“Gawd.”
“I need volunteers to distract them.”
“I’ll get one of the lads to handle the ship. Oy, mates,” he called into the mess. “We need a hand getting this scum off our boat. Who’s with me?”
A dozen voices joined in a resounding chorus of rebellion.
Mercer led them back out the way he’d come. There was still no sign of the third gunman. “Seahawk, this is Mercer. What’s happening?”
“No movement,” the pilot reported. “The container doors are closed. The jumper saw at least three people inside. One he swears is the woman you told us about.”
Mercer wasn’t surprised. Luc would want to keep his sister close. The third person was Jim, so that meant Ken Bowers was still lurking around too. “Roger. Keep them pinned. I just released the crew. A helmsman is going to turn the ship around to face the blast. The rest are with me. We have to flush out the third soldier and I believe one more hijacker who was already on the ship.”
“Just so you know, we’re down to our last two magazines. Then it’s pistols, which are about as worthless as shooting dirty looks.”
A dozen sailors crowded the hall just inside the exterior door, waiting for Mercer to give the word. All of them were facing out so none saw Paul Thierry sneak up from a stairwell leading to the engineering spaces. He laid down a scathing wall of fire, mowing down men like wheat with a scythe. It only ended when his clip ran dry.
Four sailors were dead, three wounded, and the others went after the Frenchman with the savagery of attack dogs. They caught him halfway down the metal stairs and helped him the rest of the way by pushing him headfirst into the steel decking. The blow was enough to kill the hijacker, but not enough to satisfy the crewmen. When they were finished, Thierry’s corpse was a bloody ruin that was nearly unrecognizable as having been human.
Mercer stood at the top of the companionway. Seamus Rourke climbed up from the dim engine room, blood smeared across his face and dripping from his hands. “You get your woman and get yourself clear.” His voice was eerily calm. “We’ll look after our own on the ship.”
“You’ll be okay?”
“Aye. If the Angel can take the worst of what the North Sea serves, she can take anything.”
Mercer shook his hand. “Good luck.”
He retreated back outside, feeling a small measure of sympathy for what would happen to Ken Bowers when the crew caught up to him.
The control van sat squarely in the middle of the deck, a small fortress immune to fire from Mercer’s M-16. He had two minutes before the blast and five before the tsunami. He also had no idea how to get Tisa out of the box.
Then he’d take the whole thing with him. “Seahawk, what’s your lifting capacity?”
“Forget it,” the pilot radioed. “I know what you’re thinking. That container weighs a couple of tons empty. No way we can lift it if it’s full.”
But with the door tightly closed, Luc and Jim didn’t know what was happening. “Lower your safety basket and hover directly over the container anyway.”
“I told you we can’t lift it.”
“You don’t need to.”
Mercer ran for the stern and the A-frame crane that towered over the fantail. The controls were on a seat mounted a few feet up one of the steel supports. Mercer climbed into the seat and quickly recognized the function of the knobs and joystick. The diesel generator that gave the crane power chugged away softly. He increased the power and dropped the crane’s arm back over the ship, paying out line as it descended. He halted the arm above the container and paid out more cable until the steel hook lay on the top of the box. With the chopper thundering overhead there was no way anyone inside could hear what he’d done.
Keeping the M-16 at the ready, Mercer reached the side of the container and climbed its integrated ladder. The top of the box was flat steel, but eyebolts had been welded to the four corners so it could be lifted on and off the ship if necessary. Mercer dragged the heavy hook to one of the lifting points at the back of the container and snapped it through.
He climbed back to the deck, cursing the seconds lost by not being able to jump. He was operating on nothing but adrenaline now. At the crane controls he brought his radio to his lips. “Okay, take yourself up a few feet, change the pitch of your rotors. Make it sound like you’re working.”
He pulled back on a control lever. The diesel bellowed as the crane hoisted the back corner of the container off the deck. Mercer rotated the A-frame, lifting the box even farther. He locked the controls and jumped from the crane, the M-16 pulled tight to his shoulder.
The van’s door swung open, rocking in time with the roll of the ship.
The first person to stumble out was Jim McKenzie. He dove for the deck as if certain the container would be snatched off the ship at any moment. Mercer kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back and sending his revolver sailing. As much as Mercer wanted to put a bullet between his eyes, he didn’t. He pressed himself to the side of the container and waved his hand over his head for the pilot to lower the safety basket right to the deck.
