by Cindy Dees
A second, much calmer, male voice interjected in British-accented French, suggesting that they might still need the services of the junior ship’s engineer and perhaps they should wait a little longer before they killed her.
That must be the infamous Michael Somerset. Jack frowned, perplexed by the guy. He’d been fired by the Brits for killing a couple of guys, yet he still seemed bent on stopping Viktor Dupont. Was it a personal vendetta? Or did the guy just have some sort of hero complex? Why stick his neck out like this for the good guys? What did he have to gain? And why in the hell hadn’t Somerset said anything about that minefield in the ocean?
Most important of all, could he be counted on when it came to a shooting match, which, if Jack didn’t miss his guess would happen any second now?
God, he hated being helpless on the sidelines like this!
An abrupt burst of noise exploded in his left ear at the same moment that Vanessa shouted into his right ear, “Go, go, go!”
He did the only thing he could as the assault began. He closed his eyes and prayed.
Isabella yanked open the bridge door, and the other five Medusas spun in low and fast in a fan formation. They split and raced down the side walls, shooting as they went. The hose crews burst onto the bridge with the hose valves opened, sending a violent blast of water into the room.
The terrorists, who’d been in the midst of shooting back at the Medusas gaped as the jets of water slammed into them. As forecast, the fire hoses caused instant and complete chaos. Gunmen were tossed about like twigs on a raging river. Aleesha squinted. She couldn’t see a blessed thing. Weapons fired wildly in the direction of the hoses, but nobody was hitting the broad side of a barn at the moment.
There. She made out a hijacker in front of her. In one fast movement, she took aim and fired. The guy dropped. Bursts of gunfire started to rat-a-tat around her as her teammates spotted Tangos and the terrorists collected themselves after the onslaught of water. The hose crews advanced farther into the room, arcing their jets of water back and forth. The terrorists were dodging the water now, jumping from cover to cover in an effort to get an angle on both the Medusas and the hose crews. But the Medusas had the other women’s flanks.
Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion. The remaining terrorists started dropping fast as the Medusas got a bead on their targets. Aleesha spotted Michael by the map table, crouching under it, no doubt trying to free the three women chained there. Abruptly, the officers jumped up, diving for cover behind a radio console. Two of the four remaining terrorists dropped, and the last two terrorists simultaneously realized they were the only ones left standing. In an instant of horrified clarity, Aleesha identified the last two hijackers. Viktor and Michael.
She saw the muzzles of her teammates’ weapons swinging toward the two threats. A bullet slammed into Viktor’s right shoulder, and red blossomed on his shirt. He staggered from the blow, but righted himself.
And then she saw something that made her blood run cold. Viktor was turning toward Michael, his AK-47 swinging up from his side. He was going to shoot Michael. He’d figured out that Michael was the plant inside his team, and in a last act of defiance, Viktor was going to take Michael out before he died himself.
Viktor staggered again, and a spurt of blood gushed from his left forearm this time. Kat. Only the team’s sniper was that accurate. She was trying to avoid killing the guy; he’d be worth a lot of intel alive. But he wasn’t going down like he ought to. His fanaticism was holding him upright. Awkwardly he hefted the heavy Russian machine gun onto his hip with his nearly useless right arm, still determined to kill Michael. His lips curled back in a sneer of fury. She had to do something! She had to save Michael. And she had no shot at Viktor. Kat was behind Viktor, in the same field of fire.
Michael’s gaze swept the room, looking for her. She recognized the look in his eyes. He knew he was about to die. His gaze met hers. A smile, and a look of infinite peace, passed over his face.
Her worst nightmare had come true. Death was raining down all around her. A man she cared about deeply was going to die. The violence of this profession had finally caught up with him—with them both. Her head and heart were screaming in denial; Michael was going to die before her very eyes at the hands of a madman.
She didn’t stop to think about it. She acted on instinct. Her own weapon swung up in front of her face, and she pointed her MP-5 directly at Michael. Shock filled his features. And then she pulled the trigger.
