by Jack Mars
Swann stroked his goatee.
“I don’t know. I guess so. But the sub is high tech, super modern, and the Russians are still laboring where the Soviets left off in 1986. I’m sure they’d love to have that thing.”
“Can we destroy it from here?” Trudy said.
Swann stared at her for a long moment. It was the million-dollar question.
“I love you,” he said.
Her face flushed crimson. “Swann…”
He shook his head. “For your mind. Can we destroy it from here? Maybe. Maybe we can. I have a couple of friends at the National Security Agency. They’ve got drones flying that border perimeter between Georgia and Russia. I know they do.”
He paused, trying to think through the ramifications of a drone strike from Georgian territory into Russia. It was a lot to chew on, and there wasn’t a lot of time. Instead, he found himself just imagining a Predator drone, the latest thing in killing machines, flying silently through the night sky.
“We’re not supposed to do this, but…”
“Do you think it’s a good idea?” Trudy said.
Swann looked at the phone in his hand. He shrugged and started to dial a number.
“The whole thing’s already a mess. What do we have to lose?”
* * *
“Luke? Luke! Forget the sub! Negative on sub!”
It was almost too loud to hear what Swann was saying.
Luke was crouched in the iron stairwell with the phone to his ear. It was getting hot in here. The ship was burning out of control. It was a firestorm. The reflections of flames flickered on the walls all around him. Every few moments, another piece of unexploded ordnance in one of the cargo holds blew up.
He stared out the doorway at the armored speedboat floating near the dock, catching hell from every direction. Neither Ed nor the Georgian had been able to tie the boat up.
“What?”
“Abort!” Swann screamed. “Abort mission! Escape with prisoners!”
The three American prisoners sat slumped in the stairwell, each clinging to the metal rail. Frenchy was at the doorway, peering around the corner. He cradled an Uzi in his hands. It was raining fire out there.
“What about the sub?” Luke said.
“Forget the sub! We will handle it!”
Who was going to handle it? Swann and Trudy? Well, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, unless they were planning to call in…
“Just get out of there!” Swann shouted. “Just get out!”
…an air strike.
“Get out!” Swann screamed. “Get out!”
Okay. There was no time to talk about the advisability of air strikes in this set of circumstances. If that’s what they were going to do, they must have gotten clearance from on high, possibly as high as the Almighty himself.
“Roger!” Luke shouted into the phone.
“Out!” Swann screamed.
Luke hung up.
He peeked outside. There were the ripped and shredded remains of maybe half a dozen men littering the dock. The speedboat had drifted around, giving Luke its port side. He could see Ed inside a small armored booth, the snout of a heavy gun poking out. Ed was feeding the gun with one hand, firing with the other. There had been a delay of several moments while Ed reloaded the gun by himself.
The boat was being hit from the seawall, and from the shoreline to the far opposite side. They were triangulating fire, and the boat was caught in the middle of it.
DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH…
The metallic clank of Ed’s gun cut through the noise. He raked the seawall, trying to finish off the last of the resistance over there. It was a good plan. If he could put a stop to those guys, then the gunfire would be coming from only one direction. Perhaps they could use the boat as a shield, and rush these guys…
zzzZZZZZZZ. Shooop. DING!
Some sort of rocket zipped out of the night, hit the speedboat, and bounced into the air without exploding. Luke and Frenchy both hit the deck instinctively.
Luke looked up at the stairwell. The three men sat there, slack-jawed. They barely noticed the rocket. The SEAL blinked and jerked his head away. That was the best he could do.
Luke sighed. This night was long, and getting longer. He looked out the doorway again. He had a new vantage point now—a worm’s-eye view. To their left, flames shot up five stories high. Men, crouched low, were running through those flames.
DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.
“Frenchy!” Luke shouted. “We gotta get out of here.”
He pointed out the doorway at the men taking firing positions further up the dock.
Frenchy looked out. When he saw the men, his body seemed to lose all its air and bonelessly settle to the floor. Further back, men were racing up the opposite stairwell. They were probably going to work their way across the top deck, through that long hallway, and down these stairs. Luke gazed up the narrow empty stairwell.
Any minute now it was going to be full of Russians.
Frenchy rolled over, faced Luke, and unzipped his jacket. That jacket, inappropriate for a warm night like this… Frenchy opened it. Beneath the jacket, he was wearing a heavy leather vest. Luke stared at the familiar outlines of wired up grenades and pipe bombs, the latter probably stuffed with nails, encircling Frenchy’s torso.
It was a suicide vest.
Luke shook his head. If he still needed confirmation, here it was. Frenchy was crazy.
“No, no,” Luke said. “Don’t do that. We’ll think of something.”
Frenchy slid his Uzi across the floor to Luke.
He smiled. “Boom,” he said.
“Frenchy! The boat is right there! All we have to do is make it across this dock, get in the boat, and escape. That’s all we have to do!”
Frenchy shook his head. The smile was still on his face, but now it looked very, very sad. “I don’t come here to escape. I come to kill Russians. For my brothers. And my father. And my people.”
“Frenchy!”
