by Cherry Adair
As he went down, Popov grabbed him in a breath-stealing bear hug that expelled the breath in his lungs. “I have him! I have him!”
Behind him, Ling dug his fingers in the region of Sebastian’s liver and did something internally. Oily black spots flashed and swirled in his vision. Felt like his insides were being scooped out with a claw hammer.
CHAPTER EIGHT - CHAMELEON
From the side of the room, Michaela watched what looked like a surreal Marcel Marceau routine. Popov had his meaty arms wrapped around something and was struggling to keep his hold. A pantomime starring one huge man and his invisible foe. Ling stood close by, his eyes hard.
She’d seen that look of pure satisfaction on Ling’s face before— Oh, God… Sebastian materialized in the middle of the melee, face contorted in agony.
Oh, shit, shit, shit. Michaela knew exactly how excruciating what Ling was doing felt. Bile rose up the back of her throat. Any moment now, Sebastian was going to black out from the intense pain radiating through him. Ling wouldn’t release the organ until Sebastian regained consciousness. Then Ling would do it again. Sick to her stomach, she observed his wrist twisting against Sebastian’s spine.
Face bleached of all color, Sebastian dropped to his knees, Ling, still squeezing, clearly enjoying himself.
“Excellent,” Popov boomed. “Hold him there and bring me the woman?” The security guy, a burly six-footer who’d almost cornered her in the shower more than once, sprinted toward her, grinning.
Unable to look away from Sebastian’s torture, she had the ridiculous belief that if she took her eyes away—even for a second—Ling would kill him. Swallowing bile, her heart manic as she tried to come up with something—anything-to distract Ling, Michaela saw something small and black flying toward her face at the same time. Automatically throwing up her arm to ward it off, she had a split second to recognize the projectile.
A gun.
Sebastian had thrown it unerringly as he went down.
She caught the SIG in her nondominant hand, switched it, and fired all on a single breath. Training was automatic. Too bad accuracy hadn’t been her strong suit at target practice, but the guard was almost on top of her as she fired, and for once, his size was in her favor. Her ears rang and blood splattered her face as he went down. She didn’t wait. Holding the gun in both hands, she switched her depth perception as she looked across the room and fired at Ling, who was hunched like a fricking carrion-eating hyena over Sebastian’s writhing body.
The brilliant physicist’s head exploded with the force of a watermelon under a sledgehammer. Next, she turned the gun on Malard, who’d procured a weapon from one of the dead guards. He was clearly unfamiliar with the weapon—his expertise was more in the realm of weapons of mass destruction—and he was desperately fumbling with it. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t hear him. Her ears were still buzzing.
To trip the man as he ran past Sebastian’s prone position, he shot out his leg. Gerald Malard screamed and crashed to the floor beside him; the gun knocked out of his hand and skittered across the floor.
Still white-faced, Sebastian had enough strength to grip the scientist’s head and twist, breaking his neck. The room went silent, save for the rasp of their breathing and the ringing in their ears from the gunfire in the enclosed space. The air stank of gunpowder and blood, and the harsh light ensured that all the gory details were visible and inescapable. Sebastian had been in battle scenes before, but Michaela hadn’t, and he didn’t know how she’d handle it.
“You okay?” he asked, staggering to his feet, face contorted, pale eyes blazing like blue hellfire.
“Behind you.”
“Got it.” Sebastian spun around as Popov swung a chair at his head. He had to hand it to the son of a bitch; Popov wasn’t giving up. Not that it was going to do him any good. Fisting the leg of the metal chair, Sebastian yanked it out of Popov’s hand then rammed the curved back into the Russian’s massive chest, driving him back.
“You can kill me,” Popov taunted. “But it does not affect what we built here.” He smirked, his face oily with sweat, his lab coat spattered with Ling’s blood. “In a matter of hours, our demands will be met. We shall have our money and ruler and a new world order. Every major city will be destroyed, and we will be in control of all coastal ports.” His smile was pure evil.
