by Tom Wilde
Rhea’s voice made me grit my teeth, then I tried to force a smile as I raised my head. She was cast in silhouette by the light streaming from behind her, and was flanked by gun-wielding guards on either side. I held my hands out in the universal sign of being unarmed. “I have a message for Vanya,” I said as firmly as I could manage.
“He has one for you, too,” Rhea replied as one of her men came up and viciously slammed the butt of his rifle into the small of my back. I crashed flat to the deck, sipping air through gritted teeth and praying my legs weren’t paralyzed as Rhea’s men grabbed me by each arm and dragged me along. There were some twists and turns along the way, and then I was dropped facedown on a plush Persian carpet. There was the sound of a heavy door clanking shut and the lights came on as Vanya said in a silky voice, “Well, well, well. If I believed in the mythological God that man created, I’d say he delivered my enemy to me.”
I lifted my head up as one of Vanya’s men tore my hood off. Vanya was holding court in his Harem Room, surrounded by guards who all looked like they were ready to shoot me to pieces just to please their master. But my eyes were drawn to the most dangerous creature in the room. Rhea stood beside Vanya, looking like a war-torn Valkyrie, with her hair a wild Medusa’s nest and streaks of blood drying on her face. Her eyes were wide open and fixed on me, as frozen as the evil, gleeful smile on her face.
I kept my eyes on Rhea as Vanya said, “I can’t believe, after all you’ve done to me, that you came back here. Rhea told me that Alexander wasn’t on Corsica. What could you possibly say to me that would prevent me from killing you now?”
I was just on the verge of delivering my planned speech when I was interrupted by a voice coming through a concealed speaker: “Vanya! Cronos Island is under attack! Our men are retreating to the bunkers!”
Vanya’s face purpled with rage and his whole body began to shake as he raised his hand and pointed a finger at me like Zeus ready to unleash a lightning bolt. “Wait!” I yelled. “What I have to say can change everything!”
Vanya’s men, their gun barrels trained on me, all looked from the corners of their eyes at their master, who was struggling between rage and reason, until he finally choked out, “What?”
I slowly rose from the floor, glad that my shaking limbs could still function. With my best sleight-of-hand maneuver, I slipped the pen-sized remote detonator out of my sleeve and held it up as I unzipped my wet suit to reveal the strips of plastic explosive I had removed from the backpack of one of Vanya’s dead soldiers and taped to my chest. I flipped the safety cover off the detonator with my thumb and held the device up for all to see as I announced: “Surprise! Look who’s the most dangerous guy in the room now!”
There was a collective inhaling of breath that could have sucked the air out of the room as Vanya and his men all fell back against the curtained walls in a futile effort to create distance between themselves and explosive oblivion. Except for Rhea, who stood as still as a marble statue all the while.
“New rules,” I said to my captive audience. “Do as I say, and no one dies. Make a move I don’t like, and I blow us all to hell.”
Vanya sputtered his disbelief. “But … you’ll die!”
“So what? You were going to kill me anyway. But if you listen to me, we can all make it out of here alive. The first thing you do is radio your people back on the island to give the cure to Caitlin. Now!”
There was stunned silence in the room. Until Rhea started to laugh.
All eyes were drawn to her as she said in a soft, yet certain voice, “Oh, no. Blake won’t do it. He hasn’t got the will.”
I clutched the detonator tighter, but I could feel how Rhea’s words were draining away my power over the situation. Vanya looked at her, and with a sinking sensation I saw the growing hope in his eyes.
“Poor Blake,” Rhea said with a sad shake of her head. “To come all this way, only to fail now. But you should know this before you die: There is no plague vaccine back on Cronos Island. All there is in the whole world is right here on this ship. And by now there’s no way to get the cure back to your precious Caitlin. She is going to die, drowning in her own blood. I wonder if her last thoughts will be of you?”
She really shouldn’t have said that.
I could feel the rage rising up in me, shaking the hand that held the detonator and causing my old wound to tingle with nerve sparks. It had all boiled down to Rhea and me, facing off in a duel of will, and she was winning. I could see from the corners of my eyes how the soldiers were starting to brace themselves to go on the attack, and then I saw Vanya smiling. That’s when I knew I had to do it.
