Cold Evidence (Evidence Series Book 6)

by Rachel Grant

  “The sabotage on the boat, when Luke and Undine were left stranded at the bottom, that would have been easy for you to rig.”

  “I could say the same for you,” Ray said. “The radio was working when we left, but once you got your hands on it, things went haywire.”

  “Stop it,” Luke said. “You’re wasting time, Parker. Ray, go back to the upper deck and see to that cut. And quit smoking. It’s a disgusting habit.”

  “I know, man.” Ray limped up the stairs.

  “You could be making a mistake,” Parker said. “Everyone is a suspect.”

  Luke shrugged. “It’s not Ray.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “He was recovering from surgery in September when Petrel exploded. He wasn’t even in Neah Bay—he was staying with his niece in Seattle for almost all of October.”

  “Oh,” Parker said. Then he took a deep breath. “Just because he couldn’t have been part of the initial—”

  “We’re looking for neo-Nazi Ukrainians. Not Makah Indians.”

  “And Russians. You can’t rule them out.”

  “Fine,” Luke said. “Have you seen any Russians on the car deck? And where the hell are the other Coast Guardsmen? Why are you down here alone?”

  A noise from the door that led down to the engine room drew Luke’s attention. Two uniformed Coasties emerged carrying an unconscious man between them. “That the missing crew member?”

  “Yeah. After they found him, I came up here to finish searching—and found Ray—while they provided first aid to stop his bleeding.” To the others, Parker said, “He breathing?”

  “Barely. We’re taking him up. There must be a doctor among the passengers.”

  Parker nodded and stepped aside, letting the men pass to get to the wide stairwell.

  “It’s just you and me until they get back, Sevick. We need to search the storage lockers along this side, the utility rooms, and the vans. And then finish searching the engine room. This damn boat has a hundred hiding places on this deck alone.”

  “Sweep the lockers and bins first. Then we’ll double up on the utility rooms,” Luke said.

  Parker nodded, and they set to work, clearing the life jacket storage and life raft storage containers first. They were large enough to fit a person and for safety reasons were never locked, making them the obvious choice for a man eager to hide.

  They were also empty of anything other than the safety devices they were meant to house.

  The ferry was quiet—eerie for being in the middle of the strait—without the noise of the engine. The tunnel curved, with cars exiting to the starboard side instead of straight out the front like the Washington State Ferries, so wind didn’t blow straight through the space either, but rather entered through the back and glanced off the bow.

  If the wind had been blowing, Luke never would have heard the click of a hammer being pulled back or the snick of the lock being turned.

  He paused and studied the door marked “Crew Only” and nodded to Parker, silently asking if it had been searched.

  Parker gave a quick shake of his head.

  They moved as one, a team. Luke yanked open the door, and Parker took aim. A man charged, and Parker fired.

  The man kept coming at Parker, carried by either momentum or sheer will. He had a pale object in his hand—a gun. Luke tackled him, diving forward and knocking him to the side as he pulled the trigger.

  The gun fired. Luke felt the hiss of the bullet along his bicep, but not the sting. He knocked aside the weapon and punched the man in the face. Another blow to the chest where Parker’s first bullet had hit him, and the fight left the man.

  He lay slack on the deck, eyes open and breathing labored. He wore a tuxedo. As they’d suspected, he’d hidden among the guests.

  “How many of you are there on the boat?” Luke asked.

  The man coughed blood. “There could be one or a dozen. It doesn’t matter. The bomb is counting down. You have no escape.”

  “What bomb?” Luke asked, the dread that had been with him from the moment of the first explosion bursting into full-on choking horror.

  Blood coated the man’s teeth, and the liquid pooled at the corners of his mouth. “The second bomb Yuri took from M-357. The timer is counting down. You can’t shut it off.”

  “Where is it?” Parker asked as he scooped up the man’s gun from the deck.

  The man shook his head and closed his eyes.

  “Shit. This fucker was 3D printed. That’s how he got it through the metal detector.”

  “He walked on, then,” Luke said. “With the other passengers.” Not surprising, considering his attire.

