'We're not the first people to arrive at this tanker,' Schofield said.
'What! Who's down there?'
Schofield exchanged a look with Knight.
'Not many elite units use Uzis these days,' Knight said. 'Zemir. I'd say it's the Sayaret Tzanhim.'
'I agree,' Schofield said.
'Would someone please tell me what's going on!' Mother yelled in the rain.
'My guess,' Schofield called, 'is that we've been beaten to this ship by the only other man in the world who can disarm the CincLock security system. It's that Israeli Air Force guy from the list—Zemir—with a crack team of Israel's best troops, the Sayaret Tzanhim, protecting him.'
'Hey, this day has been so weird, I'd believe fucking anything,' Mother said. 'So where now?'
Schofield checked his watch.
1735 hours.
1135 in New York.
Ten minutes to launch.
He said, 'We let the Israelis do the dirty work downstairs. Hell, I'm happy to let Zemir be the hero and disarm those missiles. As for us: into the tower. I want to check those snipers. See who we're up against before we go running into that mess downstairs to help Zemir.'
They came to the door at the base of the tower, flung it open just as—
Bam!
—they were assaulted by the blinding white beam of a helicopter searchlight.
Schofield spun in the doorway, rain in his face.
'Oh, you have got to be joking . . .' he said.
There, landing on the long flat foredeck of the supertanker—a hundred yards away, its searchlight panning the area—was an obviously stolen Alouette helicopter.
It touched down on the deck.
And out of it stepped three men in Russian battle-dress uniforms and carrying Skorpion machine pistols . . .
Dmitri Zamanov and the last two remaining members of the Skorpions.
'Damn. I forgot,' Knight said, 'you've still got a price on your head. It's Zamanov. Run.'
Into the control tower. Up some ladder-stairs. Emerging onto the bridge.
1736.
Fairfax's voice in Schofield's ear: 'Scarecrow. We've taken the bridge of the San Francisco tanker. Found enemy snipers wearing the uniforms of the Eritrean Army . . .'
Schofield went straight over to the bodies of his snipers.
African soldiers.
Commandos. Khaki fatigues. Black helmets.
And on their shoulders, a crest—but not the crest of Eritrea.
Rather, it was the badge of the Nigerian Army's elite commando unit: the Presidential Guard.
As veterans of Africa's many civil wars, the Nigerian Presidential Guard were CIA-trained killers who in the past had been used against their own citizens as much as against their nation's enemies. In the streets of Lagos and Abuja, the Presidential Guards were known by another name: the Death Squads.
Killian's protection team.
Two snipers up here. And more men downstairs, guarding the missile silos—the unseen enemy that the Israelis were fighting right now in the hold.
'Mr Fairfax. Did you say yours were Eritrean?'
'That's right:
'Not Nigerian?'
'Nope. My Marines confirm it. Definitely Eritrean insignia.'
Eritrea? Schofield thought—
'Scarecrow,' Mother said, opening a storeroom door wide. Four
body bags lay on the floor of the storeroom. Mother quickly unzipped one—to reveal the stinking corpse of a Global Jihad terrorist.
'Ah, now I get it,' Schofield said. 'The whipping boys.'
He keyed his sat-mike: 'Mr Fairfax. Tell your Marines to stay sharp. There'll be more African troops down in the main hold, guarding the silos. Sorry, David. It's not over for you yet. You have to get past those troops and get your satellite uplink unit within sixty feet of the missiles' control console for me to disarm them.'
'Ten-four,' Fairfax's voice signed off. 'We're on the case.'
Mother joined Knight at the windows of the bridge, searching the area outside for Zamanov.
'Do you see him?' Mother said.
'No, the little Russian ratbastard's disappeared,' Knight said. 'Probably gone after Zemir.'
Suddenly Rufus's voice exploded in their earpieces:
'Boss. Scarecrow. I got a new contact closing in on your tanker. A large cutter of some kind. Looks like the French Coast Guard.'
'Christ,' Schofield said, moving to the windows, seeing a large white boat approaching them on their starboard side.
