Plague Ship Page 19

  “Oregon, this is Gomez.” Hali had put the helicopter’s comm channel on the overhead speakers. “I have you in sight.”

  “Roger, Gomez. Commencing deceleration,” Max said from the captain’s chair. “Five knots, if you please, Mr. Stone.”

  Eric made a few keystrokes to slow the volume of water gushing through the Oregon’s drive tubes until he could reverse the pumps and drop the ship down to the required speed. They had to maintain some headway in order to keep the ship from rolling with the swells and complicating Adams’s landing.

  Max spun his seat so he could see the damage-control officer standing at his station at the back of the room. “Fire teams ready?”

  “In full gear, sir,” he said immediately, “and I’ve got my fingers on the triggers for the water cannons.”

  “Very good. Hali, tell George we’re ready when he is.” Max keyed the intercom to the hangar where Dr. Huxley was standing by. “Julia, George is only a couple of minutes out.”

  A bullet had only grazed the pilot’s calf, but Max Hanley felt as guilty as if the entire team had been wiped out. No matter how anyone tried to rationalize it, Juan and the others had put themselves in danger because of him. And now the mission, which should have been simple, had thoroughly fallen apart. So far, George’s flesh wound was the only injury, but Juan had dropped off the tactical net and Hali couldn’t raise him. Linda had Linc, Eddie, and Kyle with her in the van, and they reported a heavily armed jeep in close pursuit.

  For the hundredth time since the Chairman was first ambushed, Max cursed their decision to use only nonlethal weapons. No one had expected an army of armed guards. Hanley still hadn’t yet considered the implications of so many weapons at a cult’s compound, but it didn’t bode well. From everything he’d heard and read since his ex had called him, the Responsivists weren’t violent. In fact, they eschewed violence in all its forms.

  How this connected to the mass murder aboard the Golden Dawn, he didn’t know. Were the Responsivists at war with some other group? And, if so, who were they? Another cult no one had heard of, a group willing to kill hundreds of people just because the Responsivists believed in population control?

  To Max, none of it made sense. Nor did it make sense that his only son would get mixed up with a group like this. He so wanted to believe that none of it was his fault. A lesser person would have been able to convince himself of just that. But Max knew where his responsibilities lay, and he had never shied away from them.

  For now, he compartmentalized his guilt and focused on the big screen, where a window had opened with a camera view of the helipad over the Oregon’s aft-most cargo hatch. Lit only by the moon, the damage to their R44 looked extensive, as George flared the chopper over the stern railing. Smoke poured from the engine cowling in dense waves that were twisted into a wreath by the whirling blades.

  This was another example of why no one ever questioned Adams’s courage. He’d flown the crippled chopper over twenty miles of empty sea rather than do the safe thing and land it in some farmer’s field. Of course, that would have raised all sorts of questions with the Greek authorities. And the Chairman’s plan C called for everyone to be on the boat and in international waters as quickly as possible.

  George hovered the helicopter a few feet off the deck and slowly lowered it. An instant before the skids kissed, a massive gush of smoke erupted from the chopper’s exhaust. The engine had seized, and the Robinson smacked into the landing pad hard enough to crack a strut. Max could see George calmly shutting down the helo’s systems, one by one, before unstrapping himself. As the hangar elevator began to descend, George looked straight at the camera and threw a cocky, one-sided grin.

  One safely home, Max thought. Six more to go.

  WITH A FLAT REAR TIRE, the rental van drove like a pig. Linda had to wrestle it through the corners, as she maneuvered them toward the New National Road, the main artery back off the Peloponnese. Her rearview mirrors were thankfully clear, but she knew that wouldn’t last. While Linc prepared the ropes, Eddie scrounged the inside of the van for anything they could use to slow their eventual pursuers. Linda had used a laptop to control the UAV, so that was useless, but she had installed a rolling chair and a small desk Eddie could toss out the back doors. He’d also pooled all their weapons and ammunition. He had three pistols and six extra magazines of plastic bullets. The rounds would probably blast through a windshield but bounce off tires like spitballs.

