Imagine (Black Raven Book 4)

by Stella Barcelona

  “Tank and hot well hold one hell of a lot of boiling water and steam,” Marks’ lips were a thin, tense slash as he voiced Ace’s own thoughts. “Can we hit the apparatus from here without risking exposure?”

  Ace considered the angles, distance, and the position from which they’d need to fire. Awkward. He’d be off balance. Plus, he needed to shoot with his left hand, when he was right-handed.

  I’ve done it before.

  He returned Marks’ tense smile with a nod, then placed his rifle on the floor next to him and pulled the Glock out of his shoulder holster. “Fuck, yeah.”

  They heard footsteps in the hallway.

  “I’ve got this,” Ace said. “Hallway is yours.”

  Meanwhile, his Black Raven ear mic was silent. If the agents were in their intended positions, Kamin was almost directly above them, five decks up. Branch and Scott were on the stern side of the ship. And Leo. She was either two decks up, in the crawl space above the theater. Or, she’d given up there and was on her way to the radio room.

  Hell. Come on, Leo. I’d love to communicate with the team, and you. It would be nice to know whether you managed a Mayday call. Even nicer to damn well know you’re okay. That everyone is okay.

  While Marks took care of the Quan operative in the hallway, Ace slid to the floor, positioning himself on the port side of the door. Face against the wall, he pushed open the engine room door, then let the thick wall shield him against the barrage of gunfire that the Quan operatives sent his way. Amidst the loud whir of the engines, he listened for a rhythm in their gunfire.

  Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Pause. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Pause. Pop-pop-pop-pop. Pause.

  From his position he couldn’t see the men or the apparatus providing their cover. Didn’t matter. The expansion tank and hot well were large enough targets, and he knew the direction to fire. At the next pause in their gunfire, he held his Glock in the doorway, just inches from the floor, aimed it towards the hot well, and fired. Yells sounded as boiling hot water and scalding steam escaped the tanks.

  With Marks behind him, Ace advanced into the engine room. They both fired at the tank as they ran through, then took the stairs leading to the bottom platform at a run. The Quans had fallen from the elevated platform, and were screaming as they writhed in pain on the engine room floor, near the wastewater system. One of the Quans sat up and lifted his rifle. The other two crawled for their weapons. Ace and Marks fired three shots as they took the stairs leading to the bottom platform at a run. When they reached the floor, Ace went right, to the starboard side. Marks went left, to the port side.

  Three more Quans, down.

  Ace got to his knees when he reached the hydraulic system, as Skylar, on the ship’s PA system and on line sixteen, said, “Ling Wen. Surrender. We have your wife. She has only fifteen minutes to live. Get your ass to the theater. Now.”

  Given the engine noise, Ace wouldn’t have been able to make out Skylar’s words if he’d only been listening to the ship’s PA system. With Wendt’s earbud firmly in place, Ace not only heard Skylar’s demand to Ling Wen, he also heard May Wen’s screams of horror that followed Skylar’s demands. Sure as hell, her screams were confirmation that Skylar wasn’t bluffing about having her. When May Wen quieted, Skylar called five names, whom he directed to proceed to the life rafts and ready them for evacuation. Ace ground his teeth, wondering if Wen had heard the announcement and what he’d do.

  Ace unscrewed the components of the power take-off clutch assembly, and disconnected the wires. When the starboard hydraulic system was disabled, he rose. Marks was hunched over the port side hydraulic system, pulling the components apart. Overhead, two men entered the engine room through the stern access door, hoisting their weapons as they ran along the grated walkway. Ace fired as the men aimed their weapons. They were on the third level and had reached the spare parts area. Some of Ace’s bullets pinged off spare propellers. At least two hit their target. The men fell over the railing.

  Before the two men thudded to the engine room floor, gunfire whizzed past Ace. A bullet grazed his backpack, providing a solid clue that his plan to draw Quan personnel to him was working.

  Maybe a little too well.

  Ace crouched, spun, and ducked behind a steel beam, then peered around it to see two Quan operatives running through the control room door. Two more were on their heels. He and Marks killed all four. Ace counted that twenty-one Quan operatives were down. It was a sizable dent in their forces.

