Skeleton Coast tof-4 Read online

  He paid no attention to the old man mending a fishing net in the shade of the roof. A moment later he heard Sloane scrabbling across the metal. Her body was launched off the edge and Juan was ready to catch her. The impact drove him to his knees.

  At the same instant dime-sized holes were punched through the roof, the sound of a machine pistol shattered the malaise of the street. Bits of hemp were thrown into the air as the big net absorbed a dozen rounds. The fisherman was well back from the roof ’s edge so Juan didn’t have to worry about him. He took Sloane’s hand and together they raced to their left to what looked like a busier street.

  When they broke out from under the porch bullets stitched the ground all around them. The Skorpion was designed for close-in work and the gunman was too hopped on adrenaline to tame the notoriously inaccurate weapon. Juan and Sloane found temporary cover behind a ten-wheeled truck.

  “Are you okay?” he panted.

  “Yeah, just sorry for you that I’ve been eating like a pig since I arrived here.”

  Cabrillo chanced a peek around the back of the MANN truck. One of the gunmen was inching his way down the roof, covered by his comrades crowding Luka’s apartment window. They spotted Juan and raked the truck with autofire. He and Sloane raced toward the cab. The tall cargo box hid them from the window, allowing Juan to step from the front tire onto the long hood and then onto the cab. He had his pistol ready and took the shot before the gunmen upstairs could see him in this unexpected position. The range was only twenty-five yards and Juan compensated for the difference in height. The bullet slammed into the gunman on the roof, tearing a chunk out of his right hand. The Skorpion went flying as he lost his grip on both it and the corrugated sheeting. He tumbled down the roof, slamming into the ground hard enough for his breaking bones to be heard across the street.

  Juan ducked out of sight before the other assassins could pinpoint his location.

  “What now?” Sloane asked, wide-eyed.

  “One of them will stay in the window to make sure we don’t make a break for it while the other takes the stairs down.” Juan looked around.

  While this was never a busy part of town, the road was utterly deserted now and in a way looked like it hadn’t been occupied for years. Trash fluttered in the gutters and he expected to see tumbleweeds blowing by at any second.

  He wrenched open the truck’s passenger door and saw the keys weren’t in the ignition. Franklin Lincoln could hot-wire it in under a minute but Juan wasn’t as skilled. The gunman would be on them long before he got the diesel fired. He took another quick look up at the apartment. The assassin was well back from the window frame but maintained an uninterrupted view of the truck.

  “Think, damn it, think.”

  The building next to them had once been a grocery store but its windows were shuttered with sheets of plywood. Up the block was an open park with dirt rather than grass while behind them were more apartments and small single-family homes that seemed to lean on one another to stay upright.

  He rapped a knuckle against the truck’s exposed fuel tank. It rang hollow: almost, but not quite, empty.

  He unscrewed the filler cap and saw waves of diesel fumes rise in the hot air.

  There were a few things Juan carried with him at all times: a small compass, a pocketknife, a tiny flashlight with a xenon bulb, and a Zippo lighter that would remain lit once the flint wheel was turned. He used the knife to cut a strip from the bottom of his shirt and lit it with the Zippo. He moved Sloane toward the front of the truck and dropped the burning rag into the tank.

  “Step onto the bumper but stay low and keep your mouth open,” he warned and made certain Sloane plugged her ears.

  Had the tank been full the explosion would have blown the truck apart. As it was, when the rag ignited the puddle of fuel pooled in the bottom of the tank the detonation was more powerful than Juan anticipated. And even though he was protected from its effects by the cab, and more important, the engine block, he could still feel its searing heat. The truck rocked on its suspension as if struck by a cannon, and Juan’s head rang as if he’d been hit with a hammer.

  He jumped back to the ground and looked at what he’d accomplished. As he’d hoped the explosion had shredded the plywood protecting the supermarket’s windows and blown the glass halfway down the denuded aisles. “Come on, Sloane.”

