Havoc m-7

by Jack Du Brul

  He had two minutes or less and still hadn’t thought of a way out of his predicament. There were no large boulders he could jump to between the barge and the edge of the falls, and if he tried to swim to one he’d be sucked over the precipice. The crash of so much falling water echoed in his head and made concentrating difficult. He had the first three seals in place and had just started to lace the bag when Booker fired again. Mercer looked up just as he was hit from behind in a blind tackle that sent him tumbling. He’d recognized the black jumpsuit as belonging to one of the parachutists, when he was kicked under the chin. The parachutist had somehow survived when the bass boat was crushed, possibly by being close to the engine, and had taken this long to extricate himself.

  Mercer’s head snapped back and slammed the deck. He fought the dizzying wave of darkness that washed through his mind and rolled clear just as the man tried to smash his heel into Mercer’s nose. The empty hull of the barge echoed with the impact. Mercer grabbed the man’s ankle with both hands and twisted savagely. The man went down and Mercer used his fall to lever himself into a sitting position. He smashed his elbow into the man’s groin as hard as he could and staggered to his feet. The barge had stopped right on the edge of the falls where the water was remarkably only about three feet deep. Niagara Gorge was a void that seemed to stretch forever.

  He whirled again as the assassin got to his feet. Mercer recognized him. It wasn’t Poli but one of the men with him when they attacked the Deco Palace Hotel. Mercer’s Schmeisser was on top of the crates and too far, so he simply charged. The two crashed together and fell into the water sluicing across the deck. The water was only a foot deep but the current was relentless. Mercer lost traction on the slick hull plates and shot twenty feet toward the bow before he could dig in his heels and stand. The leading edge of the barge was suspended over open air and the hull continued to grind against the bottom.

  That’s when he saw his only chance of salvation. The parachutist had also gotten to his feet, but the wind had been knocked out of him. Mercer splashed to the crates and grabbed up his weapon. The white mercenary reached for a pistol hanging in his shoulder holster, but he wasn’t quick enough. Mercer fired one-handed, the heavy weapon bucking in his hand, and a pair of nine-millimeter slugs slammed into the man’s chest. He fell and was instantly grabbed by the current. Mercer dropped the Schmeisser and lunged for the body, grabbing at the man’s hair just before he went over the bow. He dragged the corpse against the current and in the lee of the crates managed to unhook the man’s reserve parachute.

  He hadn’t done enough skydiving to know if he’d put it on properly, but there was nothing he could do about it. The stern of the barge began to rise with the current as it edged toward its tipping point.

  Mercer’s biggest threat now wasn’t that he was so high above the gorge. The problem was he wasn’t high enough. While a hundred and eighty feet was a great height, it was nowhere near high enough for a parachute to deploy. It would be no different than jumping without one. Mercer ran to the crane again, spun it on its turntable until it was facing aft to shift the barge’s center of gravity in his favor, hit the levers that raised the boom to its maximum height, and started the hydraulics that would extend it to its fullest length. By doing this he bought himself another hundred feet.

  There were ladder rungs welded to the top of the first section of the steel boom, and even as it continued to rise, Mercer started to climb. The next three sections didn’t have any handholds so he had to rely on the strength of his hands to shimmy up the slick boom like a monkey.

  He reached the top just as the world began to tip. The barge was going over. The crates slid across the deck and vanished over the falls. Mercer popped the drogue chute and held it in his right hand as the barge slipped farther. He paused for a heartbeat, waiting for the boom to reach vertical. The Niagara Gorge was a narrow gash through the forests and farmlands, while in the distance Lake Ontario looked like polished glass.

  With a last rending squeal the barge tipped, and just before it shot out from under Mercer he threw himself from the crane, tossing the drogue chute over his head. He and the barge and the water all fell at nearly the same speed, but the pressure against his stomach told Mercer he was accelerating. There was nothing to do but pray as he plummeted down the face of Niagara Falls, his body sodden by the constant spray. He couldn’t see the surface of the river or the rocks below because of the mist, and perhaps it was for the best.

