Charon's landing m-2

by Jack Du Brul

  “I think we’re going to make it. I’m trying to redistribute oil within the holds. I need to rebalance the ship.” Hauser looked up at Mercer seriously. “If we were a minute later, there wouldn’t have been anything I could do. The ship would have broken up.”

  Without warning, the air in the pump room came alive as if an electric charge had arced through the space. A wild burst of nine-millimeter ammunition smashed into the steel walls and ceiling, fragmented into hundreds of supersonic pieces, filling the air like a maddened swarm. Over the shriek created by the fusillade came two concussive booms of a larger-caliber gun. Mercer was spared from the assault by a metal cabinet used to store crude samples taken from the tanks during loading. Hauser was not.

  The captain caught a brutal spread across his broad back, red blooms erupting on his coat where the hot metal punctured cloth and skin. He pitched forward, screaming. He hit a desk, balanced for a second, and then fell to the floor, writhing as though caught in a seizure.

  Mercer ducked around the cabinet in time to see a dark figure lurch from the doorway, getting off a snap shot he knew had been too slow. He edged to the door to take a quick look down the hall and almost had his throat slit for his effort. Lieutenant Krutchfield was leaning there, his face blackened and bloody. There were three bleeding holes in his uniform, and his Kevlar body armor looked as though it had been stampeded by a herd of buffalo. The knife he held at Mercer’s throat had drawn a thin line of blood before the SEAL realized he was about to kill one of the good guys and checked the motion.

  “I almost had the son of a bitch, but I’m out of ammo.”

  Krutchfield’s pistol was locked back empty and still smoked in his other hand. “I thought you were his backup.”

  “Christ, he just opened fire in this room.” Fear stripped Mercer of his usual calm. “Do you think he would have done that to his own man?”

  “Sorry.” Krutchfield was fading fast. “I’m a little messed up right now. I can’t seem to think too well.”

  “No shit. You’ve lost a lot of blood.” Mercer guided the commando into the pump room and laid him on the floor next to Hauser. The captain had quieted to an occasional whimper. Mercer couldn’t tell if he had gone into shock. “Krutchfield? Is your other man still around?”

  “I don’t think so. We got jumped pretty hard coming up. There were at least six terrs waiting for us. After securing the top of the ladder, we separated and went into pursuit. That wasn’t one of my best ideas,” the SEAL admitted.

  “Just make sure you live to regret it.” Mercer checked the clips on his two pistols, combining the half-empty magazines into one fully charged weapon. “Stay with Hauser. Do whatever you can for him. I saw a Coast Guard ship headed our way, probably called in by Devil Fish. Help will be here in just a few minutes.”

  Mercer was almost out of the room when Krutchfield called to him. “Be careful of this guy. I had him in my sights when I pulled the trigger, but he’d moved by the time the bullets arrived. He’s the quickest bastard I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thanks.” It was news Mercer didn’t need.

  In the hallway, Mercer took a second to examine the trail of blood splattered on the decking. Maybe the fleeing terrorist wouldn’t be so fast anymore. With the pistol held before him, he followed the blood, keeping himself covered as best he could. As the trail led him out of the superstructure, he increased his pace, feeling that the terrorist was more interested in escaping than finishing what he’d started in the pump room.

  Finally coming out into a naturally lighted corridor, the pale sun entering through long rectangular windows, Mercer realized that the terrorist wasn’t headed toward the rope ladder. They had come out on the main deck on the opposite side of the tanker and well forward of where it had been left dangling. This close to the main deck, Mercer could feel the radiant heat of the crude oil that covered it. It had been about one hundred twenty degrees when it was pumped from the ground at Prudhoe Bay and had lost little of its warmth since. It actually felt good compared to the sharp October air, but the smell was tremendous, so strong he could see the fumes rising off the slick.

  Staring down the expanse of the main deck it was easy to see the footprints left by JoAnn Riggs’ last terrorist, their shape distorted as the oil slowly oozed back to cover them but distinguishable nevertheless. In the very far distance, past the manifold towers, a figure ran, favoring one leg as he moved but maintaining a good pace on the slick surface.

