by Jack Mars
Kressley was right, and though the decision pained him greatly knowing that they might be dropping missiles on unsuspecting seafarers, the potential loss of life if the railgun reached range would be significantly higher.
“Do it,” President Rutledge said as Air Force One taxied down the runway. “And may God have mercy on us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
“Coming up on an approximate location!” Alan called through the headset. “Descending to two thousand feet. Keep your eyes peeled!”
Zero felt as if he was about to burst with energy, confined in the cramped cockpit, craning left and right to try to get a visual as the Prowler dipped in altitude. “I don’t see anything!”
“The hull is coated in a reflective material,” Maria reminded him. “From this height you won’t see anything. Look for a wake; this boat could be traveling at a hundred twenty miles an hour, maybe even more. They might be invisible to radar, but they can’t help but create a trail.”
Zero held the Italian-made compact machine gun across his lap, assembled, locked, and loaded. What he was going to do with it, he wasn’t yet sure. It was just somehow more comforting. Better to have it and not need it, right?
“Visual!” Maria all but screamed into the headset. “There, two o’clock!”
Zero practically pressed his face against the cockpit dome, wishing his field of vision wasn’t so restrained. The right wing dipped as Alan dropped in altitude again, and Zero saw it—a long, thin white wake with an oddly vague shape heading it.
His pulse quickened. Finally laying eyes on the thing after all this time felt like he’d just spotted Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. It was real. It was there. And as the plane dipped precipitously again, Zero’s stomach lurching with the sudden drop, he could make out the shapes of men on the deck—and a long, dark shape rising from the blue of the ocean itself.
The railgun was out of its hold, and without the reflective coating on the weapon itself it appeared almost as if it was skating along the water on its own.
The Prowler zoomed past the boat in an instant, their speed greatly higher than the ship’s. “The weapon is out!” Zero warned.
“That must be why they slowed,” Alan grunted. “They can’t be doing more than sixty or seventy; there’s no way in hell we can match their speed. But with the signal jammers, they shouldn’t be able to get a direct lock onto us.”
The bombers had come at them head-on and in formation, Zero realized, making them easier targets and not requiring a direct visual to fire. Now, with the Prowler, the railgun had a direct visual but no way to directly lock other than manually—assuming the likely outdated signal jammers were operational.
“Just to be safe,” Zero said, “you need to keep us moving.” Even as he said it he put his face to the glass to see the railgun’s long barrel rising up toward them. “They’re aiming, Alan!”
“I see ’em. Hang onto something.”
Alan shoved the yoke forward and the Prowler nosedived, sending Zero’s heart into his throat, and then leveled again, the inertia feeling as if it had rearranged his insides. He banked hard to the left, swinging into an arc that would have looked to be a turn with a predictable end.
But as they came out of the arc he pulled up.
The blue flash of the railgun illuminated the cockpit. For a second, Zero imagined that it was the light he might see when fate finally took him. Or perhaps it had, and this was it. But then he felt his stomach lurch again and he knew he was still with the living.
The railgun’s shot missed. As long as Alan kept up the erratic flying and the signal jamming pods stayed active, the railgun was like trying to shoot a fly with a BB gun.
But we can’t do this forever. The boat was still moving steadily closer to the coast, and they had no weapons. No, that wasn’t entirely true. The plane had no weapons. He had a Beretta PMX on his lap, a Glock 19 at his hip, a Ruger in an ankle holster.
“Three… four… five… six…” Alan’s voice was in his headset as Zero snapped back to reality. He was counting the seconds before the railgun would be able to fire again.
“Eight!” Alan banked hard to the right as another deadly blue flash, like lightning directly in their faces, lit the Prowler’s cockpit.
“Jesus, that was close!” Maria gasped as Alan resumed his count.
You know what you have to do.
He just didn’t know if he could actually do it.
Zero tore open the backpack and pulled out two items. One was the square black parcel with shoulder straps and the letters X1-B stenciled on it in white. The second was a round magnetic tracker.
“Eight!” Reidigger cried as he rolled the Prowler. For an instant Zero was weightless; Maria’s shriek caught in her throat over the headset.
But there was no blue flash that time. They’re trying to be unpredictable.
Alan came out of the roll and dropped the Prowler another fifty feet or so. They were flying no more than seven or eight hundred feet over the water, presenting a bigger target to the railgun operator.
He banked hard again as the railgun fired. The Prowler actually shook with the proximity of the blast.
“Can’t keep this up forever!” Reidigger shouted. “Open to any ideas!”
“Maria,” Zero said. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she practically gasped from the cockpit in front of him. He couldn’t reach for her or hold her hand. Couldn’t hug her. They didn’t say goodbyes; that was a rule they’d made long ago. But one last kiss, just in case, would have been nice.
He unbuckled his harness, slipped the X1-B pack over his shoulders, and refastened himself into the seat. “If we live through this, let’s get married.”
“Yeah,” she said breathlessly. “Okay. But we have to keep it small…”
The plane banked again, flying sideways for a fraught second or two, and then leveled out and pulled up, climbing again into the sky.