  But fate wasn’t going to be that kind to him. As he fell the mist cleared a bit. He could see the boiling surface of the river, the tons of rocks that had eroded off the falls, and even the plucky sightseeing boat called the Maid of the Mist. Mercer could feel the chute start to pull from the pack, drawn out by air resistance against the drogue. There wasn’t enough room.

  Mercer closed his eyes.

  And jerked them open when the main chute deployed, yanking the straps so far into his groin he was certain his testicles had ruptured. The wind off the falls caught the chute and pushed him just past the mounds of jagged boulders as the barge augered in. The crane snapped from its mounts and nearly hit him as he drifted a few more yards before plunging into the river. He went deep and felt the current snatch the chute, dragging him farther downstream.

  Mercer fought and clawed his way to the surface, his lungs near bursting as he got there and gulped great drafts of air. He managed to find the chute release, and once it was gone he could tread water. The Maid of the Mist cut across the narrows, passengers in blue ponchos cheering when they saw Mercer had survived. A few minutes later a pair of deckhands helped him onto the lower deck.

  “Have you got a death wish or something?” one of them asked.

  Having no pithy retort on hand, Mercer rolled onto his side and promptly threw up.

  Arlington, Virginia

  Mercer sprawled on the leather sofa in the rec room wearing the loosest pair of sweatpants he owned, a bag of frozen peas pressed to his groin and a vodka gimlet within easy reach. From the floor, Drag regarded him through droopy, bloodshot eyes, indignant that he’d been evicted from his favorite spot.

  Cali and Ira Lasko sat on the other couch facing Mercer, while Harry and Booker Sykes were at the bar. Burgers and fries from a fast-food restaurant littered the coffee table and bar top.

  When the Maid of the Mist returned to its dock and it was determined that Mercer didn’t need a hospital, he was given a ride to the Niagara Police Department and booked on numerous charges. Like after the shoot-out in New Jersey, Ira had to step in with local authorities to get him released. Sykes had picked up Cali and her team from Grand Island and abandoned his boat so no one knew of their involvement. Ruth Bishop from the Coast Guard was to lead the investigation into the gun battle, coordinating with her Canadian counterparts to find the helicopter that had dropped the paratroopers and was most likely going to haul away the crates. So far word of their contents had not spread thanks in large part to the money Brian Crenna was being paid to keep his mouth shut. He’d have a new tugboat and floating crane by the end of the week. His missing crewman had been found on the Canadian side of the border, so with no civilian fatalities this was being heralded as a thwarted terrorist attack on Niagara Falls power plants. Mercer, NEST, and Sykes’s team weren’t part of the cover story and were sworn to secrecy.

  Because none of the terrorists’ bodies had been recovered, Mercer, Cali, and Sykes’s Delta team had spent the day with the FBI’s counterterrorism unit going over hundreds of pictures of known terrorists in hopes of identifying the men who’d attacked the barge. One of the bass boats had survived the ordeal and was found packed with enough explosives to sink a cruise ship. As Mercer had noted during the battle, the terrorists were Middle Eastern. He recognized four of the men from the photo lineup. Two were Iraqi and two were from Saudi Arabia. The Arab paratrooper, a former captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, was well known to the Pentagon, but none of the others were particularly high up in the Al Qaida chain of
command. There was nothing in any database on the Caucasian parachutist.

  Ira made sure that Homeland Security would keep him in the loop as they tracked how the men entered North America and where they had gotten their weapons. They would also provide twenty-four-hour guards for Mercer’s house. That was his price for cooperation. He didn’t want to take up Ira’s suggestion of moving to a safe house.

  With his genitals sufficiently numb, Mercer set the peas on a dishrag next to him and wiped a smear of ketchup from his lips. He’d just finished telling Harry the story of the fight and his dive off the falls.

  “I think that makes you the twelfth person who’s gone over the falls and lived,” Harry remarked. “However, technically you didn’t go over them. You parachuted, so it really doesn’t count.”

