He found another foothold and kicked upward again, gaining only six feet but losing nothing when his pincer closed around a narrow ribbon of ancient lava. Just two awkward lunges in the bulky suit already cramped his legs. Mercer checked his oxygen. He had plenty so he made the mix a bit richer, giving his muscles more of what they needed.
In short fits and starts Mercer scaled the cliff. Sometimes he’d gain ten feet with a single lurch; other times he’d lose five. It was frustrating and agonizing. His body ran with sweat and with his arms trapped in the suit he couldn’t wipe the salt from his eyes. His shoulders and thighs were on fire yet he steadily gained. And as he climbed higher the pressure on the gas in the lifting bag decreased. When it expanded it increased his buoyancy, making each halting leap that much easier.
After a half hour he had to rest. He could barely fill his lungs and his heartbeat was out of control, hammering so hard it was almost arrhythmic. His feet were sodden with the sweat that had pooled in the suit’s lower extremities.
Five minutes before he felt he could go on, Mercer leapt again, clambering to find a handhold for his mechanical claw. He didn’t dare look at his depth gauge. He didn’t want the disappointment of discovering he hadn’t climbed as far as he thought or the encouragement that he’d climbed farther. He continued his measured pace, taking the good jumps with the bad but always ascending.
He checked the time again and was dismayed to see another thirty minutes had passed. The surrounding water was still black, the cliff face as featureless. He hadn’t seen a single fish or aquatic plant. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at his depth.
Two hundred fifty feet.
He’d climbed almost a thousand in an hour, but his pace had slowed. Those final two hundred fifty feet would take an hour all by themselves. The damaged bag had expanded as far as it would twenty minutes ago so it wasn’t providing any additional lift. The rest would be up to him.
He kicked off again, gaining a dozen feet, but couldn’t find anything to grab on to. He started to fall away from the cliff and punched up the motors, thrusting the suit back into the mountain. His helmet hit with an ominously soft plink. He’d scratched a deep gouge into the faceplate. Tiny fissures grew off it like crystals under a microscope.
His foot connected with the rock and even before he was sure he had solid footing Mercer thrust himself upward, grabbed an outcrop and used just his arm to keep climbing.
More cracks appeared in his visor.
He found a rhythm, an exhausting series of movements that taxed him and the suit to the extremes of their capabilities. But he did not stop. And when he found a plateau that ran along the cliff in a shallow incline he bounced along it like Neil Armstrong had bunny-hopped on the moon, his boots kicking up gouts of mud with each heavy impact. His cracking visor pinked and tinged with every step.
At fifty feet the shelf petered out and he was tempted to set the emergency release that would open the suit and let him swim free. Instead he turned back to the cliff, methodically planted his foot and kicked upward.
Mercer didn’t sense daylight until he was twenty feet from the surface and his suit was being battered by wave action. It was time.
He found a secure perch on the cliff and locked the claw around a rock. He took a deep breath and in one sudden snap wrenched his left arm out of the suit’s sleeve. The pain of the near dislocation was like a knife under his shoulder blade and across the top of his back.
When the agony turned into numbness, he reached into the pocket of his overalls. By feel he flipped open his cell and dialed Ira’s direct line. He brought the phone as close as he could to his mouth. He was just shallow enough for the signal to bounce off one of the nearby cell towers.
“Ira, listen to me,” he shouted when the ringing stopped. “It’s Mercer.”
“Mercer? Where are you? You sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a barrel.”
“Close enough. The bomb is planted. It goes off in, shit, fifty minutes, but I have a problem. Luc Nguyen has taken over the Petromax Angel. They boarded from another boat that either came from the island or broke the quarantine. Jim McKenzie is part of his group. He’s the one that turned on the hydrate pump in the Pacific.”
“Where’s that ship now?”
“I assume they took off. I don’t know. I jumped—well, I was pushed overboard.”
“Are you on La Palma?”
“Not quite. I’m calling you from one of the diving suits. I’m about twenty feet under the surface.”
“What?”