  “He could have hidden the bullets in the heel of his dress shoes. I knew we should have insisted on inspecting the shoes.”

  “Did you see who he was with? When he came aboard?”

  “I don’t remember him,” Parker said. “He might’ve boarded when I was checking your weapon.”

  Luke searched his clothing and found a Canadian passport in the name of Ned Taylor. He vaguely remembered seeing the name on the guest list but couldn’t remember if a companion had been named. “Radio the captain,” he said to Parker. “Canadian authorities need to track down the real Ned Taylor and find out if he came alone. And someone needs to question Yuri Kravchenko. Now.”

  Parker relayed the information as Luke hurriedly bound, then searched the fake Ned Taylor as the man gasped for breath. His lung was probably collapsing. Even without a collapsed lung, he would bleed out without medical aid. There was probably a doctor and a heavy-duty first aid kit aboard. Luke knew advanced first aid and had more than once provided field dressing for gunshot wounds, but his to-do list tonight was full.

  He had a motherfucking nuclear bomb to find and somehow disarm.

  He would leave Taylor to die, except the man could provide more intel. Like where the bomb was and how, exactly, to shut it off. “I’m taking him to the passenger deck, to find a doctor.”

  “I’ll search the vans and wait for backup to finish searching the maintenance rooms.”

  “I’ll send the other Coasties down to help you.”

  Luke plucked the man from the floor and threw him over his shoulder, not bothering to be careful of his wounds. “I hate these suicidal assholes.”

  “He’s getting blood all over your uniform.”

  “Dammit. These things are expensive.” He headed for the stairs but paused at the foot of the stairs. “Thanks, Parker. Nice shooting.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever fired my gun outside of training.”

  “I’m glad you had my back.”

  On the upper deck, he carried Taylor into the front cabin, where the VIPs were gathered. There was bound to be a doctor among them. A few people screeched and backed away when they saw him.

  “This man needs a doctor.”

  A woman in a red gown nodded toward the front. “The governor’s husband is patching up the other guy already.”

  “Who is he?” another passenger asked as he crossed toward the front of the ferry.

  “Did you shoot him?”

  “What happened?”

  “Is it over, can we get off the boat now?”

  The questions came rapid-fire, one on top of the other. Luke dropped Taylor on the floor in the middle of the aisle and said, “He’s part of the group who planted the explosive. Lt. Reeves shot him. We need him to live because he has intel.” He looked to the governor’s husband, who left the side of the now-conscious ferry worker.

  “That’s the guy who hit me,” the crew member said. “In the engine room.”

  “What have we got?” the governor’s husband asked.

  “Probably a sucking chest wound.”

  The doctor cursed and ripped open the man’s shirt. His wife, the governor, grabbed a large first aid kit bearing the Blackfish Line logo from the floor and brought it to her husband. She knelt across from her husband. “Tell me what to do.”

  “We need
plastic—a rubber glove will do—to seal the hole.”

  She dug out a glove from the kit and handed it to her husband.

  “You’re going to ruin your gown, Governor,” the tech company billionaire that Stefan had been hoping to woo said as he knelt next to her.

  She cast the man a wry smile, “Then I guess it’s a good thing Lt. Sevick broke that camera. This is not my best photo op.”

  “Hold this while I inflate his lung,” the doctor said.

  The governor didn’t hesitate and pressed the rubber glove over the hole in the man’s chest. Luke turned. They had the situation under control. “If he regains consciousness and speaks, report every word he says to Commander Martinez.”

  The billionaire nodded. “We’ll do that, Lieutenant.”

  Luke turned for the door, catching sight of the woman in the red gown again. She had her hand in her purse, at an odd angle. Something pale flashed.

  The same type of pale as the weapon Taylor had carried. Another 3D-printed gun. Luke didn’t hesitate and lunged at the woman. Her eyes widened when she saw him coming, and she pulled the trigger.

  Her shot buzzed past his ear, another close call, and he slammed her back against one of the mounted chairs, smashing her wrist against the inflexible arm. She screamed as her wrist snapped and the gun fell from her slack fingers. A stream of what could only be Ukrainian curses fell from her lips.

