them at the waterline. Ross stand by to pick up the crew when they man the lifeboats.”

  “Roger that.”

  The fighter came down on them like an eagle, and as soon as it was in range, the 20mm erupted. The hardened shells hit the ship just above and at the waterline near the bow so that water frothed like she had been hit by a torpedo. None penetrated. The Oregon’s armor plate deflected all of the rounds. Had she been any other ship, this would have been a crippling attack, and at the speed she was running she’d be down by the head in minutes.

  The old girl plowed on as if nothing had happened.

  “Viper Seven, report,” Giddings asked a few moments later while the plane circled like a wolf around a wounded deer.

  “Nothing,” Viper 7 finally said in dismay. “Nothing’s happened. I hit her good but she’s not sinking.”

  “Alert One,” Giddings called out. This would be the lead plane of the two additional Hornets they’d put up. “You are go for Harpoon launch.”

  Because of the time it took the Oregon’s supercomputer to decode the military encryption, the plane had already nosed around, and the ship-killing missile was off its rails.

  “Wepps!” Taking a few rounds of 20mm was one thing. Nearly a quarter ton of high explosives was an entirely different challenge.

  “On it.”

  The Harpoon missile dropped down to surface-skimming mode as quickly as it could and accelerated up to five hundred miles per hour. Its radar immediately locked onto the one juicy target it saw and flew at it with robotic efficiency.

  Mark Murphy dropped the doors hiding the Oregon’s primary defensive weapon and had the six-barreled Gatling, a clone of the one carried by their attacker, spun up to optimal speed. Its own radar was housed in a dome above the gun that gave it the nickname of R2-FU because it looked like the cute droid from the Star Wars movies but had a nasty attitude.

  When the inbound Harpoon was still a mile away, the Gatling opened up, throwing out a barrier of tungsten that the missile would have to fly through to reach the target. It was the old problem of hitting a bullet with another bullet, but, in this case, the Gatling had unleashed more than a thousand, all aimed directly at the missile.

  The Harpoon exploded well away from the ship, and Murph silenced the gun. Pieces of missile plowed into the ocean while its fireball bloomed and distorted as it lost the force of the Harpoon’s powerful rocket motor.

  In the op center, they watched the battle unfold via a camera mounted near the gun emplacement. The resolution hadn’t been good enough to actually see the incoming missile, but they all cheered when the orange-and-yellow explosion suddenly appeared.

  “Juan!”

  “What?”

  It was Linda. She was pointing to the bottom corner of the massive screen, the mast camera that had been slaved to tracking the first F-18. “It just vanished.”

  “What?”

  “The plane. I was watching it and it just vanished like it faded out of existence. I just checked radar, and it’s gone.”

  Cabrillo’s jaw tightened. “Helm, plot a course of thirty-seven degrees. All ahead flank. Wepps, ready the main gun.”

  “This is Alert One,” the pilot of the lead inbound flight reported. “They have something like the Sea Wiz, the Gatling guns our Navy uses. They shot down my missile.” This had been reported by the pilot moments ago. “And I no longer have Viper Seven on my scope.”

  “Copy that, Alert One. Fire all. Again, fire all. You and Alert Two.” This time, it was Commander O’Connell aboard the Ross giving the order, and there was no countermand from the admiral aboard his flagship. “I knew this guy was a black hat.”

  Cabrillo felt the blood drain from his face. There was nothing they could do. Nailing one of the Harpoons with the Gatling was what the system had been designed to do. There would be seven missiles inbound. If they were lucky, they could take out four of them. Damn lucky at that, but three would still make it through, penetrate deep into the ship, and explode with enough force to peel her hull apart like an overripe banana. They had mere minutes.

  But still they drove on, water blowing through the Oregon’s drive tubes with unimaginable force, the prow cleaving the sea, shouldering aside two symmetrical curls of white water.

  “Chairman, I don’t have a target,” Mark said.

  “You will in just a minute.” Juan studied the display, noting the exact position Linda had seen Viper 7 disappear.

  “You do realize we’re between the proverbial rock and hard place,” Max said.

  “It’s going to get worse. I intend on hitting the rock.”

  “We didn’t fare so well last time,” Hanley reminded him.

  Cabrillo keyed on the shipwide intercom. “Crew, this is the Chairman. Prepare for impact.” He then looked over at his oldest friend. “Last time, we grazed the field. That’s its deadly power. At an angle, it will capsize a ship with no problem, but if we hit it head-on, we should slice right through it. Isn’t that right, guys?”

  Mark and Eric exchanged a few words before Stone deferred to Murph to answer. “In theory, that’s a good idea, but we’re still going to feel the sheering effects. It won’t capsize us, but it could drive the bows so deep that the ship sinks, driven under as if pushed.”

  “See,” Juan said with an optimistic uptick to his voice.

  The sound of canvas ripping on an industrial scale reverberated throughout the Oregon as the Gatling engaged one of the incoming Harpoons. No one was paying the slightest attention. Everyone watched the forward camera. They were getting nearer and nearer the invisible field.

