by Rob Jones
“I’m not lying,” the man said. “I have nothing to lose. The man’s name is Alexios Kandarian.”
They all recognized the name. Kandarian was one of the richest men in the world, famed for his entrepreneurial exploits and love of the ancient world. His international cargo company was worth billions.
Brown laughed. “I think I speak for us all when I say, you’re shitting me.”
“I am not lying to you,” Markovich said. “This statue was sold to Alexios Kandarian, along with everything else in this shipment. I can’t tell you what he wants to do with it. Perhaps he plans on keeping it, or fencing it on, maybe he is just a middleman. Who knows? But I tell you the truth when I tell you that this shipment belongs to him and that I saw another similar statue, just like this one but a lion instead of an ox, back in Beirut.”
“And you don’t know who bought that other statue?” Amy asked.
“No. It went with another smuggler.”
“You get that, Special Agent Fox?” Miller said.
Amy nodded. “Yes, thanks.”
Brown leaned in closer to Markovich and jabbed his chest with his finger. “I meant what I said you little bastard. If you’re lying to us, then you can forget about this immunity. If my colleagues here don’t find what they want when they speak to Kandarian, you’re going down for at least ten years.”
“I’m not lying. I’m only too happy to speak with Mr Kandarian and talk to him for you. Perhaps I could even get the lion statue for you. I have many skills and connections that would make the task only too easy. Just remove these cuffs.”
Brown shook his head, fighting back the urge to strike him. “All right, take him away.”
As Guy dragged Markovich to his feet, Amy took a closer look at the ox statue with growing concern on her face. “I think Jim is right. I think this part of the same set as the one he found in Mexico. I have a very bad feeling this is one of these Revelation statues Ben is talking about.”
Markovich paused in the doorway. “I think you’re closer to the truth than you think, Agent Fox.”
“Keep moving, asshole,” Miller said.
“No, wait,” Amy said, looking at the condemned man. “Why did you say that?”
“Kandarian,” he said. “I thought everyone knew.”
“Knew what?”
“He is part of an ancient…”
The bullet tore through Markovich’s throat and buried itself in Miller’s temple. Both men slumped to the metal floor, dead with blood flowing from their wounds. The Bosnian’s arm was twisting up to the pipe where it was still cuffed and a look of surprise haunted his face. Brown drew his gun and slammed up against the bulkhead. Guy instantly reached for his phone and called for assistance.
“We’re under attack!” he said. “We need backup on the Goa Express!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Amy stared over the side of the ship and saw half a dozen men in black combat fatigues making their way over the marina toward the bow gangway they had used earlier to board the vessel.
“Gates told you there was another team after this statue, right?” asked Quinn.
“Uh-huh.”
“Think it’s the Creed?” Quinn took a step back into the compartment. An old, oil-reeking space full of smuggled artifacts was, for now, her safest bet. The words she had just uttered seemed to lower the temperature by several degrees.
“No way to tell,” Hunter said. “But I doubt it. It’s been less than a month since we trashed their castle and took out the Apostle. Something tells me they wouldn’t have got themselves up and running again by now.”
“Max is right,” Amy said.
“Naturally.”
Jodie sighed. “Did you guys know Max stands for Maximum Possible Ego?”
Lewis watched the armed men as they drew closer. “I actually did not know that.”
“Maybe we could talk about Hunter’s personality defects a little later?” Amy said. “Because right now whoever the hell they are, they’re already on the gangway! They’re going to be right on top of us in about thirty seconds!”
“But what about Markovich’s last words?” said Quinn. “He said Kandarian is part of an ancient secret society.”
“He never said that,” Blanco said. “He was killed at ancient.”
Quinn rolled her eyes. “What else ends that sentence, Sal? He’s part of an ancient golf club? He’s part of an ancient square dance society? Maybe Kandarian heard about this operation from a contact in the government and decided to come and collect his artifacts before we took them away. And the ancient reference still bothers me. Maybe he is part of the Creed. We know they have connections everywhere and take a strong interested in the ancient world.”
“Talk about it later! Right now, you guys have to get off this ship!” Brown said. “Get that statue to safety!” Behind him, Guy was taking pot shots at the men boarding the Goa Express.
Hunter scanned the deck of the container ship and counted at least a dozen men, all armed with guns. They were still at the far end of the ship, around four football fields away.
“Kandarian’s provenance can wait,” Hunter said. “Right now, we have a more pressing concern – namely the heavily armed men storming this ship. Agent Brown is right. We need to get this statue out of here in a hurry.”
Amy ran inside the room, took the ox and put it on the table beside the chest. “Quinn, photos, now. You can’t be too careful.”
The young goth pulled out her computer and took a series of images of the statue, then Amy picked it up and put it inside her shoulder bag with a few fistfuls of the straw.
Hunter raised an eyebrow. “Take it easy with that thing! It’s priceless.”
“It’s stuffed with straw and wrapped in cloth inside my bag. We have no other choice, Max. We can’t exactly ask those gunmen to stop shooting while carefully carry it down to the SUV in the original chest, can we now?”
Hunter sighed. “Fine, but just be careful with it!”
