Marauder

by Clive Cussler

  The truck passed the row of Qingdaos, then flew up the rear ramp and onto the car deck of the Marsh Flyer. It screeched to a halt, and when Juan jumped out, he saw that Linc had stopped mere inches from one of the other two trucks.

  “Linc, you take the right passenger compartment. Eddie, the left. MacD and Linda, stay on the car deck. I’ll help Parsons fly this thing.”

  “What’s your name again?” Parsons asked as he climbed the ladder to the cockpit.

  “Juan Cabrillo.”

  “I can’t wait to hear how you ended up in this place.”

  “A story for another time,” Juan said, following him up.

  He could already hear sporadic gunfire and the sound of the small hovercraft outside starting up.

  * * *

  —

  Angry about the last-minute incursion on the factory, Polk ordered his men to go after the intruders and kill every last one of them, including Parsons. He didn’t bother going back to his office. Now nobody would believe the evidence he’d carefully arranged to be planted around the building. It was more important to destroy the facility and its contents and get out of there as soon as possible.

  He went back to the truck with the detonator and reset it to two minutes. Then he sprinted for the helicopter.

  While in Australia’s Special Operations Command, Polk had taken rotary wing flight training, so the Bell JetRanger was a cinch for him to fly. He jumped in and started up the engine without even going through the checklist.

  At the same time his overhead rotor began spinning, so did the giant propellers on the Marsh Flyer.

  “Do not let them leave,” he ordered into his radio.

  One of the Qingdao hovercraft with four men aboard rose up on its skirt and hurtled across the tarmac. Bullets sparked off the fuselage, and one guard went down, but not before the craft was able to shoot up the rear ramp of the Marsh Flyer and onto the car deck.

  A second Qingdao was only moments behind, but the giant hovercraft was lifted up by its own skirt, causing the temporary ramp to slide off. The second Qingdao bounced off the rubber without going in. Instead, it flipped over, crushing the guards on board.

  The Marsh Flyer accelerated off the concrete and over the swamp, but Polk could see the flash of gunfire through the open rear clamshell doors. The four remaining Qingdaos, now holding the only surviving guards, took off after it.

  With his rotor at max speed, Polk lifted the chopper off at full throttle so he could quickly gain speed and altitude and put some distance between him and the factory.

  He checked his watch, which was counting down in sync with the timer on the detonator.

  . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

  The first load of dynamite went off right on time, blowing a hole through the roof of the Enervum factory. It was followed in quick succession by a series of gigantic blasts that rippled across the building until it was one huge fireball. The shock wave tossed the JetRanger around, but Polk was able to get it under control.

  The destruction wasn’t exactly the way he wanted it to happen, but he thought it might be good enough to serve their purposes.

  But he couldn’t celebrate just yet. He banked the chopper around to watch the four small hovercraft racing to catch up to their far larger cousin. From this angle, it looked impossible for them to take out a hovercraft the size of the Marsh Flyer.

  He silently patted himself on the back for having the foresight to arm his security team with rocket-propelled grenades.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Linda was crouched beside MacD on the car deck behind one of the trucks near the Marsh Flyer’s bow. She could make out three of the guards from the Qingdao that had made it on board, but she didn’t see the fourth one. They took cover behind their hovercraft, which had crashed into the rearmost of the three trucks. The space echoed with the deafening sound of gunfire.

  “Where is he?” MacD yelled between bursts from his MP5. The invading gunmen carried high-powered Norinco assault rifles.

  “I don’t know,” Linda called back, “but if one of those rounds hits the dynamite, we won’t have time to regret our life choices.”

  “We’ve got to ambush them now,” Linc said over the comms. “Eddie, are you in position?” Both of them were standing behind the doors to the passenger compartments on each side of the Marsh Flyer.

  “Ready.”

  “Linda and MacD, distract them.”

  “Here goes,” Linda said.

  She and MacD jumped up and unleashed a barrage in the direction of the three guards. They were so focused on the incoming bullets that they didn’t see Linc and Eddie burst onto the car deck behind them and open fire. All three were dead before they hit the deck.

  Linda and MacD edged forward, checking under the trucks for the fourth guard.

  “Do you see him?” Linda asked.

  “No,” MacD replied.

  “Neither do I,” Linc said.

  “Hold it,” Eddie said. “The rear door to the truck we came in on. Was it closed?”

  Linda looked at MacD, who shook his head.

  “We didn’t close it.”

  They joined Linc and Eddie quietly outside the rear of the truck. While Linc and Eddie held their weapons on the door, Linda and MacD put their hands on the handles. Linc nodded, and they threw them open.

  The remaining guard whirled around with something in his hand, reaching for his Norinco, but before he could reach his rifle, he was riddled with bullets.

  Linda picked up the object that he dropped. It was a small detonator with a countdown timer set at twenty seconds. There was a keypad labeled in Chinese characters. She handed it to Eddie, who tapped on it. The LCD screen went blank.

  “I’ve canceled the timer,” he said.

  The crate beside the guard’s body was open. A pocket in the lid the size of the detonator was empty.