  Juan double-checked their position, calculating angles and drift, wind, and a few other factors. “Helm, another point to starboard.”

  The ship was just beginning to respond when the entire hull lurched as though the sea had been sucked out from under the bow. It was the sensation of going over a waterfall. They had reached the dome of optoelectronic camouflage hiding the Chinese warship, and as the Oregon passed through, the magnetic forces attacked the hull with varying degrees of intensity. The stern felt nothing, while the bow was being enveloped with unimaginable force.

  Then the noise hit, a transonic thrum that drove deep into the skull. Juan slammed his palms over his ears, but it did little good. The sound was already in his head, it seemed, and it echoed off the bones, trying to scramble his brain. Above this came the high-pitch scream of tortured metal. It sounded as though the keel itself was bending. The angle grew steeper still. Max clung to the back of Juan’s seat to keep from being thrown to the deck. Loose articles began to roll toward the forward bulkhead. The lights flickered and a few of the computer screens went dead, their circuitry not sufficiently hardened against the magnetic waves and other forces that came and warped light around the stealth ship to make it invisible.

  The main view screen exploded without warning because the metal wall behind it flexed past the glass’s tolerance. Mark and Eric were peppered with shards, but both had been bent over so the cuts were limited to a few on the nape of their necks.

  The Oregon was pitched so far forward that her drive tubes came free from the ocean, and two great columns of water were shot into the air like massive fire hoses blasting with everything they had. Another couple of degrees more and the Oregon would be driven under with no hope of ever recovering. Juan had gambled and lost. His beloved ship was no match for the forces she had been asked to overcome. She’d given it everything she could, but it was just too much.

  The motion was so sudden that Ma
x almost hit the ceiling. The ship had bulled its way through the invisible edge of the dome of optomagnetic camouflage and popped back up onto an even keel with the frenetic energy of a bath toy. The sound that had so tortured them passed as though it had never struck. The Oregon lurched when the force of her motors was once again fighting the resistance of the seas.

  Unbeknownst to the crew, the six remaining Harpoon missiles struck the barrier seconds later and all six experienced catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic pulse overload. They fell harmlessly into the ocean in her wake.

  “Everyone okay?” Juan called out.

  “What a ride!” Murph whooped.

  When it was clear the op center crew was okay and Max was starting to evaluate the rest of their people, Cabrillo scanned external camera feeds on his chair’s built-in miniscreen. Unlike their first encounter with the barrier, this time much of the ship had been hardened against EMP. There would surely be damage, but the engines hadn’t died and the main power buses hadn’t tripped. Just as he suspected, not a mile away sat the oddly shaped stealth ship. He could only wonder what its captain was thinking at this moment.

  “Wepps, you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “Yes, sir,” Murph said wolfishly. “Permission to fire?”

  “Fire at will. And don’t stop until there’s nothing left to hit.”

  The big 120 in the bow belched fire, and, a moment later, the solid shot hit dead center. Another followed even before the smoke cleared. A third a few seconds later. It was that round that hit some critical piece of equipment — something discovered by Tesla and tinkered with for over a century, something that teetered on the edge of physics — because when it was struck, what was left of the stealth ship vaporized in a dazzling corona of blue fire and blinding flashes of elemental electricity. It happened too fast for the mind to grasp, and, even later, when watched on tape played at its slowest possible speed, the very act of destruction was nearly instantaneous. All that remained behind were tiny bits of the composite hull and a slick of diesel fuel.

  The overhead speakers played the voices of a very confused group of sailors and airmen who had just watched a ship nearly twice the length of a football field suddenly blink out of existence only to reappear a few seconds later, not to mention the six missiles they had fired vanishing too.

  “Commander O’Connell, this is Juan Cabrillo of the Oregon. We are standing down and awaiting further instructions.”

  “Please explain what just happened.”

  “Think cloaking device. I told you there was a Chinese warship lurking out here. Give me an e-mail address and I’ll prove it.”

  Mark took his cue and prepared a digital file of their one-sided gunfight with the stealth ship. The commander gave an address.

  A few minutes later, O’Connell came back. “Who are you people and how did you know it was out here?”

  Juan’s cell rang. It was Overholt. “One second, please, Commander.” He took the call. “Lang, I’m going to need your help convincing an Admiral Giddings that he and his people never saw a thing and have never heard of the Oregon.”

  “Did you get them?”

  “Yes, but the cat’s out of the bag about our secret identity. We also have the specs on how the stealth system operates.” He could picture Overholt rubbing his hands together with delight. Those plans were going to buy a lot of clout in Washington.

  “Whatever you need, my boy. Whatever you need.”

  “You’re a pip.” He killed the call and addressed the commander once again. “In a little while, Admiral Giddings is going to radio you and tell you that this incident never occurred and that you have no knowledge of a ship called Oregon.”

  “So the CIA has their own navy now?”

  “If that is what you choose to believe, that’s fine with me. Besides, you have a war to avert, so I’d put us out of your mind and carry on with your job.”

  “Captain Cabrillo, I want—” Her transmission cut off suddenly. When she came back, her voice had a little bit of awe in it. Langston had outdone himself in record time. “Have a nice day, Captain.”