  Mercer dashed up to the raised metal catwalk that ran down the center of the deck in hopes the dry surface would be quicker going than chasing directly after the terrorist. He was surprised, but thankful, to find an old bicycle propped up against a support stanchion, the tired-looking two-wheeler left there as a convenience to crews who needed to get to the distant bow during routine ship’s operations. Every supertanker usually carried them.

  In seconds, he was gaining rapidly.

  Wolf had been certain he’d heard voices as he and JoAnn Riggs were leaving the pump room. As they’d walked away, he could almost feel eyes on the back of his head, but he hadn’t turned to look. It was only after he and Riggs had gotten to the main deck, and he saw the human carnage that had once been his team, that he decided to go back into the ship and dispose of whoever was opposing them. Riggs continued to the boarding ladder and the cabin cruiser. Wolf knew that the pump room would be the logical target for a counterstrike. It was the only place on the ship to prevent her imminent destruction.

  As he fled along the deck, running as best he could with the stinging wound to his thigh where Krutchfield had shot him, he realized that going back had been a critical, maybe fatal, mistake. He had abandoned his training by giving in to emotions. Even if the destruction of the Petromax Arctica was averted, he had done his job. Yet he’d returned to the pump room and gotten seriously wounded for his efforts.

  Now he raced for the bow, hoping the SEAL who’d shot him would follow. If he was to die on this cursed ship, he wanted the opportunity to take out just one of the Americans.

  Wolf looked behind him, hoping to see the SEAL giving chase, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a madman on a bicycle racing toward him on the elevated walkway over his head. He tossed his empty weapon onto the deck, and from the deep pocket of his cargo pants withdrew a wax-coated flare he’d carried with him since the beginning of the scuttling operation. It had been his assignment to ignite the oil lying on the deck just before he and Riggs and the rest of the team fled the vessel.

  Mercer heaved the bicycle into a tight skid on the catwalk when he saw the figure below turn and toss away a machine pistol. He let the bike clatter to the deck as he stood to take careful aim with his pistol. Just before he got into a proper stance, the terrorist jerked his right hand, and a red sun burst from his fist, an acrid trail of smoke billowing from the flare he’d been carrying.

  “Drop your weapon or this whole ship goes up in flames,” Wolf shouted at what he thought was a SEAL on the spidery walkway.

  “You don’t need to do this. Throw the flare over the side of the ship,” Mercer countered. Wolf stood in a pool of oil about two inches deep but covering nearly four acres. Just behind him, the deck bubbled as more crude leached out of an improperly secured hatch cover.

  Two hundred thousand tons of highly explosive crude oil. Two hundred kilotons. Facing his own death, Mercer absently wondered if a ton of TNT had more or less explosive force than a ton of oil. He recalled that Hiroshima had been leveled with the equivalent of twenty kilotons. Even if the ratio between TNT and oil wasn’t close, he was still standing on a bomb many times more powerful than Little Boy.

  He tried to remember what Hauser had said about the gases in the storage tanks. Why did the air in the tanks have to be inert? It was a sign of Mercer’s exhaustion that he couldn’t remember what it was about oil that made the air in the tanks so important.

  “Yes, I do need to do this,” Wolf shouted back, the flare waving in his hands like a Fourth of July s
parkler, as mesmerizing as a cobra’s dance. “If for no other reason than to know you will die with me.”

  Mercer tightened his grip on the gun, keeping the sights centered on Wolf’s chest. Then he remembered. Oil is combustible only in a narrow range of gas ratios; to burn it had to be mixed with precisely 11 percent oxygen. Too much or too little and the mixture was noncombustive unless the oil was preheated first. Hoping that the mix was in his favor and without thinking further, Mercer adjusted his aim and fired off three rapid rounds. The 9mm bullets shredded Wolf’s shoulder so that his arm swung uselessly at his side, attached to his trunk by a few scraps of flesh. The flare, its tip burning at several hundred degrees, fell from his deadened fingers, landing with a sluggish splash onto the deck.

  Wolf screamed in pain and fell to his knees. He then saw the crimson flare lying beside him, the bright flame shooting from its tip like a tiny rocket motor. He tried to stand, but the wound in his leg and the damage done to his shoulder made his movements so uncoordinated that he pitched forward into the slick. In seconds, he was drowning, unable to turn his face out of the ooze.

