Someone might approach at any second. They couldn’t miss noticing that the container wasn’t locked tight. Then they would check the cargo.
Or, worse, just lock me in.
I would have to break for it the instant they came near the door. Count on surprise to buy me a second, maybe two. Run toward the gangway or jump for the water? Whichever direction looked less likely to get my head smashed in with a wrench.
A moment passed. I heard voices only yards away. I crouched, ready to spring.
Then the floor of the container buzzed, vibrated, rumbled. The feeling of the ship’s propellers, surging into action.
The Oxana M was moving.
Christ. I was out of options. It would have to be the water. Jump off the port side and swim to shore. The river wasn’t so wide that I couldn’t make it, even through the bone-chilling cold.
I was about to launch myself out of the blackness when I remembered the nerve gas.
I couldn’t leave the canisters behind. My escape and the havoc it would raise would undoubtedly force Liashko to change all of his plans. Including the deal Burke had arranged with Agent Martens and the Feds. Liashko would escape on the next flight across the Pacific, and who knew where his lethal stock would wind up?
Even if it meant never catching the evil bastard, I couldn’t let this chance slip away. The nerve agent was too dangerous. Too easy to hide. Secure the chemical weapons now and let fate sort out Liashko. And Burke, too, if it came to that.
I moved to the rear of the container and knelt to open the crate again by touch. The steel floor quivered with the ship as the engines increased speed, pushing the freighter faster toward the Sound.
With my jacket wrapped around the flashlight to narrow its beam, I set each cylinder of nerve gas—very carefully—to one side. The foam pads I tore into chunks to line my rucksack. Working as fast as I dared, it took fifteen minutes to pack the canisters firmly into place.
I shone the beam around the container to make sure I’d found them all. My ruck stuffed full of padding and poison looked like a nest. I’d stolen real eggs, Aura’s eggs, only a week before. Those had held the infinite promise of new life. These would birth only horror, and anguish, and death. I strapped the ruck to my back and peered out through the cracked door to the deck.
Empty. Maybe fifteen long paces to the starboard side. Beyond the rail, the lights of the city had receded into glittering specks, as if borne away in the freighter’s wake.
Too far for me to swim to shore now. I would never survive, especially not loaded down with the rucksack. Its twenty kilos might not bear me under the waves immediately, but after a quarter mile or more, with the cold sapping my strength . . .
A boat. I would slip away to another part of the deck, steal a lifeboat with an engine or even just an emergency zodiac inflatable and some oars. Anything would do now.
I slipped out of the container, closed the door to refasten its padlock, and walked directly to the rail. Voices and the faintest hint of cigarette smoke drifted back to me. The wind so frigid that the skin around my eyes creased defensively.
A steel ladder led to the deck immediately below. I stole down the rungs and into a passage that led along the port side of the ship.
We were changing course. The curved phosphorescent wake off the stern showed our path turning northwest. Moving fast, fifteen knots at least, out of Elliott Bay and into the open Sound.
The Oxana M was in a rush. To where? To meet Liashko? Or had Liashko decided to abandon Seattle and the arms deals altogether?
It wouldn’t change my plan. Find a boat and escape and call the cavalry. I crept along the passageway.
Footsteps. Clanging on stairs forty feet ahead, descending from the deck above. More than one person. I tried the nearest door. Unlocked. I ducked into the darkened room and shut the door again, just as the steps reached the passageway.
The steps were heavy but not fast. Two men, ambling along the deck, talking in what I took to be Russian. They halted just outside.
“I see you,” the voice said in English.
I froze. My hand was on the Colt in its holster. I wasn’t about to shoot any of the crew—hell, the sailors aboard may not even know who they were working for—but the sight of the gun might at least keep anyone from getting aggressive.
“Follow us out,” the voice continued. A thick Slavic accent. “No, farther than so little. Another ten minutes. Anatoly is here.”
Anatoly. The room had a porthole. I risked a look.