  Yuri didn’t bother to contain his glee when the FBI Special Agent in Charge marched into his hospital room with an entourage. Right on time.

  “Where the fuck is the second bomb, Yuri?” the woman asked.

  “Your super SEAL hasn’t found it yet?” He made a tsking sound. “He must be slipping.”

  “Cut the bullshit. Where is the bomb?”

  Yuri glanced at the clock on his monitor. “If Mykhail was on schedule, you have…eighty-five minutes to find it.”

  “How do we shut it off?”

  “You can’t. Not without the keys. Which Mykhail has surely thrown overboard.” Mykhail and Irina were well trained and as dedicated to the cause as Yuri. Their visas had been sponsored by the same tech company that had sponsored Alexei and Ivan, and they’d been waiting for tonight nearly as long as Yuri had.

  The woman fixed him with a fierce glare. “Why are you doing this? For ten million dollars?”

  “No. I don’t want money. I never wanted money. I want war.”

  “Your war is with Russia.”

  “You Americans and Canadians promised to help us, then you refused to train our troops. You reneged on our deal. You let them steal our Crimean Peninsula. I will take your Olympic Peninsula. Vancouver Island too.”

  “We refused to train neo-Nazis! We didn’t refuse to help Ukraine.”

  “You seized on any excuse. In so doing, you’ve allied yourselves with Russia. So now I will use a Russian bomb to kill you. So you will know the treachery of your allies. So you will feel the pain of Chernobyl.” He tried to sit up in the bed, but the restraints held him down. Pain pierced his chest. “Do you know how many days my family lived and worked near Chernobyl after the meltdown, before the Russians told them of the disaster? How many days my little brother played in radioactive air?”

  “We didn’t cause Chernobyl.”

  “You have turned your back on us too many times. You have tacitly accepted what Russia did to us. To the people of Chechnya. They support Assad in Syria, and you do nothing. They shoot down a plane, and you do nothing. They sink a ferry, and you do nothing. You have the might to stop Russia, but you don’t.” He formed a fist, the only motion he was capable of in his bound state. “Do you want to know why I chose the ferry?”

  “Because of your sister who died on the ferry in the Sea of Azov.”

  “Yes. But there is more than that. The nuclear weapon…it is small. It would take out Port Angeles, but not the Peninsula. It wasn’t big enough to make my statement. But the strait…she has many fault lines. One little nuclear explosion above a fault will ripple outward. You will have a massive quake and tsunamis. Canada can say good-bye to Vancouver Island. The US can say good-bye to the Olympic Peninsula. And, if the right fault is hit, good-bye to your Seattle.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Luke stared at the bomb. It was identical to the one Yuri had left in his building, complete with the encrustation that proved it had sat in a torpedo tube for over fifty years. Parker had discovered it in the news satellite truck, in a locker where one of the technicians said they usually stored backup equipment.

  Given the amount of electronics in the van, it was the perfect hiding place. Between the electronics and the salt encrustations, the bomb-sniffing dog could easily miss the signature scent of the small explosive that would set off the fission reaction. And bomb-sniffing dogs weren’t capable of detecting radioactive materials.

  Luke wouldn’t be surprised if someone in Yuri’s organization had gotten a job working security for the TV station. Both the man and the woman had excellent IDs, and according to the intel they were now receiving, their neo-Nazi group had strong ties to various organized crime groups. They knew their way around the system.

  Commander Martinez had a satellite phone and spoke directly with one of the technicians who’d spent the last twenty-four hours studying the device that had been collected from Luke’s apartment building. Luke watched as Martinez opened the panel Undine had pointed out on the other bomb. Sure enough, it revealed a mechanical clock, rolling down the minutes to detonation.

  Eighty-two minutes remained.

  The standard fail-safe had been built in; any attempt to disable the clock was a sure-fire way to detonate the bomb.

  They didn’t have time to dick around trying to disarm it. They needed to get the bomb the hell away from here.

  “Can we just drop it in the strait?” one of the Coast Guardsmen asked.

