by Jack Du Brul
“Jesus,” Mercer breathed, his heart slamming against his rib cage. “I was too petrified to be scared.”
The SEAL’s uniform was so tattered it was nearly unrecognizable. A wound in his shoulder bled freely. His face was streaked with dirt and dried blood. Despite the pain he must have felt, his eyes were impassive.
“What’s the situation?” Mercer asked.
“All the guards are dead, the building is secure, but I lost my entire squad.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Mercer said, getting to his feet.
“It’s our duty, sir.”
“Radio the chopper and have the pilot land in the backyard. I’ve got some more work tonight.”
While the SEAL made the call, Mercer wandered through the dining room and into the kitchen. Ignoring the two bodies on the floor, he searched through the three large refrigerators until he found something decent to drink. Though Kirin beer was far from his favorite, he gulped two bottles in record time. A minute later he was in the backyard, skirting the edge of the pool.
Jill Tzu had left the shed when the firing had stopped and was hiding near the guest house when she saw Mercer striding across the back lawn. Behind him, the main house burned in several places, the fiery light making his features appear sharp and uncompromising.
The Sea King thundered in over the grounds, its blinding searchlight playing across the estate as Eddie Rice searched for a clear place to set her down.
Reaching Jill, Mercer took her into his arms. She clung to him tightly, unaware that Mercer’s ribs grated against each other as she squeezed. “Everything is all right now. You’re safe. Kenji’s dead.” She nuzzled her head into his shoulder as if she were a small creature burrowing into the earth for protection. “Jill, I have to leave you here with one of my men for a while.”
Jill looked up into his face with beautiful but frightened eyes. “Can’t you take me with you?”
“I can’t. There’s still a lot for me to finish,” Mercer said, then kissed her tenderly. “That’s to let you know I would if I could — and that I’m coming back.”
Mercer untangled her arms from around his body and nodded to the SEAL. “Try to contact the Inchon somehow, maybe through Pearl Harbor, and have another team sent here. Don’t trust any local authorities. Also, guard her with your life.”
He jogged to the waiting chopper and vaulted into its hold. Eddie lifted off immediately, sweeping the chopper over the dark jungle.
In the cockpit, Mercer threw on a helmet, keying the mike immediately. “Head north as fast as this bitch can move.”
Eddie banked the chopper, then turned to Mercer, grinning, “I don’t think you’re gay, so that must have been a woman you were kissing just then. Where the hell did you find a woman in the middle of that fight?”
“You just gotta know where to look.” Mercer chuckled in the murky light of the cockpit. He opened the last two beers he’d taken from the kitchen and handed one to Eddie.
“Not when I’m flying,” the pilot demurred.
“I’m not with the FAA or the navy; don’t worry about it.”
“Good point,” Eddie replied, and took a long swallow.
“Did those SEALs have any dive equipment on board?”
“Yeah. Like you asked, I went through their stuff while I was waiting. There’s air tanks, regulators, masks, the works.”
“Good.” Mercer pulled a slip of paper from his pants pocket and handed it to Rice.
“What’s this?”
“The Loran numbers of a Russian submarine about to start a nuclear war.” Mercer had mentally calculated the position of the John Dory from the infrared pictures provided by the National Security Agency. “Punch them in and follow them.”
“Problem,” Eddie said after keying the Loran numbers into the Sea King’s navigational computer. “We have enough fuel to get out there, but not enough for the return flight.”
“There’s a good chance there won’t be a return flight.”
“Why’d I know you’d say that?” Eddie muttered.
An hour later the chopper was thundering over the ocean swells, a driving rain pelting the windscreen of the Sea King like grenade fragments. The wipers were all but useless. Occasionally, a bolt of lightning arced through the sky, casting a brilliant incandescence into the cockpit.
