Like on most days, Murph was dressed all in black, a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt bearing the name of the band Screeching Weasel. His hair was dark and shaggy, with matching scruff on his chin that he passed off as a beard, and the caffeine in the energy drinks he constantly consumed made it tough to put weight on his tall, gangly frame. Not only did he like the nonconformist look, any more effort thinking about his clothes and appearance just wasn’t worth the time.
When Eric, his best friend, was on board the Oregon, he and Murph were usually inseparable. They were the youngest crew members and shared an appreciation for complex software coding, gaming, and Internet dating, the last of which didn’t work nearly as well or as often as they hoped. They had been working together on a still-classified weapons system for the Arleigh Burke class destroyers when Eric convinced him to join the Corporation.
That was why Murph was so anxious to retrieve the drone. He knew that every minute Eric and the others were on the train, they were at risk. The Oregon was more than a workplace. The crew was family. Murph took pride in his job, but helping his crewmates get through dangerous situations was what really drove him.
It was also a very lucrative workplace, although he had earned an even higher salary as one of the world’s top weapons designers. The Corporation was formed as a partnership and all the crew members shared in the profits. The riskier and more difficult the job, the greater the payday. All of them anticipated retiring as multimillionaires.
The current job was one of the trickiest they’d ever undertaken. In this case, the most important part of the operation was out of their hands, which made Murph itchy to get the mission over with.
“Drone One coming in,” Gomez said over the headset Murph was wearing. “Starboard sid
e, four o’clock.”
Murph turned and put his hand up to shield his eyes from the setting sun. The view across the Oregon’s deck would have concerned anyone not familiar with the ship. From far away she looked like she was ready for the breaker’s yard. Up close, her exterior looked even worse.
The 560-foot Oregon had been built to haul lumber from the Pacific Northwest to Japan, but it’d been years since the 11,600-ton freighter was in her prime. Rust seemed to coat everything, from the leaking barrels and broken machinery scattered randomly about the deck to the chains connecting the sections of railing that were missing. The flaking paint was slathered on haphazardly in several different shades of a sickly green, and the fraying cables of the ship’s five cranes looked as if they were in danger of snapping just from their sagging.
From her blade-like bow to her graceful champagne-glass-shaped stern, steel plates were welded to the Oregon’s hull as if to conceal cracks that threatened to rip it in two. The dingy white superstructure separated the five cargo holds, three forward and two aft. The bridge was barely visible through the mold-covered windows, one of which was covered in plywood. It was topped with bent antennas held together by duct tape.
Murph was so used to the ship’s rickety appearance that it didn’t even register, as he watched the small quadcopter zoom toward him. It came to rest on the barrel next to him and shut down. He scooped it up and ran toward the nearest door.
“Got it,” Murph said as he went inside. “Let them know I’m on my way down.”
The chipped linoleum of the interior corridor was stained brown every few feet from some unknown substance, the peeling walls bowed out as if they were about to collapse, and the few fluorescent lights that did work flickered and buzzed. A bathroom Murph passed was coated with a layer of grime and emitted a stench so powerful that any harbormaster coming aboard for an inspection would spend the least time possible before fleeing in disgust.
Murph opened a broom closet, which was stacked with mops and cleaning supplies that had never been used. At the slop sink, he twisted the hot and cold handles in a specific order as if he were a safecracker. With a distinct click, the back wall swished open noiselessly. Murph raced through and tapped a button on the other side to close it again as he passed.
It was like stepping from a sewer into a luxury hotel. Instantly, the stink was gone. Paintings by masters like Monet and Renoir adorned mahogany-paneled walls, and recessed lighting cast a warm glow in the halls. Plush carpeting softened Murph’s footfalls.
All of the apparent decay and shabbiness was merely a meticulously designed façade. Though she still outwardly appeared to be a tramp steamer, the Oregon had been refitted from the keel up at a naval base in Vladivostok after a generous payment to a friendly commandant. He told his workers that they were constructing the Russian Navy’s latest secret weapon. Everything on the outside of the Oregon was meant to repel and disgust so that it would go by unnoticed or unsuspected, but the interior was designed for her true mission as a spy ship and as a home for her crew.