He slumped to the floor, a look of enormous surprise on his face.
She’d just shot the man she loved.
Viktor lurched, surprise painted on his face, as well. Determination stiffened his jaw, and hatred glinted in his eyes. He pulled the AK-47 up with his marginally good arm. The other Medusas fired on him simultaneously. He dropped like a rock.
He ought to have been dead before he hit the floor. But Aleesha, who was only ten feet or so away from him, saw his eyelashes move. A single blink, so slow she almost didn’t believe she was seeing it. His arm twitched, his hand sliding a few inches toward his waist. And then, too late, she saw what was he was reaching for.
“Nooo!” she screamed as she dived for him. That little black gadget at his waist was a remote detonator.
But it was too late. She watched in utter dismay as his finger depressed the little red button. A tremendous explosion rocked the ship. The deck shuddered hard beneath her cheek and the entire ship lurched as if it had been punched in the side.
She blinked, shocked to still be alive. She’d been sure in that nanosecond before he touched the button that Viktor was going to blow up the bridge. So, what had he wired? That had been a series of eight to ten simultaneous explosions, or she’d turn in her EOD badge.
“Jesus H. Christ, what was that?” The sound of an explosion hurt Jack’s left eardrum.
“High-order explosives, sir. Numerous simultaneous blasts,” someone answered.
“Thank you so much,” he snapped. “I’d never have figured that out on my own. What just blew up?”
Silence greeted his question.
“Satellite imagery?” he demanded. “What’s it showing?”
“Stand by one, sir. The feed just wobbled. Should stabilize in a few seconds. Ah, got an image. Zooming in now…holy shit!”
“Talk to me,” Jack ordered tersely.
“Eight holes in the side of the Grand Adventure, down low at the waterline. Hull’s bent outward, so the blasts came from inside her. Taking on water. Fast.”
Son of a bitch. The bastard was scuttling the ship. Jack whirled to face the admiral personally manning the wheel of the Teddy Roosevelt. “Can this thing go any faster?” he asked desperately.
“Mines be damned, we’re running at full steam, son,” the admiral answered grimly. “I’m pushing thirty knots and, in seas this rough, that’s about the best any ship this size can do.”
“Can you send the rest of the task force ahead?”
“Sorry. Even for an emergency of this magnitude, I can’t leave an aircraft carrier undefended.” He added as Jack opened his mouth to beg, “I can send out the frigate ahead of us. It can make another ten knots or so of forward speed. But I don’t know how much good it’ll do.”
Jack replied urgently, “If the Grand Adventure is sinking, there are going to be a whole lot of women and children in the water. They’re going to need help sooner rather than later.”
The admiral nodded to one of his junior bridge officers, who radioed the two frigates escorting the Roosevelt to make full speed ahead to the Grand Adventure and prepare to pick up civilians in the water.
Jack breathed a tiny sigh of relief. It might not be much help to the Medusas, but it was better than sitting around doing nothing.
“Confirm kills,” Vanessa ordered sharply.
Aleesha, who was all but lying on top of Viktor now, felt for a pulse in his ruined neck. His face was destroyed, his chest cavity pulp from the shots they’d poured into him. No pulse.
The bastard was finally and irrevocably dead. Number 23 down. So where was the woman? She’d never shown herself and they’d never ID’d her. She’d opted not to go down with her comrades, eh? Harsh. Cold.
Frantically she crawled over to Michael. He was lying facedown on his stomach a few feet away. Oh, God. No! Please let him not have been killed by her shot. She’d aimed at a nonlethal part of his body, but accidents and nicked arteries happened.
“Medic!” Vanessa called out tersely behind her.
Reflexively, she turned to the distress call. Was one of her teammates hit?
“Civilian down.” Vanessa knelt next to a white-clothed form.