  “The detonator must already have been in there,” Linc said.

  While Eddie, Linc, and Linda opened the other crates, MacD ran to the next truck and came back a few moments later holding an identical one in his hand.

  “It looks like each truck has only one detonator,” Eddie said.

  “Too bad,” Linda said, looking through the open rear door at the Qingdaos that were quickly gaining on them. “It would have been nice to dump these crates behind us one by one like depth charges. I’m already low on ammo.”

  “Me, too,” MacD said.

  “That’s actually a good idea,” Eddie said. He peered at the pursuing hovercraft and nodded his head rhythmically.

  “What do you mean?” Linda asked. “What are you doing?”

  “I see where he’s going with this,” Linc said, getting into the driver’s seat and starting up the truck.

  “They’re seven seconds behind us,” Eddie said. “Plus give us an extra ten seconds of safety.”

  He typed seventeen seconds into the keypad of the detonator.

  Linc reversed the truck, with them inside, until it was near the rear edge of the car deck, and Linda understood.

  The whole truck was going to be the depth charge.

  * * *

  —

  Trim the starboard props and make sure they aren’t over-revving,” Parsons said from the pilot seat of the Marsh Flyer, his good left hand on the steering yoke.

  Juan followed the instructions, and the huge hovercraft slewed away from the edge of the swamp track through the trees.

  “Nice work,” Parsons said. “You’re a natural.”

  “It’s just point and click.”

  Steering the Flyer must have been challenging for Parsons, even with both his hands and at half the speed. But with a bullet hole in his right hand and the throttle at maximum, he needed Juan’s assistance to keep it from spinning out of control.

  Juan pulled out his radio a
nd called the Oregon.

  It was patched through to Max. “Where are you? We don’t see the Marsh Flyer yet.”

  “You will soon,” Juan said. “Tell me you’ve already cast off from the Nhulunbuy dock.”

  “As planned.”

  “Good, because we’re coming in hot. Be ready for hostile forces.”

  “Roger that.”

  The updated Flyer cockpit had screens showing the view from cameras on all four corners of the craft to give a view of the surroundings, including the mushroom cloud of smoke rising behind them from the remains of the factory. While Juan helped Parsons with the instruments, he also served as eyes for the rest of the team.

  He had an image of the car deck on his view screen, so he’d seen the entire gun battle. Linc was still in the driver’s seat of the truck he had driven to the stern of the hovercraft, and MacD and Linda were on either side of it. He couldn’t see Eddie.

  “We’ve got four Qingdao hovercraft approaching fast from the rear,” Juan said. “Can you see them?”

  “We’ve got an idea,” Eddie replied.

  A guard in the lead Qingdao had a launcher for a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder. Linda and MacD took a few shots, but the driver of the hovercraft swerved to avoid them.

  “They’ve got an RPG,” Juan said. “Whatever you’re planning, do it now.”

  Eddie came into view and waved to the rest of them. Linc jumped out of the cab as the truck started to roll backward while the rest of them pushed. The truck fell off the lip of the car deck and flipped backward into the swamp.

  “Bombs away,” Eddie said.

  The Qingdaos easily went around the truck, and the guard with the RPG lined up for his shot. At the same time that he fired, the truck erupted in a massive explosion. It was too far behind the hovercrafts to destroy them, but it threw off the aim of the guard.

  Instead of flying into the car deck, the RPG went high. At first, Juan thought it would miss them completely, but it struck the starboard rear propeller. The broken blades went flying into the sky.

  The stump of the pylon was on fire, and the Marsh Flyer immediately began turning to starboard, threatening to send them crashing into the jungle.

  Parsons strained at the wheel to pull them back on course.

  “Cut back power on the port engine,” he shouted, pointing with his bad hand at a handle near Juan’s knee. Juan pulled back on the control, and the engines lowered the speed of the propellers on the port side to compensate for the one that was now missing.

  Parsons was able to keep them straight now, but their speed was cut in half.

  “Can we put out the fire?” Juan asked.

  “Not without flaming out the engine.”

  A guard in one of the other Qingdaos now had an RPG ready to fire.

  A second truck in the car deck rolled to the stern, this one facing the opening. The tires squealed, and Linc rolled out of the driver’s door as the truck sped through the doors.

  The truck exploded seconds after it landed in the water. Two of the hovercraft were going around it as before, but this time they were catapulted into the air. One of them blew up in midair when the RPG misfired, and the other somersaulted across the swamp.

  “There’s the bay,” Parsons said. The swamp was beginning to thin out as they approached open water.

  The drivers of the last two Qingdaos learned the lesson and went wide, quickly pulling alongside the Marsh Flyer. If they could damage the skirt, it would be over. The giant hovercraft would be dead in the water.

  There was one truck with dynamite left, but it wouldn’t do any good if they couldn’t get it into the path of their pursuers.

  “Can you spin this thing?” Juan asked Parsons.

  “Are you crazy?” Parsons said. “I’m barely keeping it together as it is.”

  “We won’t be here at all if they can pick us apart with those RPGs. Can you spin it?”

  “Maybe once. Why?”