The one speaking held a phone to his ear with one hand and a powerful set of binoculars to his eyes with the other, looking somewhere northwest of the ship. I guessed him for an officer, probably the captain. He wore a brimmed cap and a thick blue coat and pants as wards against the cold, along with a bristly beard that started at his cheekbones and extended to his chest.
The second man stepped into view to snatch the phone. Big all over, with rolls of fat on the back of his bull neck and a belly that pushed out his fine black overcoat like it had been draped over a globe.
“Do you have it?” he said into the phone. I knew that resonant voice. The last time I’d heard it, I’d been covered in the gore of the killers he’d sent after me. Liashko.
An errant gust pushed his sparse black hair vertical, and he turned to impatiently smooth it back down. His head was round and his cheeks pink and hairless, like an infant’s. But the glaring piggish eyes conveyed as much malice as the poison I carried in my ruck.
“And the landing?” Liashko said to the caller. “We will not be seen when the barge goes to shore?”
A barge. They must be rendezvousing offshore with another vessel, making an exchange there.
It made sense. The Oxana M had its own cranes to offload the shipping container, if that was their aim. In the dead of night, miles off land, the chances of being seen were minuscule.
I heard the captain speaking quietly into a radio. Almost simultaneously, the lights in the passage outside went out. Dimming the ship to running lights only for their clandestine meeting. The two men walked away. I exited the room a moment later.
The captain had said he could see the other ship, the barge. On the western side of the Sound. I couldn’t spot it myself. Off the port rail, ebony water tipped with silver from reflected moonlight stretched for miles. A low strip of peninsula in the distance almost part of the horizon.
I tried my phone again. Nothing. Too far from shore. Liashko and the captain had been using a satellite phone. If I could find another like it on board, or get to a radio—
The steady hum of the engines lowered in pitch. We were slowing. Preparing to heave to and meet the barge.
Footsteps again, on the deck above. If I was too late to stop what was happening, I could at least get a look at who was taking ownership of the missiles. Enough to give the Feds a proper description as soon as I found a way off this heap.
The shipping container with the arms was near the bow. It followed that most of the crew would be either working there or staying warm inside the superstructure at the stern, walking a direct path back and forth on the main deck. This lower level should be clear.
But the long passageway on the port side offered no hiding places. I hunched low and headed forward on the ship, looking for a vantage point.
Farther along, the passageway opened out to span the full width of the ship. Two winches like huge toadstools, each as tall as my chest, flanked an open hatch on the deck floor. With the deck lights turned off, it took my eyes a moment to adjust and see what lay within the hatch. Heavy mooring rope, as thick as my arm. Another coiled pile of rope made a mound near the port siderail. The rail at this part of the deck had a two-foot-high gap underneath, to allow the mooring lines to run from the winches off the ship to a dock.
It would have to suffice for cover. Already the thrum of the propellers had changed again, becoming hollow. The engine in reverse, to stop the ship’s leviathan momentum. I squatted beside the mound of coiled rope and
looked out through the mooring gap in the rail.
A boat was drawing along the port side of the Oxana M. Liashko had called it a barge, and I had pictured something like a trash scow in my mind.
But this was something different. A vehicle ferry, made to transport a dozen or more cars and trucks. With the pilot’s cabin at the rear and a ramp at the bow, almost the entire deck was usable smooth space for passengers.
The barge carried only two vehicles. A heavy-duty flatbed truck and a car.
A cop car. What the hell?
The cruiser was a chalk-white Chevy Caprice PPV, its push bumper and LED light bar on the roof readily visible from my bird’s-eye view. I squinted to make out the dark blue insignia on its door: Washington State Patrol.
Was the sting already running? Had I stumbled into the middle of it?
Footsteps and voices overlapped on the deck above as the crew ran to throw lines to the waiting barge. A guy in coveralls emerged from the pilothouse of the barge to catch and secure one line to the barge’s bow. A second man, a state trooper in a black winter coat and gray Smokey Bear hat, stepped out from between the vehicles to grab the line dangling at the stern.