“I don’t have time to explain it. Right now I’m directly above the nuke. You have to get a chopper off that Aegis cruiser you said was standing by.”
“It’s going to take a few minutes to coordinate.”
“I’m not going anywhere. In case we lose this signal I’m going to pop to the surface in exactly thirty minutes. Tell the pilot I’ll be the guy holding the cell phone. Can’t be too many of them around here.”
Ira smiled. “I’ll tell him the model in case there are more than one of you out there. Don’t worry, Mercer. We’re coming for you.”
Ira kept his line open, but as Mercer suspected he lost the signal a few minutes later and couldn’t get it back.
Now that he’d stopped climbing, he shivered in the suit, his sodden clothes and hair sticking to his body like a clammy skin. He played with the climate system but couldn’t get heat. All his exertion had nearly drained the suit’s batteries. He just stood slumped in the aluminum shell and waited for time to trickle by. He was too wasted to even worry about Tisa at the moment.
She’d said she loved him. It wasn’t an ambiguous moan at the height of passion. She’d said the words to his face. Mercer knew he’d get her back, if for no other reason than for him to tell her he loved her too.
When his deadline approached, he began to hyper-extend his lungs, building up oxygen to the point he felt he was going to pass out. Then he hit the emergency release located awkwardly along his right wrist where it couldn’t be accidentally activated.
The suit split along the back and filled in a rush of frigid water that momentarily pinned Mercer. He kicked free and stroked for the surface, allowing a trickle of air to escape his lips as he rose.
Ash formed a thick ceiling at the surface. He hit it and began to claw his way through, kicking frantically as mud closed in around him. It was like struggling through quicksand. He fought and twisted and was certain he was sinking. His chest burned. There was no way to know if he was one inch or ten feet from the top.
He forced himself to calm and took even, measured strokes. The ash tried to draw him back into the depths but he refused to succumb until at last he shot out of the morass. His first breath drew a mouthful of dust that he coughed and spit back into the sea. He could barely keep his head above the quagmire, but it didn’t matter.
As soon as he’d surfaced, the sharp-eyed pilot of the Seahawk off the cruiser spotted him struggling in the otherwise placid curtain of debris. A few seconds later he had his chopper hovering over Mercer and a pararescue jumper ready to haul him aboard. A basket was lowered.
Mercer was able to use the undulating mass of ash and pumice as a springboard to roll himself into the basket, eliminating the need for the PJ to leap to what would have been a broken leg. Mercer was winched into the chopper even as the pilot opened the throttle. They had seventeen minutes to get clear of the blast and the electromagnetic pulse that would wreck the chopper’s avionics.
The PJ threw a blanket over Mercer’s shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Mercer said unconvincingly. “I’m fine.”
“I think you’d better lay back until we get back to the ship.”
Mercer shrugged off the blanket. “I need to speak to the pilot.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir,” the burly PJ advised. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I’ve seen drowned rats who’d win a beauty contest over you.”
Mercer grabbed a headset
from the bulkhead dividing the cockpit from the cargo hold. “Any chance you noticed a ship inside the cordon on your way to get me?”
ABOARD THE PETROMAX ANGEL EIGHTEEN MILES EAST OF LA PALMA
They’d come under the cover of the eruption and storm on a sleek powerboat they’d stolen in Santa Cruz. Luc had brought only three men with him, but he hadn’t needed more. The Angel carried a skeleton complement of twenty-five, and only a handful of others were aboard, including Jim McKenzie and his assistant, Ken Bowers, both of whom were armed, both of whom were part of the Order.
Trying to reach the service boat had been a desperate gamble, a last role of the dice for Luc Nguyen. With the Order’s sanctuary in ruin and the oracle destroyed, his only hope of achieving anything was to see the Cumbre Vieja destroy much of the civilized world and hope the Order’s well-protected financial resources would give him power to rule in the chaos to follow.