I looked straight down the twin black wells of Rhea’s soulless eyes as I said, “Sayonara.”
Then I triggered the detonator.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
No one was more surprised than I when nothing happened.
When my thumb hit the detonator button, everyone in the room fell back in a shouting tangle, with Vanya screaming loudest of all. Then there was a breathless moment when all was still, and there I was, standing across from the unmoving Rhea and waiting for the explosion that never arrived—it was like a flash of lightning that had no thunder to follow.
“What the…?” I stuttered. I hit the button again, and all it did was go click. The detonator’s little telltale light winked at me, telling me the device was active, but nothing happened.
I snapped the button several times in quick succession, and even shook the thing in the universal method of trying to coax defective electronics back to life, but as the detonator remained stubbornly impotent a sick feeling welled up in my guts. “Uh-oh,” I said as I saw Vanya’s men gather themselves up, with a growing rage replacing their fear. Rhea’s laughter pealed forth like a bell, heralding my coming demise.
While I was snapping away at the detonator like a man with a nicotine fit and a defective cigarette lighter, I saw Vanya shakily rise from the cushions. His face was as white as his beard and his hand trembled as if with palsy as he uttered with growing intensity, “Kill him … kill him … kill him!”
One of his men raised his rifle, and my eyes zeroed in on the black, unblinking eye of the gun barrel, but Rhea slapped the weapon away and spat out the Japanese word for “idiot.” “Don’t shoot him now,” she snapped. “You might set off the bomb.”
I felt the slightest touch of hope, but it was crushed as Rhea then said, “Drag Blake outside and throw him overboard. When he’s floated past the stern of the ship, then everyone can shoot him!”
Before I could make a move, two of the men rushed up and grabbed me by each arm, squeezing me out of the cabin to the outside deck, but not before I heard Rhea call out to me in a happy voice, “Sayonara!” I was slammed back against the guardrail, hard enough to make my cracked ribs stab me with pain, as I convulsively clutched the detonator one last time.
That’s when the radio signal was finally able to reach all the plastic explosives I’d scavenged from the packs of Vanya’s troops and packed inside the life vest locker on the powerboat. My plan all along was to try to get aboard the ship and bluff Vanya into thinking I was ready to blow myself up, but the C-4 taped to my chest was just a decoy. I’d placed the armed explosives inside the powerboat to use as a last-ditch attempt to sink the Phaeton if I had to. Only the radio signal couldn’t penetrate the thick, armored walls of Vanya’s inner sanctum, so I hadn’t been able to connect. Until now.
It was as if a great white shark had swallowed a hand grenade. The concussive blast slammed the man nearest the stern into me as a gout of flame blew out of the side of the ship like a navy cannon firing a salvo. The guards and I hit the deck in a squeezing jumble and I was sandwiched in between the men. As the ship shuddered to a stop in the water I bucked off the man on my back and struck the other guard an incapacitating blow to the skull with the detonator I still gripped in my cramped right hand. I grabbed the railing and pulled myself up to face the other soldier, only to see a jagged protrusion that l
ooked like a shark’s fin jutting out of his back as he sprawled on the tilting deck; he’d unwittingly protected me from a deadly flying shard of shrapnel.
The Phaeton was a heaving sea beast in its death throes as I snatched up an automatic rifle and lurched for Vanya’s chamber. I shoved the hatch open and caught a glimpse of Vanya, all tangled up with his personal guard and bunched in a corner of the stateroom. One of his guards saw me as well and I barely had time to slam the metal hatch shut before the man let rip with a thunderous metal-storm of gunfire. I held the hatch shut like I was gripping an oversized shield as bullets hammered into it, until I heard the sound of a scream that cut off as the weapons fire died out.
I held on to the hatch for a silent count of three, then risked a quick look inside. The ship rolled and pulled me off balance as I saw the lights inside flicker and then turn a bloody red as the emergency lighting took over. There was a cluster of bodies piled against each other in the far corner of the room. The low tables started to slide along the carpeting that was bunching up like slow waves toward the rear of the ship. The curtains had been ripped from the walls, exposing the freshly scarred bulkhead.
