“Yeah, I do. Come on.”

Thirty seconds after clambering aboard the hydrofoil, Juan had them rocketing down the bay while Sloane changed into dry clothing from the craft’s stores. She took the wheel while Cabrillo changed and broke out some rations.

“Sorry, all I have are MREs,” he said, holding up two brown foil packets. “It’s either spaghetti with meatballs or chicken and biscuits.”

“I’ll take the spaghetti and give you the meatballs. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Really?”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

“I don’t know. I always picture vegetarians wearing Birkenstocks and living on organic farms.”

“Those are vegans. In my opinion they’re extremists.”

Her statement got Juan thinking about fanaticism and what drove people to it. Religion was the first thing that sprang to mind, but what else were people so passionate about they would mold their entire lives around it? The environmental and animal rights movements were the next groups he considered. Activists were willing to break into laboratories to release research animals or burn subdivisions at ski resorts to get their message across. Were some willing to kill for it, too?

He wondered if the polarity of opinion had been so sharpened in the past few years that societal norms of restraint and respect no longer applied. East, West. Muslim, Christian. Socialist, capitalist. Rich, poor. It seemed every issue could drive a wedge deep enough to cause one side or the other to consider violence.

Of course, it was into this very divide that he sailed the Oregon. With the world no longer cowering under the threat of nuclear annihilation from a war between the old Soviet Union and the United States, regional flare-ups had proliferated to the point that conventional means could no longer contain them.

Cabrillo had known this was coming and had formed the Corporation to combat these new threats. It was disheartening to think it, but he knew they would have more work than they could ever handle.

With no ransom demands from Geoffrey Merrick’s kidnappers it appeared more and more likely that his abduction was politically motivated; and given the nature of Merrick’s work, the politics most likely involved were the extreme environmental fringe.

Then he wondered if his kidnapping was somehow connected to whatever Sloane Macintyre had stumbled into. The odds were dead against it despite the coincidental fact that both were connected to Namibia. The Skeleton Coast was far from the world consciousness when it came to the environment. Brazilian rain forests or polluted waterways, those were what people were familiar with, not a remote strip of desert in a country that many couldn’t find on a map.