Mercer sat quietly in a borrowed navy wet suit, content to let Eddie Rice do his job. It had been torture getting himself into the constricting neoprene, but now the tightness around his chest eased the pain from his cracked ribs. Unconsciously, his hand polished the barrel of his machine pistol as if he were at home working on a piece of railroad track. Hundreds of questions roiled in his mind, questions about Kenji, the Koreans, Kerikov, and Lurbud, but he could not allow himself to become distracted by them. He had to remain completely focused on the present and let the past sort itself out later.
He and Eddie were racing against an imminent nuclear launch. Failing meant not only their deaths but also the loss of one of man’s greatest discoveries. The benefits of the bikinium were too great to let slip away now, and on a personal level, Mercer wouldn’t allow himself to fail; he’d suffered too much in the past week to not see this completed successfully.
“What’s our ETA?”
“About another ten minutes.”
Mercer glanced at the luminous dial of his Tag Heuer. “According to Lurbud’s threat, the John Dory launches in thirty.”
“I’m already ten knots over the safety limits of this bird in these conditions.”
“Make it twenty knots over and that Mai Tai you wanted will be on me.”
“Christ, I could use it now,” Eddie replied miserably as he torqued more power out of the turbofans.
The chopper rocked and jerked in the storm as Rice fought to keep her below the John Dory’s radar. Her rounded nose nearly skimmed the white spume atop the waves.
“Bingo,” Eddie nearly shouted a minute later. “Target dead ahead.”
“What’s the range?”
“One mile,” Eddie said, glancing again at the neon blue radar screen.
“That’s got to be her. Take us down. I’ll swim the rest of the way. When I jump out, take off again, but be ready to pick me up when that ship blows. Approach from the stern and make sure no one else gets aboard except me and the man I’ll have with me.”
“I told you, we don’t have enough fuel to get back to Hawaii.”
“That doesn’t matter. Someone will figure out we’re here eventually.” Mercer didn’t want to tell Eddie that if the SEAL failed to get through to Pearl Harbor, the President would launch his own nuclear strike against the volcano in just three hours.
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
“It’s the main reason I can’t get life insurance.”
The Sea King’s engines wound down and the rotors whipped the sea into a salty mist as Rice brought her in for a water landing. Mercer waited at the open doorway of the chopper, sweating in the wet suit, the two large air tanks bowing his back. Around his waist he wore a leaded belt and a waterproof bag containing some other items borrowed from the SEALs. A razor-sharp dive knife was strapped to his right calf. The whole time Mercer had struggled into the gear, he had wracked his brain trying to recall everything that Spook had taught him about diving all those years ago in that flooded New York mine.
As soon as the rounded underhull of the Sea King touched the churned-up water, Mercer bit down on his mouthpiece, sucked in a breath of cool air, and launched himself out of the chopper.
The water was warmer than he expected. At first Mercer sank below the surface, then he adjusted his buoyancy by detaching one of the lead weights. He took a bearing from the compass on his wrist and, still underwater, started swimming toward the John Dory.
Mercer had made two potentially fatal assumptions when he launched himself from the Sea King. One was that the ship they had picked up on radar was, in fact, the John Dory. There was a definite possibility that the craft ahead of
him was an entirely different ship, one innocently steaming through the area. The second assumption concerned the hull of the Soviet submarine/ freighter. If there was no gap between the submarine’s hull and the fake sides of the freighter, he would have no way of gaining access to the vessel. If he was wrong about either guess, he would be dead long before the Russian missile detonated.
After a few minutes of swimming, Mercer felt a vibration through the water — the pounding engines of a large ship.
Adding a little air to the compensator, he surfaced on the crest of a swell. Through the rain-lashed night, he made out the running lights of a large freighter about two hundred yards ahead of him. His breath hissed through the regulator, rain and spume splattered against his mask.
He ducked back under the surface and continued to doggedly swim toward the John Dory. The backs of his legs were beginning to ache and his breathing was labored.
The sound of the ship’s props filled the silence of the sea, but the vessel itself was still hidden in the gloom. Mercer was hesitant to turn on his dive light for fear of being detected by a lookout on deck, but at last he took the chance.
