by David DeLee
Zayd stood at the bow, working on what looked like a computer console.
She could fire the railgun at any moment. They were too far away to stop her. Tara’s stomach turned sour at the thought.
Faaid moved from where he’d been standing toward the stern of the boat. He held something large and gunmetal gray in his hands. They were still too far away for them to make out what it was.
McMurphy asked the question out loud. “What the hell is that?”
“Whatever it is, you can bet it’s not good for us.”
“Thank you, Commander Obvious.”
Bannon unstrapped and stood up. Tara stepped back.
“Now would be the time to strap in, Brice, not…Where are you going?”
Between the seats, Bannon paused. He gave the railgun boat another look. “We start firing, trying to pick ’em off like Tara suggested, they’ll fire that damn gun. You can’t land this thing,” he looked at Tara, “or crash it into them, so get us as close, and as low, as you can. I’m jumping out.”
He squeezed past Tara who followed him into the cabin. “I’m going, too.”
Without looking up, Bannon stuck a Beretta into his .45 holster. It didn’t fit right but it would hold the weapon until he hit the Bowrider’s deck. “You think you’re up for it?”
“I’m breathing. That’s enough.”
He looked up. She read his concern for her in his expression. “You’ve been through enough already.”
“Brice. There’s three of them.”
They felt McMurphy alter the chopper’s trajectory, banking to port and speeding up. He was approaching off their port stern. The chopper smoothly swept around in an arcing circle. His intention was to do a fly by over the stern, the largest and deepest deck on the boat. The biggest part of the boat to jump onto, and it looked like the size of a postage stamp.
With no time to argue, Bannon handed her an M16.
But Aziza Faaid had other ideas.
Bullets stitched across the starboard flank of the chopper.
“That gizmo of Faaid’s,” McMurphy shouted. “It’s a gun.”
“Who’s Commander Obvious now?” Bannon shouted, grabbing for a canvas tie down to keep from being pitched across the cabin. Tara grabbed for a jump seat, winced at the hot flare of pain that shot through her arm. She glanced out the open door. Faaid’s gun had two pistol-grips set under a disk that looked like a flying saucer. It fired rounds at a rate to rival the M16s on full automatic. Mixed in the volley were red tracer rounds.
Tara returned fire, but her rounds fell short of the boat.
Over the ping of rounds ricocheting off the skin of the helicopter, McMurphy called out, “There goes the deposit on this thing.”
“Just get us on top of them,” Bannon shouted.
He crouched beside Tara by the open port side cabin door. She’d exchanged the M16 she’d been firing for a freshly loaded one and strapped it across her back. She had no holster so she gripped the Beretta P9 in her hand, keeping her finger off the trigger. For now.
McMurphy zigzagged their approach, doing his best to avoid the deluge of gunfire.
“I can’t get close with that camel turd shooting at us.”
“On it,” Tara said.
They were within range now. She swung the M16 off her back and pressed against the edge of the open door. She flipped the switch on the rifle to full automatic and sent a barrage of bullets across the stern deck.
Faaid ducked and ran back to the bridge section. He crouched behind the co-pilot’s chair.
“Bring us down!” Bannon shouted. “Now!”
The helicopter pitched forward and sped up.
They swept low—five feet—over the stern section and banked to the right. With his hand over his holster and the M16 strapped to his back, Bannon leaped.
Tara swung the M16 over her shoulder, strapping it once more to her back. About to leap out, the chopper rocked violently. Unprepared for the sudden shift, Tara stumbled away from the open door.
Faaid was firing at them again. This time his bullets hit their mark—the chopper’s tail. Smoke billowed from the rotor housing. Flames engulfed the tail section. A hit rotor snapped off with a loud metallic bang. It spun away. Alarms blared from the cockpit. The chopper wobbled erratically and spun in a counterclockwise direction.
Tara scrambled back to the left side of the cabin, about to launch herself out of the chopper but stopped short when she saw the railgun boat was no longer beneath them. She’d missed her opportunity.