“You will die with the knowledge that you have failed. Your countrymen will suffer and die by the millions, and everything you knew and loved will be destroyed. Your precious T-FLAC will show your photograph and you will forever be ridiculed. You’ll die in infamy!”
Michaela didn’t enlighten Popov. “Want this back?” she asked Sebastian, holding out the SIG, her attention still on Popov.
“Wanna do the honors?” Sebastian shoved the chair harder into the Russian’s corpulent belly.
She shuddered. “No, thanks?”
Popov was pressed against the wall. He stopped laughing and shifted gears, his voice changing from triumphant to reproachful. “You are like a daughter to me, Michaela. Did I not treat you well? Did I not give you tidbits from my own plate? Did I not protect you from the advances of Nickolas, Wilhelm, and the others?”
Being hand-fed disgusting cold leftovers from Popov’s plate and receiving occasional bruising beatings were not her idea of fun. “The only reason you couldn’t rape me was because you were too damn fat to crowd me in the shower stall and too slow to chase me like everyone else did, you sick son of a bitch. You sure as hell didn’t mind using me as your punching bag— Hurry up and shoot him, Sebastian. I want to get out of here.” She turned on her heel, too repulsed to even look at Popov.
She heard the shot as she walked outside.
Sebastian joined her a moment later, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. He pressed her face into his chest, kissing her hair. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge?”
She lifted her head. “How do you propose we do that?”
“We’ll figure it out. Together. Move it.”
Michaela grabbed the front of his gray sweater and reeled him in. “I’m not done with you, Tremayne.” She stood on her toes to brush her lips against his.
“I sure as hell am counting on it.” He crushed his mouth down on hers.
Breaking away, he took her hand. “Let’s go see what we can use as transportation?”
His fingers were warm and very solid between hers. They were going to die here today. They both knew that.
There was no way out of Decommissioned Soviet Submarine Base #15.
“I know where we can find a broom. Maybe we can fly out.”
“Too bad we’re not witches.” He stroked her cheek with his fingers. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s find a ride.”
There were no “rides.” Sebastian knew that Michaela knew he knew they were without a creek or a paddle.
The corridor was eerily empty; the only sound was the compressed air being fed through the vents. “Exactly how long do we have?”
“Hour, six minutes.”
“There’s that Oh-ninety-four-class nuclear sub tied up at the dock,” Sebastian offered.
“You think we can take a forty-year-old sub and make it run?”
No. He knew it wasn’t operational, but with luck, he’d be able to jury-rig the communicator he and Cohen left up there to contact the ship for just this eventuality. The operatives on the trawler would send in a submersible and extract them. If the comm devices worked. That was a huge fucking if. “Don’t know unless we try.”
Hand in hand, they jogged through several miles of corridor until they reached the open expanse of the docks.
Neither mentioned the cold simply because it was so cold at sea level, no words were necessary. The words would have crystallized instantly on leaving their lips.
“Damn.” Michaela slowed as she saw a body sprawled and surrounded by glossy red blood on the stained cement dock platform several yards away.
“That’s Sergei over there. Why did they kill him? He wasn’t
going anywhere.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian laughed, tightening his fingers in hers and starting to run. “He was. Look.” Two small two-man subs floated just above the waterline, all but hidden by the gray bulk of the behemoth cigar-shaped 094—class World War Two sub. Looked like a whale and her pups.
“Oh my God. Popov and Ling. Of course.” Her beautiful face filled with excitement. “Can we disable one? I don’t want any nasty surprises. I don’t know how many security guys were left behind. I’m not sure we got them all, but I’m sure I don’t want to see any of them ever again, especially in our rear-view mirror.”
“Good plan.” Although he’d already considered the odds himself. “Yeah. Why don’t you get inside, out of the cold. It’ll take me a few minutes to figure out what goes where.”
