He listened.
Voices.
And he was going to have to go down this damn ladder feet first!
He grasped the submachine gun with sweaty hands.
Maybe he should do the other side first.
Come on, decide, goddamn it! Callie is on this boat and her life—and yours—is on the line.
Forward. Then aft.
He stepped in, put his right foot on the first rung of the ladder.
The good news was that he had climbed ships’ ladders all his adult life.
With his heart in his mouth, he went down as quickly as he could, swinging the gun barrel as he dropped below the overhead.
A short passageway with two doors off it, one port, one starboard, then another ladder down, and a door leading forward. He went to the open hatch and looked. Lights. Voices. The engine room spaces.
But first these compartments. Callie just might be in one of them.
The port door opened as he twisted the knob. A small stateroom, empty. The door to a tiny head stood open and he could see in. Also empty.
He tried the starboard door.
Locked.
He put the silencer right against the doorknob and pulled the trigger once. A ripping sound as the bullet smashed through the innards of the door lock.
He twisted the knob savagely, and it opened.
Another empty compartment. But wait!
The bunks were made up in this one.
He went back to the port compartment. Two messy bunks, wadded-up blankets … blood!
Had they held Callie here?
The door leading forward, this had to lead to the owner’s stateroom. Please God, let Sonny Wong be there right this very second.
Grafton put his ear to the door and heard nothing.
Now he turned the doorknob.
Locked.
He used the gun on the lock. Instead of one shot, he accidentally triggered three.
This was the master stateroom, all right, complete with four portholes—two on each side of the ship—a king-sized bed, and Jacuzzi, but the stateroom and adjoining bathroom were empty.
Goddamn these sons of bitches.
He sensed that time was running out.
Hurrying, he descended the waiting ladder into the engine room.
Two men were fifteen feet aft, and they turned their heads as he came down the ladder. He hosed half a magazine at them, dropping them both.
Turning, going forward, hustling along, through a door into the accessories compartment.
Empty!
Aft again, running, checking for people …
There were another two men working on something on a workbench between the large diesel engines in the extreme after end of the ship. They saw him running toward them between the fuel tanks. One dove sideways to cover and the other pulled a pistol.
Jake managed to drop the gunman before he pulled the trigger.
A burst of Chinese came from the alcove where the other man had taken shelter.
Grafton didn’t hesitate. He couldn’t leave people alive behind him, or he and Callie and Wu and Carmellini would not leave this ship alive. He squirted a burst into the alcove as he ran by, then stopped and fired again, emptying the magazine in the gun.
Changing the magazine, he stalked forward, back through the engine room, past the bodies of the first two men he had killed. Even though he didn’t want to, he looked to ensure they were dead. His stomach churned as if he were going to vomit.
Up the ladder he went, gun at the ready.
Jake Grafton saw the shadowy figure in the thwartship passageway as he climbed the ladder and almost shot him. At the last second he realized he was looking at Carmellini, who was swaying as if he were drunk.
“What happened?”
“Ran into an old colleague. He damn near killed me.”
Blood was running down Carmellini’s blackened face from a cut on his scalp.
“I’ve been forward and into the engineering spaces,” Jake whispered. “Callie has got to be aft, down this staircase.”
Carmellini wiped at the blood flowing from his scalp, then used a bloody hand against a bulkhead to steady himself. “Let’s go,” he muttered.
They descended the staircase together. The passageway at the bottom led aft to a swinging door, two actually, hinged on each side, with windows in each. There were doors—probably to staterooms or storage compartments—on each side of the passageway.
Motioning for Carmellini to hold his position, Jake walked the length of the passageway and peered through the window. He was looking into the dining facility. Four men sat there over bowls of Chinese food, smoking and watching a television mounted high in one corner. Beside Jake was a door to a refrigerated compartment. On the aft end of the dining hall was the door to the galley.
She had to be in one of these rooms off this passageway. Jake turned, went to the first stateroom door, and put his ear to it.
Nothing.
Voices at the next one, speaking in Chinese, it sounded like.
The next one nothing.
Carmellini motioned to him. He was checking the starboard doors. He was pointing to one. He came to Jake, whispered right in his ear. “English, a woman’s voice.”
“Chinese in this one,” Jake said and pointed.
He went to the door Carmellini pointed out, and Carmellini took the door with the Chinese speaker. They looked at each other, then both turned the knobs at the same time and opened the doors.
The first thing Jake saw was Callie, facing him across a table. A man sat facing her with his back to the door. Otherwise the room was empty.
He couldn’t shoot the man in the back because he might hit Callie.
The look on her face galvanized Yuri Daniel into action. He rose, spinning, reaching for a pistol in his belt, all at the same time. And found himself staring into Jake Grafton’s face.
The Russian got the pistol clear of his belt when a burst from the submachine gun caught him under his chin and knocked him backward. Another burst, this time full in the chest, caused Yuri Daniel to collapse across the table.
“Oh, Jake, thank God! They have Wu in the—”
He had her then, jerking her through the door into the passageway, in time to see Tommy Carmellini empty a magazine through the open doorway of his compartment.