  Time to move on.

  Engine whir suddenly quieted, marking a change in forward speed. Ace’s position in the engine room was almost at midship. The boat started rolling, from side to side. The gentle rocking motion told Ace that forward speed hadn’t simply slowed the ship—it had stopped it. Presumably, Skylar wanted to facilitate an evacuation.

  Good luck with that.

  Ace noted the time.

  0222.

  Eleven minutes before he’d allow himself to worry about not hearing from Leo. Twelve minutes before May Wen would lose her life, unless Skylar was stopped.

  In Ace’s mind, his immediate objective became the man he now knew to be Skylar. A tall man, in camo-gear. Pale skin. Dark hair and eyes. Standing on a stage terrorizing innocents.

  Stop Skylar. Figure out who’s pulling his strings.

  He had a lot to do in very little time. He inhaled the engine room’s scents of oil, diesel, and moist air. At least he’d made some progress. Unless Skylar and his company had rope ladders, they were going to have a damn hard time getting the hostages, or themselves, off the ship without hydraulic assistance.

  Gesturing for Marks to follow him, Ace ran to the engine room’s midship doorway, which opened on the Thalia Deck, directly beneath the Clio deck. Now that he no longer needed to worry about surveillance cams, the midship doorway would provide the fastest access to return to the theater. The route might coincide with the one route that Wen would take to get into the theater, assuming he was headed there.

  At the door, Ace unzipped the side pocket of his backpack and pulled out his thermal imaging scope. As he opened the door, Skylar, on the PA system, said, “Ling Wen. Surrender. Your wife has ten minutes to live. Tick. Tock.”

  A fresh batch of screams came from May Wen. Ace blocked out her terror as he stepped into the cool night air and ran towards a deck-to-deck support beam for cover. While Ace didn’t need to worry about surveillance cams along the exterior starboard side of the ship, he had the same concern there as he and Leo had when they’d been on their balcony; he didn’t want anyone on Follower to see them.

  With Marks beside him, standing guard, Ace lifted his scope and edged forward so that could peer around the support beam. Not more than a mile away, Follower, with its lights out, was parallel to Imagine. Both ships rocked side to side in the ocean’s gentle swells, with almost no forward motion.

  Thermal imaging made details visible. It had three decks above the waterline, holding at least twenty men, at various points along the vessel. All of them carried rifles. Two men were on the top deck, in front of the radar arch. Ace squinted, studying objects on the ground next to them. Not rifles. Too big. “Surface-to-air missiles.”

  Marks gave a low whistle. “Interesting.”

  “Not in a good way.”

  A small helicopter sat on the top deck, behind the radar arch. With its large cabin shape and tail rotor, the chopper looked like an Airbus H-135. Easily maneuverable. The rotors weren’t spinning now, but he knew it could be aboard Imagine within minutes. Six passengers could fit in it easily. Eight if they pushed.

  “Chopper’s going to be their fallback when they figure out lifeboats won’t work,” Ace said, reminding himself to keep most of his body behind a support beam. He scanned the deck, left and right. No sign of Wen, or anyone else.

  “Copy that.”

  Thermal imaging revealed that on the bow, bulky housing looked out of place on the otherwise sleek ship. The apparatus was square, approximately five feet tall and five
feet wide. A matching apparatus was on the stern. Two missiles were in place in each housing, poised for firing towards Imagine, each approximately six feet long with a diameter of approximately twenty inches, give or take an inch. Two men were at the missile housing on the bow. More were on the stern. “Looks like anti-ship missiles. Four. At the ready.”

  “Holy fucking crap.”

  “Not exactly helpful, Marks. Do some thinking here.”

  “Yes, sir. They’re going to scuttle Imagine.”

  “No, Marks.” Ace took cover again behind the beam and turned to the younger agent. “They’re planning to scuttle her. We’re here to stop that from happening.”

  Marks nodded, fighting past the uncertainty Ace read in his eyes. “Yes, sir. Okay. I’m with you. But…how?”

