Hell Ship

by David Wood

  It was not a surrender. Outgunned as they were, there was no way for just the two of them to win by staying on offense. But Scalpel knew Ray well enough to divine his meaning.

  Play dead. Wait for them to come to us.

  The ploy had worked. After a minute or so, two of the gunmen came to investigate. Ray and Scalpel waited until they were fully through the door then took them out. Capitalizing on the fact that the remaining enemies were holding their fire to avoid shooting their own men, Ray had used one of the dead men as a shield and bulldozed his way through the door, dropping the last two before they could get off a shot.

  Despite their losses, Scalpel was savoring the victory, but Ray flew into a rage.

  “Where in the hell is it?”

  It took Scalpel a moment to realize what his employer was talking about. There was no treasure in the treasure vault.

  There was also no sign of Maddock and the others, but Ray didn’t seem concerned with that. He snatched up something up from one of the dead men; a beret, adorned with a Templar Cross. He threw it to the ground with a disgusted snarl and shone his light around the room, catching motes of dust and whorls of smoke, until he found the back entrance. “That way. Hurry.”

  Ray took off at a full sprint. Scalpel breathed a curse of his own, and struggled to keep up, but every step was an ordeal. He reached the doorway, saw the stairs, and groaned again.

  Suddenly he was yanked backward. His flashlight and pistol went flying as he flailed his arms, but there was nothing to arrest his fall and he slammed backward onto the stone floor. An immense figured loomed out of the smoke and dust. In the ambient glow of scattered lights, he saw the Indian, Bonebrake, advancing toward him with murder in his eyes.

  Scalpel crabbed away, scrambling back to his feet. His pain had vanished momentarily, overwhelmed by a surge of fight-or-flight endorphins, though for the veteran soldier, there was only one choice: fight. He whipped his combat knife from its sheath and reversed direction, charging Bones and slashing the blade ahead of him.

  Bones ignored the attack, side-stepped a slash would otherwise have struck home, and planted a kick squarely in Scalpel’s chest. Scalpel was driven back, stumbling but not quite losing his footing this time. Before he could recover, Bones hit him again, harder.

  Scalpel realized an instant too late that this last blow had not been designed merely to knock him down. Bones had lined him up like a billiard ball and knocked him squarely toward the main door to the vault. Scalpel stumbled over the fallen slab that once blocked the way, and landed in a tangle of dead bodies—fallen Templars and his own teammates.

  Bones was on him again before he could recover. He plucked Scalpel up like a sack of dog food and heaved him away one final time. The hard landing Scalpel braced himself for didn’t happen immediately. Instead, he felt his body accelerating, his guts leaping up as he went into freefall.

  Bones had thrown him off the stairs.

  His next memory was of pain. His breath was gone, driven from his lungs by the impact with the floor. He lay there unmoving, unable to move, hardly able even to believe that he was still alive…but he was.

  His breath caught and with that gasp came another jolt of pain. He knew he had broken something, maybe a lot of somethings. He could almost feel shards of bone slicing into his organs.

  But…still…alive.

  Maybe he wasn’t as badly injured as he thought. He saw a light at the top of the spiral staircase and tried to judge the distance of his fall… thirty feet? Forty at the most?

  The light was moving. Winding around the corkscrew stairs, descending. Bones was still coming.

  The fight had gone out Scalpel, but there was still a little bit of flight left in him. He heaved himself onto his side, ignoring the crunching noise that could only be parts of his own skeleton grinding together, and then got to hands and knees. He couldn’t seem to get his feet under him, but thought he might be able to crawl, and so he did.

  The passage out of the stair chamber lay just ahead and he plunged into its dark depths. He measured out the journey in a rhythm of grunts; after about twenty such agonized exhalations, he saw a light behind him.

  Bones made no sound as he walked, but Scalpel could judge the pace of his pursuit by the increasing brightness.

  He’s playing with me, Scalpel thought angrily, but there was nothing to be done about it. He had to keep going, keep moving.

  He reached another of the round chambers, and was confronted by a choice of paths. Which way? He had been following Ray during the ingress and while he vaguely remembered that his employer had said something about making the Sign of the Cross, the significance of the statement eluded him.

  Don’t stop. Keep moving.

  He crossed the chamber to the opposite arched opening and kept going. Bones was only a few steps behind, but made no effort to close the remaining distance. Instead, after taking only a few steps into the passage, he stopped.

  It took Scalpel a few seconds to process this change. He kept going, deeper into the tunnel, then finally turned. “What are you waiting for?”

  Bones shone the light in Scalpel’s face, blinding him momentarily. “I want you to understand why this is happening.”

  Scalpel knew why. “What? The girl? Is that it?”

  “Her name was Gabby.”

  “She sold you out.” Every word was an effort, forced out through teeth gritted together against the pain.

  “Then that was between me and her.” The light got brighter, closer. “This is between me and you.”

  Some part of Scalpel wanted to get up, stand his ground, face death on his feet…but the reptile brain controlled his body now. He shied away from the light and squirmed further into the passage. If Bones wasn’t going to come after him, maybe he could get away.