  Hand-in-hand they fled into the dark interior of the grocery store while outside the truck burned. At the back of the store was a door leading to a storage area and loading docks. Juan turned on his penlight and spied an exterior door. He assumed that the assassins knew where they’d gone, so he didn’t bother being stealthy. Cabrillo blew the lock off the chain securing the door with his pistol. The chain rattled to the concrete floor and he shoved the door open.

  Across the street from the rear of the grocery store was the wharf where they’d docked the lifeboat. It looked right at home tied up amid the broken-down fishing boats and sagging docks. Running flat out they crossed the road and raced along the maze of interconnected jetties while behind them one of the gunmen emerged from the back of the grocery store and continued the pursuit.

  Fishermen working on their boats and kids casting lines off the dock were still looking at the smoke rising over the abandoned grocery store as Sloane and Juan ran by. The wooden docks were slick with mold and fish slime, but they pushed their pace even harder.

  The buzz-saw screech of a Skorpion on full automatic raked the air. Juan and Sloane both fell flat, sliding across the slippery wood and falling off the dock and into a small skiff with an outboard motor mounted to its transom. Juan recovered in an instant but stayed low as wood splinters and lead danced along the edge of the dock.

  “Start the engine,” he ordered Sloane, and peered over the edge of the jetty. The gunman was fifteen yards away but would need to walk at least fifty to reach the outboard because of the peculiar layout of the piers. He tried to fire when he saw the top of Cabrillo’s head, but the machine pistol was empty.

  Sloane yanked on the starter cord and to their relief the engine fired on the second pull. Juan cut the painter and Sloane torqued the throttle. The little boat raced away from the dock and across to where the lifeboat waited. The assassin must have realized his targets were escaping and that he was too exposed to keep after them. Namibia still had a police force, and after the past few minutes of gunplay every cop in Walvis and Swakopmund would be descending on the harbor. He threw his gun into the water to hide any evidence and ran back the way he’d come.

  The prow of the little outboard kissed the side of the lifeboat. Juan held their craft steady while Sloane climbed aboard. He followed her onto his own boat, reached over, and gunned the outboard’s throttle, sending the little boat arrowing back across the marina.

  He had the lines cast off and the engine fired in record time. In minutes they had cleared the outer buoy and were racing into open water. He kept a straight course to get them into international waters as quickly as possible in case Harbor Patrol came after them, not that they could catch them once Juan engaged the hydrofoils and the boat lifted from the sea.

  “How are you doing?” Juan asked when he had the boat in trim.

  “My ears are still ringing,” she said. “That was about the most insane thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.”

  “Crazier than helping a woman being pursued by God knows how many assassins?” he teased.

  “Okay, second craziest.” Her mouth turned upward into a smile. “So are you going to tell me who you really are?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. Once we check out the area where Papa Heinrick saw his metal snakes and determine for ourselves what’s going on, I’ll tell you my whole life story.”

  “You’re on.”

  They soon crossed Namibia’s twelve-mile territorial border, according to the boat’s GPS and Juan throttled down the engine to take the hydrofoil off plane.

  “This old girl drinks fuel at an awful rate when she’s up on her wings,” he expl
ained. “If we’re going to make it out and back we have to keep her to about fifteen knots. I’ll stand the first watch, why don’t you head below? I can’t offer you a bath but we have plenty of water to freshen up and you can get some sleep. I’ll wake you in six hours.”

  She lightly brushed her lips against his cheek. “Thank you. For everything.”

  TWELVE hours later, they were approaching the region where the metal snakes reportedly lurked. The wind was picking up as a storm swept across the desert and slammed into the moist, cold air above the ocean. Cabrillo wasn’t concerned about weathering a storm in the lifeboat. What bothered him was a reduction in visibility making their search that much more difficult. And to top it off, static electricity building in the atmosphere was playing havoc on the craft’s electronics. He couldn’t get a tone on his sat phone and the radio received nothing but static across all the bands. And the last time he checked the GPS it wasn’t receiving enough signals from the orbiting satellites to properly fix their position. The depth meter was reading zero feet, which was impossible, and even the compass was acting up, slowly revolving in its liquid gimbals as though magnetic north was swirling all around them.