Frenchy pulled himself to his feet. “When boom comes, you go.” He gestured out at the speedboat. It had drifted with the swells into the dock. It kept slapping the side of the dock, drifting out a couple of feet, then slapping the dock again. Ed was still raking the seawall. Things had quieted down over there. The boat was between Luke and the opposite shore. Maybe, just maybe…
Frenchy stepped out the doorway, hands held high, and started walking toward the men positioned down the dock.
Luke slapped his forehead. “Ah, no.”
He pulled himself to his feet and went over to the men on the stairwell. “Get up!” he shouted at them. “Get up!” He slapped the first one, the CIA spook, across the face. The man looked at him with suddenly fierce eyes.
“Up!” Luke said. He grabbed the guy by the hair and yanked him to his feet. He looked at the Navy SEAL. “You! Get that man up! Let’s go!” He pointed at the last in line, the heavyset submersible pilot.
The SEAL nodded groggily and pulled himself up. Then he turned, grabbed the man by his shirt front, and fell backward, pulling the man to his feet.
“Move your ass!” Luke screamed at the SEAL. “Get these men ready! We’re bugging out!”
He went to the doorway and raised a STOP hand behind him.
“On my go.”
Frenchy walked toward the men, hands high above his head. Even amidst the flames, Luke could see the men sighting on him. Frenchy was shouting something in Russian. Closer, closer, he kept walking toward them.
One of the men shouted something. Frenchy kept walking.
A muzzle flash and BANG!
Frenchy flinched, but kept walking.
A flurry of shots erupted.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Frenchy jittered and fell to the deck. Luke heard himself groan.
That didn’t work.
The Russians came out, guns drawn, moving cautiously. They approached Frenchy. Luke watched, but he couldn’t tell if Frenchy was alive or dead. He wasn’t movin
g. His body was just a big lump on the concrete decking.
Things had quieted down. Ed had stopped firing at the seawall. The crackle of gunfire slowed down from the distant shoreline. They were giving a ceasefire over there. They didn’t want to hit the men on the dock.
“Wait…” Luke said, very quietly. “Wait…”
He readied the Uzi. Somewhere above him, he heard men running along an iron catwalk. They were coming.
Half a dozen men surrounded Frenchy’s body. They didn’t touch it. Luke knew this was for fear it was booby-trapped. A man jabbed at him with a rifle.
Then Frenchy blew up.
No warning. Just:
BOOOM!
There was a flash of light. Luke ducked way back. The ground shook beneath his feet. In the initial flash, he saw severed limbs flying. The limbs didn’t worry him—it was the nails in the pipe bombs.
He counted to three.
One.
Two.
“Go!” he shouted. “Go! Let’s go!”
He darted out onto the dock, rolled to the ground, and opened up with the Uzi. It bucked in his hands, making an ugly automatic blat. From the corner of his eye, he saw the SEAL pushing the other two men in front of him, toward the boat.
Good man. Good man. That guy had roused himself just enough to get it done.
Luke let loose with another burst from the Uzi.
Someone over there was firing back. Bullets rained around him. The shooting was coming from above him, not down the dock. He looked up—there were men on an iron catwalk three stories above his head.
He felt something very sharp, like a wasp sting, in his forearm. For an instant the pain was so blinding he thought he might be having a heart attack. The Uzi slid away from him.
He gritted his teeth. “Ow! Dammit!” He was hit.
Suddenly, the sound of Ed’s heavy gun came again.
DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.
The men on the catwalk jittered and jived as Ed sliced them up.
“Stone! Let’s go!”
The speedboat’s engine roared. A great, churning wake appeared behind it. Luke’s ride was leaving.
He pressed up and ran in a low squat. Zing! Another bee sting in his lower right leg. Bullets were flying.
Just ahead, the boat had left the dock. There was a three-foot gap, growing bigger every second. Luke took two giant steps and leapt across the chasm. He hit the gunwale chest high and dragged himself over the lip. He tumbled into the boat.
The other three men were sprawled on the floor with him. The floor was awash in blood. He wasn’t the only one who had been hit.
DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.
Ed was firing everywhere at once.
The speedboat planed upward, the nose riding high. It took off at warp speed. Luke was rolled over and thrown against the stern. He lay just under the big engines, all of them screaming above his head. All he could hear was the noise of the engines.
He glanced up at them. They were each covered in thick steel armor plating.
Well, he had pretty much gone deaf in the last few minutes, so the noise didn’t bother him much. And this was as good a place to hang out as any.
He closed his eyes, and for a moment got lost in the sensation of dark speed. He didn’t want to think about anything. He didn’t want to think about Frenchy, and the bloodbath they had left on the dock. He didn’t want to think about the fact that at least one of the prisoners was bleeding and probably shot.
He didn’t want to think about what Don Morris was going to say about all this.
He opened his eyes. He really didn’t want to think about Don Morris right now. And he really didn’t want to think about Don’s superiors.
There was a helicopter in the sky above their heads, moving fast. A gunman was in the side bay doorway, and the pilot was trying to give him a shot. The chopper had a bright spotlight, shining down on the black water in front of them.