  As soon as he’d fired and saw that Wolf had dropped the flare, Mercer vaulted over the railing of the catwalk. While the flare had not yet ignited the crude, he didn’t want to push his luck. He landed hard, his legs kicking out on the slippery surface so that he fell on his backside, the impact jarring his buttocks and lower back. Agony crashed against the top of his skull. Sliding more than crawling, he reached for the incendiary, scooping it up and holding it high over his head just as the globules of oil that dripped from it burst into yellow flames that landed on his body. He used his free hand to beat out the tiny fires and carefully got to his feet, shuffling to the Arctica’s railing. He heaved the flare far out into the Strait, well beyond where the oil had leaked from her holds.

  “Mud Skipper, this is Devil Fish. Come in, please.”

  Mercer stood by the rail watching the flare sputter in the water and didn’t want to respond to the submarine lurking below the ship, but slowly he began to hear an alarming noise. He fished the small radio from his pocket. “This is Mud Skipper. Go ahead.”

  “Sonar is picking up a prop signature, twin screws accelerating away. The signal matches that of the cabin cruiser. Can you confirm you are aboard it?”

  He looked down the length of the ship, past where the bridge wing jutted out over the side of the huge vessel. Beyond the stern, he could see the Happyhour running from the tanker toward the open Pacific. With Krutchfield and Hauser in the pump room and the rest of the SEALs dead — as well as the Arctica’s crew, only terrorists or JoAnn Riggs could be on the fleeing cabin cruiser.

  “Negative, Devil Fish. The boat is carrying terrorists. Can you take them out?”

  “Affirmative.”

  The swift passage of the USS Tallahassee only thirty or so feet below the surface actually created a disturbance in the water like the movement of some great fish. Mercer couldn’t believe the speed of the attack submarine or its incredible agility as it went off in pursuit of the Happyhour. Watching intently, he waited for the explosion of a torpedo strike against the vessel’s transom, but it never came. The Happyhour was just a small speck near the horizon when suddenly a shining black leviathan rose up from the sea directly behind her.

  Like a playful dolphin, the nose of the USS Tallahassee exploded into the wake of the Happyhour, the huge hull coming forty feet out of the water before her incredible weight overcame the inertia of her atomic engines and she smashed back into the Strait, walls of white water blowing out from the impact. Almost as quickly as she appeared, the Tallahassee vanished once again. The submarine crash dove as soon as she broached the surface, and as the Tallahassee sank under the waves she created a huge vortex behind the cruiser as it tried to escape. Four thousand tons of water rushed back into the void the sub’s hull had produced with her brief appearance.

  JoAnn Riggs and the pleasure boat Happyhour were sucked into the maelstrom, vanishing as if they had never existed. The cruiser was swamped so quickly by the maneuver that a seagull racing above the white-hulled boat was also drawn under and drowned. A few seconds passed and the broiling water calmed. There was no debris to mark where Riggs had died.

  Had Mercer not been watching, he wouldn’t have believed it. One minute he could clearly see the Happyhour racing for the open ocean, and the next it looked as though it had been swallowed by some nightmarish creature, like Jonah being consumed by the whale. Gone. Forever.

  “Devil Fish to Mud Skipper, Devil Fish to Mud Skipper. Mission accomplished. Coast Guard reports they will be alongside in two minutes. There are lightering tankers en route to pump off your cargo, and Seattle authorities have been alerted to an oil spill. Response teams are on their way. We are continuing on to our regularly scheduled mission already in progress.”

  Mercer smiled at the jubilant voice over the radio, not knowing it was the submarine’s captain but not surprised later when he found out it was. “Roger, Devil Fish. This is Mud Skipper. Over and out and thank you very much.” He began trudging back to the superstructure where a Coast Guard cutter was getting into position to tie up.

  With only eight minutes left before detonation, Coast Guard personnel discovered and disarmed the charges placed between the Arctica’s double hull. The tide that Riggs and Kerikov had counted on to dump oil all along the shores of Puget Sound was not nearly as high as predicted that day, and the twelve million gallons of crude spilled, though more than the Exxon Valdez, did not cause nearly the environmental catastrophe as intended.