He helped Michaela release the catch on the heavy hatch, and helped her board.
She reached over and flung her arms around his neck, kissing him hard and way too short before giving him a little shove. “Hurry.”
CHAPTER NINE - CHAMELEON
It was a damn good thing Michaela wasn’t claustrophobic. The interior of the 150-ton midget sub was about the size of a compact sports car. She didn’t want to think about how the sub had been maintained, if it had been maintained at all. Nor did she want to contemplate how stable the nuclear reactors powering the engines might or might not be.
She shot a quick glance at her watch. The base, and anything on or near it, would be nothing but vapor in less than ninety minutes. “Hurry the hell up, Sebastian. What the frick are you doing out there?”
There was just enough gray light coming through the open hatch to see by, and she perused the simple control panel while she waited, committing the schematic to memory. When he got back, Sebastian was going to want to leave immediately.
Ignoring the rank odor of sweat and stinky feet, she hit the “oxygen” switch. Powered by diesel, an overhead light came on, and the faint hiss of compressed air assured her they wouldn’t suffocate when the hatch closed. Next, she fiddled with the exhaust systems. Exhaled carbon dioxide, and the moisture from their breath, would pass through soda lime, a chemical “scrubber” to render the air breathable for a longer period of time. They had to put at least an hour between themselves and the base. Starting five minutes ago. Hurry, Sebastian!
The little sub was armed with a couple of torpedoes, mines, and timed explosive charges. When last had they been checked? Did they even function? Frick! She hoped like hell she and Sebastian wouldn’t need them.
Conveniently, there was an “on” button. After several tries it caught, the cabin lights flickered to life, the sonar screen lit up, and the gyroscope appeared to be working. She felt the vibration of the propeller C shaft starting to turn.
So far, so good.
The interior heater came next. The cold water would freeze them in a matter of minutes without it.
Ping. Ping. Ping. The sound of bullets glancing off the sub’s thick metal hull brought Michaela’s head up. There was no way a bullet could get through the pressure-resistant hull, but she couldn’t say the same for Sebastian, who was out there sans LockOut.
“Outta the way. Coming through,” he yelled as his booted feet appeared in the rounded hatch opening above her head. “We’ve got company.” Slamming down the hatch, he gave the locking wheel a spin and practically fell into his seat.
A quick glance showed him everything was all systems go. “Good job.”
Michaela glanced out of the small view portal no larger than her hand. “She’s all yours, Captain. Haul ass. There’re at least a dozen guys running around up there like chickens with their heads cut off.”
“I noticed.” The sub started moving forward at a snail’s pace.
She adjusted the air vent to point away from her face. “Please tell me you disabled the other sub.”
“Wasn’t time. It’ll take them a while before they’re ready to give chase. It’ll give us a good head start.”
Go. Go. Go. “We need a few more feet clearance from the dock before we can submerge.” She observed how much room was between them and the mother ship through the thick glass of the observation window, and she wished she could see what, if anything, the other mini-sub was doing. Think positively, she told herself. Visualize them screaming in frustration because nothing works.
To control buoyancy, the submarine had ballast tanks and auxiliaries that would fill with water so she and Sebastian could dive and air so they could surface. She checked the indicator showing the water level as it rose in the tanks. “Starting the fill.”
As the submarine dived, the ballast tanks flooded with water and the air vented until the sub’s overall density became greater than that of the surrounding water. The sub began to sink under the ink-black surface. Movable sets of short hydroplanes on the stern controlled the angle of the dive.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
“Speed it up, sweetheart. Before they pop a hole in this tin can.” Sebastian concentrated on the dive, aware of every breath Michaela took. God, he was proud of her. Despite what she’d endured for the last couple of years, she was calm and centered, and exactly who he needed beside him right now.
In a matter of hours…
First things first, however.
Bubbles, catching the meager light from above, rippled past the three small view portals as the little sub sank deeper and deeper. Eventually the bubbles disappeared in the darkness and there was nothing but blackness. Light didn’t penetrate very far in the ocean, and they’d navigate from here on out virtually blind.