  They flashed through tiny villages that clung to the sides of the road, a clutch of stucco buildings, homes, a taverna with seating under grape trellises, an occasional staked goat. Although foreigners were building vacation houses along the coast, just a mile or two inland it looked as if life hadn’t changed in this part of the world for a hundred years.

  Something caught Linda’s eye, a flash in the mirror. There had been no other traffic this late at night, so she knew it had to be the headlights of one of the jeeps she’d spied back at the compound.

  “We’re about to have company,” she said, and pressed the accelerator a bit harder, balancing speed against the burst tire’s shredding.

  “Let them get right up to us,” Eddie called from the rear of the van, his voice jumping in time with the flattened wheel. He had one hand on the door handle and the other on a pistol.

  The jeep had to be doing eighty miles an hour and ate the distance in seconds. Peering out the back window, Eddie watched them come and realized they weren’t going to tuck in behind the van but come alongside it.

  “Eddie!” Linda cried.

  “I see it.”

  He threw open the door when the jeep was ten yards back, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. His first rounds bounced off the jeep’s hood and grille, but the next few found the windshield. They punched neat holes through the glass, forcing the driver to swerve and slow. For a moment, it looked like he was going to roll the four-by-four, but at the last second he cranked the wheel in the opposite direction of the jeep’s slide, and its left wheels crashed back to the pavement.

  Almost immediately, he started after the fleeing van.

  “Linc, down! Linda, hold on,” Eddie shouted when the guard in the jeep’s passenger’s seat raised himself over the windscreen. He cradled an assault rifle.

  The gun’s chattering and the metallic whine of bullets chewing through sheet steel came at the same time. The windows in the van’s back doors exploded, showering Eddie Seng in a cascade of diamond chips. Metal crackled with heat where rounds punched through, and one bullet ricocheted inside the van before embedding itself in the back of Linda’s chair.

  Eddie raised his second pistol over a window frame and fired blindly, while Linc used his body to shield Kyle Hanley’s unconscious form.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” Linda called from the driver’s seat. She was hunched over the wheel and looking at the side rearview mirror. “You hit the shooter in the chest.”

  “Did I kill him?” Eddie was slamming home fresh magazines.

  “Can’t tell. A guy in the back is taking his gun. Hold on!”

  Linda hit the brakes and swerved into the jeep’s lane. The two vehicles came together with a sickening crash, the van riding up onto the jeep’s bumper for a moment before coming back down with a hard bounce. The limp passenger was thrown from the jeep, while the men in back crashed into the roll bar.

  Hitting the gas again, Linda bought them a hundred-yard head start before the guards could regain the hunt.

  “Oregon, how far are we?”

  Eric Stone answered immediately. “I have you in sight from the UAV. You’ve got another six miles.”

  Linda cursed.

  “To make matters worse,” Stone continued, “there are two more jeeps coming up behind the first. One’s maybe a quarter mile back and the other a little farther.”

  The jeep came up on them again, but rather than get too close, it hung back, and the armed guard started firing at the van’s tires. Linda worked the wheel to foul his
aim, but she knew it was only a matter of time. “Any bright ideas back there?”

  “I’m afraid I’m out.” Eddie admitted, but then his face brightened. He tapped his radio mike. “Eric, crash the UAV into the jeep.”

  “What?”

  “The drone. Use it like a cruise missile. Hit the passenger compartment. It should still have enough fuel on board to blow up on impact.”

  “Without it, we won’t be able to pick up the Chairman,” Stone protested.

  “Have you heard from him in the past five minutes?” The question hung in the air. “Do it!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  NO SOONER HAD CABRILLO hit the pavement in front of the jeep, its driver hit the gas. Juan had a fraction of a second to flatten himself and reach up, as the bumper loomed over him. He grasped its underside, with the jeep picking up speed, dragging him down the road. He reached up higher to get his backside off the rough pavement, while rubber was chewed off his boots.