“Swing us around!” she shouted. “Swing us around!”
McMurphy ignored her, concentrating all his effort on keeping them airborne.
The chopper lurched and dropped then pulled up.
Tara’s stomach roiled.
“Take us back!” she shouted. “Take us back!”
“Can’t,” McMurphy shouted back. “I need to put her down.”
He switched on the emergency transponder.
“You can’t.” Tara watched the railgun grow smaller. “There’s no place…”
“There’s one place.” The chopper banked left and climbed and then picked up speed, sputtering and trailing a column of thick, black smoke as they flew away from the railgun and away from Bannon.
“If we can make it,” McMurphy said cryptically.
Tara held on and looked out the cabin door. She saw where McMurphy was taking them, realized what he was going to try and do. He was heading for the Oceanic Princess.
It was their only chance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
BANNON HIT THE STERN deck of the railgun boat flatfooted. He bent his knees, absorbing the impact before losing his balance and falling to the deck. He tumbled across the deck and banged his shoulder into the gunwale. The downdraft from the chopper’s rotors buffered him, whipping at his hair and clothes. His pants snapped against his legs.
He twisted onto his back and grabbed for the Beretta he’d jammed into the ill-fitting holster. He cleared leather and popped off a round at Faaid.
The bullet chewed through the plastic padding of the co-pilot seat behind which Faaid hid. He flinched and ducked deeper behind the seat, still aiming his strange looking weapon at the passing helicopter. The saucer-like disk spun. He held it by two pistol grips. The weapon spit out rounds faster than an M16 of full automatic, with zero recoil.
Bannon glance skyward.
The helicopter had taken fire. Black smoke billowed from the tail section. The tail rotor was spinning erratically. He could see one of the rotors had broken off. The back end of the chopper swished like a fish’s tail as McMurphy struggled to keep control of the aircraft. Tara clung to the open cabin door. She looked desperately down at the boat, at Bannon, but there was nothing she could do. They’d passed over the boat too quickly for her to make the jump. Even from that distance, Bannon could read the angst on her face.
Having adjusted course, McMurphy zoomed away from the railgun boat, doing his best to get out of range before Faaid succeeded in downing them. The chopper flew away.
The damage to the tail rotor was too extensive. The chopper was minutes from going down.
He’d have no choice but to land. That meant ditching in the ocean, or—if they could make it—reach the Oceanic Princess and make an emergency landing there. The ocean liner would be large enough to land on and might have a helipad onboard. Many of the large cruise ships did, and the Oceanic Princess was one of the largest of them all.
If they could reach it in time, and Bannon knew that was a big if.
Meanwhile, he had his own problems to deal with. He pushed himself to his hands and knees. The boat bounced over the waves, continuing its deadly pursuit of the Oceanic Princess.
Faaid had abandoned his attempts to bring down the chopper now that it was out of range. He shouted at Zayd who was crouched behind a jury-rigged podium in the boat’s bow.
“Fire the railgun!” Faaid shouted. “Fire it now!”
At the wheel, the redhead
ed woman named Bridget twisted around. She sent the boat into a hard, starboard turn. In her hand, she held a small compact silver automatic. She took a shot at Bannon who dived across the enclosed space behind the bridge. The bullet pinged off the gunwale behind him.
“Powering up the rails,” Zayd called out. “Current at seventy percent. Eighty.”
Bannon fired at Bridget, but she wrenched the wheel in the opposite direction, sending Bannon tumbling back across the deck. His shot went wild. From the bow, Zayd clutched her podium stand, holding onto it for dear life. “Hey!”
She pulled herself up right, brushing her long black hair from her face. “Ninety percent. Ninety-five. We’re ready!”
Bannon’s stomach knotted.
He’d rolled into the corner. He jumped up to his knees and aimed his gun at Zayd’s back.
Her fingers danced over the LCD screen in front of her.
Faaid cowered behind his chair, hanging on. “Fire! Fire!”
Bannon squeezed the trigger, firing.
