He shook Merrick’s shoulder. “Geoff, what kind of ship?”

“Juan,” Julia said in a warning tone.

Merrick’s head rolled to face him but he couldn’t open his eyes. “A tanker. He bought an oil tanker.”

The monitor started to wail as his heart rate slowed dangerously. Julia pushed Juan aside, shouting, “He’s crashing! Get the cart in here!” She threw aside the sheet covering his chest as one of her staff raced into the room with a portable defibrillator.

Through it all Merrick managed to open his eyes. They were clouded with pain. He reached out to clutch Cabrillo’s hand, his mouth forming three words he didn’t have the breath to say aloud.

The chirping alarm turned into a continuous tone.

“Clear,” Julia said, the paddles poised over Merrick’s naked torso. Juan took his hand away so Julia could apply the electrical impulse to restart Merrick’s heart. His body convulsed as the charge ran through him and the monitor showed a corresponding spike before returning to flat line.

“Eppy.” The orderly handed Julia a syringe full of epinephrine. The needle seemed impossibly long. She speared the area between two of Singer’s ribs and loaded the drug directly into his heart. “Up it to two hundred joules.”

“Charging, charging, charging,” the orderly said watching the machine. “Go.”

She applied the paddles again and for a second time Merrick’s body jerked partially off the bed. The line on the monitor peaked again.

“Come on. Come on,” Julia urged and then the beat was back, widely spaced at first but improving steadily. “Get a ventilator in here.” She shot a scathing look at Cabrillo. “Was it worth it?”

He met her gaze. “We’ll know when we find a tanker named the Gulf of Sidra.”

Chapter 30

30

THE weather was turning foul as the Oregon raced northward, forcing a delicate balance between speed and the need to keep the wounded from being further injured by the ship’s motion. Julia had torn a page from the nineteenth century by slinging the worst of the wounded in hammocks so they swayed with the swells and were cushioned when the ship was hit by a particularly tall wave. She hadn’t left Merrick’s side for more than twenty minutes since getting his heart started again.

After getting the name, it had taken Murph and Eric less than a half hour to discover that a tanker called the Gulf of Sidra had been anchored off the coast of Mauritania for nearly a month but had weighed anchor the day before. The ship had been owned by Libya’s state oil monopoly until a recent sale transferred her to a newly incorporated Liberian firm called CroonerCo., which Murph recognized as a thinly veiled reference to Singer’s last name.