“Of course,” he agreed. “Just you, me, the girls. Alan. Todd. Your dad?”
“Maybe we don’t tell him about it.”
“Yeah. Maybe we don’t.” He smiled as he tightened the strap on the Beretta diagonally over his chest so he wouldn’t lose it. “As soon as the tracker is on, give Penny the coordinates for a missile strike. Then have them blow that thing out of the goddamn water.”
“What?” Maria said, panicked. “Kent, wait, what are you—”
Zero tore off the headset, reached for the red lever near his right foot, and yanked it hard.
Two things happened in the span of a heartbeat. First, the dome of the cockpit exploded away and went flying off into the Atlantic Ocean. Second, a powerful burst detonated beneath him, ejecting the seat—and him—about one hundred and fifty feet into the air.
Zero’s lungs deflated with the sheer and sudden force of ejection. He felt his spine compress as every muscle in his body went to jelly. Cold wind tore at him as the edges of his vision darkened, threatening to lose consciousness with the sudden and excruciating g-force.
The Prowler was gone from beneath him, jetting ahead, wings wagging as it tried to evade any potential railgun blasts.
The seat fell away, leaving only the frame and the parachute behind, and then he was falling too. For one terrifying moment, he realized he had absolutely no control over this process, and that this was, in all likelihood, a very bad idea.
A shadow fell over him as the white parachute unfurled. He winced against the sudden drop in descent, the straps straining against his chest and shoulders.
Zero sucked in a gasping breath. He hadn’t expected that to be as painful or jarring on his system as it had been.
Come on. Get it together.
He scanned the ocean below as he descended and spotted the white wake of the boat to his northeast. The Prowler had gotten ahead of it when he ejected, but it was coming up fast and he would only have one chance to get on it.
One very slim chance.
The railgun’s barrel lift
ed like a bird looking skyward, tracking the Prowler as it dipped and arced in the sky. He could only imagine what Maria and Alan might be thinking right now—hopefully worrying about themselves and not him.
The Prowler banked hard as if going into a roll. The railgun barrel tracked it, moving slightly left with the action.
Just get clear, Alan. There’s nothing more you can do here.
The plane leveled suddenly, feigning the roll—but whoever was behind the railgun saw it coming.
The railgun fired. Without the cockpit and the plane’s engine to contend with, Zero heard the blast—not so much a blast as a resonant thoom—and the ship lit up blue for a fraction of a second.
The Prowler flashed orange as its right wing was torn from its body.
“No!” he heard himself scream.
The jet spun wildly as it fell from the sky. Zero could do nothing but watch and drift closer to the ocean as the Prowler whipped around and around. As if slow motion, he watched it hit the sea at an angle, skipping across the surface of the water twice like a stone on a river. Finally it stopped, tipping upward on an angle, bobbing twice.
Then it began to sink.
His breath came ragged in his own ears. He no longer felt the cold, or the biting wind, or the pain in his spine from the hasty ejection.
Alan. Maria.
It didn’t feel real. He felt detached, as if floating instead of falling slowly.
Part of him wanted to give up. To fall into the icy ocean and let it take him too.
He forced himself to tear his gaze away from the sinking Prowler. The ship had nearly reached him. He was still about four hundred feet in the air, give or take. He wouldn’t reach it in time. Not with the parachute; he needed to be another hundred feet or so northward to even have a shot at landing on it.
Figures on the small boat pointed at him. People. The perpetrators. They were the target. Not the railgun or the ship that carried it. The ones who had stolen it, the ones who had fired it, the ones who had killed every soul aboard three battleships and shot the Prowler out of the sky.
A deep rage bubbled up inside of him, the likes of which he hadn’t felt since he discovered his wife’s assassin.
A fusillade of automatic gunfire tore at the air. The figures weren’t pointing at him; they were armed, shooting at him. No, not at him. At his parachute.
The white canopy over his head shredded. At the same time, Zero clawed at the straps still connecting him to it.
He managed to free himself as the parachute folded, and he plummeted to the ocean.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Zero felt weightless as he fell through the air, as if the ocean was rising up to meet him. He reached for his right shoulder, fingers finding the ripcord there, and he pulled it. The X1-B pack on his back burst open, the lightweight aluminum frame springing to size and supporting a blue sailcloth the same azure color as the sky above. Once again he was thrust into shadow as the personal glider expanded outward on either side of him.
The glider caught on the wind, yanking hard on Zero’s already-sore shoulders. His descent slowed, but his angle was too sharp; the glider directed him downward, ever closer to the water. He gritted his teeth and twisted his body, angling his shoulders back and straightening his legs beneath him to increase drag.
Pull up, dammit!
The glider leveled as his right foot skipped across the ocean’s surface. He sucked in a breath as he sailed mere feet over the Atlantic, wishing he’d had even ten minutes of practice with the glider before deciding to eject himself out of an airplane with no other safety net than trying to land on a rather small boat.
The South Korean ship was mere yards away. Zero angled himself toward it as three men on the bow aimed guns at him.
His left hand groped for the Beretta PMX as he struggled to keep his body angled slightly upward, to keep himself from crashing into the frigid ocean at forty miles an hour.