  Wendt’s earpiece crackled to life, with Skylar yelling for someone to fix the hydraulic system so that the lifeboats could launch. Ace smiled and told Marks what he’d just heard, then continued with the scuttling scenario. “Before they’d scuttle this ship, someone like Skylar, at least, will try to evacuate. We’re not going to let that happen. Which also means I can’t kill Skylar right away.”

  Fucking hell, but I’m walking a tightrope.

  Ace edged forward again and refocused his scope. They were probably of the surface skimming variety, radar-guided. He couldn’t pick out more details. Then again, he didn’t need many more. The missiles were sizable enough to pack serious destructive force. “Can’t tell exactly the type. Or how they’ll be guided. Given the short distance the missiles have to travel to reach Imagine, I’d say details don’t matter.”

  “Given the amount of time that we’ve been out to sea, the depth here could be anywhere from a thousand to five thousand feet. Or more.” Marks’ tone had grown calmer, more matter-of-fact. “It would be hard to recover evidence at that depth.”

  Ace nodded. “Save for elusive transfers of money through complex financial transactions that could be impossible to trace, the bombing might very well destroy all evidence of the mass-hijacking and murder. Unless we succeed.” Ace lowered the scope, returned it to his backpack, and searched for one of the small, orb-like cameras he’d packed. The device auto-focused and had thermal-imaging capabilities. He attached the camera on the exterior of the support beam, with full view of Follower. For now, the camera was useless. But once Leo reestablished comms, they’d be able to send the video feed to Ragno and the cyber department in Denver.

  “Let’s end Skylar’s show. With just the two of us advancing into the theater, we don’t have many options. We’ll detonate flashbangs, then move in. Once in, we’ll get an assist from Leo, who’s in the crawl space above the theater.”

  As Marks nodded, Skylar’s voice, on the PA system, interrupted any response. “Ling Wen,” Skylar said. “Your wife has seven minutes to live.”

  A fresh round of May Wen’s screams and pleas for her husband’s help filled the ship in reverberating surround-sound, compliments of Imagine’s state-of-the-art PA system. Before her screams faded, Ace and Marks were on their way to the theater, climbing the exterior stairwell that would open onto the Clio Deck. Double doors there would lead to the foyer that separated the casino and the theater.

  As Ace reached the deck, he saw Wen and Kamin running towards the same doors. They saw Ace and slowed their forward momentum.

  “I disabled the surveillance cams, but couldn’t signal Mayday. Or restore our comms,” Kamin reported. “No sign of Leo.”

  “We need to stop them,” Wen said.

  “We will.” Ace incorporated them into his plan and told them the logistics. He noted the time—0231. Well past high time to alert the world as to what was happening aboard Imagine. Goddamn time to have agent-to-agent comms restored. If he didn’t hear from Leo soon, he’d implode. Yet the only sound he heard on his embedded ear mic was silence.

  “Goddammit, Leo.” Ace muttered. “Where the fuck are you?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  2:20 a.m.

  With her laptop perched on the oversized, shiny black boots of a larger-than-life Christmas nutcracker, Leo sat lotus-style in the props booth. She glanced up, into the lifeless eyes of the figurine that was to play a part in the Christmas show.

  Fairytales. Useless. As usual.

  She was wedged between wheeled platforms that held a top-hatted snowman and a red-nosed reindeer. The wheels had brakes that kept them stationary. Various stage flats, painted with idyllic scenes of a Norman Rockwell-ish, small-town Main Street at Christmas, were behind the statues.

  Without Christmas music in the theater, every sound was amplified. Each click that she made on her keyboard seemed loud. As did Skylar’s footsteps, as he moved along the front of the stage and threatened the audience, and May Wen’s sniffles between yells. Every now and then, she heard heavy footsteps of Quan operatives in the backstage crossover area, behind the props booth, as they followed Skylar’s orders and moved out to other areas of the ship.