Schofield couldn't believe it.
In addition to the Nigerian Death Squad, the Israeli shock troops and the Russian bounty hunters already on this supertanker, they now had a group of French maritime police on the way!
'That ain't the Coast Guard,' Knight said, peering through some night-vision binoculars.
Through them he could see a big white cutter, charging through the chop—could see its knife-like bow, its big foredeck gun, its glassed-in wheelhouse, and bloodbursts all over the wheelhouse's windows.
Armed men stood at its wheel.
'It's Demon Larkham and IG-88,' Knight said.
1738.
Seven minutes to launch.
'Damn it, more bounty hunters,' Schofield said. 'Rufus! Can you take them out?'
'Sorry, Captain, I'm outta missiles. Used them all against that French carrier.'
'Okay, okay . . .' Schofield said, thinking. 'All right, Rufus, you keep to your instructions, okay. If we can't disarm those missiles in time, we'll be needing your special help later.'
'Got it:
Schofield spun, still thinking, thinking, thinking.
Everything was happening too fast. The situation was spiralling out of control. Missiles to disarm, the Israelis already on board, Nigerian troops, more bounty hunters . . .
'Focus!' he shouted aloud. 'Think, Scarecrow. What do you ultimately have to achieve?'
Disarm the missiles. I have to disarm the missiles by 1745 hours. Everything else is secondary.
His eyes flashed to an elevator at the back of the bridge.
'We're going down to the hold,' he said.
1739 hours.
NEW YORK BAY 1139 HOURS
On the foredeck of their supertanker, in bright morning sunshine, Book's team of Marines dived for cover.
Book scrambled into a deck hatch, slid down a very long ladder into darkness, followed by his Marine escorts.
He hit the floor, looked around.
He stood in a cavernous hold, easily three hundred yards long. A dozen cylindrical missile silos stretched away into darkness, like colossal pillars holding up the ceiling.
And bunkered down in front of the farthest missile silo, taking cover behind a heavily fortified barricade of steel crates and fork-lifts, was a team of heavily-armed African commandos.
THE ENGLISH CHANNEL 1739 HOURS
The elevator doors opened to reveal the aft section of the supertanker's main hold.
Schofield, Knight and Mother emerged, leading with their guns.
The missile hold was absolutely enormous—a massive interior space the size of three football fields stretched end-on-end. And in its forward half, the Chameleon missile silos: high reinforced titanium cylinders stretching all the way up to the underside of the supertanker's foredeck. Inside them: the most devastating weapons known to man.
And in that forward section of the ship, a brutal battle was underway.
A dozen Nigerian commandos were bunkered down beneath the farthest pair of missile silos, covering the missile control console— an elevated platform mounted ten feet off the ground on steel struts, and the place Schofield needed to be within sixty feet of in order to disarm the missiles.
The Nigerians were positioned behind a very well-prepared barricade, and they fired machine guns and hurled grenades at their Israeli attackers.
Bullets and grenades hit the silos, but did no damage—the walls of the silos were far too strong.
In between Schofield and this bat
tle were all sorts of supply materials: shipping containers, missile spare parts; he even saw two yellow mini-submarines with hemispherical glass cockpits suspended from chains high up near the ceiling catwalks.
Schofield recognised the subs as heavily-modified ASDSs—
Advanced SEAL Delivery Systems. With their glass domes, these shallow-water mini-submarines were often used by the US Navy to visually inspect the exterior hull of an aircraft carrier or ballistic missile submarine for sabotage devices. It was a given that a project as important as Kormoran-Chameleon would be equipped with them.
1740.
Schofield, Knight and Mother dashed forward, ducking low, winding their way between the supply materials, observing the battle.
Just as the Israelis launched a ruthless offensive.
They sent a few men to the right to draw the Nigerian fire, then they hit the Nigerian barricade with three rocket-propelled grenades from the left.
The grenades shot down the length of the missile hold . . . three white smoke-trails, flying together . . . and hit the Nigerian barricade.
It was like a dam bursting.
The Nigerians flew into the air. Some screamed. Others burned.