  “Technically, my ass,” Mercer spat back and hobbled to the bar for another drink. “I may not be able to talk about it but in my mind I went over the falls and I’ve got the swollen stones to prove it.” He turned to Ira. “I’ve forgotten to ask. How’s it going with the recovery of the crates?”

  “Coast Guard’s on it now with Cali’s teammates, ah, Slaughbaugh and Williams. They managed to recover two of them pretty easily from the Maid of the Mist Pool below the rapids, but the other two are directly under the falls, where the water is deeper than the falls are tall. The good news is there’s no trace of radiation in the water, so we know they didn’t break open.”

  “And security?”

  “Airtight this time,” Ira said solemnly. “What made you invite Booker along?”

  “Poli’s been a step ahead since Africa. He has the original manuscript from Chester Bowie’s safe, which gave him the name of the freighter Bowie used to ship the crates to America. And as Cali proved finding what happened to the Wetherby wasn’t too tough. What I hadn’t anticipated was the number of men he’d employ and the sophistication of the assault given the short amount of time he had to plan it.”

  Booker Sykes spoke up. “An operation like he coordinated would have taken weeks, maybe months for training and he pulled it off in just a couple of days.”

  “That tells us,” Mercer continued, “that he’s got a lot of assets in the States.”

  “And you’re sure he wasn’t with the assault team?” Ira asked.

  “Positive,” Mercer said bitterly. More than anything he wished the mercenary had been there when the barge went over the falls. “I did recognize the white paratrooper from New Jersey. He was taking the potshots at us while Poli was driving. I suspect the Qaida fighters on the bass boats were just cannon fodder in case the barge was protected.”

  “That’s why all the explosives,” Booker added. “Suicide run if you had a Coast Guard escort. I figure the Iraqi who ’chuted in was the terror cell’s leader but they were working for Poli.”

  “Who ultimately works for someone else,” Cali said.

  “Someone we don’t have a bead on yet.” Mercer returned to the couch and settled the frozen peas over his groin again. “But it’s got to be Al Qaida. How else could he get their men? For Poli it’s all about the money. Guys willing to die in a suicide attack do it for politics or faith.”

  Ira finished his burger and crushed his napkin. “You think this is Al Qaida’s attempt to get the radioactive material they need for a dirty bomb?”

  “What else could it be?” Cali answered. “We all know they’ve wanted to get their hands on nuclear material for years. And despite what the media thinks, NEST and other groups are doing a damn fine job closing conduits from the old Soviet republics and any other source imaginable.” She glanced at Mercer almost as if what she was about to say was his fault. “What no one anticipated was finding a cache of natural plutonium that seems to have been lost for a couple thousand years. Using what Chester Bowie rediscovered is Al Qaida’s only chance if they want a dirty bomb.”

  “I don’t get something,” Harry said. “If you guys could recover the crates without any problems, what’s the big deal with a dirty bomb anyway?”

  Cali met his frank gaze. “It’s a terror weapon. More people would be killed in the initial explosion than would suffer radiological effects, but that doesn’t matter. The mere mention of radioactive contamination would be enough to cause nationwide panic. Remember the anthrax attacks and how many people were hoarding Cipro?”

  “Unfortunately,” Ira interrupted, “competition in the media has forced them into using scare tactics in order to sell ad space. A story like a dirty bomb attack would turn the media into a feeding frenzy of doom and gloom that would actually help the terrorists in spreading fear. You have to know that our press is no longer free. And it’s not some vast right wing, or even left wing, conspiracy that’s destroyed its objectivity. It’s our own consumerism that has allowed the media to be co-opted by Madison Avenue in order to sell lingerie and cheaper computers. You just know there are editors and news directors out there who are anxiously awaiting a terrorist attack or a plane crash or a celebrity murder so they can pump their circulation and raise their ad rates. So long as advertisers subsidize the media, the press will always find the negative. It’s human nature.”