  “Too many fault lines,” Luke said. “The strait is riddled with them. This thing goes off here, and it could set off the big one.”

  “Can we take it out to the Pacific?” Parker asked.

  “We’d have to get it past the Cascadia subduction zone,” Luke said. “If it hit there, we’d have tsunamis in the US, Japan, China…even Siberia.”

  Yuri may have found a way to hit Russia after all.

  “How far do we have to go to get it past the subduction zone?” Parker asked.

  “From here, probably a hundred and seventy-five nautical miles if we go due west.”

  “At thirty-five knots, that would take five hours,” Parker said. “It’s impossible.”

  “The Navy can send out an Osprey. Pick up the bomb, fly it out past the zone,” Luke said.

  “I don’t know if any Ospreys are in the area. It’ll take twenty minutes to scramble a Seahawk. The nearest one is probably on Whidbey. Maybe we could get a Blackhawk from Joint Base Lewis-McChord,” Martinez said.

  “If we load the bomb onto an Interceptor, we can start heading west,” Parker said. “The Seahawk or Osprey can catch us down the line. That will buy us a few minutes.”

  “What’s the max speed on the new Interceptors?” Luke asked.

  “Forty knots. We won’t be able to make it to the ocean, but we can at least get the hell away from the most heavily populated areas.”

  “Commander,” Luke said, “The governor needs to initiate the tsunami warning system for all of Washington. People need to get to high ground, just in case. Same for the BC premier.”

  The commander gave a sharp nod. He pulled out his radio and hailed the Coast Guard Cutter Adelie. “Launch the Interceptor II and bring her to the aft car deck entrance.”

  “Orders were no boat can approach Chinook,” the captain replied.

  “Belay that, Captain. We believe we’ve captured all terrorists aboard Chinook, but even if we haven’t, if we don’t get the Interceptor, everyone on this boat—and all the boats in the vicinity—are going to die anyway.”

  While the captain made arrangements for the boat, one of the Co
asties slid into the driver’s seat of the van. “I’m going to back it closer to the edge.”

  “This could be a one-way trip, Luke,” Parker said. “If a Seahawk or Osprey can’t reach the boat in time, whoever is piloting the Interceptor will have to keep going. This is a one-person job, and that person is me.”

  “With two people, one can drive the boat and the other can work to disarm it.”

  “Do you know how to disarm a nuke?” Parker asked.

  “No. But I know how to disarm explosives, and this contains a basic explosive to initiate the fission reaction.”

  “You want to open that thing up? While on open water, on a tiny boat?”

  “Do you have a better plan?”

  “Drive like hell for the ocean, and wait for a helicopter/plane to swoop down and pick me up.”

  “Have you ever been in a boat that was picked up by an Osprey before? Do you know how to hook up the cables, or what it’s like to fly dangling by a cable from a small airplane? I have. This is a two-person job, Parker. Hell, it’s a five-person job, but I don’t want to risk anyone else.”

  Parker’s insistence on going alone didn’t sit right with Luke. There was an eagerness and an irritation that seemed…off. Luke was the first man to stand up for his country, but he wasn’t eager to die, and this was almost certainly a suicide mission.

  Yet Parker’s tone held no fear that would lace even the bravest special forces operator’s voice. Operators weren’t brave because they felt no fear. It was the opposite. They feared but took the mission head-on anyway. They worked through the fear. Even with it. They never lacked it.

  Something was off. And the thing that was off was Lt. Parker Reeves.

  Yet he was volunteering to take a live nuke out to sea to save the world. It didn’t feel right or wise to give Parker sole possession of the live nuke.

  As Luke and the Coast Guardsmen maneuvered the bomb onto a hand truck and positioned it on a ramp to deposit into the Interceptor, his suspicion grew.

  Commander Martinez secured an Osprey for the pickup, relaying the situation to admirals, secretaries of government departments, hell, for all Luke knew, the man could have a direct line to the president. But they didn’t have time for others to discuss the situation and come up with solutions. It would take the Pentagon a month to formulate a plan, and the State Department six weeks to implement it.