The knife-edge bow of the John Dory was no more than ten feet away and bearing down on him at eight knots. Mercer dove hard, but his reaction came an instant too late. The steel plates of the ship’s bow scraped along his body, shredding the thick rubber of his wet suit. The thick crust of barnacles grated against Mercer’s skin like a thousand tiny paring knives.
Mercer screamed into his mouthpiece as pain shot through his system, racing through his body to explode against the top of his skull. He felt the gray blanket of unconsciousness falling over his mind, but managed to push it aside by sheer force of will. He wouldn’t allow pain to stop him now. He had only a few seconds in which to find a handhold of some sort before the vessel passed him. And if that happened, he had no chance of ever catching her.
Training the dive light upward, Mercer recognized the smooth curve of a submarine’s hull. At least he had the right ship. He flashed the light to starboard and saw a space between the freighter silhouette and the sub’s hull. He swam into the gap.
When his head broached the surface, he spat out his mouthpiece and gulped down the warm humid air trapped between the steel plating and the sub. The water in the four-foot-wide gap was churned in a vortex that carried Mercer along with the ship.
Since he did not have the luxury of time, he didn’t bother glancing at his watch. He was certain that the sub was getting into position to fire the missile. He immediately set to work. The magnetic limpet mines he’d pilfered from the SEALs’ stores stuck to the hull with a quiet snap; the timers had all been set, and as each one made contact with the sub’s hull, it went active.
As soon as the explosive charges were planted, Mercer began climbing the spiderweb of steel girders that locked the bogus freighter hull to the submarine. Because of his injured ribs and the scuba gear hanging from his back the climb was exhausting. He wished he could dump the dive equipment, but if he hoped to escape with Valery Borodin, he needed it. At the top of the girders, he paused to look at his watch. Four minutes until launch.
Shit.
The sharp steel struts had ripped into his hands; blood poured from the wounds and dripped onto the deck where Mercer stood, just forward of the submarine’s conning tower. The empty superstructure of the freighter soared thirty feet above his head. The cavernous space echoed with the hiss of water sliding across her hull and the beat of her props. The nearly total darkness smelled of diesel oil and saltwater. As quietly as possible, Mercer stashed his scuba gear and dive fins in a corner.
Two minutes.
He crept up the ladder of the rounded conning tower. As he neared the top, he made out muted voices. The language was unmistakably Russian.
He popped his head over the top of the conning tower and gave a friendly smile to the two shocked officers standing at the open hatch.
“Take me to your leader,” Mercer grinned. Exhaustion and the adrenaline he was using as a substitute for real courage had made him giddy.
The two officers produced pistols in record time, leveling them at Mercer’s head. One of them shouted down into the sub. Though Mercer did not speak Russian, he assumed that the captain had just been informed that they had a prisoner. Prompted by curt gestures from a pistol barrel, Mercer went down the hatchway and into the Soviet submarine.
At the base of the ladder, Mercer casually glanced around the vessel’s control room. By the slack-jawed looks and the lack of movement, he rightly guessed that the launch had been suspended for the moment.
“Hi, my name’s Barney Cull.” Mercer stuck out his hand but no one made a move to shake it. “I’m offering a sale on hull scraping and wondered if you needed my services.”
Captain Zwenkov stepped forward, his face set in a deep scowl. “Who are you?” His English was thick but understandable.
“Actually I’m Sam O. Var, your local Coffee Wagon Company representative. How are you guys fixed for blinis?”
Zwenkov said something that in any language would have sounded like, “Get him out of here and lock him up.”
Mercer was hustled from the control room by two armed sailors. He called over his shoulder, “Don’t think strong-arm tactics will get me to lower my prices.”
He would have continued with the jokes but the pistol stabbing into his kidney jammed the air in his throat. He was led through the sub toward the stern, thankfully away from where he had planted the charges.
He was stripped of his wet suit and after a rather extensive body search, one of his guards undogged a hatch and thrust Mercer into a small cabin. The hatch was closed behind him but not locked.
