Page 56 of Clive Cussler Ghost Soldier

Max leaned forward in his chair.

All eyes were fixed on the remaining two Pakets honing in on the last speeding torpedo—just heartbeats away from slamming into theOregon’s hull.

?

“Got it,” Callie said, her hands deftly working the drone controls.

A distant, low-frequency thud echoed inside theSpook Fish.

Juan and Linda exchanged a worried glance.

“What was that noise?” Callie asked. She didn’t move her eyes from the drone’s view screen as she maneuvered back under the plane’s tail.

A few seconds later, a second thud sounded.

“Incoming message,” Linda said.

The main monitor flashed a new text from theOregon. She read it aloud with a smile.

“All clear.”

28

Aboard theOregon

Callie and Linda helped the deckhands secure theSpook Fishas Cabrillo and Hanley made their way to the elevator. Murph and Eric were already in the lab with the dripping-wet flight data recorder and prepping it for examination.

Juan punched the elevator button. “Too bad we couldn’t find the attack vehicle trying to kill my ship.”

“Eric hacked into a French military satellite over the region. We tried to triangulate the missile launch location by reverse-tracking the missiles, but a hundred thousand square miles of cloud cover over the area blinded us.”

“What about our radar?”

The elevator door opened and the two men stepped inside. Juan hit the floor button.

“Too far away to pinpoint anything.”

That worried Juan. TheOregonhad Aegis-class equivalent radar capabilities. “So more than one hundred nautical miles.”

“Looks like it. Judging by their speed, size, and payload, Wepps thinks those missiles were likely powered by mini turbojets—the same kind found on cruise missiles.”

Juan nodded, pulling up data from his prodigious memory files. “If they were cruise missiles, we could be looking at a three-hundred-milerange. Maybe more. And who knows the range of the torps they put in the water. Did you say they came in on a low trajectory?”

“Yeah. And that suggests a ship-based launch, but there’s no telling. Eric says we have Mark 54 torpedoes fixed with glide wings that launch from P-8s at thirty thousand feet. And most low-flying Storm Shadows are plane-launched first.”

“And nothing from the Sniffer?” Cabrillo was referring to theOregon’s automated surveillance array capable of picking up and decrypting virtually any kind of signal in the electromagnetic spectrum. The Sniffer helped make theOregonone of the most powerful spy ships afloat.

“Hali said there wasn’t anything useful or actionable,” Max said.

“Let’s table the search for now. I suspect at this point it’s a dead end.” Cabrillo checked his Doxa watch. “We’ll head to the lab and see what the boys have found under the hood of that box. But first I need to make a quick port of call at the little submariners’ room.”

“Ditto that, Chief. I’ve got ten cups of coffee sloshing around in my eight-cup thermos with a stopper that ain’t as snug as it used to be.”

?

Juan, Max, Eric, and Murph stood in the electronics lab around a large worktable. Linda had the conn now, and Callie was still in the moon pool securing theSpook Fish.

Murph and Eric hovered over the orange flight recorder box as they attached the retrofitted power supply and data cables with surgical caution. An open laptop stood next to the recorder.