  He hung on like that for a couple of seconds to catch his breath. He’d lost the mini-Uzi but still had a Glock in a holster at his hip. He doubled his grip with his left hand and used his right to grab his earbud and set it in place in time to hear the last exchange between Eddie and Eric.

  “Negative on that,” he said, his throat mike easily negating the engine roar inches from his face.

  “Juan,” Max shouted in jubilation, “how are you?”

  “Oh, I’m hanging on.” He tilted his head back so he could look up the road. Even with everything upside down, he saw two sets of car taillights and the unmistakable flicker of rifle fire from one of them. “Give me thirty seconds and the van’ll be in the clear.”

  “That’s about all the time we have left,” Linda cautioned.

  “Trust me.” With that, Cabrillo tensed his shoulders and pulled himself higher, so that he was lying across the bumper just out of the driver’s view. Clutching the grille as tightly as he could, he cross-drew the Glock from its holster with his left hand. He pushed off with his right to vault over the hood.

  He drew down as he came up, double-tapping the driver in the chest. At this range, the plastic bullets would have been fatal, had the driver not worn a Kevlar vest. As it was, the two slugs hit with the kinetic energy of a mule, blowing every molecule of air out of the driver’s lungs.

  Cabrillo scrambled across the hood, clutching the wheel as the driver released it, his face already a deathly white as his mouth worked soundlessly to draw air. Cabrillo kept to the middle of the road by looking back at where they’d been rather than forward where they were heading. It didn’t help that the driver kept his foot pressed to the gas pedal.

  Juan had no choice but to reach over the dash with his pistol and shoot the man in the leg. Blood splattered the dash, the driver, and Cabrillo, but the shot had the desired effect. The driver’s foot came off the gas and the jeep began to slow. When they were down to twenty miles per hour, Cabrillo leveled the pistol between the driver’s pain-seared eyes. “Out.”

  The driver jumped clumsily, falling to the macadam, clutching his bleeding thigh and coming to a stop in a heap of abraded skin and broken limbs.

  Juan swung over the lowered windscreen, settled into the driver’s seat, and started after the first jeep. In his mirror, he could see a set of headlights barreling down the road and rightly assumed it was another contingent of Responsivist guards. The tenacity of their pursuit set off all sorts of alarm bells in his mind, but that was something to think about when they were well away from here.

  The men firing at the van had no reason to suspect Juan’s jeep as he came up behind them, even as the third jeep narrowed the gap. They flashed under a sign announcing in both Greek and English that they were fast approaching the entrance ramp for the New National Road and its vital bridge over the Corinth Canal, so it was the timing, not the execution, that worried him. It would have to be perfect. The ramp was coming up on their right. The third jeep was fifty yards back, and bullets continued to ping off the side of the van ahead.

  “Linda,” Juan said, eyeing the jeep in front and the one coming up behind him, “speed up as fast as you can go. Don’t worry about losing the tires. Just floor it.”

  The van started to open a gap between it and the jeep, but the jeep’s driver fed it a bit more gas and closed the gap again. Cabrillo came up to the jeep’s bumper and hit it with what police refer to as PIT, or Precision Immobilization Technique. The impact wasn’t very hard and didn’t need to be. The trick was to hit in such a way that the back end of the target vehicle gets spun around.

  Feeling like a stock-car driver gunning for the lead, Juan hit the jeep a second time, just as the driver corrected from the first impact. This time, there was no saving it, and Juan had to crank his wheel hard to the left as the Responsivists’ four-by-four careened out of control, swinging in a wide arc across the road, before its two left tires hooked and the jeep began to flip over and over, shedding bits of sheet metal and the bodies of its occupants as it rolled.

  The jeep came to rest on its roof, lying across the single-lane entrance to the thruway, effectively blocking it. Linda’s back was covered, and she was clear to make her run for the bridge. Juan kept watching his rearview mirror. The party in the third jeep slowed as they approached the on-ramp but must have soon realized their quarry had escaped, because they accelerated again after Cabrillo, who continued to drive toward the heart of Corinth.