No. Not a trooper. Just a man wearing the uniform.
Sean Burke.
Fifty-One
Burke was here. Working for Liashko, helping to smuggle the container of weapons ashore. He must have known the missiles were on board to prepare this rendezvous on the water. There would be no tactical team coming. If Burke had signaled Martens, they would have descended on the Oxana M before it cast off the first mooring line. He’d sold us out.
Above me, I heard the whir of cables and clank of the crane’s jaws as it grabbed hold of the cargo again.
It wasn’t tough to predict their next moves. They would place the container on the flatbed truck. Take the barge to shore. The boat had a shallow draft and the extendable loading ramp at its bow. They could set ashore at any boat launch, or even on a beach. And simply drive away, with Burke in his WSP disguise and stolen patrol car running interference, making sure that the truck reached whatever destination they intended. A hiding place? A buyer?
It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was making sure I got the cops here before that truck reached shore. After that, the missiles might vanish.
A radio. There would be one on the bridge, and backup handheld sets around with the crew. I’d take the whole place hostage if I had to, set off every flare gun on board, just to hail the Coast Guard.
But I was already too late.
I never knew whether I had been spotted, or whether the four men had simply been taking an alternate path down the starboard passageway to cut across the deck. But they had been quiet. Even as I whipped around, they were already raising their guns, overcoming the shock of spotting me and yelling in multiple languages for me to halt.
Sailors, two of them, from their oil-stained weather gear. The other two wore street clothes, puffed vests and turtlenecks and woolen pants. Handguns for the sailors, AK-12 assault rifles in pixelated khaki camo for the city boys. Liashko’s men, I was sure.
They grabbed me and threw me to the deck. Hands relieved me of my gun, emptied my pockets, and tore the balaclava off my head and the rucksack from my back. I yelled for them to be careful with it, and one of them kicked me in the side. After that I was no trouble at all. The crewmen hauled me to my feet and manhandled me up to the main deck.
Dazed, for an instant I thought I was lying on the ground again. But it was the container that was high, swooping overhead on its journey to the barge.
The wind at the bow whipped at our hair and clothes and even blew the last of my dizziness away. Liashko stood at the ship’s rail, looking down at the barge as his steel box filled with one hundred and twenty Verba missiles was lowered to the waiting truck.
One of his men stepped forward to speak to him in Russian, before handing over the rucksack. Liashko’s face, already glowering, began to seethe. He tore at the top flap, yanking the ruck open to look inside. His eyes went wide with terror. But he managed to keep a grip on the ruck and the canisters of death staring him in the face.
He turned to look at the green shipping container on the barge, then back at me.
“How do you have this?” he said, holding out the rucksack as if for me to look inside.
I didn’t answer. Liashko said a word and one of his bodyguards punched me in the gut. I’d already tightened in expectation, but the blow still hurt like hell coming right after the kick to my ribs. I might have fallen if the sailors weren’t still holding my arms. When I looked up again Liashko was pointing, ordering the crew to do something. The captain, standing behind me, spoke as well. From the side deck, a gangway began to lower to the barge.
Liashko and the captain got into a shouting match. The arms trafficker was furious about the stowaway and the near loss of his property. Around me, I could feel the bodyguards edging back, uncertain about the sudden tension from the crew all around them. Then the captain was marching down the gangplank to the barge, followed by Liashko and his two men, who herded me in front of them like a reluctant sheep.
Should I dive for it? The water here had to be something like forty-five degrees. A bullet would be much faster, and no less certain to end it all.
We reached the barge. A chop had risen with the wind, and the barge bobbed on the waves. Each man wavered unsteadily for a moment as they acclimated to the motion.
“Who the fuck is he?” Burke said, stepping forward. His eyes met mine. Rage? Or fear that I would give him away?
“It’s him. Shaw, the thief,” Liashko said.
“Can’t be,” Burke said. “Shaw’s dead.”
