“Now more than ever,” Roo said, pulling his feet out.
She helped him out of the capsule. It was perched on a flat trolley just under the massive open door of the barrel’s breech, looking for all the world like the closed vault of a bank door … for giants. Katrina grabbed his thumb as he stepped forward and yanked back on it as he moved away from her.
It popped again. This time the yank of pain was followed by the aching absence of constantly strained tendons and muscle stretched out past their limits.
Roo took a deep breath. “Thanks.” There was a worker in overalls slumped near the motorized trolley. He’d been the one tasked with loading it up. “Your work?”
From the outside, the capsule Roo had been in looked like a large cruise missile. But one just barely large enough to fit Roo inside while lying down. Some of the lines revealed its mini space shuttle abilities, like the fact that it had gray heat tiles on the underbelly. That would allow it to withstand reentry into the atmosphere when it returned from delivering a small satellite to orbit.
A window shattered somewhere in the distance.
“He’ll wake up in ten to fifteen,” Katrina said. “I prefer quiet right now. Hurry, the cameras are down in this half of the loading zone. I didn’t jam the ones looking at the barrel itself, but someone will still be sent out to take a look.” She had a large duffel bag with her. She grabbed four fist-sized packs of adhesive explosives and a remote detonator. “So here’s our dilemma. There’s a capsule already loaded inside the Verne. You were going to be number two on the launch agenda tonight.”
Roo looked up. Water was dripping along the barrel, seeping in from between where thick rubber baffles kept the weather out.
“My explosives won’t crack the barrel. The breech is mechanized, we can’t open it from here. But there’s a control room.” Kit handed him a small submachine gun from the duffel bag. “We blow it up, we stand a chance of stopping the launch. It’ll be dangerous, though. Like, stealing a helicopter off a boat dangerous.”
“Do you have any grenades?”
Kit handed him two. “All I have, plus the explosives in the bag.”
“If we can hold the control room until backup arrives…” Roo muttered.
“How far out are they?”
“Minutes?” Roo wasn’t sure how long it had taken to shove him in the capsule and tie him down. “But we can’t wait.”
“I agree,” Kit said firmly.
Roo looked at her. “Your father might be in there. Are you going to be able to…”
“We talked about this already. He contributed to my genetic material,” Kit said, her jaw set. She slung the bag over a shoulder and held up a submachine gun of her own. “He stopped being my father a long, long time ago. I’m here to stop him. He killed my husband.”
“Okay.” They crossed the warehouse, stepping through pools of water accumulating on the floor and dripping down into the concrete trench by the breech.
They opened the door to the outside and the wind ripped it away off its hinges. Roo put his hand out and looked back at her. “Hundred miles an hour?”
“And building.”
Enough to blow them away standing upright. The wind thundered loud enough to overwhelm his eardrums and drive deep into a space behind his sinuses. A hundred yards away the control center, a concrete bunker with no windows, was lit up in spotlights. The mud between the two buildings was a no-man’s land of squall, flying mud, and wind.
“Get low!” Roo shouted. Kit nodded.
On hands and knees they pushed forward across the mud between the loading bay and the control center, the wind tearing and ripping at every piece of clothing. It felt like a thousand hands yanking and shoving them around.
The rain needled into Roo’s skin.
He started to shiver. The wind chill, even though it was summer in the tropics, was stripping the warmth out of the air.
They were right outside the door of the bunker.
“Hey! You. Stop!” The faint voice of a guard reached them. The man struggled up against the wind at them from around the corner of the bunker. He had a pistol aimed at them, but the hurricane winds battered his hand.
Roo stopped. He turned back to face the man. “Don’t shoot,” Roo shouted at Kit.
“What?”
“We’re too close to the bunker, they might hear it.”
Then Roo stood up. The guard had been keeping his distance, not wanting to get jumped.
But they were in the middle of a hurricane.
“Hey.”