Each cabin was uniquely decorated according to its occupant’s specifications. Murph’s wouldn’t have looked out of place as a rich college student’s dorm room. Other than a functional bed and a huge desk with the latest ergonomic chair for work, the key furnishings of his cabin were centered on the leather sofa and gigantic television connected to all of the latest consoles.
When he was out of his cabin, Murph spent much of his time with the Oregon’s vast array of hidden weaponry. The welded plates on the side of the hull could drop away to reveal 20mm Gatling guns modeled on the ones aircraft carriers used for antimissile defense, and clamshell doors in the bow opened for a 120mm cannon like those mounted on Abrams tanks. A Metal Storm hundred-barrel gun could rise out of the stern to fire tungsten projectiles at the fantastic rate of a million rounds a minute. Six of the leaky oil drums on deck held .30 caliber machine guns that would pop up to fend off boarders and were remotely manned from the operations center. A closed-circuit camera system gave expansive views of the ship itself and anything around it out to the horizon.
Defensive capabilities also included surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles, Exocet antiship missiles, and the latest Russian torpedoes, all purchased on the black market so they couldn’t be traced back to the U.S. Someday Murph hoped to add antimissile lasers and electromagnetic railguns to the arsenal after a previous mission had shown him up close how powerful they could be in battle.
In addition to the Magic Shop, which contained racks of clothing, various props, and a makeup department that would make a movie studio envious, the ship had a waterline boat garage for handling all types of small vessels, including wet bikes, Zodiacs, and her RHIB—short for “rigid-hulled inflatable boat,” the same kind Navy SEALs took into combat. The center of the Oregon contained the moon pool, the largest single space on the ship. The pool in the cavernous room had a water level equalized with the sea level outside and was used to launch underwater missions through massive keel doors—anything from scuba divers to its pair of submarines.
Of the five deep cargo holds in the Oregon, two of the forward holds had been modified to house the crew quarters, and one of the rear holds housed a hangar with the ship’s MD 520N helicopter that rose up on a platform for takeoff. Those three had been cleverly covered by false roofs of crates and containers to fool anyone looking down on them from the deck into thinking that the holds were full of cargo.
The other two holds, which could be serviced by the two working cranes on deck, often carried actual freight to throw off inspectors. But today the forward hold carried a secret cargo, which was Murph’s destination.
He opened the hatch to the hold, and instead of timber or containers, he was met by row upon row of server racks surrounding a massive computer that took up fully half the space. A giant refrigeration unit cooled the hold so that the electronics didn’t overheat in the sweltering tropical environment.
Three workstations were occupied by two men and a woman, all on loan from the National Security Agency. When the offer to sell the flash drive was made by the Ghost Dragons, Langston Overholt IV, Juan Cabrillo’s venerable CIA mentor who had been instrumental in encouraging Juan to build the Oregon and had assigned most of the Corporation’s missions from the government agency, had seen the potential for an opportunity that might never present itself again.
He knew that the Oregon had been operating in Southeast Asia hunting down pirates targeting American containerships and quickly got agreement from the NSA chief to provide the equipment they’d need for a special mission. Fort Meade’s newest cryptographic supercomputer, one of the few in the world that could break the Chinese code, was loaded onto a C-5 Galaxy cargo jet and flown to Guam, where it was transferred to the Oregon.
Not only did the Oregon have enough space to hold the computer, she had a revolutionary engine that could supply its huge power requirements. Instead of the original diesels, the Oregon was powered by a pair of magnetohydrodynamic engines that used magnets cooled by liquid helium to strip free electrons from the seawater. Four pulse jets forced water through Venturi tubes to propel her to speeds that shouldn’t have been possible on a ship her size, and the vector nozzles on the jets made her as agile as a jackrabbit.
“Here it is,” Murph said to Abby Yamada, a slender woman in her forties who was the NSA’s chief cryptanalyst on the mission. He removed the flash drive from the drone and handed it to her. He looked at his watch and added, “You’ve got six minutes fifteen seconds.”
“Thanks,” she said, inserting it into the USB port. “Let’s get this done.”
Since Murph had a top secret clearance, they allowed him to stay while they worked. English was the universal coding language, so he could understand most of what they were doing. He watched in curiosity as they attempted to hack into the drive without erasing it, but he would have much rather been doing it himself. He wasn’t used to bei
ng a bystander on his own ship.