Whoever opened fire at me wasn’t trained well enough to keep from shooting while inside a metal-plated chamber—all the bullets bounced and ricocheted off the armored walls and turned Vanya’s safe room into a concentrated killing zone.
I let gravity pull me inside and saw that Vanya’s men, loyal to him to the last, had covered him with their own bodies and taken the brunt of the gunfire. But the center of the bloody nest was moving, and Vanya’s head and arms broke free from the dead limbs that covered him. His eyes were wide and sightless, and he was muttering “Oh, God! Oh, God!” over and over.
I braced myself on the shifting deck and yelled through the metallic clamoring, “Vanya! The vaccine! Tell me where it is and I’ll get you out of here!”
Vanya’s head started twisting about as he pawed at the bodies entrapping him. “Blake!” he screamed. “Blake! I can’t feel my legs! Oh God! Get me out, and I’ll give you anything! Blake!”
I slung the rifle over my shoulder and went for him, only to see his eyes fix on a point over my shoulder and freeze. That’s when it hit me—Rhea.
I spun around, grabbing for the rifle, and saw Rhea outlined within the forward hatch. She was holding a small metal case in her hand. The case was open, and I could see the red emergency lights glistening off glass within. Her hair was wild, like plumes of smoke, and she was laughing like a maniac in between singing with a childish voice, “I have the antidote.”
I raised my rifle, but Rhea was waving the box of vaccine around and I didn’t dare shoot. “It’s the one and only one, Blake,” Rhea shouted with evil glee. “You’ll never find where the rest is hidden. Now, throw the gun away. Or do you want your Caitlin to die?”
I didn’t even stop to think as I tossed the automatic rifle down the hatch behind me, hearing as it clattered along the deck until it made a splash. All too quickly, Rhea tossed the case toward me. I almost had to jump as my hand flashed to catch it, and for a heart-stopping moment, the case bounced in my grasping fingers twice before I got a grip. The ship gave another lurch and I lost my footing, sliding down against the tilting back wall. I snapped open the case and saw it contained a single hypodermic needle. And an empty niche where a vial of medicine should have been.
Vanya was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out the words because a roaring hiss like a ruptured steam pipe filled the room just as the scorching heat from a flash of fire burst in from astern. I shielded my face and raised my eyes toward Rhea, who stood across the stateroom and above me, holding up the vial of vaccine that she’d slipped out of the case before she tossed it at me. With a look of absolute triumph on her wild features, she smashed the vial against the wall, leaving a smudge like wet blood under the hellish light.
I roared louder than the dying wails of the ship as I launched myself at Rhea, charging up the slanted deck only to have her leap at me. Rhea and I collided in midair and I barely managed to catch her hand, now grasping a redly gleaming knife blade. We crashed to the deck, rolling over and over until I slammed into the back wall with Rhea poised above me and the knife aimed at my throat. The room was slowly turning over and the wall I was pressed against started to become the floor while I grappled with Rhea’s knife hand. She shifted her grip, grabbing the knife with both hands, and shoved her weight against it, slowly driving the point to my throat while I held on with my rapidly fading strength. “Goodbye, my dearest,” she hissed between clenched teeth.
“Go to hell,” I grunted as I shifted myself to the right, letting the knife slide into my shoulder. The pain sparked a surge of strength and I reached around her, holding her close to me until I could see nothing but the fire reflected in her obsidian eyes. I threw all of my weight into rolling the two of us over once; twice.
Then Rhea was falling through the open hatch that had now become a trapdoor. I caught a glimpse of her as she flailed in the air. Her scream of rage was cut off when she fell through a curtain of fire and splashed down into a bubbling red-lit cauldron of water that boiled up from the stern of the sinking ship.
“Blake!”
It was Vanya, screaming as the mass of dead men that entangled him started to slide and drag him to the back hatch as if they were following after Rhea. I realized I had one last chance the save something out of all this death and destruction.