Another shot struck the bulkhead beside them and ricocheted off in a shower of sparks.
“Damn it,” Quinn said, her breathing getting faster. “We’re in deep shit, again.”
“Take it easy,” Blanco said.
Hunter watched the men. Again, he doubted they were the Creed’s disciples, this time from the clothes they wore. The disciples’ sharp black suits and sombre, clean-cut faces were nowhere to be seen here. Instead, these men were unshaven and wore torn faded army-surplus combat pants and olive-green long-sleeve field shirts with ammo belts over their shoulders.
Blanco had noticed, too. “These guys smell more like military than the disciples.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Hunter said. “And check out the crew cuts. I think the men Gates’s Dutch contact warned us about have definitely turned up to the party.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Jodie said. “Is anyone even listening to me?”
Senior Special Agent Brown reached for his sidearm, a Glock 22. “I am, Agent Priest, and as the ranking officer I’m calling the shots. Agent Fox – you have the ox statue in your possession and a possible lead to the lion statue. You get your team off this ship and find Kandarian. Agent Guy will stay with me and give these guys hell.”
“Thanks, Nate,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “How long till the back-up arrives?”
He shrugged. “They’re on their way and we can lock the bridge door to stop them getting in. Have you seen how thick that steel is? Get out of here!”
“They’ll divide into two teams when they see us make a break for it,” Hunter said. “You keep one of them busy and give us time to lose the others.”
“But they’ve got the bow gangway covered!” Jodie said.
Amy adjusted the shoulder strap of the bag containing the statue to bring it tighter into her body. “We can reach the marina if we take the stern gangway, too. We’re already nearly there from our current position here in the bridge-house.”
“But the second we break
cover we’re coming under fire,” Hunter said. “Is everyone ready for that?”
Quinn shook her head. “I’m never ready for that.”
“We can do it,” Jodie said.
Any looked at her team. “So is everyone ready?”
“Sure thing,” said Lewis.
“Then we go on three, two, one…”
She scrambled out of their position and ran hard down the remaining length of the portside deck with the rest of her team following her lead. Close behind, they heard a man shouting in Russian. Bullets nipped at their heels. Then, Brown and Guy returned fire and forced the men back into cover.
“Russians!” Blanco yelled. “I think they’re Russians!”
Amy was slipping through the gap in the rail and running down the stern gangway with the bag still over her shoulder. One of the Russians was leaning over the side of the ship and taking aim. He fired and a puff of smoke drifted into the air above his head. The bullet pinged off the rail inches from her elbow and she screamed.
“We can talk about that later, Sal!”
“Yeah,” he called back. “That might be a good idea!”
Another scream behind them, and Hunter turned to see Special Agent Guy tumbling over the rail on the second deck. He hit the top of a steel intermodal container with a crunch and then fell out of view behind it.
“They got Guy!”
“Shit, Brown’s on his own!” Blanco said. “We have to go back.”
“Keep running!” Jodie yelled.
“I’m going back!” Blanco started to turn but stopped in his tracks a second later. Two of the men in black fatigues were raking Special Agent Brown full of holes just outside of the bridge-house. His jerking body was thrust back against the blood-streaked bulkhead of the bridge by the impact of the rounds entering his chest and then he slumped dead to the deck.
“Holy crap!” Blanco said. “They tore him apart!”
“They’re checking the chest in the bridge,” Lewis said. “And when they don’t find the statue it’s not going to take them long to work out we have it.”
Blanco readied his weapon. “I’m going back to take those bastards out!”
“Get your head down and get out of there, Sal!” Amy yelled.
He turned and followed her. She was still in the lead, ten yards ahead of the rest of the team. They were following in single file, crouching down to avoid rogue bullets and ricochets. Then, he watched in horror as she approached the top of the stern gangway and a man in a black balaclava stepped out from behind a container and grabbed her.
“Amy!”
The team reacted fast, swinging their weapons around into the aim and preparing to fire on the man but it was too late. He roughly pulled her into the shadows behind the container. Blanco feared the worst.
Hunter was already sprinting over to her. The others were a few steps behind. Bullets zipped and traced in the air as Blanco turned the corner to find Amy on the ground with Hunter crouched down beside her. She looked dazed and confused.
“What happened?”
“He took the bag,” Hunter said. “And by the look of it, he must have hit her.”
Blanco’s resolve to kill the man who had struck her was steel. Gripping his gun, he took off in the direction the Russian had fled, sprinting down the narrow gap between the towering containers, checking each time he approached a junction where new walkways stretched away across the vast deck.
“You son of a bitch!”
Movement in the corner of his eye. He spun around to his left just in time to see the Russian fifty yards away beside the portside stern rail. He was holding Amy’s bag in his right hand and a Steyr submachine gun was over his shoulder. Blanco lifted his gun just as the man spun around and flung the bag over the side of the ship like a shotput.
“Hands in the air, asshole!”
The Russian bolted. It was instinct. Turning to flee from the American, he was about to pass out of sight when Blanco fired three times. Each round found its mark in the man’s head and neck and blasted him over the rail. There was no scream; he was already dead by the time he went over the side. When Blanco reached the rail, the man had already smashed into the bay and his broken body was bobbing about in the water between the ship’s hull and the bleached wooden anchoring poles on the shore.