In the spartan room, a man a few years younger than Mercer sat on one of the bunks. He was handsome in that Connecticut shore, hair blowing in the wind, sweater knotted around the throat kind of way. Mercer assumed, correctly, that this was Valery Borodin. Borodin said something to Mercer in Russian.
“Sorry, I don’t speak it.”
Mercer’s use of English drained the color from Valery’s face. “I said, you’re not a member of the boat’s crew. Who are you?”
“I’m Philip Mercer, the guy you sent the telegram to.”
“Who?” Valery’s eyes narrowed in confusion.
“Philip Mercer. You sent a telegram to me in Washington, warning me about the danger to Tish Talbot.”
“Tish sent you?” Valery stood, his voice brightening.
“No, you sent me.” Mercer was getting confused himself.
“I don’t know who you are, but you know Tish?”
“You didn’t send a telegram to me in Tish’s father’s name?”
“No.”
“Just after you had her rescued from the Ocean Seeker?”
“No.”
“If you didn’t, then who the hell did?” Mercer muttered. “Well, anyway, I’m here to help you get off this tin can.”
“Did Tish ask you to come?”
“Not exactly, but she’s safe and waiting for you right now in Washington, D.C.”
“There’s no way to escape. We’re hundreds of miles from Hawaii.”
“Listen, in thirty seconds this sub is going to have more holes in it than the golf course at Pebble Beach. I’ve got a helicopter waiting for us, so don’t worry about it. Where’s your father?”
“He died two days ago. Heart attack.”
“For the pain he’s caused, don’t expect my condolences.”
Mercer glanced at his watch and held up his right hand with fingers splayed. As each second ticked by, he curled one finger downward. With two fingers to go, several explosions rocked the John Dory. Immediately klaxons sounded throughout the sub. The dim battle lights blinked once, then shut off completely; a single white bulb lit as the emergency system took over. Above the wail of the sirens and the shouts of men, Mercer could hear the sound of water pouring into the vessel, signaling her impending death. Mercer thrust his hand down the front o
f his pants, ignoring Valery’s startled look.
Few body searches ever explore the area between the scrotum and anus. As Mercer’s fingers grasped the four-barrel pepperbox Derringer pistol held there by his jock strap, he was thankful that homophobia struck Russians, too. The gun, a favorite of nineteenth-century riverboat gamblers because of its small size, had been a gift from his grandfather years before and had remained in Mercer’s desk at home since then.
He yanked the tiny pistol from his pants, mindful of the stray hairs caught in the gun’s hammer. Although the Derringer was only twenty-two caliber, it was loaded with bored-out hollow-points filled with mercury. At a range of more than ten feet the gun was useless. Closer, a hit would be fatal.
“Are you coming?” The sub was already listing.
Valery grabbed a cheap briefcase from the bunk. “Yes, I’m with you.”
They stepped into the boat’s central passageway, Valery clutching the briefcase to his chest like a mother protecting her baby. Panicked sailors and officers ran down the narrow corridor, ignoring everything except their own safety. Mercer and Valery blended into the stream of men rushing to the nearest hatch.
Bursting into the control room, Mercer saw Captain Zwenkov leaning over the weapons officer. They were still going to launch the nuclear missile. Instinct made Zwenkov turn around and face his executioner.
The report from the Derringer was lost in the sounds of the dying vessel and her crew, but the bullet tore through the captain’s head cleanly. His cap flew through the air, carried by the top section of his skull. The blood-splattered weapons officer whirled in his seat, but before he could move, a round caught him in the throat, ripping out his carotid artery and jugular vein, sending a fountain of blood across the ballistic control computer.
A crewman grabbed Mercer from behind. Mercer whipped around, smashing his elbow into the man’s jaw. Blood and broken teeth sprayed from the Russian’s lips. Another man, this one wearing the coveralls of an engineer, charged forward, and Mercer shot him point blank in the heart.