Luc Nguyen exploded from the van, firing his machine pistol in a wild spray. He vanished around a winch housing before Mercer could fire. The two traded bursts, neither able to get an angle. Ricochets filled the air. One struck McKenzie in the leg as he lay sprawled. Jim screamed as blood erupted from his severed femoral artery. He’d bleed out in minutes without treatment.
Twenty miles to the west, two hundred feet under the sea, the vent was nearly choked with lava that spurted from rents in the tunnel’s walls. Enough water remained in the shaft to prevent the molten rock from flowing so the whole chamber was simply being sealed off.
None of the tremendous heat or increased pressure affected the suitcase-sized box so meticulously placed inside the mountain. The timer clicked to zero.
The trigger for the bomb was a complex ball of shaped high-explosives charges. They went off with nanosecond precision. At the center of the blast wave was a sphere of refined plutonium. There wasn’t enough of the deadly material to form a critical mass and create the self-sustaining chain reaction of a nuclear blast—until the trigger charges compressed the sphere. In a burst as bright as the surface of the sun, the plutonium went critical and mass became energy according to Einstein’s famous theory.
The explosion bloomed at nearly the speed of light for the first few fractions of a second, vaporizing everything in its path—rock, soil, and most importantly the western supports of the natural dikes inside La Palma.
At the surface the light pulse was a flash capable of blinding even miles away, and when it faded, a giant mushroom cloud had appeared, a glowing seething column of plasma and debris equal to the volcanic eruption the day before. At its base tens of thousands of tons of rock had been pulverized, releasing a million years’ worth of trapped rain. A mile-long, mile-deep chunk of La Palma slid into the sea, washed away in a deluge of trapped water.
On the southern part of the island, the Teneguia volcano suddenly ceased spewing lava as internal pressure deep under the island shifted. Magma and boiling water poured from the tear in the island in a seemingly never-ending gush.
Ahead of this surge, a wall of seawater grew, born of the nuclear blast and nourished by the release of the dikes. While nowhere near the size of the mega-tsunami that threatened the United States had the eastern part of the island collapsed, the wave reached eighty feet in a minute and sped outward at a hundred miles per hour.
Mercer and Luc both paused as the horizon bloomed a fiery purple. And then movement on the deck broke both from their awe. They wheeled at the same time. Mercer held his fire. Luc did not. Tisa had finally freed herself from the container.
She’d come out on deck, unknowingly standing between her brother and Mercer. Luc’s burst caught her in the stomach, blowing her body back against the container. Her blood trickled down the side of the steel box.
Luc dropped his weapon, wailing as he raced for his sis
ter. Mercer tightened his grip on his M-16 and put Luc’s head right in the crosshairs. He pulled the trigger on an empty magazine. Luc reached his sister’s side, cradling her limp body in his arms.
Mercer’s rage boiled. As he rushed to them, the safety basket skittered by as the chopper pilot fought a crosswind. Mercer grabbed the edge of the mesh litter and dragged it with him. He slammed the heavy stretcher into Luc’s shoulder, spinning him away from Tisa. She fell back to the deck.
Luc held up his hands. “No. We must save her. Help me to get her out of here.”
Mercer hooked the corner of the basket under the edge of the shipping container and threw three coils of the wire line around Luc’s chest. Luc didn’t understand; perhaps he even thought Mercer was going to save him too. Mercer didn’t take his eyes off the madman as he spiraled his hand over his head, a universal sign to take up slack on a cable.
The pilot heaved back on his controls, tightening the wire around Luc’s chest until he could not scream. Mercer’s face was an inhuman mask as he repeated the gesture.
The chopper heaved again. The coils sliced into Luc Nguyen’s chest, and as they cut through to his spine and snapped his backbone the recoil sent his legs skittering across the deck like a crab. He flopped sideways, trying to reach out for the severed limbs as they came to rest a few feet away.
His eyes swiveled to Mercer. “At least you won’t have her.” And he was dead.
Those words drained everything from Mercer. He could barely see through the tears as he freed the safety basket from under the container. “Hold on,” he cried. “Hold on.”
Tisa was alive, but barely. She’d taken three rounds, two in the abdomen and one in the chest that leaked frothy blood. A lung shot. “Mercer?” Her voice came as a soft whisper.