Roo jumped into the air and spread his arms and legs. The wind caught him, eagerly throwing his body through the air a few feet over the ground. Roo slammed into the man’s chest in midair and knocked his weapon loose. They tumbled and bounced into the mud, grappling at each other.
Then Roo got his forearms wrapped around the man’s neck. He could see a small swastika just under his right ear.
With his legs clenched around the stomach, his back pressed deep into the mud, Roo slowly choked him to death as the wind battered him with aerosolized mud.
He staggered back to Kit, waiting at the door to the bunker. She held up three fingers. Then two. One.
Roo kicked in through the door. It was like smacking a wall. The wind was holding it closed shut. Kit waited for him to get it slightly open, then jammed the barrel of her gun into it to lever it open wide enough for Roo to enter, submachine gun up tight to his chin. “Get down! Down!”
Bullets kicked the concrete around him as people fired. Roo sprayed the room in the direction of the fire, then zeroed in on the first shooter. He went down in a spray of blood.
Another neo-Nazi had dropped for cover right as Roo entered. Now he stood up with a gun. Kit, sweeping in from behind, shot him in the temple.
“Anyone else want to try that?” Roo asked. The other three men standing in the room dropped their guns and raised their hands. “I’m Prudence Jones of the Caribbean Intelligence Group, this is Katrina Prideaux of the French Secret Service. No one is to fire the Verne Plus, understand.”
“Everyone, facedown, hands behind your backs,” Kit ordered.
One of the technicians near the wall of computer screens raised a hand tentatively. “Mister Beauchamp saw you on an external monitor,” she said.
Roo pointed his gun at them. “And?”
“He started the launch countdown. Already. Is that a problem?”
“Yes,” Kit said, walking over to her. “Abort. Now.”
The technician shook her head. “There are two keys. I’m Annabelle, the head of operations, so I have one.” She held up a key on a necklace. “Beauchamp took the other one, at gunpoint. You need both to stop the countdown.”
“How long do we have?”
“Six minutes.”
“Where is he?”
Annabelle pointed at one of the monitors. “You’d better hurry.”
In the misted static of the wind, Beauchamp staggered along the walls of the warehouse wrapped around the Verne cannon.
“He’s headed for the parking lot.”
Roo reached into his pocket and pulled out the gecko-feet gloves. “He’s going for the Humvee. I’ll go after him,” he said to Kit.
“I should go,” she said. “I’m capable of doing what needs to be done, Roo. I can do it.”
“I know you can. I don’t doubt it. But these gloves are my hand size,” he said, holding them up and wiggling them. “And the wind has picked up enough so that anyone out there is going to need all the help they can get.”
“Be careful.”
“Keep Beauchamp’s pet Nazis on the ground,” Roo told her. “I’ll be back with the other launch key.”
“We’ll watch the cameras,” Kit promised.
The inside of the control bunker was quiet, warm, and still. An oasis of light and calm.
Roo opened the door and stepped back into the maelstrom.
25
Roo crabbed his way through the mud after Beaucha
mp. It only took a few seconds to realize he wasn’t going to catch the man before he reached the parked cars. Several of the lighter compacts had slid across the mud and stacked up against the back of the warehouse, cracking the wall. But the Humvee remained in place, rocking back and forth.
Beauchamp looked back, and Roo saw the triumph on the man’s face. It faded when Beauchamp turned around: a tank broke through the mud, churning debris up with its tracks as it roared toward them.
For a moment, Beauchamp twisted back and forth, not sure whether to still try and run for the Humvee or turn back on Roo. The tank covered the distance as they both stood and watched, smacking into the vehicle and shoving it aside as it skidded to a stop.
The tank’s main barrel dropped and spun, aiming at the warehouse. The cavalry had arrived.
Roo stood up and pointed at Beauchamp. “Him!”
Two Barbados Defense Force soldiers popped nervously out of a hatch. They aimed rifles at Beauchamp, who immediately spun and ran for the far side of the warehouse. Bullets kicked up mud, but he turned the corner unharmed.
