Page 7 (1/2)

“If we’re here in theyou can bank on it”

“Then I guess we should make sure we’re not,” Hanley replied with a devilish look in his eye

The two men entered the superstructure Juan led the supplies that apparently had never been used He worked the handles of a slop sink as though he was dialing a safe There was a distinct click, and the back wall popped open to reveal a richly carpeted hallway beyond Gone were the utilitarian metal walls and cheap linoleuany, and chandeliers along the ceiling provided warht

Like the disguise Cabrillo had donned to fool the Iranian Navy, the Norego wasn’t what she see the nets, the crew had created the Norego froon

Built originally as a lumber carrier, the vessel had plied the Pacific for nearly two decades, hauling Canadian and American timber to Japan and the other Asian markets T

he eleven-thousand-ton freighter had served her owners ad to her As with any older ship, she was nearing the end of her useful life Her hull was starting to corrode, and her engines no longer worked as efficiently as when they were new The owners placed advertiseazines that they were interested in selling her for scrap, knowing their once-proud flagship would fetch a few dollars per ton

At the ti the Corporation, and he needed a ship of so for the right one When he saw pictures of the luhter He’d been forced to bid against three breaker yards, but he still ed to buy the vessel for far less than had he purchaced a newer ship He had no interest whatsoever with the vessel’s cargo-hauling abilities He wanted her for her anonymity

The Oregon then spent the better part of six h theher outward appearance, the vessel was coines were replaced with the latest cutting-edge power plants Using a process called nets to strip naturally occurring free electrons from seawater to produce a near-limitless amount of electricity That poas then fed into four aqua pulse jets that pushed water through a pair of glea vectored-thrust drive tubes at trey had been tried on only a few vessels, and since the fire on an MHD-driven cruise ship called the Emerald Dolphin it had been banished back to laboratories and scale models

At the speeds the vessel was now capable of, her hull had to be stiffened and reinforced Stabilizing fins were added, and her bowabilities Several hundred hout the ship for her sophisticated suite of electronics, everything frorade radar and sonar to dozens of closed-circuit television ca tabs on the system was a Sun Microsystems supercomputer

Then came the weapons Two torpedo tubes, a 120 system from an M1A1 Abrams main battle tank She sported three General Electric 20uns, vertical launchers for surface-to-surface antiship uns for self-defense All the weapons were cleverly hidden behind retractable hull plates, like the Ger World War I The 30 cals were tucked inside rusted oil barrels permanently affixed to the deck With a flick of a button in the operations center, the barrels’ lids would pop open and the weapons would eunners safely inside the ship

Cabrillo added other surprises, too Her aft-er Robinson R44 helicopter that could be hydraulically raised to the deck Concealed doors where she could unleash allZodiacs and a SEAL assault boat, were at her waterline, while, along her keel, two massive panels opened into a cavernous space called a moon pool, where a pair of mini-subs could be launched covertly

As for the crew’s accoeways and cabins were as luxurious as any five-star hotel The Oregon boasted probably the finest kitchen afloat, with a staff of cordon bleu-trained chefs One of the ballast tanks along her flanks, designed to make the vessel appear fully loaded should the need arise, was lined with Carrarapool

The workers who’d done the refit had thought they had been doing the job on behalf of the Russian Navy as part of a new fleet of covert spy ships Cabrillo had been assisted in this ruse by the commander of the base where the dry dock was located, an eminently corruptible admiral whom Juan had known for years

The money to start the Corporation and pay for the conversion of the Oregon had come froed to an assassin-for-hire Cabrillo had taken care of for his forency Technically, the et, but Juan was given tacit approval to fund his enterprise by his iston Overholt IV

Cabrillo had been conte the CIA for a short while when Saddaht everyone at Langley coht the Cold War for so long that when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union iional flare-ups that Juan had knoould follow The Agency’s corporate culture was too entrenched to see the looer When Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb, the CIA learned about it from news broadcasts Cabrillo felt the CIA’s inflexibility was blinding the itself after sodominated by two superpowers