Successfully getting out of the sub base was only a small part of the problem. Now they had to head for open water. The ice ceiling was up to thirty feet deep, with ice stalactites hanging down like inverted mountains, some a hundred feet deep or more.
“I found some navigation charts over there; if you give me the coordinates of the trawler, I’ll chart our course.”
When she’d quickly sorted through the nav charts, chosen one, and unrolled it, Sebastian reeled off the coordinates. Her lips moved and her eyes had the same slightly unfocused look they’d had when she was working out how to sabotage the bomb. Sebastian knew she was doing a hell of a lot of calculating, and he waited silently, enjoying the discovery of yet another skill in this remarkable woman.
Her head came up. ”At our present speed of seventeen knots, our ETA is seventy-one minutes. We’re in trouble.”
Sebastian put everything at full throttle. The sub vibrated with the force of the engines.
“Yeah. I know.” The sub had been designed to resist high pressure for deep-sea research rather than to outrace tangos or nuclear explosions. At least their human pursuers wouldn’t be able to move any faster than he and Michaela could. Sebastian put everything at full throttle and prayed that it wouldn’t just break down completely. The sub vibrated with the force of the engines.
They were down to thirty-some minutes before the nuke back at the base detonated. “They know approximately when we should check in and where we are. If they don’t hear from us by then they’ll send in the DSRV.” At her blank look, he clarified, “Deep-Submergence Rescue Vehicle.”
For several minutes, there was nothing but the sound of the whoosh of compressed air and the steady ping of the sonar. The chance of the T-FLAC team finding them—even with knowledge of their starting point—was slim to none. The Arctic was six and a half times the size of the Mediterranean. They’d never be found.
Suddenly, the sub bounced violently then went into a downward spiral. The gyroscope and other instruments went crazy.
Torpedo.
“Shit. They’re right behind us.”
The ocean was a minefield of ice mountains that glowed eerily in the faint glow from their running lights as they dropped, diving at a steep angle impossible to sustain without landing splat on the ocean floor. “Pull up. Pull up!”
A direct hit would be disastrous, but the after-shocks rocking the tiny sub could be just as lethal. It took
skill and nerves of steel to power the sub flat out as it canted this way and that without rhyme or reason.
An enormous mass of ice floated over them, missing them, but causing a tsunami of wave action that had them fighting to hold on. Their sub wove up and over, between, and under the enormous chunks of lethal ice as they tumbled and drifted around it.
The other sub was right on Sebastian and Michaela’s tail and gaining fast. A second torpedo streaked across their port side, missing them by several yards but spinning their sub like a top for a full minute. As soon as he was able to, Sebastian made a U—turn, ducking behind a long, narrow blade of ice.
Michaela, anticipating what he needed, powered down the lights.
Silence hummed and pinged as the other sub drifted by. They sat there until the ocean was once again pitch-black.
“They know where we are. They’ll be back.” Michaela’s voice was quiet and rock steady.
Sebastian identified the radio transponder, but communications had to wait. Alert the bad guys to their exact location too soon and they could kiss their asses good-bye. “Let’s see if we can find a more secure location to wait them out.”
With Michaela manipulating the intake of water, they sank deeper and deeper, their passage soundless. Icebergs that were merely tips above the water swelled to unnaturally enormous proportions below the water, forming an endless maze of smooth, blue-green ice visible in the oncoming running lights.
He slowed to safely steer through the jutting points and eerie shapes of the frozen underwater mountain ranges.
Sebastian flipped on the exterior microphones. “Shit. Here they come again. Lights off. We need a safe— There.” Big, black gaping holes stared out from the pale ice, sightless eye sockets in a frozen face. “See that black hole over there? Ice cave. Our home away from home.” He aimed the sub through the twists and turns, the space becoming tighter and more confined.