Bridget zig-zagged the wheel. The boat swerved left, then right, then left again.
Bannon went tumbling across the deck again. His aim spoiled, his bullet pinged off the railgun’s slide.
Zayd’s activated the firing sequence. Bannon saw two red columns climb up the computer screen. “Firing!”
The rails didn’t move. There was no recoil. The gun simply made a deep, ear-shattering bang. Thick gray smoke puffed from the two rails that formed what would’ve been the barrel of a conventional gun. A blast of hot muzzle fire followed a split micro-second later.
The Oceanic Princess was less than a mile away.
Ignoring the danger Faaid and the others posed to him, Bannon stood up. In horror, he watched the great flank of the cruise ship. Two hundred thirty feet above the waterline. Over a thousand feet in length. Sixteen passenger decks.
In less than a blink of the eye—the projectile had crossed the space between ships at seven times the speed of sound—a section of the stern just above the waterline exploded. The ship tilted from the force of the impact, like a child’s plaything splashing around in a bathtub. Smoke and flames billowed up from the giant hole blasted into the hull, and only then, after, did the sound of the explosion reached those watching from the railgun boat.
“No!” Bannon shouted. “Damn you all to Hell! No!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE CHOPPER FISHTAILED, STRUGGLING to cover the distance between the railgun boat and the Oceanic Princess. They were only about a mile away. The engines banged and sputtered. McMurphy had taken control from the computer and was flying her manually. He brought the chopper low over the water, worried if they couldn’t make it they’d have to ditch in the water.
Tara stood beside him, looking out the window at the approaching cruise liner. “Are we going to make it?”
McMurphy grimaced. “Damn right we are,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “But I’d strap in all the same.”
Tara slipped into the co-pilot seat and snapped the five-point harness into place. “Anything I can do?”
“Pray.”
“Done.”
The question in McMurphy’s mind was where to put the bird down, fore or aft deck? Each had the space. He angled toward the bow. Fewer people were milling about watching their approach.
“Get on the air. Tell ’em to clear the bow. We’re coming in and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
Tara snatched up the radio. She broadcast on all emergency bands, assuming, hoping the captain of the Princess would have his personnel monitoring that for instructions and updates from the Coast Guard.
The cruiser ship was coming at them fast. McMurphy had seconds to decide—water landing or crash the Princess’s party. He angled the chopper’s nose up. All or nothing. The aircraft shuttered with the effort. McMurphy looped the chopper up over the deck. Below them people scattered, several of them getting pulled out of the way by uniformed crew members of the Princess. Others, with their phones out, videotaped the approach.
Seriously, McMurphy thought. He’d never seen so many billabong shorts, bikini tops, and ugly Hawaiian shirts in his life.
He managed to get the chopper over the ship’s railing. One engine conked out with a cough and a shudder. They hovered above the deck. McMurphy struggled with the controls. “Hold on. This ain’t gonna be soft.”
A second engine stalled. The chopper listed then lurched.
He’d gotten them to just ten feet above the deck when the last engine failed. They dropped like stone. “This is gonna hurt.”
They hit the deck—hard. McMurphy’s head snapped back, hitting the padded headrest. He felt the impact all the way up his spine. The five-point harnesses held them in place but chafed as they pulled tightly across their shoulders and thighs.
The left skid snapped. The chopper lurched forward then settled at a cockamamie angle, like a car with a flat tire. Smoke rose from the console. The cockpit smelled of burnt wires. The cabin filled with hazy smoke. McMurphy looked at Tara.
She looked back. “If you say any landing you walk away from is a good one, I’ll break your legs.”
He smiled and pulled a cigar from his breast pocket. He stuck it in his mouth, popped his bushy red eyebrows like Groucho Marx and said, “Got a light?”
Tara shook her head but couldn’t resist giving him a grateful smile. She hit the release on her harness and climbed out of the wrecked helicopter. McMurphy did the same.
A man in a captain’s uniform rushed up to them. “I’m Captain Herron, skipper of the Oceanic Princess. Are you two all right?”