Liashko stared at me. Was I the same man? My scars hadn’t been showing in the pictures he’d seen of my dead body. My standing here, very much alive, gave him cause to doubt his memory.
“Hiding aboard and looking to steal money,” the captain said.
“No.” Liashko brandished the rucksack. “He took these.”
From his pocket he removed a set of keys and handed them to Burke. “Open it.”
The barge pilot had been busy securing the container to the flatbed with chains and restraining straps. Burke stepped around him to climb onto the truck and remove the padlock. Liashko shouted at the pilot, who hurried to turn on the headlights of the state patrol car and illuminate the container just as Burke swung its door wide. Liashko stepped closer to see. I was shunted along by the muzzles of the armed bodyguards.
If the two thugs split up and I could take one by surprise, I’d have a chance. A lousy one, on this small boat with nearly no cover, but something.
Liashko swore at the sight of the open missile crate. He turned to grab me with both hands by the throat.
“Who are you?” he hollered, flecks of spit flying. He was strong. Even with my neck muscles tensed, his thumbs crushed my windpipe. Shining spots materialized in my vision, a mottled constellation on Liashko’s enraged pink face.
Fuck it. Go down swinging. I went limp, sagging against the arms of the crewmen holding me, and just as abruptly sprang back up to headbutt Liashko in the teeth. He fell back and his hands dropped from my neck.
I didn’t get to enjoy the moment. Something hard smacked me on the skull, and this time I folded for real. Another kick sent me over sideways.
“Don’t!” Burke’s voice. “Don’t shoot him yet. He might have stolen more. Or booby-trapped it.”
Liashko cursed again and spat on the deck. His men yanked my arms behind me once more and I felt handcuffs—probably taken from Burke’s WSP service belt—click tight around my wrists. The sailors yanked me upright and frog-marched me to the patrol cruiser. One of the bodyguards opened the back door and I ducked just in time to save my head another bad knock as they tossed me headlong inside.
I wrestled myself upright. My side ached from the kicks. Looking through the clear plastic barrier between the backseat and the front compartment and the car’s windshield I had a
view of the back of the flatbed, and the collection of angry men standing between the truck and the freighter’s massive hull. Burke and the captain were arguing now. Liashko held a handkerchief to his face. Red dappled the ivory cloth. Good. A gift from me, you son of a bitch.
Bravado. I’d failed, and now both the missiles and the nerve gas were back in Liashko’s hands. And Burke’s. My wave of hatred for both men almost overwhelmed the dread of the bad ending I knew must be in store for me. Soon.
Liashko shouted both men down, and now the captain seemed to be on the receiving end of his rage again. The barge pilot in the coveralls was inside the container, maybe checking the arms. He leaned out to show the Verba launching tube from the crate I’d opened, which seemed to infuriate Liashko further. His bodyguards had fanned out.
I saw what was about to happen before the crewmen did. Even before Burke did, and he began to move in the next instant. The bodyguards raised their rifles and fired. The two sailors didn’t even have time for a look of surprise before they died. That left the captain, who lifted his hands as if to wave away the oncoming rounds half a second before they tore open his chest. He fell between the barge and his ship, into the water.
More gunfire now. Coming from above, from the deck of the freighter. I hit the floor of the cruiser. One bullet spider-webbed the car’s windshield and another punched a tiny hole through the roof of the cruiser, two feet from my head.
I looked sideways out the window. The bodyguards had Liashko shielded from fire around the other side of the truck. They leaned out to exchange chattering bursts from their AKs with the continued assault coming from the ship.
Shifting in my seat, I tried to reach into my sleeve, to the leather brace with my picks. The cuffs hindered my hands. I could touch my wrist but no farther. I kept struggling, straining for a different angle.
In the corner of my eye, I saw the mooring lines fall limp from the freighter. They’d cut the barge loose. A few seconds later both sides stopped shooting. Engines surged and water frothed as the Oxana M began to pull away.
A Dangerous Breed Page 34