Sea of Greed

Kurt braced himself for the inevitable, but the charge that had been attached to their hull — wherever it had fallen — never exploded.

Kurt looked over at Joe. “Fire must have melted the detonator.”

“Obviously,” Joe said. “I knew that would happen. I wondered what you were so worried about.”

Kurt looked at Joe and then burst into laughter. Both of them had expected to be blown to bits even as they pulled away from the fire.

Kurt pressed the transmit switch on the panel. “Raleigh, do you read us?”

“You’re coming in very faint,” Captain Brooks said, “but as long as you’re not calling from the afterlife, that’s a good thing.”

“Any sign of our sparring partner?”

“Sorry, Kurt. We lost them again. Whoever it was, they were running to the east the last time we spotted them.”

Joe pointed to the timer on the panel in front of them. “We’ve overstayed our welcome as it is.”

Kurt agreed. “Raleigh, we’re heading your way. Be ready to pick us up.”

They reached the surface with a minute to spare, hooked on and were hoisted out of the water. Kurt had just stepped onto the Raleigh’s deck when the show began.

First came the white flash of a shock wave, which vanished like a fleeing ghost. It was followed by a narrow column of water erupting at the surface. As the column fell back in a windblown spray, a ring of light grew beneath the surface. It brightened considerably in the seconds before it hit the surface and then erupted in an expanding ball of flame.

A new wave of heat radiated across the deck of the Raleigh, more than half a mile away, and what was left of the Alpha Star vanished in the flame.

Farther off, the other fires began to wane, dwindling to almost nothing and then flickering out one by one, leaving only a rising cloud of steam. The other two oil rigs, blackened and burned, now stood in the clear.

A cheer went up on the deck of the Raleigh and Cox walked over to congratulate Kurt and Joe.

“Heck of a job,” he said. “Someone ought to write a book about you two. In the meantime, the least I could do is buy you men a drink.”

“I’ll take you up on that drink,” Kurt said. “First, I want to figure out who those guys were and why they decided to take out your drilling operation.”

“How do you intend to do that?”

Kurt made his way around to the front of the submersible, stopping beside one of the robotic arms. Dangling in its claw were the remnants of the equipment he’d torn off the other submarine. “This came from the other submersible, which had a unique design. It wasn’t Navy surplus. It wasn’t off the shelf and it didn’t look like anything built by any of the manufacturers I know of. In fact, it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. That means someone built it to spec. I intend to find out who.”

11

GULL ISLAND, TWENTY-FIVE MILES FROM THE COAST OF MISSISSIPPI

THE IMMENSE AIRCRAFT sat on the water, sheltered by a barrier island only twenty-five miles from the Mississippi shoreline. Though it was at rest for the moment, the plane seemed poised for flight, its nose aimed seaward, its outstretched wings reaching for the wind like a great mechanical albatross yearning to fly.

The aircraft was called the Monarch. It was nearly the size of a 747, though shorter from front to back and wider in cross section. It had a squat, flat-bottomed fuselage that fanned out like the hull of a boat, its wings attached at the top, drooping slightly and supported at the tips by torpedo-shaped floats.

Six turbofan engines were nestled in the top of the wings instead of hanging beneath, a design that prevented them from taking in the spray generated by the body of the plane as it landed and took off from the water. The twin tails soared higher than they might have needed to, but the extra height made it easier to control the aircraft both on the water and in the air.

The Monarch was a triumph of engineering, the only plane of its kind, the creation of Tessa Franco, a wealthy and brilliant designer who’d been called a modern-day Howard Hughes. The comparison was meant as both compliment and put-down, hinting at creativity, recklessness and possible madness.

Tessa — who with her dark hair, smoky eyes and continental beauty seemed more likely to be found on the red carpet at Cannes than in an engineering lab — responded to the comparison by pointing out that she was neither male, nor mad, nor generally reclusive, though she was otherwise quite content to be compared to the adventurous and innovative billionaire.

Sitting in her plush office in the forward part of the aircraft’s upper deck, she divided her attention between the light of dusk that came through the window and the flat-screen monitor in front of her.