“I’m here, darling. Hold on.”
She was so deeply in shock she hardly reacted as he rolled her into the litter. Mercer placed himself over her, keeping his weight off her body, and felt the stretcher lift from the Petromax Angel.
The wave bore down on the ship in an unchecked rampage, a wall of water stretching across the breadth of the sea. True to his word Seamus Rourke had gotten the ship turned so she faced the wave that towered over the ship. She started to scale the front of the tsunami as the Seahawk began to winch Mercer and Tisa from the deck. The litter remained rooted as angry black water foamed around the ship’s bows and covered the deck.
Mercer and Tisa were soaked and the litter began to skid toward the stern. An instant before it slammed into the NewtSuit garage, it flew up and off the deck, lifting clear of the watery frenzy.
The Angel rose ever higher, her inclinometer pegged at ninety degrees as the wave’s momentum kept her pinned to the wall of water. And then her bow reached the crest, cleaving a fat wedge from the wave’s apex, and she vanished into the trough, dropping as fast as a runaway roller coaster. She should have been driven straight under the surface when she reached the bottom. Or at least snapped in two. But the Angel buried her prow deep, then fought her way back. Her deck had been scoured clean. The garage, the control van, and the cranes had all been torn away. Not a single piece of glass, from her windscreen to her smallest porthole, was left intact. But she fought it off, pouring water off her deck as though she were a surfacing submarine. The next wave was half the size of the first and she met it almost contemptuously. The ship was safe.
Tisa kept her eyes open as they were winched into the helicopter, a smile on her lips as she stared up at Mercer. “Hold on,” he kept repeating, although his words were lost in the noise of the rotors and the wind that buffeted the stretcher.
When they reached the chopper, strong hands hauled the basket into the cargo hold and the side door was slammed closed. The PJ helped Mercer out and then cut away Tisa’s shirt and assessed her wounds.
“How is she?” Mercer shouted.
The PJ continued to work as if he hadn’t heard.
“I said how is she?”
A minute passed before the man slumped away from her. His arms were bloody to the elbows. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Mercer shoved him aside and knelt next to Tisa. He took her hand. It was cold, much colder than anything he’d ever felt.
“Mercer?” He put his ear close to her mouth. “Mercer, what time is it?”
That’s when he finally understood. Her request was a plea, an attempt to find her place in a future she’d always known. She’d lived at a lonely crossroads between the past and inevitability. She’d been denied the promise of the unknown, the sense of wonder each new day could bring because she knew somewhere how it would end.
He’d worn the TAG Heuer for almost two decades. It was almost a part of him. He unsnapped it and fit its steel band over her wrist. “You tell me,” he sobbed gently.
She touched the watch and smiled up at him again. “It’s my time.”
“I know.”
“I wish . . .”
“So do I.”
“Say it once,” said Tisa. “We will never be able to experience it, but please at least let me hear it.”
Mercer couldn’t see her through his tears. “I love you, Tisa.”
She never heard. She was already gone.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Of course Deep Fire Rising is a work of fiction. However, I have based its premise on scientific fact. Quantum teleportation has been carried out in a dozen experiments around the globe involving clouds of atoms that are “zapped,” for lack of a better word, across a room in an instant. The ability to transport a submarine into a mountain is beyond our capabilities. For now. But as Dr. Marie points out, tomorrow’s breakthroughs are made by people inspired by some of today’s scientific speculation. Methane hydrate, methane gas trapped in ice crystals, is very real and will likely become the next great source of fossil fuel energy once the technology to develop it becomes available. The story of Admiral He and the Chinese treasure fleets is a true one. I recommend Louise Levathes’s book When China Ruled the Seas to anyone wanting to know more about this little-known time in China’s history.
As for the Canary Island La Palma—well, this is where I started working my imagination. If the island stays true to its history of eruptions, the Cumbre Vieja volcano will become active again in the next two hundred years or so. The eruption will further fracture the island’s western flank and it is probable that the trillion-ton slab of rock will crash into the Atlantic. The devastation to the United States, Europe and Africa described by Mercer will occur. The truly fictional element of Deep Fire Rising is that there is something that can be done to stop it. There isn’t.
1 Published by Onyx
Deep Fire Rising Page 45