  “Because we’re going to turn the Flyer into a slingshot.”

  * * *

  —

  Polk was watching from two thousand feet up. The Marsh Flyer was burning as it crossed into the bay back toward Nhulunbuy, but it was still moving. His men should have destroyed it by now, but their tactics had been sloppy. He told them to stop following behind the hovercraft and shoot at it from the side. Once they deflated the skirt, the surviving guards could sink it and kill everyone who jumped overboard, then meet him at the airport for their flight to rendezvous with the Marauder.

  One of the Qingdaos matched the speed of the wounded Flyer, and a man stood with an RPG to cripple his target. It seemed like an easy shot.

  But to Polk’s surprise, the Flyer’s propellers rotated, sending the gigantic hovercraft into a horizontal spin on its own axis. The centrifugal force flung something out the back as the stern aligned with the Qingdao, and Polk realized it was another truck like the last two.

  Neither he nor the Qingdao pilot could do a thing as it splashed into the water and exploded, sending a geyser into the air that disintegrated the small hovercraft and severely damaged the Marsh Flyer.

  The aft skirt was ripped to shreds, and the Flyer plowed into the water. The propellers on top continued to turn, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It was already beginning to list. The buoyancy tanks must have been punctured. It wouldn’t stay afloat for long.

  Polk radioed to the last Qingdao.

  “Make sure no one gets off alive.”

  Low rain clouds were starting to roll in, so he wouldn’t be able to watch for much longer, but he wanted to be sure they finished their task.

  He’d been so focused on the hovercraft that he hadn’t noticed a ship entering the bay until he banked around for another pass. It looked like an ordinary bulk cargo ship, although it was spewing a huge wake behind it like it was a speedboat.

  Then something odd happened. The tower on one of the ship’s cranes seemed to come apart, revealing some kind of device. It was only when the mechanism swiveled around and aimed at the Qingdao that Polk recognized it as a twin-barreled Gatling gun.

  A torrent of rounds poured from the weapon, obliterating the small hovercraft in an instant.

  A moment later, a boat sped out of a gap in the ship’s hull.

  It wouldn’t take long for the Marsh Flyer’s rescuers to realize Polk was involved in the attack. He turned the chopper sharply and flew for cover into the nearby cloud bank.

  As he flew toward the airport, he called ahead to the pilot to make sure he was ready to take off the moment Polk arrived. Then he phoned his wife.

  “How did it go?” she asked. “Are you on your way?”

  “I’m on my way, but we’ve got a big problem,” Polk said, fuming about the debacle he had just witnessed. “Our operation has been compromised.”

  “Compromised? By whom?”

  “That, my dear, is the right question.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Despite his injured hand, Bob Parsons didn’t need any help getting into the Oregon’s rigid-hull inflatable boat. He stepped over the gunwale easily from the top of the sinking Marsh Flyer. MacD, Linda, Eddie, and Linc were right behind him, followed by Juan, who was the last off. As Raven steered the RHIB back to the ship, the giant hovercraft turned turtle with a huge splash and disappeared into the depths.

  Parsons gave the Flyer a crisp salute, then watched the crane sleeve on the Oregon return into place, covering the Kashtan Gatling guns. He was equally interested in the gap in the hull of the ship where the RHIB had emerged. The boat garage was located at the waterline and contained all their surface craft, including Zodiacs, Jet Skis, and the special operations boat they were now on.

  “I know my U.S. Navy ships,” Parsons said, “and that isn’t one of them. I’d say you’ve got yourself a Q-ship.”

  Q-ships, warship
s disguised as tramp steamers, were most frequently used against U-boats during World War II. They would act as decoys to lure submarines to the surface where they were vulnerable to the hidden armaments.

  “You’re looking at the Oregon,” Juan said, “and I’m her captain. As you’ve already seen, she has a few hidden tricks.”

  “You work for the Americans?”

  “Mostly. This job, however, has a more personal aspect. Your employers injured one of my crewmen, and I want to know why.”

  “How did you know they were going to kill me?”

  “We didn’t. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time to give you a hand. No pun intended.”

  “No worries,” Parsons said with a chuckle. “If it hadn’t been for you, I would be part of the factory wreckage.”

  “Do you know what they were doing in there?”

  “I wish I could tell you. They were pretty tight about security, although I did catch a few bits and pieces from some of the workers there.”

  “Like what?”

  “I transported a load of ammonium perchlorate to the factory. I looked it up. It’s mainly used to make rocket propellant.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know. A lot.”

  “Anything else?” Juan asked.

  Parsons shrugged. “Just that some of the people working in there were biochemists, although I don’t know what that would have to do with rockets.”

  “Who did you work for?”

  “A guy that called himself Miller, although that wasn’t his real name. That was the one who was about to have me wasted. He worked with his wife or girlfriend, but I never got her name. I think she was a ship’s captain like you.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw her giving orders to the crew of a trimaran.”

  “A trimaran?” Juan took out his phone and showed Parsons a screenshot of the two sketches that Kevin Nixon had drawn from Sylvia Chang’s descriptions of the man and woman she saw during the attack on her ships.