Oh, no. One of the ship’s female officers. She raced over to where Vanessa and Kat were working urgently on the victim. They moved aside as Aleesha dropped to her knees.
Vanessa said, “She’s shot in the back of the head. The bastards murdered her.”
Aleesha bent down to look behind the young woman. Maybe if she found the piece of missing skull…she had a field kit with her…she could cauterize some of that bleeding…defibrillate her heart…
She reached for her med kit frantically, and a hand clamped around her wrist, stopping her. She looked up at Vanessa.
“You can’t save them all,” her boss, her friend, murmured to her.
The words pierced her soul like arrows. But she was a doctor! She was out here to save innocents. All of them! She tried to shake off Vanessa’s hand, to reach for her med gear.
“Let it go,” Vanessa said soberly.
Aleesha closed her eyes for an anguished moment as sanity returned. The back of the girl’s head was completely gone. Inger Johannson was dead, and no medicine was going to save her.
She’d failed. Inger was depending on her, and she’d failed her.
Aleesha thought back quickly to where Inger, Hannah Leider, and Gwyn had moved after Michael unchained them. All three of them had run, crouching, toward the Medusas—their backs to the hijackers. She’d seen them dive behind one of the big radio consoles that housed the ship’s navigation computers.
Aleesha looked down at Inger’s head injury again. Based on the direction and angle of entry, the bullet that killed her must have come from behind her. Indeed, one of the terrorists had shot her. The sheer spite of it took Aleesha’s breath away and stripped away any remorse she might have had over killing every last one of the hijackers.
“She’s gone,” Aleesha muttered. “I let her die.”
A wail startled her. Gwyn, the hospitality officer, rocked back and forth on her knees, hugging herself and sobbing.
Aleesha looked around the room, searching for any more civilian victims in need of life-saving medical attention. The order of triage in a scenario like this was civilians first, Medusas second and Tangos last. Karen was field bandaging the arm of one of the hose crew members, and several more of the civilian volunteers were nursing cuts and contusions. Then her gaze lighted on a prostrate male figure.
“Michael.” She again raced to his side and dropped to her knees. She rolled him gently onto his back. Blood seeped from just below his left shoulder.
He groaned and then cracked one eye open. “Is he dead?” he murmured between closed lips.
She replied, “Viktor? Oh, yeah.” And then nearly fainted with relief as Michael sat up gingerly. He’d been playing possum! She was going to kill him for scaring her like that.
“You shot me!” he accused indignantly.
She couldn’t help but grin. Clearly the man was not on the verge of dying. But she noticed her legs felt like rubber. She retorted, “Viktor was raising his AK-47 to you. I figured if I beat him to the punch and shot you first, it might convince him you weren’t the traitor, and he might not bother to shoot you again. Oh, and I figured I could shoot you without killing you, whereas Viktor had every intention of blowing your head off.”
Michael stared narrowly at her. “So you shot me to save my life?”
“Well, yeah. Basically,” she answered.
“It was a big risk to take,” he muttered, apparently only partially mollified.
“Better than certain death.” Then she added quietly, “I didn’t want to lose you.”
They leaned toward each other. Lord, she needed a hug right now. But then the detonator at her waist poked her, jolting her back to the situation at hand. “What did Viktor just blow up?” she asked tensely.
Michael blinked. “Blow up?”
“He mashed a detonator as he went down.”
“So that wasn’t your Navy firing on us?”
“No. They wouldn’t try to sink a cruise ship full of innocent passengers—” She broke off, horrified. Sink it. Viktor had tried to sink the ship! It made perfect sense, knowing him. If he couldn’t get off the ship alive, by God, he wasn’t going to let anyone else get off it alive, either. Sometime during the last several days, he’d wired the Grand Adventure to blow.
“Viper!” she yelled. “I think Viktor tried to sink the ship. We need to do a damage assessment, ASAP!” She leaped to her feet in dread as a rush of certainty overcame her. The kind of intuitive certainty deep in her gut that she’d learned to trust implicitly. “Those explosions happened near the waterline. He planted charges all down the side of the ship so the antiflooding bulkheads would be useless.”
