“How long will I last defending my palace? An hour? Two? Maybe three. Time and again I have proved tougher than I thought I was.”
“Don’t even tryto defend this palace. Consolidate your forces and lead your men defending Black Sand Prison.”
Poe shook his grizzled head. “I will consolidate my forces here.”
“That will play into Iboga’s hands. If you defend the palace instead of the prison his officers will escape and rouse the army.”
“You see the dilemma. Even with your help, I don’t have enough men to defend both the palace and the prison.”
“But it is not a dilemma. All you have to do is defend the prison long enough for me to neutralize Iboga.”
“No. I cannot go to the prison.”
“Why not?”
“I cannot. I will not.”
“I don’t understand,” said Janson.
An elderly man interrupted. “Acting President Poe suffered in Black Sand. Felt fear and pain you could not imagine.”
“I canimagine,” said Janson.
Poe said, “Then you understand that every man has his limit. This is mine. I cannot go to that place. I will fight here in the Presidential Palace.”
“You’ll die in the Presidential Palace,” said Janson.
“If need be. I am not afraid to die.”
“Dying won’t help your country, Mr. President.”
Jessica Kincaid, who had been listening in the doorway, stepped into the office. “Why don’t we take you away to Lisbon or London? While we defend the prison and hunt Iboga.”
“Good idea,” said Janson.
“No,” said Poe. “Once off Isle de Foree I am nothing but a pretender to the throne. I must remain in command of sovereign territory.”
“Back to the mountains,” said one of the older men.
“No, my friend, we aren’t strong enough to hide in the mountains. At best, I would be isolated. At worst, hunted down like an animal.”
“We did before.”
“Before we went en masse,” Poe said patiently. “I’m sorry. We had time to build defenses, time to get support from outside, money, gunrunners. Iboga underestimated us last time. He won’t give us such time again.”
Kincaid gestured for a word with Janson. He stood close and she whispered, “He’s talking about defending the undefendable, Paul. I do not want to die defending the undefendable.”
“Agreed.”
The boy piped up with another idea. “Could we ask Nigeria to send soldiers to help us?”
“ Not Nigeria!” every Isle de Foreen in the room chorused, which evoked sudden laughter. For a moment the tension was broken.
“There is another way,” said Janson.
Poe interrupted bitterly, “To be valuable to giants is a curse.”
Paul Janson repeated, “There is another way.”
“What way?”
He felt Kincaid staring at him.
“Did they gas the helicopter?” he asked her.
“Topped up.”
“Freddy, are you there?”
Freddy Ramirez stepped in from the hall, filling the doorway like a bull.
Janson addressed the room. “Listen up! Every fighter to the prison. Hold it at all costs. On the double.” He turned back to Kincaid. “Take your rifle.”
“Yes, sir.”
“President Poe, let’s get aboard that helicopter.”
“No,” Poe protested. “Where are you taking me?”
“You and I will slay giants.”
“But where?”
“The one place,” said Paul Janson, “where the president of Isle de Foree will be safe, visible, and totally in command.”
FORTY-ONE
The anorexic French pilot of LibreLift’s ancient Sikorsky S-76 had developed a severe cough in the weeks since he had ferried Janson and Kincaid out to the gunrunners’ freighter. Janson thought the pilot sounded like a man dying of throat cancer. The sharp stink of leaking fuel irritated inflamed membranes. The burly Angolan co-pilot cast his partner worried looks as he hacked and hacked.
The cough interfered with his light touch and the helicopter flew clumsily as it skimmed the waves. Janson pressed a reassuring hand to Ferdinand Poe’s shoulder. The lights of Porto Clarence faded in the equatorial haze. Ahead the ocean was dark and featureless.
Janson listened to the marine VHF radio, waiting for a hail on Channel 16 when an alert watch officer noticed an unidentified radar blip. After fifteen minutes flying in the dark at 130 knots—the most the old machine could make without the turbines rattling the rotors off—he saw a faint glow on the horizon.
It grew slowly brighter.
They were only five miles from the source of the light when the radio suddenly spoke. “Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen. Do you read me?”
The query was routine. The drill ship’s radar had spotted them and calculated their speed and course but was not likely to get an accurate fix on their altitude without receiving a transponder signal. The watch officer could see no transponder response and would logically attribute it to instrument failure or operator error.
Janson checked the time. Twenty-three-forty. As he had hoped, they were arriving before midnight. The Vulcan Queen’s third mate—the youngest, least experienced ship’s officer—would still be standing the eight-to-twelve watch. The busy night of ASC helicopters coming and going should lull him into concluding that the unidentified craft was routine traffic. The trick was to stall to get as close as possible, but not so long that the watch officer would get nervous and call the captain, who would be sleeping in his quarters below the bridge.
Janson rigged the fast rope in the side door.
“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen. Please identify yourself and your intention.”
“This is madness,” said Poe. “They’ll think we’re pirates. They’ll shoot us out of the sky.”
“Pirates don’t fly helicopters.”
At a range of less than a mile, the ship looked brilliant as a city. Electric lights covered every inch of her, illuminating the tall square stacks in the stern, the full height of her forty-story drill towers, and the enormous bridge house on the bow. The thousand-foot-long, eighty-foot-high hull was so big it cast a wind shadow. Upwind of it, seas were breaking in whitecaps and slamming against the hull. In its lee the water was flat calm. A supply boat sheltered on that side, moored under a loading boom, bathed in work lamps.
Other offshore service vessels circled, waiting their turn. All three vessels bristled with firefighting monitors, a vivid reminder that the purpose of the vast and complex floating factory was to exploit explosively volatile hydrocarbons. The Vulcan Queenherself was festooned with bright orange fireproof lifeboats. They were free-fall escape craft, perched to slide down sharply sloped slipways and plunge into the sea.
White domes studded the roof of the six-story bridge house. They protected the satellite antennas that received GPS data for the dynamic positioning system that controlled the thrusters and propulsion pods that held the ship in place. Battered by wind and water, the Vulcan Queenneither rolled nor drifted. The DP held her in as firmly as a continent.
“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen.”
Janson answered with a nonchalant oil patch drawl, “ASC 44 Crew Bird dropping in with a load of worms.” “Worms” were novices, new men on the job.
The helicopter was so close now that Janson could distinguish individual derricks and deck cranes. The ship was drilling 24-7. Riggers climbed high in the draw works. Movement on the main deck caught his eye. A squad of security men was unlimbering the ship’s sonic cannon and water guns, though it was hard to believe that any Gulf of Guinea pirates would risk suicide attacking such a big ship.
“ASC 44, I’m still negative on your transponder.”
“I’ve been catching grief on that all day,” Janson apologized.