And the Israelis stormed forward, killing the Nigerians where they fell, shooting them in the heads, at the same moment as . . .
... a gigantic steel loading door set into the starboard wall of the hold rumbled open, rising into the air on its runners.
The massive door opened fully and—whump!—a wide steel boarding plank clanged to the floor from outside the aperture and like a crew of 16th-century pirates boarding a galleon, the men of IG-88 flooded into the missile hold, charging into it from their stolen Coast Guard boat, their devastating MetalStorm guns blazing.
Schofield watched as—now under fire from at least twenty IG-88 men—the Israeli commandos, the crack Sayaret Tzanhim, seized the area around the missile control console.
They formed a tight semi-circle around the elevated console platform, all facing aft, firing their Uzis and M-16s at IG-88.
Under their protection, the Israelis' leader—a man who could only be Simon Zemir—climbed up onto the steel platform and went
straight over to the console, flipped open a briefcase and extracted a CincLock-VII disarm unit.
'Sneaky bastard Israelis,' Mother said. 'Is there any US technology that they haven't stolen?'
'Probably not,' Schofield said, 'but today they're our bestest buddies. We watch over them while they watch over Zemin'
1741.
From behind his missile silo, Schofield watched as Zemir's CincLock unit illuminated like a laptop and Zemir stared at its touchscreen, flexing his fingers in anticipation of the disarm sequence he was about to face.
He's going to disarm the missile system, Schofield thought.
Excellent. We might get out of here without much hassle after all.
But then, to his absolute horror, Schofield saw three shadowy figures descending by rope from the rafters of the missile hold above and behind Zemir's console platform.
None of the Sayaret Tzanhim saw them. They were too busy firing at Demon Larkham and his IG-88 bounty hunters.
'No,' Schofield whispered. 'No, no, no . . .'
The three shadowy figures whizzed down their ropes at lightning speed.
Zamanov and his Skorpions.
Ziplining down from the ship's foredeck, from a hatch near the bow.
Schofield broke cover, yelled uselessly above the gunfire: 'Behind you!'
Of course, the Israelis responded immediately.
By firing at him. Even Zemir himself looked up, about to start the disarm sequence.
Schofield dived back behind his silo, rolled to the ground, peered back out—
—just in time to see the three Skorpions land lightly on the elevated platform a few yards behind the preoccupied Zemir.
And Schofield could only watch, powerless, as in the strobe-like glare of the Israelis' muzzle-flashes, Zamanov crept silently forward,
drew his Cossack fighting sword and swung the blade at Zemir's neck from behind in a brutal horizontal slashing motion.
And in that instant, Shane Schofield became the last person on the bounty list still alive.
And the only man on Earth capable of disarming the CincLock-VII missile security system.
Zemir's head dropped off his shoulders. He had not even been able to start the disarm sequence.
Schofield's mouth fell open. 'This cannot be happening.' One of the Sayaret Tzanhim glanced over his shoulder—in time to see Zemir's headless corpse drop off the console platform and down to the floor, spilling blood; to see Zamanov stuff Zemir's ragged head into his rucksack and whiz back up his retractable zipline—
Blam!
Covering the fleeing Zamanov, the other two Skorpions shot the Israeli trooper in the face—just as two more Sayaret Tzanhim soldiers were blasted by IG-88 fire from the other direction.
Fire from both directions—twin forces of professional bounty hunters—assailed the Israeli commando team.
And as the remaining Sayaret Tzanhim noticed Zemir's fallen body and the fleeing Skorpions above it, they became confused and in the face of IG-88's superior firepower, lost formation.
They were decimated.
IG-88 overwhelmed them. Within moments, the entire Israeli
force was dead.
1742.
IG-88 took control of the barricade. Demon Larkham strode like a conquering general into the enemy blockade. He pointed up at the ceiling, at Zamanov and his Skorpions fleeing on their retractable ziplines with Zemir's head in their possession.
The three Skorpions hit the ceiling next to a wide cargo hatch.