  “How bad do you think it’s going to get?” Sloane asked, jerking her chin in the direction of the storm.

  “Hard to tell. It doesn’t look like any rain is falling, but that could change.”

  Cabrillo settled a pair of binoculars to his eyes and slowly scanned the horizon, timing his movements with the slow undulation of the waves so he had maximum height as he scouted each direction. “Nothing but empty water,” he reported. “I hate to say this but without the GPS I can’t set up a proper search grid, so we’re just blundering around out here.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “The wind’s holding steady from due east. I can use it to keep my bearings so we can hold a course. I guess we can search until it gets dark. Hopefully the storm will blow over by dawn and the GPS will come back online.”

  By rough estimate, Juan piloted the lifeboat in mile-wide lanes, tracking back and forth across the vast ocean like he was mowing a lawn. The seas built steadily as they searched, so the waves were topping seven feet while the wind freshened, carrying the taste of the desert so far from land.

  With each lane searched both became more convinced that everyone had been right about crazy old Papa Heinrick and that his metal snakes were nothing more than a raging bout of the DTs.

  When Cabrillo saw a glint of white in the distance he dismissed it as the spume riding atop a wave. But he kept his eye on the spot and when they crested another swell, the speck was still there. He snatched the binoculars from their holder. His sudden movements after so many monotonous hours grabbed Sloane’s attention.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.”

  He waited until another surge bore the lifeboat up the face of a wave before putting the glass on the distant glimmer. It took him long seconds to fully comprehend what he was seeing. The scope of it defied belief.

  “I will be damned,” he muttered, drawing out each word.

  “What?” Sloane cried excitedly.

  He handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself.”

  As she adjusted the eyepieces to fit to her smaller face, Juan kept an eye on the object. He was trying to judge scale and found it next to impossible. With nothing to compare it to it could easily be a thousand feet long. He wondered how George Adams could have missed it during his aerial reconnaissance of the area.

  Then from the white object came an intense burst of light that flashed against the scudding clouds. The range was two kilometers, perhaps a little more, but at a thousand miles per hour the Israeli-made Rafael Spike-MR antitank missile ate the distance so fast it gave Juan just seconds to react.

  “Incoming!” he roared.

  17

  JUAN’SGlock was still secured at the small of his back, so he grabbed the satellite phone in its waterproof bag and tackled Sloane around the waist, throwing them bodily over the rail and into the dark water. They began to swim frantically from the lifeboat, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the impending explosion.

  The rocket’s dual electro-optic and infrared seeker stayed homed in on its target as it streaked across the sea, arrowing in on the plume of scorching exhaust from the lifeboat’s engine. It slammed into the hull moments after being launched, punching a hole through the side and detonating just fore of the engine block. Designed to core through a foot of armor, the shaped charge sliced the keel, breaking the lifeboat’s back as debris was blown thirty feet into the air.

  The smoking, smoldering ruin folded almost in half as she sank, a gout of steam erupting when the sea made contact with the red-hot engine and manifolds.

  The overpressure wave was magnitudes greater than when Cabrillo blew up the truck’s tank back at Walvis Bay and had he not tossed himself and Sloane off the boat they would have been crushed by its force. They floundered in the chaotic waves radiating from the blast site, spitting and sputtering water that they had inadvertently swallowed.

  Bicycling his feet to stay afloat, he reached for her to make sure she wasn’t injured.

  “Don’t ask me if I’m okay,” she managed to say. “You’ve already asked me that a dozen times since yesterday.”

  “It has been an exciting twenty-four hours,” Juan admitted, toeing off his shoes. “We have to get as far away from the boat as possible. They will almost certainly send someone out to investigate.”

