Page 157 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest

Juan couldn’t believe what had just happened. Somehow theOregonhad put the phone in thermal overload—turning the lithium-ion battery into a miniature grenade.

“Cabrillo!” Suárez raged as he clutched blindly for the flamethrower lance. His hand finally found purchase, and he gripped the weapon in his bloody palm. He rolled over and raised the flamethrower in the direction he thought Cabrillo was chained.

Juan swallowed hard. The nozzle was pointed directly at him.

“Burn in hell!” Suárez shouted as his finger began to mash the trigger.

But a burst of gunfire from Eddie Seng’s MP5 put three slugs into the Colombian’s skull before Suárez could unleash a torrent of flaming napalm. The wiryOregonoperator stormed over to the corpse with MacD hot on his heels. Seng disabled the flamethrower as MacD fished around in Suárez’s pockets for the handcuff keys.

“We’ll get you outta here in a jiffy, boss,” MacD said.

“The nuns?” Cabrillo asked.

Pistol shots rang in the cave as bullets spanged the rock walls. Cabrillo screamed as a jacketed hollow-point bullet ripped through the palm of his right hand in a spray of blood.

Eddie and Mac wheeled on their toes and opened fire as Suárez’s two gun thugs charged into the cave. The pistoleros spilled into the dirt, nearly cut in half by the wall of lead. They both tumbled, dead before they hit the ground.

Eddie ripped a bandage from his kit as Mac unshackled Cabrillo from the cross.

“Eddie! Mac! Report!” Linda shouted in their comms.

?

Aboard theOregon

Max, Linda, and the rest of the op center team breathed a sigh of relief as Eddie Seng reported in on a live camera feed from the AW cabin. The thrumming rotors nearly drowned out his voice. Cabrillo lay in a webbed cot on the cabin floor.

“Chairman’s stable,” Seng said over his comms. “But he’s lost some blood.”

“Doc Huxley has the surgical team prepped and ready,” Lindasaid. “She has two O-negative donors heading for transfusion. She’s searching records for the Chairman’s blood type now.”

“It’s O-positive.” The familiar voice came from the back of the op center.

Linda turned and nearly screamed as she faced the doorway.

Hali, Eric, and Mark whipped around in their chairs, mouths agape in utter confusion.

Juan Cabrillo stood in the op center rubbing the back of his neck, his face pinched with a throbbing headache.

“What the—?” Max did a comical double take of one Cabrillo in the doorway and the other Cabrillo on the big screen.

Juan smiled. “Tell Hux she’s prepping for Kevin Nixon.”

84

While Kevin was under the knife, Cabrillo took Linda down to his cabin to show her what had happened.

He pointed at the tranq gun Kevin tossed to the ground after he shot Cabrillo with it. He then took her to his marble-tiled bathroom, where silicone spray, squeeze tubes, and other makeup items lay scattered on the bathroom counter. Nixon’s empty canvas bag was tossed on the marble tile floor along with the pair of Bermuda shorts and yellow T-shirt he had worn earlier. The bag was big enough to hold everything on the counter along with the change of clothes and the tranq gun.

Linda reached inside Nixon’s bag and pulled out a silicone storage pouch labeled “JC.” It was the kind of pouch that Nixon used to carry the hyper-accurate 3D printed masks he had perfected over the years—lifelike masks that put the CIA to shame, and fooled everyone.

Cabrillo showed her a contact lens case marked “JC/blue” and the charging case used to carry a voice synthesizer, also labeled “JC.” They’d both seen Kevin put one of the clear Band-Aid–like devices on Juan’s throat plenty of times when he outfitted Cabrillo for one of his undercover missions.

“He’s just about your size and weight, too,” Linda noted. “Makes sense, now that I see it all here. But I never would have guessed he would do something like this.”

“He’s the best in the business.” Cabrillo checked his watch. “Let’s head back to the sick bay. Kevin should be coming around soon.”

As they made their way back up to the sick bay, Cabrillo asked, “So how did you manage to pull off the phone attack on Suárez?”