In the flickering bloodred light, Vanya’s eyes were mad with fear—the weight of his dead soldiers was pulling his flailing body along as gravity dragged them all through the doorway to hell. Vanya desperately reached for me and I reached back, but not to take his hand. His fear-driven grip damn near pulled my arm out of the socket, but ultimately his strength failed, and mine didn’t, and with a final heave of the deck, Vanya fell screaming through the hatch as if the ship itself had swallowed him up.
I didn’t have a moment to lose if I was going to try to save my life and Caitlin’s. I forced myself to crawl up the sharply slanted deck until I reached the hatch to the outside. I jumped to the railing, seeing the whole world illuminated by the flickering fires of burning oil that floated on the sea. I climbed as fast as I could toward the bow while the Phaeton itself reared and bucked, trying to throw me off. I made it to the apex of the dying ship and launched myself out to the sea. When I hit the water I swam as hard as I could, attacking the waves as the suction of the sinking ship pulled at me, trying to drag me under with it to the depths. At that moment I thought of Caitlin, and I fought the sea like a demon escaping a watery hell.
With a final, gurgling bellow, the Phaeton slipped beneath the waves, leaving only its flaming blood in its wake. I was wondering how long it would take the sharks of the Mediterranean to zero in on the shipwreck, along with the blood I was leaking into the water, when I heard the shuddering roar of a pair of large helicopters approaching fast. I didn’t have the breath to shout nor the strength to spare for waving, but I felt a flood of relief when one of the airborne craft took up a position above me and whipped the water with the force of its twin-bladed downdraft. I saw a blinking light that swayed to and fro as it floated down toward me, and just as my leaden arms and legs were threatening to quit, I reached up and grabbed the yoke of a rescue harness.
I slipped my arms through the harness and gave a feeble tug on the line, then surrendered all my efforts as I was carried upward against the helicopter blades’ beating gale that slapped my body and pounded my ears. As I slowly spun on the line, I saw another large helicopter hovering nearby, shooting a searchlight beam that swept the sea.
I was finally hauled aboard like a sack of cargo and into a red-lit fuselage whose inner walls were lined by heavily armed soldiers. The man nearest the hatch wore a helmet with a night-vision set that made him look like an alien insect as he helped disentangle me from the rescue harness. The side panel was shoved closed and someone clamped a set of headphones over my tortured ears. With a fuzzy me
chanical overtone, I heard Smith ask, “You still with us, Blake?”
Before I could reply, the helicopter lifted up and away, flattening me to the hard, vibrating deck. I felt a pair of arms pull me up and over to one of the jump seats bolted to the hull and saw it was Smith, his dark face shining under the red-hued light as he demanded, “What about the Pandora plague? Did Vanya get the signal out?”
I shook my head, praying I was right, then Smith grinned and said as he strapped in next to me, “Hot damn! Operation Trojan Sea Horse really worked!”
“Where’re we going?” I shouted into my headphone microphone.
Smith jerked a thumb at the soldiers. “We’re heading for Vanya’s island with the marines. Navy SEAL teams have already gone in; we’re the reinforcements. French air-sea rescue is going to pick up any survivors from Vanya’s boat.”
“Have your troops reached the laboratory section yet? Have they found Caitlin?”
Smith hesitated a beat, then said, “Last report was there was still heavy fighting.”
I unzipped my suit. “Get me a medic.”
“A medic?” Smith’s eyes went to my shoulder. “Whoa. Looks like you got tagged.”
One of the helicopter crew came over and reached for my shoulder, but I intercepted his hand. “Smith, call your ground troops and tell them to find Dr. Song at Vanya’s complex. They need to locate her and keep her safe.”
“Who’s Dr. Song?”
“She’s the woman who cooked up Vanya’s plague virus for him. And she’s the only one who can fix a cure. With this.” I held up the hypodermic syringe I got from the box that Rhea threw at me after she removed the plague medicine.
Smith stared at the syringe. “What the hell is that?”
“Blood. More importantly, blood that I’m betting has already been inoculated with the cure for the Pandora plague.”