  “What’s the alternative?” Harry asked. “In countries where the state supplies the news, you get nothing but propaganda.”

  “I don’t know,” Ira admitted. “But it pisses me off that when there’s no real news to report they go out and find some horror to exploit. Thousands of teenagers die every year but it’s only during a lull in the news cycle that one death gets turned into a national tragedy. And this happens not because we value that teen over any other but because the constant exposure to the details creates a feedback loop of interest.”

  “Pretty cynical,” Harry remarked. “And I can’t deny it.”

  “Sad, huh?” Ira said tiredly.

  Mercer leaned forward. “We’re getting off topic.”

  “Sorry.” Ira scratched at his bald head. “I spent the morning with our media consultants building the cover story around the attack. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

  “We’ve secured the bulk of the plutonium Chester Bowie mined,” Mercer stated. “I’m not even going to worry about the little bit that was in the safe. That still leaves the Alembic of Skenderbeg, which we’re still trying to hunt down, and what the Russians mined after Bowie left Africa. Have you gotten anywhere with them?”

  “Actually I have.” Ira opened the briefcase at his feet and withdrew a folder. “That’s how I spent my afternoon. I got this from Grigori Popov, a guy whose career mirrors mine. He was a sub driver in the Pacific Fleet who moved to naval intelligence. He’s now a deputy in the Ministry of Defense. I’ve known him for years, and while I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, we’ve been dealing with each other long enough to know when it’s time to put all our cards on the table.”

  Ira glanced at his notes. “We were pretty much right when we spoke in my office a few days ago. The Russians had stolen the designs for our atomic bomb but knew they wouldn’t have the resources to enrich uranium for at least a decade, and plutonium production would take even longer. As World War Two came to a close the KGB created something called Scientific Operations headed by a shrewd cookie named Boris Ulinev.”

  Mercer sat bolt upright, color draining from his face. “Jesus. Department 7.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Don’t you remember me telling you about my involvement when Hawaii almost seceded and the whole plot to blow up the Alaska Pipeline?” Lasko nodded. “Both of those were old Department 7 operations.”

  “That’s right!” Ira exclaimed. “I knew it sounded familiar when Greg was telling me about it.”

  “You know their last director is still on the loose out there,” Mercer said with ill-disguised anger. “Ivan Kerikov’s his name. I wonder if he’s mixed up in all of this.”

  “I doubt it,” Ira told him.

  “Ah, guys?” Cali interjected. “Little help for those of us who don’t know what you’re talking a
bout.”

  Mercer explained. “Department 7 was created during World War Two as the Russians were advancing into German-occupied Eastern Europe and then into Germany herself. Their sole mission was to assimilate captured technology. The Nazis had some pretty advanced stuff on their drawing boards at war’s end and the Soviets stole as much as they could get their hands on. Plans for jet aircraft, powerful radar systems, next-generation missiles, even the world’s first infrared scopes. It was Department 7’s job to take this technology back to the Soviet Union and integrate it into their military. That’s how they were able to produce jet fighters so quickly after the war. The MiG-15 was basically a copy of a German aircraft.” He looked back to Ira. “It makes sense they’d be involved with this if Bowie was right and it was German agents after him.”

  “He was and they were,” Ira said. “When Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, learned about the Alembic of Skenderbeg, he personally dispatched a team to search for its power source. Two of them were killed, we know now by Janissaries, while a third returned to Germany with a sketchy report about Chester Bowie and his crates. The Germans didn’t send another team back to Africa, believing they could enrich uranium themselves, and the whole affair was shoved into an archive.”

  “And in waltzes Department 7,” Booker said from the bar, a plug of tobacco shoved against his right cheek.

  “Exactly. While the Nazis shipped a lot of their nuclear program to Japan at the close of the war, there was enough left in Germany for Department 7 to figure out there might be a natural source of nuclear fuel. Unlike the Germans the Soviets scoured parts of Africa until they found the cache in the Central African Republic in 1947, which was a French Colony at the time. Oh, and Greg Popov denies any massacre took place.”