Carmellini charged through the doorway. Jake pushed Callie forward toward the staircase and ran aft, toward the dining hall, the gun leveled at his waist.
A glance through the door—three of the men were still watching television, though one was looking toward Jake. Perhaps he heard something.
Jake dug in his pocket, pulled out a grenade. He pulled the pin and let the lever fly off. He pushed the swinging door open a couple of inches and tossed the grenade.
The explosion made the doors swing on their hinges.
Then Jake stepped in and emptied the magazine at the men sprawled amid the tables.
As he changed magazines, the cook came running from the kitchen, shooting with a pistol.
The first shot thudded into the bulkhead as Jake was going down, the second hit a chair while he struggled to get the Colt .45 out of his shoulder holster.
Before the cook could fire a third shot, Tommy Carmellini killed him with a burst of submachine gun fire.
“Let’s go, Admiral,” he roared from the doorway. “We got ’em. Let’s get outta here.”
Jake finished changing magazines, then scrambled up. “Go, go, go!” he yelled.
Tommy Carmellini led the way with Callie and Wu right behind. Jake Grafton followed.
Jake called to Tommy, “Get them aboard the other ship and warm up the chopper. I’ll be right along.”
He ran up the nearest ladder to the topmost deck, above the salon, and went to the lifeboat, which had a canvas cover protecting it. Jake used his knife on the cover.
Sure enough, in the bottom of the boat was a can of gasoline that might contain two or three gallons. He shook it. Full, or ne
arly so.
Jake went to the hatch that led down to the engine room and emptied the gasoline can into the compartment.
From the foot of the ladder leading topside, he tossed a grenade, then scrambled upward.
He was nearly up when a jet of hot gases tore at him, almost causing him to lose his grip, as the explosion shook the ship.
Trying not to breathe the flames that singed his feet and hands, Jake scrambled for the gangway.
He was across the pier and up the gangway on the Barbary Coast when another explosion tore through the China Rose and flames jetted from her hatches.
“Are you all right?” Jake demanded of Callie.
“Yes, yes! Are you all right?”
Before he could answer the adrenaline aftershock hit him like a hammer and he vomited. He leaned against the passageway bulkhead aboard Barbary Coast and whispered, “Sorry about that,” to Nikko Schoenauer, who was standing guard with an AK-47.
“Hey, forget it,” said Nikko, who had overdosed on adrenaline a few times himself.
“Oh, Jake, I love you.” Callie hugged him as tightly as she could while staying away from the shoe polish. She drew back. “You look like the wrath of God.”
He took a good look at Callie under the Barbary Coasts lights, which were brilliantly lit by the ship’s emergency generator. “They really pounded on you,” he said bitterly.
“It’s over. Get me to a hot bath.”
Wu and Schoenauer had a short conversation in Chinese. “Why not take a bath here?” Schoenauer asked the Graftons. “The helicopter can take these two—” he jerked a thumb at Wu and Carmellini—”to the Central District and come back for you in an hour.” He turned to Carmellini and examined the cut on his head. “You need to have that stitched up.”
Jake nodded his agreement.
Wu paused and rested a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Your wife save my life, maybe,” he said in heavily-accented English. “She very strong woman.”
He smiled at Callie and nodded once, then turned to follow Tommy Carmellini.
When Callie was up to her neck in bathwater, Jake told her, “For a while there I thought I might never see you again. When I saw the blood smears in that stateroom, I thought I was too late.”
“I knew you’d come, Jacob Lee. I’ve never been so happy in my life as I was when that door flew open and I realized that terrible blackface apparition standing there was you.”
While the Graftons cleaned up in Barbary Coast’s owner’s stateroom, China Rose burned at the pier. No one came to fight the fire, although the crews of nearby ships gathered on deck to watch her burn.
Flames gradually spread throughout the ship. Finally the aftermost line securing her to the pier burned through, and wave action and the tide swung the stern well away from the pier.
When she sank an hour later in a welter of steam there wasn’t a whole lot left. The black water of the harbor extinguished the last of the flames.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Cross-Harbor Tunnel was jammed when Rip Buckingham picked his way through it. People by the hundreds lounged against the wall and sat in the traffic lanes. Most were armed with weapons taken from the police barracks armory or soldiers who had surrendered in the afternoon, but there weren’t enough weapons to go around.
Appointed officers were busy trying to organize the crowd into military units. To facilitate this process members of each unit were issued distinctive badges that attached to their clothes with Velcro. The plastic badges were in a variety of solid colors and simple shapes, such as circles, squares, triangles, and the like. The rebel organizers, Rip noted, stood in front of their groups and emphasized that everyone in the group must wear the group’s badge, although they never told the volunteers why.
Rip knew. The badges allowed the York units to quickly recognize the wearer as a good guy, thereby freeing up York processing capability for other things.
The enemy would eventually catch on, of course, but by then the recognition patterns would have been routinely changed.
The tension in the air was palpable; it was impossible not to feel it. As Rip walked and listened to the excited conversations, which were echoed and magnified into an infinite chorus by the walls of the tunnel, the power of the moment almost overwhelmed him.