The big Georgian captain of this mongrel was aware of the chopper. All his lights were out. The boat was past the seawall already, entering open water, and he was trying to do a high-speed serpentine. Oh God. All the way to Georgia? There was no way.
Luke looked to the right. More lights in the sky were coming from the north. They were going to be sitting ducks down here.
If possible, he needed to get those men up and under the Georgian’s cockpit canopy. It was going to be a tight fit, but…
He moved. “ANHHH!” He was in a lot of pain. For a moment, he had forgotten about that.
The choppers were converging. This was about to get ugly.
“Get up!” he told himself. “Get up!”
A bright light flashed behind him, if possible the brightest one of the entire night. There was a new explosion, very loud, so loud that Luke could barely discern the limits of it. For an instant, it drowned out the roar of the engines.
Luke looked back. The freighter had blown up again.
Had a reserve gas tank been hit? Luke was pretty sure the fuel tanks on that thing had already blown. Suddenly, a battery of missiles screamed out of the sky, hitting the ship again. The explosion was blinding. It was more like six explosions, happening all at once. Luke shielded his eyes to watch it.
“What the…”
The answer came to him an instant later.
“Swann.”
Above their heads, the choppers peeled off, looking for whatever had just launched those missiles. The boat was moving so fast that behind them, the explosions began to dwindle into the distance.
Big Ed slithered out from under the steel box surrounding the machine gun. Ed’s shirt was torn to shreds. He seemed to be bleeding from everywhere—his hands, his feet, his legs, his upper body. Luke pulled himself from under the engines and sat along the gunwale. Ed dropped down next to him.
“You hit?” Luke said.
Ed shrugged. “I don’t know. Can’t tell. Probably.”
He looked at Luke. “You?”
Luke nodded. “Yeah.”
“Bad?”
Now Luke shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Ed gestured at the former prisoners. The SEAL had pulled himself into a sitting position against the opposite gunwale. He hugged his knees. The other two were still sprawled on the bottom of the boat.
“These guys hit?” Ed said.
Luke nodded. “I think so. It was murder out there. Thick.”
“How would you rate this operation?” Ed said.
“Rate it?” Luke said. “Like on a scale of one to ten?”
Ed nodded. “Sure.”
Luke nearly laughed. He gazed back at the orange glow on the dark horizon. Absolutely nothing had gone the way he planned it. His original intention was to sneak on board the ship while the Russians were absorbed by the speedboat crash. Sneak in, grab the prisoners, blow the submersible, and muscle their way out on the second speedboat. If they went fast enough, maybe they’d be gone before anyone fired a shot.
No. None of that had happened. And yet, here they were, escaping to Georgia with the prisoners, and the submersible scuttled, to put it mildly.
“I’d rate it International Incident.”
Ed laughed. Then Luke did. A fit of the giggles started to overcome them.
The Georgian speedboat driver looked back at them. His face was sweaty and gleaming. He smiled, then raised a large fist into the air.
“Next stop, my home country,” he said. “Tonight, we drink!”
CHAPTER NINE
4:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
“I was told to get those men out,” Don Morris said.
He looked around the packed conference room. The place was a forest of eyes, all of them staring right at him. Eyes, eyes, everywhere he looked.
“And the men are out. I was told to scuttle that submersible. It’s been destroyed.”
Standing along the walls were the young people, the aides, the assistants, t
heir eyes open and staring and concerned, but also serious, ready to punch numbers into their BlackBerries or scribble down notes. Those folks were of no concern to him.
Sitting with him at the oval table in the center were the bigwigs and heavy hitters, several of them military men who had once outranked him, his superior officers, many of them civilians with appointed posts close to the president.
These eyes were angry. They believed they had found their scapegoat, and they had hauled him in here to be raked over the coals.
Well, Don wasn’t having it. Not for a minute, none of it. There wasn’t a military man at this table who had seen and survived the combat Don had. There wasn’t a civilian man or woman who knew the kind of guts, determination, and initiative it had taken to succeed in the operation Stone and Newsam had carried out today.
“You all wanted a Top Secret mission, with the Special Response Team going it alone. You got that. And if you happened to want a mission that punched through and exposed Russian vulnerabilities, you got that, too. In spades.”
Was he mad at Stone and Newsam? Was he mad at Trudy Wellington and Mark Swann? You bet he was, and when they got back, he planned to kick their asses up and down the halls of SRT headquarters. But in the meantime, he’d be dipped if he was going to sell out his team in front of twerps like these.
They had his fire up, for sure.
Dick Stark of the Joint Chiefs was standing near the president.
“Don, no one here is looking to blame you for what happened. I think the president, and the rest of the people assembled here, just want to understand what happened out there, and why. Mr. President, would you agree with that?”
Alone among the people in the room, President David Barrett’s eyes seemed vacant, unfocused, maybe even dazed. That wasn’t good. The United States and Russia were toe to toe right now, and one thing America needed at a time like this was confident, decisive leadership.
The president nodded. “I would, yes.”
Don suspected that at this moment, David Barrett would answer nearly any question put to him in the same way.
“Mr. President, would you like a large cheeseburger, medium rare?”
“I would, yes.”
“Mr. President, would you say that mole people live deep under the earth?”