“Damn it!” Blanco smacked the top rail with a curse as he watched another man in black fatigues sprinting toward a Humvee parked up outside a Costco warehouse. He had caught the bag and it was already over his shoulder. As he approached the Humvee, he blipped the locks, threw the bag inside and spoke into a palm mic.
When Blanco got back to the team, Amy was on her feet. Her left eye slightly bruised and swollen.
“That bastard hit you?” Blanco said.
“I’m fine,” she said, waving him off. “He could have shot me, Sal. Where’s the statue?”
“One of them threw it overboard.”
“Then we need to get off this ship!”
Ahead on the dock they saw the familiar sight of flashing blue lights and heard the sirens of at least a dozen police cars and a black truck, all screeching out of Sunset Park and swerving to a halt all over the marina. Police officers emerged from the cars and took up defensive positions while a team of counter-terror operatives jumped out of the truck and started to fan out and head toward the ship’s bow.
To the south, the black Humvee containing the bag was already moving out of sight of the police. At the stern, Amy jumped from the bottom of the gangway and hit the concrete marina running. “Back to the SUV!” she yelled. “That’s Plan A.”
Plan A was ended when one of the Russians in the team still on the boat shouldered a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and fired it at their SUV. The team crouched down to protect themselves as the lethal projectile screeched through the drizzly air above their heads and ploughed into their vehicle. It punched a hole right through the windshield and detonated in the heart of the SUV, blasting an enormous white-hot fireball into the air.
CHAPTER SIX
The gasoline ignited and burned hard and heavy, spewing a dark black cloud of noxious smoke into the air, scratched by pieces of gnarled, burning metal shards as they rained back down to the concrete marina.
“I think we need a new ride,” Quinn said.
The back-up force of FBI and anti-terror units were set up in a defensive perimeter on the marina and throwing some serious gunfire at the Russian unit still on board the Goa Express. This gave Amy and her team the time they needed to get after the team fleeing with the statue.
“This way!” she cried out, weaving around the smoldering wreckage of their SUV. “We can use Brad Miller’s SUV.”
Hunter said, “Without a key?”
“I’m the key,” said Jodie.
They followed the ex-thief from California over to the FBI officers’ black Chevrolet Suburban. With the Russians and FBI exchanging heavy fire behind her, she approached the vehicle and pulled a small black device from her pocket.
“What’s that?” Hunter asked.
“Think of it as an electronic skeleton key, Hunter.”
“No such thing.”
Her eyes fixed on his as she raised an eyebrow and pushed a small button on the box with her thumb. When the locks blipped open, he worked hard to hide how impressed he was.
“It hacks the OBD.”
“OBD?”
“Onboard diagnostics computer. All the very best thieves are using them these days.”
“But you’re not a thief,” Amy said. “Inside, everyone! We need to get that statue back!”
They jumped in. This time, Jodie was at the wheel and revving the car as they buckled up. She hit the throttle and took off with an ear-piercing squeal of tires before Quinn had even closed her door.
“Hey!”
In the back, Blanco was breaking two pump-action shotguns out of Special Agent Brown’s vertical gun rack, and passing one to Hunter. “Here.”
“Got it.”
J
odie floored the throttle and the Suburban surged forward, pushing Amy back into the seat and stopping Blanco from loading up the pump-action shotgun. Spinning the wheel, the young woman turned north and headed for Brooklyn.
Quinn spun around and looked through the rear window. “I think we’re going to make it!”
“Don’t speak so soon,” Jodie said. “We’ve got problems at six o’clock.”
Hunter turned and saw a black Humvee pulling onto the road behind them. “That can’t be the Russians from the ship. No way did they get past all those counter-terror guys! That was a small army.”
“Maybe the men on the Goa Express have more friends than we thought,” Lewis said. “That’s where my money is.”
“Great. We got assholes on two fronts,” Quinn said.
“Keep going, Jo!” Blanco said.
“I’m on it.”
The other Humvee was leading them into the industrial area of Red Hook. Blanco opened fire on it as it slowed for a corner, spraying his shots all over its rear panels but just missing the tires. The driver of the Humvee spun the wheel to the right and pulled away from them as one of its rear doors swung open to reveal one of the terrorists. He was gripping another rocket-propelled grenade launcher in his hands.
Blanco saw it first and yelled at Jodie to take evasive action. “It’s locked and loaded, Jo!”
“Got it.”
Not a single sign of fear on Jodie’s face as she spun the wheel to the left like a pro and stamped on the accelerator. The Suburban surged forward and took the next crossroads at such high speed the axles shuddered and shook everyone on board.
“Holy crap!” Quinn called out.
“It’s all good, Q.” Jodie let the wheel slip around to the right and straightened up on the new road. Blanco was gripping onto a headrest for balance as he watched the grenade streak across the junction behind them and explode in a US Postal Service distribution center. The weapon ripped through the front of the building and blasted a substantial chunk of the roof clean up in the air. Seconds later, it returned through a cloud of black smoke to the ground in burning matchwood, twisting little contrails of smoke and embers in their wake.