  It did not occur to him until he heard a heard a loud click followed by a strange noise that seemed to come from behind the walls, that there might be another reason why Bones was holding back.

  Bones looked on impassively as the fires took Scalpel. He felt no deep satisfaction or solace in the man’s immolation. He wasn’t even sure why he felt such a compulsion to avenge Gabby, especially if the accusations against her were true, as they seemed to be. He had liked her, and maybe it was the fact that he had let those emotions make him vulnerable that troubled him the most. Maybe if he hadn’t been distracted by her advances….

  Doesn’t matter.

  The only reason he lingered to watch Scalpel burn was to ensure that, this time, the man stayed dead. When the supply of oil in the Templar trap finally ran out and the flames surrounding the smoking corpse flickered out, he turned away and struck the image forever from his memory.

  CHAPTER 25

  The blast erased most of John Lee Ray from existence. What parts of him that were not vaporized by the explosion joined with the spray of steel shrapnel that shredded the entire upper section of the rail car.

  On the lowermost tier, Dane and Alex were sheltered from the deadly spray, but the concussion in the enclosed space felt like a slap from God. Dane had covered up and remembered to open his mouth at the last second, a precaution, albeit a desperate one, to survive the sudden expansion of air spaces in the body from the heat caused by the overpressure wave. It must have worked because he didn’t die, but for a few seconds he thought that might have been a preferable outcome.

  His awareness returned almost as abruptly as it had left. He felt Alex moving beneath him….

  She’s still alive. Good

  But then he felt something else as well, a tremor that vibrated up through the floor. He struggled to a sitting position. The damage to the car was so extensive, he felt a momentary dislocation. All the windows had blown out and the roof had peeled back like the lid of a sardine can, opening the car to the night sky. A blast of frigid air hit him in the face, and only then did he finally grasp what all of these disconnected sensations were telling him.

  “We’re moving.”

  Alex stirr
ed and then looked up at him. She seemed unhurt and after looking around for a moment, her mouth moved but Dane couldn’t tell if she’d said anything. He got to his feet and peered through the nearest side window.

  The dark landscape was rushing by, much faster than he’d seen it move during his earlier ascent. Dangerously fast. They weren’t just moving, he realized, they were out of control.

  With a steadying hand against the sidewall, he clambered up the steps to the damaged upper portion. The end of the car had been almost completely destroyed. Nothing remained of the operator’s booth. Through the gaping hole, he saw that the open air platform he’d climbed onto only a few moments before, was now dangling precariously, held in place by a single twisted metal bracket. As it bounced and clattered noisily along the railway ties, he glimpsed something else trailing behind the car, a length of cable, frayed at the end where the platform had severed it.

  Now he understood why they were moving. The funicular functioned by connecting two equally weighted rail cars with a cable; the cars acted as counterweights for each other, providing both motive and braking force with just a little extra energy from the drive motor at the top of the line. With the drive cable broken and the onboard safety brakes evidently disabled in the explosion, the car was essentially a roller coaster, hurtling down the track, accelerating to the physical limits of its rolling wheels, which far exceeded safe operating speed. Dane didn’t know the length of the upper line. The lower line, from Schwandegg to Mulenen was just over a mile, and he recalled the operator telling the passengers that the upper section was shorter.

  Calculations raced through his head. If the car was traveling just thirty miles an hour, they had less than a minute before reached the end of the line. He and Alex might survive the ensuing collision, might not, but his bigger concern was the passing loop at the halfway point.

  The funicular was a single track—a pair of rails—except in the middle where the line split briefly to allow the cars to pass each other. At normal operating speed, the diversion was barely a bump in the road, but at terminal velocity, there was a good chance the car would jump the tracks and go tumbling down the mountain. That was something he didn’t think was they would survive, and he had less than thirty seconds to do something about it.

  Jump?

  The tracks were elevated, so if they tried jumping out the side, they would fall maybe a couple stories onto an uncertain surface, while still carrying all the forward momentum of their journey. They could jump onto the tracks behind the car, and probably suffer nothing worse than a lot of broken bones. Not his first choice, but an option.

  Stop the car, or slow it down. How?

  He looked around the destroyed interior for anything he could throw out in front of the wheels to create some friction braking, but saw nothing…except for Hancock’s body.

  He leaped down the stairs and hastily searched the pouches on Hancock’s vest, found what he was looking for.

  “Get up to the top,” he shouted. “And find whatever cover you can.”

  Alex stared at him blankly until she saw him prep the grenade. “You’re not—”

  “Go!” He stripped off the safety band and pulled the pin.

  Alex scampered up the tiers to the top. There was nothing to hide behind, but she flattened herself on the floor and covered her head.

  Dane rolled Hancock on his side and placed the grenade into the space between the body and the corner of the car. He let the spoon fly, dropped the grenade, rolled Hancock back, and then scrambled away, all in the space a single second.

  The car continued to jolt and rattle along the track for what seemed like an eternity. The grenade had a five second fuse—Hancock had probably cooked his off for a couple seconds before throwing it to ensure that Ray wouldn’t have time to kick it back at him—and five seconds seemed like an eternity.