  “You too, Commander, and good luck.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Two days later, the Oregon was tied up to one of the long concrete piers at Naha City on the island of Okinawa. They were on the civilian side of the port, not the military. Max had secured a berth for two weeks and called in a few markers from past crew members, having them return to guard the ship while the crew took its much needed break.

  As expected, the presence in the region of the big carrier task force had calmed tensions. They were talking already about jointly exploiting the new gas fields.

  Old Teddy Roosevelt had it right, Cabrillo thought as he worked at his desk: walk softly but carry a big stick, and sticks don’t come much bigger than a nuclear aircraft carrier.

  He was making out electronic money transfers and feeling good about it. Most of the crew were on their way to wherever they wanted to go. It was amazing how many were sticking together in groups of threes and fours. They worked and lived with one another every day and yet, given the choice of a little alone time, they hung around together even more. Then again, they were more than coworkers or crewmates. They were family.

  Juan wanted to include notes with the money but knew anonymity would be best. He was giving instructions to one of the banks they used in the Caymans to make donations from a dummy front company. Five million was going to Mina Petrovski. It would not compensate for losing her husband, but it would make raising her two beautiful girls a little easier. He didn’t know if his guide, the old fisherman, had left behind any family, so he made a donation to a fund that supported pensioners left penniless by the destruction of the Aral Sea. MIT received a five-million-dollar gift to endow the Wesley Tennyson Chair of Applied Physics. He figured the dusty old professor would like that.

  Juan would never forget any of them. Men dead, one woman widowed, and all so other men could kill more efficiently. It was a sad commentary.

  “Knock, knock,” Max said from the open doorway.

  “I thought you were already gone.”

  “Cab will be here in twenty minutes. Have you figured out where you’re going?”

  “Lady’s choice.”

  “Lady?”

  “I had Lang pull one more string for me. She was due to rotate off in a week, so I pulled in one last chit, and Commander O’Connell will be here tomorrow afternoon.”

  Max was surprised. “You don’t even know what she looks like.”

  Cabrillo smiled. “Does it really matter?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “Besides, she doesn’t know what I look like either. I had Mark do a quick background check on the commander, and I know she’s not married and her first name’s Michelle.”

  “Mazel tov.”

  “Before you go, would you like to know what Perlmutter e-mailed me tonight?”

  “He was still looking into how the Lady Marguerite ended up in a landlocked sea?”

  “Give that man a mystery and he’s like one of the Hardy Boys.”

  Max scratched at his chin. “I have a feeling our two science-fiction buffs are going to be disappointed.”

  “Give the man a cigar. The men Tesla hired to man her the night of the test were a bunch of thugs. They stole the boat lock, stock, and barrel right after the test. It next appeared in Havana and was called Wanderer and was owned by a sugar plantation owner. He lost it in a poker game to a Brazilian cardsharp, who sold it to a Moroccan merchant. Anyway, on and on, it changes hands until it ends up in Sevastopol, on the Black Sea, in 1912. There the ship was broken down and transported, first by sea and then overland, to the Caspian and then on to the Aral. The guy behind it was a Turk named Gamal Farouk. His idea was to use the boat as a lure to get investors to buy into a scheme he had to raise fish in the lake. Aquaculture, we call it today. Back then, it was an idea ahead of its time, and St. Julian thinks the whole thing was a scam.”
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br />   “He thinks this Farouk character spent that kind of money to get the boat all for a get-rich-quick con game?”

  “You ever see the dredge barges they hauled into the Klondike during the Gold Rush? Those things were ten times as heavy as the Marguerite, and I bet the syndicates who footed the bill all ended up losing their shirts. As Barnum said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’”

  “How did they put it all together when it arrived at the lake? That’s the stumbling block that almost had me believing Tesla had invented teleportation.”

  “Clever and simple. Farouk used dynamite to dam up a stream. The boat was assembled in the streambed and refloated when the dam was removed.”

  As an engineer, Max nodded in appreciation of such an ingenious solution to the problem. “So what happened to our Turkish swindler?”

  “The day they launched the boat, Farouk and two wealthy tribesman he wanted as investors went out and never came back. The boat sank and was only discovered again after the lake vanished. The men who reassembled the Marguerite were probably camel drivers and farmers. When they finished, she was as seaworthy as a concrete block.”

  “I think I prefer Mark and Eric’s explanation, but your story does have its charms,” Max said. He checked his watch. “Ah, but what about their tale of the three Frenchmen found in Alaska?”

  “Three possibilities,” Juan replied without hesitation. “One, it’s just an urban myth and there’s nothing to it. Two, they were French, so it could have been the result of a practical joke gone bad.”

  “Okay, and number three?”

  “They were screwing around with a force Tesla discovered tangential to his work on bending light around an object, a force he could not tame, and he rightly left it alone.”

  “Which one do you think it is?”

  “One, but I think two would have been pretty funny, and three scares me because only God knows what other Tesla projects are kicking around out there. This one nearly caused a war. Next time, we might not get so lucky.”