Chapter 70

70

Aboard the Oregon

Juan, Max, and Murph stood at the bottom of the crane as a warm tropical sun broke the horizon. The top of the crane where the wrecked Kashtan had nested behind its steel sleeve was shattered and blackened from the lightning strike and the subsequent explosions from the missile cook-offs.

Max whistled. “Looks like the business end of an exploding cigar.” He mopped the back of his sweaty neck with a clean rag he kept in his hip pocket. They were all sweating in the tropical heat.

Murph shaded his eyes from the sun to study the wreckage.

“Looks like it got smashed with Thor’s hammer. Shocking.”

Max raised a disapproving eyebrow. Bad joke.

Murph shrugged. “What? Too soon?”

Max shook his head. “Remind me to add a ‘no puns allowed’ clause to your next contract.”

“Sorry.”

Cabrillo ignored their banter. “Thank God nobody got killed.”

He was commenting as much about last night’s mission on the island as he was about the lightning barrage that nearly sank his ship. As soon as Cabrillo realized the island’s GPS signal was a lure and the warehouse a trap, he bellowed out evacuation orders loud enough for Linc and MacD to hear them on the backside of the building. Everyone bolted away just as the drone hit. Two seconds earlier, and the team would have been wiped out. Instead, the five of them found themselves knocked to the ground, bruised and bleeding. Linda was out cold.

Cabrillo was still on his back when the ocean sky beyond the trees lit up in a booming white firestorm. Only later would he learn the terrifying details.

Gomez had raced to the sound of the warehouse explosion with a med kit when two more explosions—the Vendor’s torpedo and the Oregon’s reactive armor—ripped the night air behind him. The lanky Texas pilot reached Linda and saw the wound on her face. He got her bandaged up and stabilized and helped carry her back to the RHIB.

As soon as they all got back to the Oregon, Linda was rushed to the emergency operating room, where Hux tended to her eye. Not only had a piece of shrapnel hit it but her retina detached. As an experienced combat surgeon, Hux had dealt with this kind of thing before. Her skilled hands and specialized equipment saved Linda’s vision, but she was no longer fit for duty. She was currently in recovery and her eye was out of danger, but she was benched from the game for the next few weeks.

While Hux was in surgery, Forrester stitched up MacD in the clinic and passed out Tylenols and bandages for the others.

Cabrillo glanced around the Oregon’s expansive deck. It almost looked normal again after last night’s galvanic carnage. Exhausted and battered after their mission, the Gundogs skipped their hot showers and bunks to throw in with the damage control parties. Every able-bodied hand worked through the night and into the early morning to clear away the wreckage, assess damages, and effect whatever repairs they could. Some systems, like the Kashtan, required complete replacement or overhaul at a qualified shipyard.

At dawn Cabrillo told his operators to punch the clock and get some rest, while he assembled the brain trust on the deck to plot the way forward. The Oregon was wounded, but she wasn’t yet out of the fight. The question was, how much fight was left in her?

“Max, give me a rundown on systems.”

“As near as I can tell, the first few strikes knocked out the primary and secondary circuit breakers. But those breakers weren’t designed for a superstorm like that one.

“After that, everything was vulnerable. The run of cascading strikes overwhelmed the rest of the systems, ripping out entire circuits like grandma pulling weeds out of her truck garden. I’m surprised we didn’t suffer worse damage than we did.

“The storm also knocked out the auto power transfer switch—I’ll make sure that never happens again. The engines probably escaped damage because the entire engineering section is actually a giant electrical generator and we secured it accordingly.

“The Cray supercomputer was triple-protected on its own remote circuit for obvious reasons. By some miracle, that was enough to shield it. Its self-diagnostics have run clear. The biggest damage we suffered were the systems that weren’t properly shielded.”

“Such as?”

“Everything from small engine motors, power tools, Jet Skis—you name it. Every department is doing an inventory. The moon pool reports that the Nomad’s navigational electronics were fried, and the Gator’s hull is cracked. We’ve lost them both for the time being.”

“What about the Spook Fish?”

“Callie’s running diagnostics on her now.”

“That torpedo blast—we’re sure our hull wasn’t breached?”

“Watertight. But we lost a good chunk of reactive, so the hull is no longer smooth. The loss of hydrodynamic efficiency will shave at least twenty percent off our top speed, maybe more.”

“Getting sunk would have dropped our speed even further. I’ll take the twenty percent and run.”

“True that, boss.”

“Wepps? Where are we?” Cabrillo asked Murphy.

“Kashtan is a total loss, obviously. The hundred-twenty-millimeter auto cannon is still functional as a gun, but out of commission until those fused door plates can get replaced. The lift for the rail gun is distrutto, but the AW’s lift is fine. Go figure.”

“What about sonar and radar?”

“Eric said he checked and double-checked the systems. All good.”

“Tell him to check them again.”

“Aye.”

Cabrillo darkened. “How did all of this happen, really?”

“You mean, the lightning?” Max asked. “Lightning happens.”

“I refuse to believe the Vendor’s torpedo attack accidentally coincided with the worst lightning strike any of us have ever heard of. It was coordinated, or I’m a pigeon-toed prima ballerina.”

Cabrillo turned to Murph. “Is it possible to weaponize lightning?”

“Anything is possible so long as it doesn’t violate the laws of physics. I’ve just never heard of anybody successfully doing it. There were rumors about the CIA trying to find a way to use it as an assassination weapon, but nothing came of it, at least as far as I know.”

“In Vietnam, the feds deployed a weather weapon called Operation Popeye,” Max said. “But that was only to extend the monsoon season with cloud seeding to slow the Vietcong supply lines.”

Juan sighed with frustration. The Vendor had dealt them a couple of bad hands and last night’s lightning barrage nearly knocked them out of the game. With no other leads to go on, the smart play would be for them to get to a repair yard as quickly as possible so the Oregon would be ready to fight if and or when another clue came their way.

But Cabrillo couldn’t shake the feeling that the “smart play” was still a retreat, and that didn’t sit well with him at all.

He was weighing all of his options when his radio crackled.

“Chairman, do you read me?”

Juan keyed his mic. “Five by five, Hali. What do you need?”

“Eric Stone wants to see you in the conference room. He says it’s urgent.”