It had taken just a few moments to hijack the Petromax Angel. As soon as they tied up to the rig tender, one man had gone to the bridge, another to the engine room, and the third scoured the crew accommodations, herding everyone he found to the mess hall, where technicians from the Sea Surveyor were already being guarded on Mercer’s orders. Luc had been able to secure the deck spaces with help from Jim and Ken.
They’d been too late to prevent Mercer from diving with the weapon, although Jim had been confident the damage he’d caused to his NewtSuit would prevent him from even reaching much past where the ROV was blocking the tunnel.
So it came as a numbing surprise when Mercer had radioed that he was on the end of the towline Luc’s soldier had started reeling up from the bottom. No sooner had the call come through than Charlie Williams, pale and still weak, staggered into the control van. The Order soldier who’d rounded up the crew had left him unconscious in his cabin. He raged at Ken Bowers, accusing him of attempted murder for smashing a wrench over his head. Jim had remained calm, coaxing Mercer to the surface so they could use his ADS to retrieve the bomb and at the same time trying to maintain his façade of innocence.
It all fell apart when Spirit realized that Jim had personally vouched for Bowers. They were on deck then, waiting for Mercer to be hauled over the rail. As soon as Jim knew they had the suit, he’d ended C.W.’s rants with the pistol he’d kept with him since he first left California on the Sea Surveyor.
Now Mercer was gone, pushed over the side by Spirit in her last act of defiance. All that remained for the surviving members of the Order was to run and hope the nuclear bomb failed to prevent the catastrophe.
Luc, Jim McKenzie and Tisa stayed in the confines of the control van as the workboat raced from the weapon’s epicenter. Jim maintained contact with the navy and fed bogus updates to Admiral Lasko, buying them the time they needed. Tisa hadn’t said a word since Mercer fell from the stern and made no protests when her brother tried to console her by touching her hair or her shoulder or hip. Her only movements were to gently rub the place where once she wore the watch he had given her.
“How far have we come?” Luc asked.
McKenzie checked the GPS readout on one of the multiple computer screens. “Almost twenty miles.”
“Is that far enough?”
“To avoid the fallout, yes, but we need to keep going. There’s going to be a pretty big wave following the blast and we’re still inside the navy quarantine zone. Once we make it to the nearby island of La Gomera, we’ll hide there until things calm down. We still have two weeks to make our escape if the bomb fails and the main eruption splits La Palma.”
“How much more time?”
“I estimate ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Do you think they will ever stop hunting you?” Tisa asked, breaking her hour-long silence.
“They don’t know we’re running,” Jim countered. “They don’t know they have to hunt us.”
Luc smiled at her. “My dear sister can speak after all. I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
“I doubt that. I think you feed off destruction. You need it the way others need love.”
“I need love too, you know.”
“And even that is something you’ve managed to pervert.”
Jim shifted in his padded seat. He’d known of Luc Nguyen’s incestuous feelings toward his sister and the thought made him uncomfortable.
“Not pervert, Tisa. Purify. Think of it. The two children of the Order’s last lama. Think what we could create.”
“A monster for the monstrous new world you want to build on the ashes of the old.”
He looked at her sadly, but also with the knowledge that he would have what he wanted.
Out of nowhere, the thunderous roar of a helicopter shattered the relative quiet of the control van. Jim launched himself out of his chair and looked out the open container doors. A gray SH-60 Seahawk hovered over the Angel’s fantail. Its side door was open and a soldier covered the workboat’s stern deck with an M-16. Behind him was the shadowy outline of another man. McKenzie was dumbstruck when the chopper turned slightly and the shadow passed. The other man was Philip Mercer.
Mercer saw Jim McKenzie standing just outside the container box, tapped the PJ on the shoulder and pointed. The M-16 spat and bullets sparked across the ship’s steel deck.
Jim dove back into the van. “It’s Mercer!”
“I told you they’d hunt you down.” Tisa never doubted that Mercer would come back for her.
Luc glanced out of the container and was driven back by fire from the Seahawk. He grabbed a walkie-talkie from his shirt pocket. “Everyone, get on deck! We’re under attack.” He checked the holster around his waist and racked a round in the chamber of the machine pistol he’d brought. As soon as his men appeared, they’d shoot the chopper from the sky.