  A chopper flew Captain Hauser and Lieutenant Krutchfield to a hospital, and both survived. Knowing there was only one more detail to take care of, Mercer was beginning to feel he could finally put an end to the entire affair.

  The United Arab Emirates

  Looking at a globe, it is almost impossible to get any farther away from Seattle than the Persian Gulf. They lie on nearly exact opposite sides of the planet. Yet it was still a little quicker for Mercer to fly first to New York, then continue east across Europe and on to the Middle East, rather than across the Eurasian landmass. He had no recollection of the transcontinental flight. He slept from the moment he boarded in Seattle until the plane barked its wheels in New York. Because the terrorist attack at London’s Heathrow Airport had so disrupted air travel, the only quick flight he could get to Europe was aboard Air France’s supersonic Concorde. He would have preferred a slower mode of transportation since he moved through JFK like a zombie and had planned to keep sleeping on the transatlantic leg of his journey. He managed only a two-hour catnap on the slender missilelike aircraft.

  In Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport was absolute chaos as thousands of stranded passengers tried to make their way to the British Isles. Had he been more alert, Mercer would have cared, but as it was, he dozed through the hour layover before his connection to Abu Dhabi.

  The brutal glare of the desert sun in Abu Dhabi came as a relief to the cold, damp misery he’d experienced for the past couple of days. It felt as if his bones would need weeks to dissipate the chill of his plunge into the icy water while escaping from Petromax’s oil rig. He carried only a small bag of hastily purchased clothing from Kennedy Airport, so he was through customs in minutes, past the enormous duty-free shopping mall in the airport, and out onto the strip of road abutting the international terminal.

  Waiting for his contact, a colonel named Wayne Bigelow, Mercer set his bag at his feet, ignoring the taxi and limousine drivers soliciting fares into Abu Dhabi City, and closed his eyes once again, nodding off as he stood against a lamppost. After he got the chill from his body, his next order of business would be to pay back more of the tremendous sleep debt he’d incurred.

  A car horn sounded close by and dragged him back to consciousness. Mercer had formed a pretty good impression of Colonel Bigelow from the telephone call he’d placed back at Sea-Tac Airport and more than half expected to see the old soldier driving a battered Land Rover, o
ne with its top hacked off and a heavy tire bolted to its hood. Instead, Bigelow leaned from the open window of a new Mercedes 600 SEL sedan, its glossy black paint radiant in the sunlight.

  “Dr. Mercer, I presume?” Bigelow’s accent was strictly Colonial English, like a voice from a bygone era. His silvered mustache was waxed to needle points, and his face was as dark and weathered as tree bark. Even seated in the luxury automobile, he retained a rigid military bearing. Mercer guessed that when Bigelow died, rigor mortis would actually loosen his spine. He liked the older man immediately.

  “What’s left of him.” Mercer pushed himself off the lamppost and, grabbing his bag, walked to the car.

  “Sorry I’m late, but I wanted to catch the fireworks this morning. Damn impressive those Hornets your navy uses. Scream like the bloody hounds of hell, they do.” Bigelow noted how slowly Mercer walked around the Mercedes and how gingerly he eased himself into the leather passenger seat. “Looks like you and Khalid Khuddari have the same tailor.” Mercer’s right arm was in a cloth sling to lessen the tension on his more severely torn shoulder tendons.

  “It’s amazing the sympathy you get with one of these. Hell, even the Air France flight attendants were civil.”

  “Should have come down on BOAC.” Bigelow still used the old name for British Airways. “But I’m sure the flap at Heathrow has mucked them up for a few days.”

  “So everything went as planned?” Mercer asked. Between the time spent waiting in airports and on planes and the hours he’d lost traveling thirteen time zones east, a full day had passed since he and Captain Hauser had prevented the destruction of the Petromax Arctica.

  “Like clockwork,” Bigelow replied with a grand smile. The Mercedes purred along at about a hundred miles an hour on the ribbon of asphalt bisecting the white desert sand. “I’ll let Minister Khuddari fill you in on the details.”

  “I understand from my conversation with his secretary that he was severely injured in London during an attack at the British Museum and later at Heathrow.”