Then another thought hit her. It nearly made her throw up. “The children. They’re on the first deck.”
She took off running without waiting for anyone else to join her. She heard footsteps pounding behind her but didn’t look to see who it was. Panic like she’d never experienced before spurred her forward. Oh, God. All those children!
If possible her panic deepened as she noticed a very slight tilt to the deck under her feet. The ship was taking on water. Fast. She took the midship stairwell in great knee-jarring leaps, jumping down flight after flight of stairs as fast as her body could possibly go. Whether or not she remembered to breathe, she had no idea. She just knew she had to get down to those kids and get them out before their hiding place became their deathtrap.
She turned the last corner and looked down at the first deck. Oh. My. God. It sloshed maybe knee deep in water. She charged into the water, running in an awkward high-kneed gait, splashing her way against the dragging weight. High-pitched screams became audible as she approached the tank. The hall was clogged with panicked women fighting against one another as they all tried to reach the water tank holding their babies.
“Make a hole,” she bellowed as loud as she could.
But the mothers’ terror was too deep for that. She used her superior strength to elbow her way past them all. As she careened into the water plant, she heard the sound of hands pounding on the metal walls of the tank from the inside over the noisy sloshing of the sea water and the cries of the mothers. The water had risen to nearly midthigh, now.
Thirty or forty children milled around outside the tank, clearly unsure of what to do. They must’ve swum out through the maintenance hatch. They turned huge, frightened gazes on her as she splashed into sight.
“Ladies, listen to me!” she shouted. “I need all of you to head down that hall and upstairs to Deck 5,” she ordered. “You’re not doing me a damned bit of good down here, and you’re getting in the way of any rescue attempt. Clear the halls now! I’ll take care of your children.”
It was too much to ask of them. They didn’t leave.
She tried again. “Fine. Then form a chain of women down the hallway one person wide. As the kids come out of here, I need adults to guide the children up to Deck 5 and onto the lifeboats. Set it up like a bucket brigade of kids. Will you do that much for me?”
The women acted on that order. They’d leave, as long as they still felt like they were taking part in rescuing their children. She couldn’t blame them.
Most of the women and all of the kids who’d already gotten out of the tank took off, half swimming, half wading toward the stairwell.
She moved over to the water tank and shouted against
its surface, “I’m here! I’ll get you out. Don’t worry!”
The lower maintenance hatch the kids had used to get into the tank was flapping in the swirling waters, patently unsafe for anyone trying to pass through. She took a deep breath and ducked under the water. She pulled the door fully open, but a rush of water nearly slammed it shut on her legs as she swam through it into the tank. She stood up inside the dimly lit space. Jeez, what a mess. The chaos in here was complete. Panic reigned with children screaming and clawing at the walls.
She passed out the rest of her cyalume sticks and shouted into her throat mike, without any idea of whether or not a transmission would make it out of this metal-enshrouded space, “I need help down here!”
Off mike, she bellowed at the top of her lungs, “Quiet!” The sound was impressive, banging around against the metal walls. It quieted everyone down for a moment in stunned surprise.
“Everyone is going to get out of here alive. Nobody’s going to die. But you all have to be quiet and follow directions or I will leave you in here and let you drown. Is that understood?” she said in her fiercest possible voice. Hopefully, if she was scarier than the prospect of drowning, the children would focus all their attention on her.
“Okay. Everyone who can swim underwater, come over to this door right now and form a single-file line. You—” she grabbed the nearest orange shirt “—swim through the hatch and hold it open from the other side. A line of mothers are waiting to take everyone up to the lifeboats on Deck 5.”
She leaned close to the staffer and said more quietly, “Try to get word to the soldiers that I need all the help I can get down here ASAP.”
The girl nodded, and Aleesha gave her a little push toward the hatch. “Go. Hurry.”