A minute into the job, one of her colleagues said, “I’ve got a serious problem here.”
“What is it?” Yamada asked as she continued to type.
“When I was hacking into the code, I somehow activated a timer.”
All heads turned toward him. He looked ashen.
Murph went over to his terminal and saw that the drive was asking for a password. If the correct one wasn’t input within three minutes, the drive would erase itself and the entire mission would be for nothing.
10
Memories churned to the surface for Max Hanley as Vietnam’s coast passed by on the huge screen in front of him. He had served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War on Swift Boats patrolling the coastline and the Mekong Delta, sweating through every square inch of his uniform and swatting at the incessant mosquitoes as he and his fellow sailors waited for the ambushes they knew would come. His crewmates were some of the best men he’d ever known. Many of them had been killed or gone missing. He almost joined them when his boat was destroyed and he was captured. He spent six months in a POW camp before escaping.
Now, more than forty years later—with twenty extra pounds at his belly and a ring of ginger circling his chrome dome where a full head of hair used to be—it was hard to believe he was sitting in air-conditioned comfort as he watched another battle unfold on the same soil. The operations center was the heart of the Oregon. Located directly below the window-dressing bridge in the superstructure, virtually every function of the ship could be handled from this one room through a new Cray supercomputer. Max noted with pride that the Oregon’s computer nearly matched the sophistication of the NSA’s, if not its raw computing power.
With its banks of touch screen workstations and a massive high-definition screen that dominated the front of the room, the op center resembled a futuristic bridge straight out of Star Trek, so much so that the large seat at the center of the room where Max sat had been dubbed the “Kirk Chair” by Mark Murphy and Eric Stone. The Oregon could even be operated from controls in the chair’s arms, if the need arose. As chief engineer, Max would normally be at his engineering station at the back, but with Juan away on the mission, the Corporation’s vice president was in command of the ship.
Linda Ross, a Navy vet and the Corporation’s vice president of operations, sat at the helm, which was usually Eric’s station. Except for Juan, Eric was the Oregon’s best ship handler, but Linda wasn’t far behind them.
“I’ve got a fishing boat right in our path a mile ahead,” she said, pointing at the screen. Her pixie-high voice matched her petite figure, elfin features, and upturned nose, but having served as an officer aboard an Aegis cruiser, she spoke with authority. Known for updating her hair color and style regularly, she had recently grown out her dark tresses and tinged them with eggplant highlights. “Shall I adjust course toward the coast?”
“Yes,” Max said. “I don’t want to get any farther away from the train than we have to. Give the fishing boat a wide berth, but once we’re past them, get us back to our original distance.”
“Changing course,” she said, and deftly moved the Oregon to its new heading.
“Max, I just got a call from Murph,” said Hali Kasim, the ship’s Lebanese-American communications specialist. He lowered the old-fashioned headset he preferred, but his mop of crushed hair didn’t move. “He says they’ve got a problem down in the hold. He’s on his way back up here.”
“Did he say what kind of problem?”
“No. He sounded out of breath, like he was running.”
“What’s going on with Juan?”
“They’ve run into resistance from the back of the train, but they’re taking care of that. He said they’ve moved on to Plan C.”
“Already? I didn’t even know we’d tried Plan B. Did he say what Plan C was?”
Hali shrugged. “Sorry.”
Max peered up at the screen and saw someone hanging from the door at the rear of the train’s seventh car on the side away from the Oregon. From the size of the man, he guessed it was Linc doing something with the train coupling.
“I can’t tell what he’s doing. Gomez, can you zoom in any closer on the train?”
Seated next to Hali was George “Gomez” Adams, their resident drone and helicopter pilot. Dressed in a flight suit in case his services were needed in the air, his matinee idol looks rivaled MacD’s. The main difference was that Gomez sported the handlebar mustache of a Wild West gunfighter. The nickname stuck after he had an illicit liaison with a drug lord’s wife who was a dead ringer for Morticia Addams, the matriarch on the sixties television show The Addams Family.
“It’s already zoomed in as far as it’ll go,” Gomez said, “but I can fly Drone Two closer.”
“Not too close. We don’t want to take the chance that it will be seen from the train.”
“No problem. I’ll keep it between the train and the sun.”
As Gomez flew the observation drone in for a closer look, Murph burst into the op center, panting from the run. He took his seat at the weapons control station next to the helm and began to furiously type on his keyboard.
“What’s going on?” Max asked.
“One of the NSA guys triggered a password entry screen on the flash drive,” Murph said breathlessly while his fingers continued to fly. “If we don’t get the right one, the flash drive will erase itself. Even with that monstrosity in the hold, they’ll never crack it in time.”
“How long do they have?”