The soldiers looked at Roo, puzzled, but Roo was already running after Beauchamp. In just seconds he covered the length of the warehouse and found his target climbing the scaffold steps on the outside of the Verne cannon’s barrel.
“Beauchamp!” Where the fuck was he going?
Roo made it to the metal stairs, thankful for the gecko gloves. They attached to the railing, helping him hold on gratefully as the wind tried to fling him away.
The barrel pointed up into the air, aiming off the coast of Barbados and over the dramatic cliffs. Roo shielded his eyes and looked up to see Beauchamp moving up the massive barrel. The wind whipped hard at his suit, and the man struggled to inch along, holding onto the rigid metal stays that ran from the barrel up to the scaffolding around it.
“Beauchamp!” Roo shouted.
He didn’t hear Roo. Not in this constant thundering howl of wind. The last time he’d been buffeted this bad Roo had been dangling at the end of a line hanging off Angela’s plane, watching the harbor in Roseau recede from under his feet.
Roo grabbed the barrel with his gloves and began scurrying up to catch Beauchamp. It was awkward, and occasionally eddies of gusts within the overall thundering roar would shove at him from the side and force him to lay flat while he regained his grip.
But with much grunting and grimacing, he caught up to Beauchamp.
Beauchamp, sensing something was wrong, turned back and saw Roo following him. He screamed something, but Roo couldn’t hear him above the wind. Roo reached back for his recently acquired pistol and aimed it at Beauchamp.
“Give it over!” Roo shouted.
Beauchamp held out his hand. “You drop it. Or I will drop this.” He opened his fist and the silver launch key whipped about in the wind.
Roo dropped the pistol. The wind swallowed it. He looked down at the ground far below him. A sixty-foot fall. But into mud.
Beauchamp laughed. “I’m going to throw this away, and it’s going to fly away with the storm. Then I’m going to watch the launch from the barrel itself. Even if you kill me, you can’t stop the change coming.”
There was only way to get the key back to the control room, Roo thought. He wasn’t sure if the mud would cushion him enough. Or where the hurricane would blow him as he fell …
“The world will see!” Beauchamp shouted above the storm. “It will see how much better things will be when we have more…”
Roo’s biceps screamed as he bounded forward on arms and legs in a crouch. Beauchamp reflexively tried to block Roo instead of dropping the key, as Roo had hoped, and Roo grabbed it. He held it close to his chest.
His gloves latched onto Beauchamp’s hands, but his whole body dangled over the air. “More what?” Roo asked Beauchamp, pulling himself almost face to face. “More for just you?”
Roo’s fingers slipped, even despite the gecko hold, and Beauchamp tugged and tore at the gloves. Roo let go with one hand, the one he’d grabbed the keys with.
Beauchamp’s face lit up with triumph. “I know those soldiers have come for me. That’s why I ran up here. I’m done, but my work will live forever. I will leave a legacy…” Roo’s hand slipped further, and Beauchamp unfastened the glove. “But you, Mr. Jones, are dead.”
Roo slipped free and fell.
He clutched the key tight to his chest as he was spun around, buffeted and tumbled by the incredible wind. He had no control, no awareness of where up or down was.
Until he struck the mud on his back.
Roo lay there, staring up at the maelstrom around him, the mud surrounding him. But he had the launch key gripped tight to his chest.
When Kit stumbled over to him, he just held up the key. He would have smiled, but it hurt too much.
26
The eye of the hurricane was a moment of calm. At the center, the winds ceased. The clouds faded away and the sun struck the island.
Everywhere one looked: a veil of clouds.
Barbadian soldiers dragged Roo out of the mud and into an armored personnel carrier where a CIG Special Forces medic started looking him over.
“One hundred and twenty broken bones, including the jaw, so don’t try to speak,” he muttered. “Man, you left a five-inch-deep impression back in that mud. You lucky to be alive.”
Rhodes clambered into the back of the APV. “We have fifteen minutes before the eye wall hits, and we’re all lucky the storm veered to hit us,” he said. “Let’s get him to safety.”