He wasn’t sure if the fire selector was on full-auto or not as he raised the compact submachine gun, easily one-handing the five-pound weapon, and fired. A dozen nine-millimeter rounds exploded from the barrel in a second. The three men hit the deck; he wasn’t sure if they leapt for cover or he’d hit any of them.
But the force of the blast put him slightly off-kilter. The glider angled too far to the right.
I’m not going to make it.
The only chance he had was to radically overcompensate.
A bellow erupted from his throat as he twisted his body to the left. At the same time, the South Korean boat veered, trying to steer away from him. The glider’s frame groaned with the sudden action, threatening to fold.
Zero soared over the port side of the fifty-foot boat. It was under him now, but he was moving too fast to land. He was going to glide right over it.
He pulled his legs in, his knees to his chest, his arms hugging them and head tucked, curling himself into a ball. The glider dragged, angling sharply downward.
Shots rang out behind him as he hit the deck. He rolled once, bouncing, the glider still catching the wind—and he tumbled off the starboard side.
A hand shot out and grabbed onto the railing before the glider pulled him right off the side of the boat. He shouted with the pain, his shoulder threatening to dislocate even as his other hand fumbled with the clasp of the straps holding him in place.
The glider slipped away from his shoulders and drifted off on the air like a paper airplane.
Zero clung there for a moment, just a few seconds, panting and hanging by one hand and expecting that any moment one of the Middle Eastern men he had seen on the ship was going to aim a gun over the side and fire it into his face.
He heard shouts then in a language he understood: Arabic.
“Where did he go?”
“He fell over the side! He must have!”
“Idiot, there was no splash!”
Now’s your chance. Zero clenched his teeth. He took up the Beretta in one hand, the other clinging to the railing, and with his foot against the reflective hull of the boat, he forced himself upward with a shout and unloaded the rest of the PMX’s magazine in a spraying burst over the deck.
One man cried out and fell as bullets penetrated his midsection. Another dove behind the weapon for cover even as several rounds struck the railgun, sending up sparks.
Where’s the third? Zero quickly hauled himself over the railing, letting the spent Beretta fall to the deck—he hadn’t brought a spare magazine—and drawing the Glock 19 at his hip. The railgun rose from the center of the ship, standing about nine feet tall, the barrel of it comprised of two parallel rails close to twenty feet in length.
It would have been a sight to behold had Zero not been preoccupied.
A three-round burst rang out as he spun to the right. Pain seared in his abdomen even as he leapt in front of the railgun’s barrel for cover.
“Stop shooting, you fool!” someone screeched in Arabic. “You will hit the weapon!”
“I hit him!” the shooter shouted back. “I got him!”
The shooter was right. Zero winced as he pressed a hand against the place where two bullets had struck his midsection.
There was no blood. They hadn’t penetrated. The long-sought question of whether or not the jacket Penny had supplied was infused with a graphene mesh had been answered. His ribs would be bruised to hell, but at least his insides were still intact.
But they don’t know that.
“Confirm it!” a voice shouted. “Then throw the body over!”
The boat’s engines were surprisingly quiet; Zero could hear the careful footfalls of boots coming his way. He crouched low, to one knee, and when the man whipped around to the front of the railgun, his rifle raised to his shoulder, Zero fired twice into his chest. He sprang to his feet and kicked out, sending the commando staggering backward. The man toppled over the railing, his scream cut short when he hit the Atlantic.
Two down.
“Hassan!” a voice called out. And then
in English: “Bastard!”
The frigid wind whipped around him as he held his position on the bow. He wondered for a moment if he could disable the railgun by shooting at it in key places—but he had no idea where those places would be or if it would even work.
Besides, I might need the ammunition.
He dared to peer around the railgun, down the length of the ship even as it raced closer to the coastline. He saw no one except the man he’d shot with the Beretta, lying face-down and motionless. It gave him an idea.
Zero sprawled on the deck with a view beneath the weapon’s long parallel rails. A moment later a pair of black boots came into view, slowly heading toward the bow. Zero aimed and fired, just once, the bullet passing beneath the railgun and striking an ankle. The man screamed and fell.
As soon as Zero saw his head, he fired a second time, and then scrambled to his feet. That made three down. How many had he seen from the air? At least five, maybe six—and he knew where to find the others.
He stole quickly down the length of the ship to the stern. Behind the raised railgun were two steps down, a thick windshield rising up, and behind it, an impressively complex control panel.
Three men stood at the controls. Two of them were Middle Eastern, much like the three he had just killed, but the third was fair-skinned, with sandy, slicked hair, a black tac vest over his jacket. European, most likely. He stared at Zero through the windshield even as his hand hovered over a lever.
There was something cold in his stare, almost lifeless. It reminded him all too much of the psychopathic assassin Rais, Zero’s former nemesis that he had finally killed on the walls of Dubrovnik.
It takes three to pilot the boat, he realized. These men could not fend Zero off or the boat would stop. Most likely was that only two were piloting, and one was operating the railgun—and Zero had little doubt that the man behind the weapon was the sandy-haired mercenary with the cold stare.
