Plague Ship by Clive Cussler, Jack du Brul

together, Maurice turning right to return to the galley, Juan left. He took an elevator down three decks. The doors opened to a cavernous room lit with ranks of floodlights and smelling strongly of the sea. An overhead crane held the larger of the two submersibles the Oregon carried, a sixty-five-foot Nomad 1000. The blunt-nosed mini-sub could carry six people, including a pilot and copilot. Clustered near her three bow portholes were armored xenon lamps and an articulated manipulator arm with a grip that could rip steel. The Nomad was rated for a thousand-foot depth, almost ten times as much as her little sister, the Discovery 1000, hanging suspended in a cradle above it, and was outfitted with a diving chamber, so swimmers could exit the craft while she was submerged.
    Beneath the submersible, crewmen had already pulled the deck grating away to reveal a gaping pit that went all the way to the Oregon ’s keel. The outer doors were still closed, but pumps were filling the swimming pool-sized opening in preparation for the launch.
    Linc, Eddie, and Max were already sliding black wet suits over their swim trunks. Scuba equipment for all of them had already been loaded into the sub. Linda Ross stood with her arms crossed over her chest, watching Max with amusement. Hanley had served two tours in Vietnam as a Swift Boat captain and no longer cut the dashing figure he once had. He was having a hard time stretching the suit over his paunch. He didn’t normally accompany a team on a shore excursion; however, he was the best marine engineer in the Corporation, and everyone agreed his expertise could come in handy.
    “Come on, old boy,” Juan said with a grin, and patted Max’s belly. “I don’t recall you having this much trouble a few years ago.”
    “It’s not the years,” he moaned, “it’s the pastries.”
    Cabrillo sat on a bench and, unlike the others, started to put a dry suit on over his clothes. “Linda, have you done your prelaunch checks?”
    “We’re good to go.”
    “And the cradle?”
    “It’s secure,” Max answered for her with possessive pride. He’d designed it, and had overseen its fabrication in the Oregon ’s machine shop.
    Juan took a communications headset from an attending engineer and called up the Op Center. “Hali, it’s the Chairman. How’s it look out there?”
    “Radar shows the normal procession of tankers heading in and out of the Gulf. There’s a containership that pulled into Bandar Abbas’s main dock about two hours ago, plus a handful of feluccas and dhows.”
    “Nothing from the naval base?”
    “They’re quiet. I’ve scanned all frequencies, and, other than normal blather between ships at sea, there’s not much going on.”
    “I hope you’re honing your language skills.” It was a joke between the two. Hali Kasim was the son of Lebanese parents but couldn’t speak a word of Lebanese or Arabic, one of four languages in which Cabrillo was fluent.
    “Sorry, boss, I’m letting the translating algorithms of the computer do the work for me.”
    “Eric, Murph, you guys set to go?”
    When Cabrillo was sending a team ashore, there were no better officers to have manning the ship’s navigation and weapons systems than Stone and Murphy.
    “Yes, sir,” the two said in unison. Murph added, “We are locked and loaded and ready to be goaded.”
    Juan groaned. Murph’s newest hobby was slam poetry, and, despite the crew’s repeated assertions to the contrary, he thought he was a master of the edgy street genre. “Stand by for a comm check once we’re secured in the Nomad.”
    “Roger that,” Hali replied.
    Linc and Eddie gathered up the waterproof bags containing their weapons and gear and climbed atop the mini-sub. They vanished into the hull through the small hatch. Max and Cabrillo followed them up, Juan giving the thick steel hull a superstitious slap before descending into the submersible. The ride to shore would take an hour, so they took their seats along