“Never better,” McMurphy said around his cigar.
Captain Herron looked at his bandaged forehead and blackened eye, then at Tara as she came around the other side of the chopper to join them. His gaze rested on her field-dressed wounded arm. Blood had soaked through the elastic wrapping. From his expression, he found McMurphy’s claim was dubious at best.
“Warrant Officer McMurphy.” He shook the captain’s hand. “This is Tara Sardana. I hate to tell you, but this ship’s still in grave danger.”
“We’re aware. We’ve altered course and increased speed as much as we can. A ship this size doesn’t turn on a dime. We’re not built for evasive combat maneuvers.”
“We need to get your people up on deck,” Tara said.
“Start loading the lifeboats on the starboard side.” McMurphy pointed toward the railgun boat, now just a mile away off their port side. “That’s what we need to worry about.”
Several crewmembers and passengers were standing around, listening. A clamor of concern spread through the passengers within earshot. The crew began to herd the passengers, moving them away from the crashed chopper and toward the lifeboats.
“You heard them,” Herron said to his people, reiterating Tara and McMurphy’s instructions. “Go! Move!” To McMurphy and Tara, he said, “We’ve already begun the evacuation protocols. We can have all the passengers in lifeboats and launched inside thirty minutes. But that’ll require all the lifeboats.”
“Your point?” McMurphy asked as the crossed the deck to the port side.
“Half the lifeboats are on this side,” Herron said.
They stood, gripping the railing, and looking out at the boat racing toward them.
“How bad is it?” Herron asked.
“There’s a state-of-the-art weapon on that boat,” Tara said, “with the capacity to sink this ship with a single shot.”
Herron visibly blanched at hearing that.
“Don’t sugar-coat it, Blades.”
“He needs to know.” She turned her attention back to the railgun boat.
“We’ve got a man on board trying to stop them,” McMurphy said.
Tara shouted, “TAKE COVER! EVERYONE TAKE COVER!”
What happened next happened almost instantaneously.
From the barrel of the railgun erupted a puff of white-hot fire and dark smoke. So fast it felt instantaneous, they f
elt the explosion. The sound was horrifying. The ship groaned and yawed starboard. Those milling around were swept off their feet and sent tumbling across the deck. Fire alarms went off. Klaxons sounded.
The explosion first, then they heard the bang of the railgun firing, seconds after the missile had already struck.
Tara slid across the deck. She reached out for the broken helicopter skid and grabbed the wrecked metal, cutting her hand on the twisted metal. Worth it, she thought, since it saved her from plunging over the side of the ship. A crewmember slid past her. She grabbed his arm, arresting his slide off the ship, too. A white-hot pain flared in her injured arm. She winced and ignored it as she pulled the young man up until he could grab the skid for himself.
Panting, he thanked her. Over and over.
McMurphy and the Captain had grabbed the railing in time, preventing them from getting pitched over the side of the boat. Two crewmembers and three passengers weren’t so lucky.
Their screams could be heard as they fell to the water below.
Under them the Princess began to right itself.
Tara climbed to her feet and pulled the crewman up with her. “Thank you, ma’am. I thought I was a goner for sure.”
McMurphy and Herron helped other crew and passengers get to their feet as well.
From deep within the ship, more explosions rumbled. Tara felt them rumble through the deck. The muted blasts, like the boom of a bass drum deep in her chest.
Herron called out. “People need our help. Let’s go. Move. Move!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
BRIDGET BARNES SPUN THE wheel of the railgun boat, aiming it once more for the cruise ship. As they raced toward the cruise ship, Bannon looked past her and saw the smoke billowing from the large black hole in the Oceanic Princess’s hull. They were close enough now for him to see the fires raging inside the ship. Several decks were exposed. Iron girders had been torn apart like balsawood. Live wires hung like snakes, snaking and sparking. Water gushed over the ragged end of the floors, the result of an overwhelmed sprinkler system, fighting and losing against the bright flames that were only betting bigger.