The moment of calm in the middle of a hurricane, Roo thought. He’d known some people who left their homes, thinking the storm was over. Or just curious to see what the world looked like outside in the temporary calm.
They’d often get caught as the hurricane resumed, the winds changing direction.
“I want to come,” Kit said.
Rhodes looked at Roo, who nodded. And despite the painkillers the medic pumped into him, regretted the movement.
She crouched next to him. “We had just a minute to go, Roo. When I saw you fall, I thought it was over.”
He squeezed her hand. Waved her closer to whisper, “Your father?”
“We found his body,” she said. “After he ran up the barrel to get away from you all, after you got the key, he just stood up there until a gust took him. In the end, too much of a coward to face us. His body’s down on the cliff. Someone will recover it later.”
Roo nodded. Winced again. He still wanted to tell her something else. Something that occurred to him while lying on his back in the mud. It felt like he’d had an eternity to mull things over there. “We still…” He was going to add, “… have work to do.” But he had to pause.
“Don’t talk right now,” she cut him off. “Whatever it is, it can wait. I’ll need to go lie low, if Rhodes will let me. When you recover, we’ll talk.”
She looked at Rhodes. “Least I can do,” he said.
Roo took a deep breath and turned his head back to look at the ceiling of the APV as it trundled to life in the eerie calmness around them.
27
A light drizzle from a summer rainstorm pattered against the side of the Spitfire as Roo sat at anchor. The white sands of Bridgetown beaches gleamed despite the gray skies. The work of reconstruction was going on across the water. Heavy equipment was still moving cars that had been thrown into inconvenient places, like walls and onto bridges. Several boats still lay scattered around town. But life bustled. Music blared from a park. People were out buying food, buses running on schedule again.
“Hey,” a voice called from the side.
Roo hopped out to the starboard scoop and looked over. Kit stood on the front of the dinghy, holding up a case of Red Stripe and a bag of groceries. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Always,” Roo said, and helped her up after tying off the painter to the dinghy.
Roo fried some plantains while the rice cooker steamed away. They sat in the cockpit and watched the sun p
onderously settle toward the blue line on the horizon as boats sailed by.
“I hoped you’d come by,” Roo said, when he finished his beer and threw the remains of the rice overboard for the fish.
“When Rhodes told me you’d snuck out of the hospital and gone to Aves, I thought you’d left Barbados for good.”
Roo smiled. “I promised you a drink,” he said.
“It’s not really a drink if I deliver it, though, is it?”
“Then I’ll have to owe you another.” He laughed.
“Is that a promise?”
He nodded.
Kit looked over at the cockpit seat nearby. “So what’s all that?”
Roo pointed at the plastic backpack-like object. “That’s a rebreather for diving. Wet suit. And next to it, a speargun. You’ve seen one of those before.”
Kit’s smile faded. “You’re not going fishing. What’s really going on?”
“I said I was going to hunt down the people who killed my nephew. And Beauchamp is dead.” The motley assortment of Eastern European neo-Nazis he’d collected to be his bodyguards and do his dirty work had scattered to the winds. “But there is a small loose end.”
“What is that?”
Roo pointed to the three-hundred-foot mega-yacht in the harbor. “While Rhodes and his people are finishing their investigations, Charleton, the creator of the Verne Plus, was asked to stay on the island while things were cleaned up. He’s right over there.”
“You think he’s involved?” Kit asked.
“Well, he denies understanding what Beauchamp was up to. Says he just needed the money and partnership,” Roo said. “I’m dubious. I need someone to sit on deck and watch the boat while I go over. And if I don’t come back, to let Rhodes know what happened. At the very least, I’d like to have a discussion with Charleton.”
“That’s why you came back with your boat?”
“Yes.”
“And after that?”
Roo opened another beer and pointed at the sun. “You ever wonder where the sun goes after it sets?”
Kit looked out over the ocean. “Far, far away…”
Hurricane Fever Page 19