  NO ONE IN THE OP CENTER could believe what they saw from the flying drone until Eric radioed Cabrillo. “Is that you in the second jeep, Chairman?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Nice piece of driving.”

  “Thanks. How’s everything look?”

  “Linda and her team are in the clear. There are no other vehicles coming out of the Responsivists’ stronghold, and, so far, your fireworks display hasn’t caught the attention of the local authorities. We’re about two minutes from entering the canal. George just came in from the hangar and will be taking over the UAV.”

  “What about my route through town?”

  “Last sweep looked clear. As soon as Linda reaches the bridge, you’ll have primary aerial coverage.”

  “Okay. See you soon.”

  Wearing his flight suit with the pant leg cut off and a large bandage taped to his thigh, George Adams settled himself at a computer, keeping the injured leg extended stiffly.

  “How you doing?” Max asked, trying to sound more gruff than normal to hide his guilt.

  “One more scar to impress the ladies. Hux only needed eight stitches. I’m more worried about the Robinson. Talk about giving something the Swiss cheese treatment. There were eleven holes in the canopy alone. Okay, Stoney, I’m ready.”

  Eric flipped UAV control to Adams so he could concentrate on getting the big freighter through the Corinth Canal.

  First proposed during Roman times, a canal across the narrow isthmus was beyond their capabilities. Being master engineers, the Romans built a road, which the Greeks called the diolkos, instead. Cargo was removed from ships at one end, and both freight and vessel were loaded onto wheeled sleds that were dragged by slaves to the other terminus, where the ships were refloated and reloaded. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the technology had evolved to excavate a proper canal and save modern cargo vessels the one-hundred-and-sixty-mile journey around the Peloponnese. After a failed French effort, a Greek company took over and completed the canal in 1893.

  At a little less than four miles long and only eighty-two feet wide at sea level, there wasn’t much to note about the canal except for one special feature. It was carved through solid rock that soared more than two hundred and fifty feet above the ships transiting through it. It was as though an ax had cleaved the living rock to create the narrow passage. A favorite tourist activity was to stand on one of the bridges that span the canal and peer down at the oceangoing ships far below.

  Had it not been for the lights of the tiny town of Poseidonia, the view on the
Oregon’s main screen would have looked as though the ship was racing toward a cliff. The canal was so narrow it was difficult to spot. It was just a fractionally lighter slash on the dark stone. An occasional headlight swept along the main bridge a mile inland.

  “You sure about this, Mr. Stone?” Max asked.

  “With the high tide, we’ll have four feet clearance on each side of our wing bridges. I can’t promise I won’t scrape some paint, but I’ll get us through.”

  “Okay, then. I’m not going to watch this on TV if I can get the live show. I’ll be up on the bridge.”

  “Just don’t go outside,” Eric cautioned, a little uncertainty in his voice. “You know. Just in case.”

  “You’ll do fine, lad.”

  Max took the elevator topside and emerged on the dim pilothouse. He glanced aft, to check where crewmen were making preparations under the direction of Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski, two of Linc’s best gundogs. Crewmen were also stationed at the bow.

  The ship was steaming at nearly twenty knots as it made its approach. Though the canal is used today primarily by pleasure boats and sightseeing craft, any large vessel was towed through by tugs because of its tight confines and speed was limited to just a few knots. Max had supreme confidence in Eric Stone’s ship-handling abilities, but he couldn’t ignore the tension knotting his shoulders. He loved the Oregon as much as the Chairman and hated to see even a scratch mar her intentionally scabrous hide.

  They passed a long breakwater to starboard, and the collision alarm sounded through every compartment on the ship. The crew knew what was coming and had taken the proper precautions.

  Small bridges running along the coast roads spanned each end of the canal. Unlike the high truss bridges that towered over the water, these two-lane structures were just above sea level. To accommodate ships transiting the waterway, the bridges could be mechanically lowered until they rested on the seafloor so that vessels could pass over them. Once the ship was clear, the bridges were cranked back into place and cars could cross once again.