Corsair

Max Hanley was in his cabin working on a scratch-built model of a Swift boat, one of the fast riverine crafts he had commanded during Vietnam. Hanley wasn’t a man who dwelled much on his past or gave in to the siren song of nostalgia. He stored the medals he’d won in a Los Angeles safe-deposit he hadn’t visited in years and met up with former shipmates only at funerals. He was building the model simply because he could do it from memory and it kept his mind occupied with something other than his responsibilities.

Doc Huxley had suggested the hobby as a way of reducing stress and keeping his blood pressure in check. So far, he’d managed to stick to it longer than the yoga she’d prescribed before. He’d already built and presented a beautiful replica of the Oregon to Juan, which now sat under a plastic case in the executive conference room, and had plans for a Mississippi paddle wheeler when he was finished with the Swift boat.

The knock on his door was so soft that he knew it was Eric Stone taking the whole silent-rigging thing to the limit.

“Enter,” Hanley called.

Eric stepped though the doorway, carrying a laptop computer and a large, flat portfolio. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, which probably wasn’t too far off the mark. Stone usually maintained a semblance of the military comportment drilled into him at Annapolis, but today his shirt was untucked, and his chinos were as wrinkled as a balled-up piece of aluminum foil.

While Max worried whenever they had people stuck out there in a hostile environment, Eric took it even further. Max had been Stoney’s mentor when he’d first joined the Corporation, but since then he’d grown to idolize Juan Cabrillo, and Mark Murphy was like the brother he’d never had growing up. Fatigue lines etched his normally smooth face, and while he’d never had much of a beard it was obvious he hadn’t shaved in a while.

“You have something?” Max asked without preamble.

He showed off the portfolio. “Detailed maps of Juan’s location and a rundown of the place’s history.”

“I knew you could do it.” Hanley cleared a wide space on his desk for Eric to lay out the map. He stood to give himself a better perspective. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

He could see a small training facility, built high in the mountains, roughly twenty miles from the coast. The camp was well hidden by the peaks, and, had it not been for its proximity to a large open pit of some kind, it would have been easy to overlook, even knowing its location because of Juan’s implanted GPS transponder. There was a dark line snaking up from the shore to the pit that closely followed the contour of the land. Where the line met the coast were a couple of old buildings and a long jetty. There were other buildings along the rim of a valley where the earth had been excavated.

Eric pointed to the port area first. “This is what remains of a British-built coaling station dating back to the 1840s. It was updated with a bigger pier in 1914, possibly in anticipation of World War I. That pier was partially destroyed during Rommel’s North Africa campaign, and the Germans rebuilt it to use as a staging area for their push toward Egypt. The dark line here is a railroad that linked the station to the coal mine here.” His finger followed the railroad tracks to the buildings overlooking the open-pit mine. “There used to be a barge canal to transport the coal, but the aquifer dried up and the railroad was laid in.”

“Looks to me like someone’s reopening the place,” Max remarked.

“Yes, sir. About five months ago. The rail line was refurbished to accommodate larger ore cars, with an eye toward extracting coal from the old mine.”

“Did anyone ask if this makes sense in a country sitting on forty billion barrels of oil?”

“I did as soon as I figured out what this place was,” Eric replied. “And, in a word, it doesn’t. Especially in light of their government’s attempts to go green with the tidal generating station farther down the coast.”

“So what’s going on here really?”

“The CIA thinks it’s a cover for a new subterranean nuclear-research program.”

“I thought Uncle Muammar gave up his nuke ambitions,” Max remarked. “Besides, the CIA was probably convinced my mother-in-law was pursuing a nuclear program when she had a new root cellar dug.”

Eric chuckled. “Foreign intelligence services dismiss the CIA estimate. They think this is a legit enterprise. Problem is, I can’t dig up any corporate entities charged with working there. Which isn’t all that surprising. The Libyans aren’t known for their transparency. There was one article in a trade publication that said Libya is interested in pursuing coal gasification as an alternative to oil, and claims they have a system that will be cleaner than natural gas.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Max said.