  How far away was the passing loop? Would they hit it before the explosion? Would they—

  The second blast felt nothing like the first. The earlier damage to the car allowed much of the pressure wave to radiate harmlessly away. Hancock’s body caught most of the shrapnel and what little got past was directed straight up; none of it came anywhere near Dane and Alex. The explosion however, did exactly what Dane hoped it would. The front end of the car burst open like a balloon, throwing pieces of metal and plastic debris out onto the tracks ahead of the car. None of the pieces was large enough to derail it, but the debris quickly piled up in front of the wheels, supplying just enough friction to slow the downward plunge.

  But not enough to stop it.

  Dane lifted his head and looked out behind them. The railroad ties were still flashing past, though not too fast for him to distinguish each one. How fast then? Twenty miles an hour? Less?

  It would have to be enough.

  He pointed to the platform still dangling behind the car, skipping along the tops of the tracks. “We’re going to climb down onto that!”

  She nodded to signal her comprehension.

  He made the first move, reaching his foot out cautiously, as if attempting to cross a stream on stepping stones. Too slow, he told himself. Too cautious.

  His foot came down, his weight pushing the platform onto the rails. The damaged bracket holding it fast shrieked in protest and for an instant, he thought the added friction would cause the whole thing to tear away. He eased back, and instead threw his body forward, diving onto it, arms and legs spread out so that he wouldn’t fall off.

  The platform shuddered beneath him as it was driven down onto the rails, but he rolled over and shouted, “Jump!”

  Alex made the leap into his open arms just as the bracket tore free. He caught her, hugged her close, even as the platform skittered chaotically across the tops of the rails.

  The runaway car pulled away from them, and then abruptly veered to the right. It had reached the passing loop. There was a screech of metal as the car’s momentum forced the wheel flanges up against the sides of the rails…and then over them. The rail car shot out into space, and a moment later slammed into the mountainside with a hollow-sounding crash. A second impact followed as the car tumbled, splintering trees, and then another and another.

  Dane, still holding Alex tight, kicked away from the sliding platform before it could follow the car. The ties juddered painfully beneath them for a moment, but then the hammering stopped, or more precisely, they stopped.

  Dane lay there for several seconds, listening to the rail car plow a furrow of destruction down the mountainside. His entire body felt like it had gone ten rounds with an industrial-sized meat tenderizer, his head was pounding and his ears were ringing…and he was grateful for the pain because it meant he was alive. When he felt like he could open his mouth without throwing up, he asked Alex if she was all right.

  “Not really,” was her weak reply, but the trace of laughter in her voice told him otherwise.

  They lay there together a couple minutes longer, staring up at the darkening sky and the startling visible swath of the Milky Way over head, until the will to move again returned.

  EPILOGUE—Hell to Pay

  Washington, DC

  The door opened and Dane stood up stiffly. His body was still black and blue from the pummeling he’d taken during the escape from the Templar vault, but scrapes and bruises were the extent of his injuries, and those would heal and fade in time. The damage to his career, on the other hand, remained to be seen, but he didn’t have a good feeling about it.

  Bones had caught up to Dane and Alex as they hobbled back up the sloping track toward the summit. The tumult had not gone unnoticed at the lodge and it seemed likely that the authorities had already been contacted. The good news was that an emergency response would take time; it might be days before anyone began to grasp the scope of what had happened, more than enough time for them to limp their way off the mountain and make their way back home.

  Home, however, had its own perils. When Dane again made contact with Maxie, the conversation was brief and poin
ted: Proceed immediately to the nearest U.S. military facility and await transport. Maxie did not ask for a report, and made it clear that they were not to talk with anyone.

  A military plane returned them to Washington where Alex left them. Maxie was waiting there, stonily silent. He’d brought along their dress whites and told them only that they had an appointment at the Pentagon the following day, a meeting with the Secretary of the Navy.

  And now that meeting was about to begin.

  “BOHICA time,” muttered Bones. Bend over, here it comes again.

  Maxie shot him a venomous look, but said nothing. Dane followed his CO through the door, with Bones bringing up the rear. The female officer who had opened the door stepped aside as they passed, but Dane didn’t look at her. Instead, he marched—as formally as his aches would allow—to stand in front of a table beside Maxie. They were in a conference room, not the Secretary’s office, and that struck Dane as odd, but it was a minor concern.

  Maxie snapped to attention and saluted. “Commander Maxwell, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  The man in civilian attire seated behind the large table—Dane recognized from the framed photo that hung in every office of the United States Navy—looked up with a slightly irritated expression and returned the salute with a half-hearted wave. Maxie dropped his hand but remained at attention. Dane and Bones just stared forward, waiting for the axe to fall.

  “I’ve got a nine-thirty, so let’s keep this short and informal.” The SECNAV rose and picked up a thick manila envelope, then strode around the table to stand in front of Dane. He took a sheet of paper with the distinctive letterhead of the Department of the Navy from the envelope and held it up as if to read.