Zamanov's two companions climbed up through the hatch first, stepping up into the pouring rain on the foredeck, reached back down as Zamanov handed them the severed head of Simon Zemir.
Supermachine-gun fire riddled their bodies.
The two Skorpions on the foredeck convulsed violently, their chests exploding in bloody fountains.
A six-man subteam of IG-88 troopers stood in the rain waiting for them. Demon Larkham had anticipated this, and so had already dispatched a second team to the foredeck.
The rucksack containing Zemir's head dropped to the deck, and the IG-88 subteam ran forward, grabbed it.
Outnumbered and outgunned, Zamanov ducked below the floorline, swung over to a catwalk high above the missile hold and disappeared into the shadows.
Down in the missile hold itself, Schofield was speechless.
This was unbelievable.
With three minutes to go till the nuclear missiles fired, Zemir was dead and IG-88 held the control console. Twenty of them, with MetalStorm guns!
He needed some kind of distraction, a really big distraction.
'Call Rufus,' he said to Knight.
'You sure?'
'It's the only way.'
'Right,' Knight said. 'You're a truly crazy man, Captain Schofield.' Then Knight spoke into his throat-mike. 'Rufus. How is Plan B coming along?'
Rufus's voice came in. 7 got the nearest one for you! And she's one big momma! I'm a hundred yards out, engines running, and pointed straight at your
One hundred yards away from the Talbot, a second supertanker was powering through the storm with Rufus at the helm.
Waiting its turn to unload its cargo at Cherbourg, the giant 110,000-ton container ship, the MV Eindhoven, had been sitting at rest in the Channel, its engines idling, when Rufus had landed the Black Raven on its foredeck.
Now, but for Rufus, it was empty, its sailing crew of six having wisely decided to depart on a lifeboat after Rufus had strafed their bridge windows with two M-16s.
'What do you want me to do!' Rufus shouted into his radio.
On the Talbot, Schofield assessed the situation.
The Rufus Plan was always meant to be a last resort—a means by which Schofield could sink the false supertanker if he failed to disarm its missiles.
&nbs
p; He stole a glance at the control console and its barricade and suddenly his blood froze.
Demon Larkham was looking directly back at him. He'd spotted them.
The Demon smiled.
'Rufus,' Schofield said. 'Ram us.'
17:42:10.
Demon Larkham's men charged out from behind their barricade, winding their way between the missile silos, their MetalStorm rifles blazing.
Coming after Schofield.
Schofield led Mother and Knight over to a lifeboat positioned beside the open cargo door on the starboard side of the hold.
'Quickly,' he yelled. 'Get in!'
They all dived into the lifeboat, then snapped up to return fire.
The IG-88 men closed in.
Schofield fired hard. So did Mother and Knight, trying to hold them off until Rufus arrived.
But the IG-88 troopers kept advancing.
'Come on, Rufus,' Schofield said aloud. 'Where are you . . . ?'
And then—magnificently—Rufus arrived.
/
It sounded like the end of the world.
The shriek of rending metal, of steel striking steel.
The collision of the two supertankers on the surface of the English Channel, veiled in sleeting rain, was an awesome, awesome sight.
Two of the largest moving objects on the planet—each nearly a thousand feet long and each weighing more than 100,000 tons— collided at ramming speed.
Rufus's stolen tanker, the Eindhoven, ploughed bow-first right into the port flank of the Talbot, hitting it perfectly perpendicularly.
The sharpened bow of the Eindhoven drove like a knife into the side of the Talbot, smashing into it like a battering ram.
The port flank of the Talbot just crumpled inward. Seawater gushed in through the gigantic gash the Eindhoven created in its side.
And like a boxer recoiling from a blow, the entire supertanker rocked wildly in response to the impact.
At first, it rolled to starboard, so great was the force of Rufus's ramming strike. But then as seawater began to enter the Talbot en masse, the missile-firing supertanker tilted dramatically—and fatally—back to port.
At which point it rolled over onto its left-hand side and began to sink.
Fast.
The scene inside the missile hold of the Talbot would have made Noah gulp.
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