Corsair

The Sidra had sheered away from the Oregon as soon as they were in the gravity-induced vortex, sucked toward the opening as surely as if she’d been aimed at it. Max goosed the directional thrusters and closed the gap, keeping one eye on the camera feed showing where Juan would appear.

“Come on, buddy. We don’t have all day.”

The Chairman suddenly burst through the frigate’s hatchway, holding the hand of Secretary Katamora. Max steepened his angle and closed the gap, so the two ships brushed just enough to scrape a little paint off her hull. Juan was on the Sidra’s railing at that exact moment. He lifted Fiona off the deck and hurled her onto the Oregon, where she fell into the waiting arms of a still-woozy Mike Trono.

As soon as Juan’s boots hit the deck, Max pulled the big freighter away from the stricken frigate and opened the throttles as far as they would go. The warship was also desperately trying to get clear of the maelstrom. Smoke belched from her stack and her props beat the water frantically, and yet she lost more ground with every passing moment.

The Oregon’s revolutionary engines gave her ten times the power, and once water was humming through the tubes her lateral motion checked and she started to pull away. Max even eased back on the controls a touch, never wanting to push his babies harder than he had to.

The Sidra’s hull slammed into the open sluice intake at a perfect broadside. Water continued to rush under her keel, but half the floodwaters were suddenly contained once again. Balanced precariously, with the sea pressing in on the hull so her steel moaned at the strain, the crew could do nothing as the ship that had foiled their perfect plan steamed serenely away.

On the Oregon’s deck, the Corporation operators who’d been blown back by the RPG clustered around the Chairman and his guest. So little time had elapsed since that fateful moment that medical staff hadn’t even arrived, but it looked as if Doc Huxley and her team weren’t going to be busy after all. The injuries appeared minor.

Juan stuck out a hand to formally introduce himself to Fiona. “I want to say it is an honor to meet you. My name’s Cabrillo, Juan Cabrillo. Welcome aboard the Oregon.”

She brushed aside his hands and hugged him tightly, repeating her thanks into his ear over and over again. The thing about adrenaline heightening one’s senses was that it had that effect on all of them, so before Fiona realized how much Juan was enjoying the contact he gently untangled himself from her willowy arms.

“I know you’re a woman of many accomplishments, but I wonder if acting is among them?”

She looked at him askance. “Acting? After what we just went through you’re talking about acting. You call me nuts.”

He slipped an arm around her waist to lead her into the ship’s interior. “Don’t worry, you get to play yourself, and we just practiced the scene I want to reproduce for Ali Ghami.”

“You know?”

“I even know how he got leverage on Qaddafi. His grandson was in Switzerland on vacation when he was killed in a car crash. The crash was staged and the boy kidnapped. If Qaddafi ever wanted to see the kid alive again, he had to make Ghami Foreign Minister, not knowing that he had just made one of the worst terrorists in the world a senior government official and given him access to everything he needed to pull off his little caper.”

“And you?” Fiona asked. “How do you fit in with all of this?”

He gave her a squeeze. “Just lucky, I guess.”

EPILOGUE

THE SENIOR STAFF WAS ASSEMBLED ON THE AFT HELICOPTER pad when George Adams brought Hali Kasim back to the ship from a Tripoli hospital. Hux had a wheelchair standing by, and she turned away from the chopper as it flared in over the Oregon’s fantail.

The skids kissed dead center. Gomez killed the turbines. Everyone rushed forward under the spinning blades to pound on the rear door glass, laughing and aping for Hali as he sat strapped in, a johnny pulled loosely over his heavily bandaged chest. He’d undergone five hours of surgery to repair the damage Assad’s bullet had done to his internal organs and endured a week of hospital food before his doctors would allow him to leave.