  The front wall of the booth was a portion of the lightweight, plywood wall that bordered the rear of the stage. Painted black, it blended seamlessly with the rear stage wall. Aside from that thin piece of plywood, only a few feet of stage, the green velvet house drapes, and the three Christmas trees that were in front of the drapes, separated Leo from Skylar.

  She whispered her second attempt at agent-to-agent contact. “Leo to Alpha, Omega, Kamin. Copy?”

  Silence.

  Hell.

  “Could the problem be our encryption?”

  Leo’s whispered question was directed at Ragno. She was pretty certain the answer was no, but when in doubt and in a hurry, she was plenty happy to ask others their opinion. She’d reestablished communications with headquarters a few minutes earlier, with the completion of the most important task she’d ever performed as a Black Raven agent. Mayday.

  Now, all agents who worked cyber support for field ops were hanging on the silence that had been the reply to her radio check, while also urgently working on the tasks required by Imagine’s predicament. Ragno led the cyber-support team, with Zeus’ troubleshooting team working alongside them.

  “Shouldn’t be.” Ragno’s voice was clear through Leo’s ear mic, as though she was sitting next to Leo. “And let’s hope not, because our lines need encryption, at least until I manage to isolate Skylar’s comms and shut him down. Starting at ground zero would be at least a fifteen-minute task. Let’s try a couple more times within existing parameters. This should work.”

  Leo clicked quietly at her laptop, as she and Ragno both tackled the problem of reconnecting Ace and the other agents. Her laptop screen had three windows open. One window showed the commands she and Ragno were entering to open the agent-to-agent comm line. Another showed the video feed of the theater from the camera she’d left in the overhead vent. The third showed ongoing dialogue in the form of instant messaging thought bubbles between cyber-support agents in Denver, as they tackled the myriad tasks that would lead to who-what-and-how-the-hell-we’re-fixing-this.

  As she worked, Leo felt a shift in the ship’s movement. Stage flats and props creaked as the ship rolled right to left. The stabilizers adjusted to the different movement, and the ship became steadier. She glanced at the time on the computer screen—0222.

  “We’re slowing,” she told Ragno. “Virtually stopping. That has to mean Skylar’s making some kind of move. Probably an evacuation. But why now? He’s only gotten money from about a third of the hostages.”

  “Yes, but he’s got May Wen, so he knows her husband’s coming,” Ragno said. “Odd, though, that Ling Wen hasn’t appeared already. On another note, with the number of operatives Skylar is calling who aren’t responding, he’s got to be worried about sabotage. I suspect he’ll abandon his efforts with the other hostages entirely once Wen shows up.”

  “Bank transactions with endless security combos take a while, even when hostages are sweating bullets in their eagerness to comply.”

  Leo clicked through several mor
e commands, then waited for the cursor signal to reappear, which would signify that the comm line was open. When the cursor didn’t appear, she rolled her shoulders, rubbed her hands together, and started over. While she worked, she watched Skylar through the video feed. He paced a slow path in front of the Christmas trees and in front of May Wen.

  In the IM dialogue that ran along the left margin of her screen, Denver-based agents were discussing the ongoing attempt to determine with whom Skylar was communicating on line four.

  “Haven’t determined the encryption program Quan is using.”

  “You try Inviso-Crypto? Latest greatest.”

  “Trying I-C now.”

  “Skylar’s listening on line four at least as much as he’s talking. Maybe listening more.”

  Leo’s pulse quickened at that observation. Why hadn’t she thought of it herself? She typed. “Good point. Listening as much as talking suggests that Skylar isn’t the guy in charge, right?”’

  “Would seem that way.”

  “Skylar’s line 4—most comms are definitely coming from locations on Imagine.”

  Thinking of First Officer Raznick, who’d become even more of a person of interest once Leo gave Denver the man’s name and preliminary searches started showing odd banking transactions, Leo typed, “Could comms be coming from helm station?”

  The agent replied, “Don’t know. Yet. Stay tuned.”

  “Investigate First Officer Raznick.”

  A fresh batch of chilling screams from May Wen stole her attention. Each new octave of horror strengthened Leo’s resolve to figure out a way to stop Skylar from executing the woman.