There was nothing these people could not do. They would pound at the rocks and shoals of the tyrant’s forces like an angry sea and sweep them away, winning in the end, as inevitably as the spinning of the earth.
He reached the mouth of the tunnel and walked into the black night. The rebels had killed all electrical power in Kowloon. Looking north one could see the occasional glow of lantern light in a window, but that was all. The Kowloon skyline had completely disappeared. Members of the Scarlet Team were here at the mouth of the tunnel, working by flashlight with items on a long table.
Rip walked over for a closer look. Michael Gao was preparing a tiny radio-controlled airplane, a “bat,” for flight. He held it in his hand, a black toylike thing with a wingspan of eight inches. With a two-bladed prop driven by a minuscule electric motor, the four-ounce bat could fly at about thirty miles per hour for several hours.
Gao nodded at a colleague in front of a control panel, who pushed a button, starting the bat’s engine.
The controller waggled a stick; the ailerons, elevators, and rudder of the plane wriggled in sync. As Gao held the bat at arm’s length, both men studied a monitor on the control panel.
Inside the bat was a miniature infrared television camera that continuously broadcast its signal. This signal gave the controller a real-time look at what lay beneath the bat. The signal was also processed by the York network, increasing the situation awareness of the York units.
When all was ready, Gao tossed the bat upward into the air at a thirty-degree angle. In seconds it disappeared into the darkness, and he reached for another one of the dozen that sat on the table.
“How close is the enemy?” Rip asked.
“They have a few scouts within a couple hundred yards,” Gao told him, “but their combat units are about a mile back. They are building fortified positions in depth across the peninsula. We are trying to learn what is behind the leading edge of their forces. Are they or are they not going to attack us?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. The bats should tell us soon, then the brain trust will make some decisions.”
“Okay.”
“Have you heard? Wu Tai Kwong is back!”
Rip Buckingham hadn’t heard. Relief flooded through him. His legs felt weak. He grinned and slapped Gao on the back.
“Did Sonny Wong release him?”
“No. He was rescued. I don’t know much more than that. He landed in a helicopter moments ago.”
“My mother-in-law is out there,” Rip said, gesturing beyond the perimeter. “I am going to go find her.”
“The PLA is out there, too. Do you want a weapon?”
“Have they started shooting civilians yet?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Good luck,” Michael Gao said, and held out his hand.
Rip Buckingham shook it, then walked away into the darkness.
“Losing the main monitor is no big deal,” one of the controllers told Virgil Cole. “We’ll just use another monitor for the primary display. I can’t understand why she wasted a bullet on it.”
Cole took a deep breath and exhaled carefully. He consciously tried to think like Jake Grafton. “She just wanted us to keep our heads down while she got the hell out of here, that’s all.”
“She might have caused real trouble if she’d taken the time to empty a clip into the CPU.”
“And someone would have shot her,” Cole muttered. “She ain’t sacrificing any goddamn skin for the cause. Sonny Wong doesn’t have enough money to buy that epidermis.”
Wu Tai Kwong stood in the corner surrounded by his lieutenants, the Scarlet Team. He listened as the
y all tried to talk at once, smiled and said a few words now and then, then finally sent them back to their posts. Then he came over to Virgil Cole. A few minutes sufficed to tell the American of his adventures. The cuts on his arm had been stitched and bandaged, and he had been given an antibiotic for the infection. The stump of his finger seemed to be healing properly.
“We couldn’t stop the revolution to turn Hong Kong upside down trying to find you,” Cole explained.
Wu waved it away. “You did precisely the right thing, the same thing I would have done in your place.”
“Your return saved me fifty million dollars.”
“And I know you need the money,” Wu said with a grin.
“Is Callie Grafton okay?”
“She is bruised but intact. Her spirit is unbroken. She is a warrior’s wife. They wanted her to sign statements implicating you in many crimes, and she refused.”
Cole didn’t understand. “Why did she refuse?”
“She thought she was protecting you, doing the honorable thing. She would not have signed to save her life.” Wu Tai Kwong’s head bobbed as he thought of Callie. “With a thousand like her I could conquer the world.”
“Jake Grafton and Carmellini?”
“Bloody but still on their feet.”
Cole passed a hand across his forehead, then moved on. He gestured toward the monitors. “We are intercepting PLA radio traffic. Beijing has approved the use of heavy artillery. Governor Sun wanted a barrage laid on the tunnel entrance. We think the PLA is now positioning the guns at the army base preparatory to a barrage. We have launched bats to see where the guns are and estimate when they might open fire, but the question is: Should we keep our forces in the Cross-Harbor Tunnel while the barrage is underway or move them out now?”
The two men studied the computer presentations of enemy positions and the locations of the York units, then referred to the map on the wall. They were joined by a half dozen of the key lieutenants, who listened silently to the discussion.
“The PLA will probably attack after die barrage,” Wu said after he had looked at everything. “Let’s get the people out of the tunnel and position them in front of the PLA strong points. If we can do it without the PLA learning of the movement, they will think we are in the tunnel entrance rubble when they attack.”
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