  “We headed where I think we’re headed?”

  “Time to catch a ride on Papa Heinrick’s snake.”

  Though swimming a mile wasn’t a difficult feat for two people in shape, battling the waves that crashed into them hampered every movement. It grew more difficult when a white luxury yacht identical to the one that had chased thePinguin nosed its way into their area, the cyclopean eye of a searchlight cutting through the gathering dusk. It was the boat that had first caught Juan’s eye, but it was what that boat had been tied to that commanded his attention.

  “Must have gotten a buy-one-get-one deal on those babies,” Juan said.

  “Only BOGOs I get are at the supermarket for potato chips,” Sloane quipped back.

  After fifteen minutes of them swimming around to avoid the searchlight’s powerful beam, the big yacht roared off into the darkness, giving Juan a bearing on which way to head, not that he thought he could miss their target.

  The cool water had begun to sap their strength. To make their job easier, Juan handed his Glock and the satellite phone to Sloane and shucked off his pants. He tied the legs closed at the cuffs and held the open waist into the wind so the pants filled with air. He quickly cinched them closed with the belt. He traded the makeshift flotation device to Sloane for his gun and phone. “Just make sure you keep one hand on the waistband so it doesn’t leak air.”

  “I’ve heard about doing that but I’ve never seen it done.”

  Sloane’s teeth hadn’t begun to chatter but he could hear the strain in her voice. Juan said, “It was a lot easier practicing in a swimming pool.” Now wasn’t the time to tell her that the maneuver had saved his life on more than one occasion.

  Buoyed by the air-filled pants Sloane swam much more strongly. And as they got closer to their destination, its massive size was acting like a damper for the waves.

  “Do you feel that?” Sloane asked.

  “What?”

  “The water, it’s warmer.”

  For a moment Juan was afraid that Sloane’s body was no longer fighting the cold but rather succumbing to its icy tentacles. But then he felt it, too. The water was warmer and not just a degree or two but as much as ten or fifteen. He wondered if an active geothermal vent was causing such a temperature increase. Could that also explain the massive structure floating atop the waves? Did it somehow harness its power?

  What Papa Heinrick had called a metal snake was in fact a dull green pipe that Juan judged t
o be at least thirty feet in diameter with all but the top six submerged. The pipe wasn’t solid, however; it flexed along its length with each wave that passed under it. He judged his earlier estimate that the structure was a thousand feet long to be accurate.

  The water was nearly eighty degrees when they finally reached the pipe. Juan placed his hand against the metal and felt it was warm to the touch. He could also feel the vibration of machinery from within the structure, massive pistons sawing back and forth with each thrust of the sea.

  They swam along its flank, keeping enough distance so a wave wouldn’t smash them into it, and found one of the hinge points after a couple hundred feet. The sound of machinery was louder as the mechanism converted the action of the waves into potential energy of some kind. Rungs were welded to the side of the pipe to allow workers access to the massive hinge. Juan had Sloane climb up first. She had his pants deflated and untied by the time he joined her.

  She gasped. There was just enough light for her to see that below his knee his right leg was a prosthesis.

  “I’m sorry, that was rude,” she whispered. “I had no idea. You don’t limp or anything.”

  “Gotten used to it over the years,” Juan replied, tapping the titanium strut that acted as his shin. “Parting shot from the Chinese Navy a few years back.”

  “Ihave to hear your life story.”

  Juan thrust aside thoughts about how George Adams could have missed the pipe when he reconnoitered the area from theOregon ’s chopper. Instead, he steeled himself to the practicalities of their situation. He and Sloane were vulnerable as long as the men remained on the yacht tied up on the far end of the structure. There was no other option.

  He slipped into his pants and found an access hatch on top of the pipe. He opened it and saw there was a second hatch below. They’d explore later. He wedged the bag containing the satellite phone in the space between the two doors and locked the outer hatch closed.