He looked out again. The American helicopter remained over the stern, flying sideways so the gunman in the doorframe could cover the entire aft of the service boat.
“Paul, Pran, where are you?” he radioed.
“I’m on the bridge,” Paul Thierry replied. He was a boyhood friend from Paris who’d gone to Rinpoche-La with Luc when he’d returned to his father’s side. “As soon as I run to the wing I will have them.”
“I’ve just reached an exterior door on the main deck of the superstructure,” Pran, a Vietnamese cousin, answered. “I’m ready.”
“Gerhard?”
The young German had been recruited into the Order while in Nepal seeking life’s answers among the mountains and the opium. “On the port side making my way aft. A lifeboat is blocking their view. Give me a moment longer. Ja, okay, I am ready.”
“On my mark we all fire at once.” Luc jacked the slide again, mistakenly ejecting a live round. Tisa smirked at his nervousness.
“Now!”
He rounded the corner of the container again and fired as soon as his rifle barrel was clear. He’d cooked off half a magazine before realizing the helicopter had peeled off and paced the workboat fifty yards to starboard. “Damn it. Hold your fire. Wait until they return.”
From cover behind the drum of tow cable Mercer watched Luc shouting into the walkie-talkie. He’d leapt from the helicopter to the Angel in the few seconds between Jim’s frantic retreat into the container and the first time Luc Nguyen surveyed the scene. He cradled the second M-16 carried on the Seahawk and two spare magazines. He had no idea how many men Luc had brought.
When Luc gave the order to fire, Mercer counted four separate muzzle flashes: Luc’s, a gunman on the bridge wing, another on the starboard-side main deck near the superstructure and the fourth one deck up hiding behind the port-side lifeboat. He called in their positions with the tactical radio the PJ had given him.
“I can take the guy on the bridge wing even if he ducks inside. The guy by the container’s just going to hide again. Same with the guy at the door into the superstructure. I advise you take the one by the lifeboat. We’ll come in from the bow.”
“Affirmative.”
“Beginning our run, now
. Hot guns!”
Mercer paused a beat as the chopper dove in on the workboat. As soon as the PJ opened up and Luc vanished into the van, Mercer rose from his position and dashed forward to get a better angle on the gunman under the port-side lifeboat. The man had spun so he could watch the helo rake the opposite side of the ship, concentrating its fire on the bridge.
Just as the Seahawk shot along the length of the vessel, breaking wide in case Luc or Pran counterfired, Mercer put two rounds into the back of Gerhard’s head. The German pitched over the rail, hit the top of the main deck railing and tumbled into the water. Mercer reached cover beside the container they’d used to store the NewtSuits.
“One down,” Mercer reported.
“Call it two,” the parajumper corrected. “And we’ve got six minutes.”
Mercer looked at his watch. The nuke.
“Roger. Give me cover fire on the control van. I need to reach the superstructure.”
“You got it.”
The chopper wheeled again and came back at the Angel, carefully aimed shots plinking around the container, sparking off the roof and keeping those inside pinned.
Mercer raced forward, keeping to the port side of the ship, and found an open hatchway. He could see clear across the ship and hoped to have outflanked the third gunman, but the man had changed positions. Instead of hunting the soldier, Mercer went for the mess hall. The door had been secured with a chain around a standpipe. He shot off the padlock and whirled, making sure the three-round burst hadn’t drawn the missing gunman.
The door to the mess flew open. The first man out was the third officer, Seamus Rourke. “Mercer! What the hell is going on?”
“No time. The bomb goes off in four minutes. The men who took over your ship stupidly headed due east. You have to turn us about. When this side of the island collapses it’s going to produce some monster waves and we’re right in their path. If we’re not facing them, we don’t have a chance.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“There are two men outside with machine pistols. One in the control van. I don’t know where the other is. Also, Jim McKenzie is part of the hijacking and I suspect his assistant is too.”
Deep Fire Rising Page 44
