The others were shocked into movement and Bell’s lip twisted as he fired a three-round burst that opened up a sucking chest wound in the closest of the men. The last of the crewmen made it to the rifles and then thought better of it, his survival instinct catching up to him just in time.
Rix stepped over the soup cook—still alive, although not long for it—and prodded the uninjured man in the side of the head with the Mossberg’s barrel. “How many on the ship?” he asked.
“No,” said the man, raising his hands. “No.”
Bell checked the man he had shot. “This one’s done.”
Marshall was at the door, glancing this way and that, his M4 slung and a Browning Hi-Power pistol in his thick-fingered fist. “No one’s coming.”
Rix poked their prisoner with his gun again, reaching out to silence the television. “How many men?” he repeated. “Where is the weapon?”
“No English,” said the man, raising his hands to lace them together at the back of his head.
“You talk or you die,” Rix went on. “Last chance.”
Bell held up a hand before the man, fingers spread. “Five? This many?” He opened and closed it twice. “Ten?”
That got him a nod. “Ten. Yes. Ten.”
Marshall gave a grunt. “Skeleton crew?”
Rix had an answer to that, but it was lost as the prisoner’s hands blurred and came away from his neck with the bright arrowhead of the push-dagger he had concealed in the back of his collar. The blade came down in a fast slash that cut open the mission commander’s right sleeve, biting into him even as he dodged away.
The man screamed as he lunged at Rix, intent on burying the dagger in his neck, but Bell was too quick and the MP5 rattled off another burst. He let the weapon’s recoil rise on its own and the gun marched 9mm rounds up the stomach and ribs of the attacker.
Rix kicked him away and the other man collapsed across the sofa, twitching as he began to bleed out. “Fuck.” He let the Mossberg hang free on its sling and clutched at his arm.
Bell tore a bandage pack from his gear vest and handed it to his commander. “That’ll leave a mark.”
“Piss off,” Rix spat, tending to his injury. “So much for a live one, then.”
A voice crackled in their ears. “This is Nomad Two. Do you have contact?”
“Three targets down,” Marshall reported. “Proceeding.”
“Copy,” said Nash. “Be advised. We’re not seeing any movement up here. Where the bloody hell is everyone?”
“Where indeed?” grated Rix. “All right, moving on. If the boat’s empty, this should make our job easier.”
Marshall jerked his thumb in the direction of the branching corridor. “The other hatch. Leads into the cargo bay, boss.”
“That way, then.”
* * *
“Mobile Three,” said Sam. “Marc, do you read me?” She pressed flat against the side of a support girder, looking toward the aft of the Palomino.
“I’m here,” said Marc.
“Can you orbit the drone around the ship? Give us a read on the number of tangos? Something’s not kosher about this.”
“Mobile One agrees,” said the voice in her headset. “Winds are picking up, so we’re down on loiter duration. I don’t think we can keep the saucer airborne for more than a couple more minutes.”
She nodded absently. The breeze across the deck of the freighter was growing colder and more insistent. “Do what you can.”
Something fast and low blurred past overhead, framed against the gray haze of the oncoming dawn.
“He got anything?” Nash called out, pitching his voice softly. He was crouched several feet away with the carbine at his shoulder, panning back and forth in a fruitless search for a target.
“Still no reads,” Marc replied. “No targets on deck, I repeat, no targets.”
Nash made a sour face. “Two guards patrolling, and not another soul? That don’t make sense.”
“No,” admitted Sam. “It doesn’t.”
“You hold here,” Nash told her, rising to his feet. “I’m gonna scope out the seaward side of the ship for myself, see if they missed something.”
“The drone—”
He shot her a look. “Is a gimmick. I don’t trust a kid’s toy to give me intel.” Nash moved away, melting into the shadows.
* * *
Bell dropped back to the rear-guard position and Marshall took point, leading with his M4, steering himself along the suspended catwalks over the empty cargo holds of the ship. He panned the gun right and left, stepping carefully with his NVG goggles snapped down over his eyes. The white-on-green images gave everything a surreal, detached air, as if he was peering at some virtual world.
“Unless they’re shipping dead air and rust, there’s nothing here,” noted Bell.
Passing through the first two freight compartments, there were only echoing metallic voids and the stink of stale seawater and corrosion; but then Marshall had to remind himself that the weapon they were searching for did not have to be huge. The reports shown to the team during their briefing made it clear that the device used in Barcelona was portable, and Bill knew well enough that someone smart enough could fit a nuclear bomb inside a medium-sized suitcase, or a bio-weapon in a vial the size of a fountain pen. Size did not automatically equal lethality.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” he muttered to himself.
“You what?” said Rix from behind, as they reached the hatch leading into the next compartment.
“Nothing, boss.” Marshall leaned into the lever and the door clacked open. “Thinking out loud…”
He trailed off as the hatch swung wide and presented the main cargo space. This one was a good three times the size of the first two, filling up the rest of the Palomino’s hull forward of the bridge.
What made him go silent was the unmistakable scent of human odors above the wet and the rust. Down below, in an area that normally would have been filled by hundreds of cargo containers, there was just one. A single green rectangle of corrugated steel, resting along the line of the keel. Arranged around the front of it was a makeshift porch built out of scaffold rods, rope and tarpaulins. He spotted a few camp beds and a big plastic drum like the kind used to store rainwater for irrigating gardens.
And there were people. Kids, really. Teenagers by the look of them, maybe four or five, peering up at them with dirty faces. Their uniformly disheveled appearance made it hard to tell if they were boys or girls.
They all looked utterly terrified, and small wonder, considering they were staring up at three intruders with guns, men rendered faceless and alien behind the bug-eye masks of night vision gear.
“What we got here?” Bell broke the silence. “People trafficking?”
“Not nearly enough of them for that,” Marshall noted, thinking it through. “Recreational supplies, maybe? For the crew.”
Rix cursed softly under his breath, flipping up his NVGs, and the other men followed suit. Marshall had been to Gavin Rix’s house for dinner once or twice, and he had seen the man’s pride and joy—Callie and June, his daughters, sweet girls the pair of them, and the absolute apples of their dad’s eye. The youngest ones down there on the deck had to be the same age as Rix’s daughters, and Marshall only had to look at his mission commander to know the man was thinking the same thing.
“Careful,” said Rix, finding the steep access steps that led down to the makeshift camp. “Don’t spook them.”
“I’m calling this in,” said Bell, pressing his throat mike. “Mobile? Nomad Five. We have civilian contact on board.”
* * *
Marc’s brow creased and he leaned across the keyboard before him. Inside the hull of the ship, the radio comms were heavy with static interference. “Nomad Five, clarify. You mean the crew?”
“Negative,” Bell’s deep voice was firm. “Could be prisoners. We’re in the main hold. They’ve got them living down here.”
He shot Owen a look, but the ot
her man shook his head. “Satellite infrared isn’t picking up anything.”
“Under some kind of cover, maybe?” suggested Leon. “The Russian mafia use military-spec diffusion material to line the boats they have for shipping in girls for the sex trade. Could be the same thing.”
Rix’s words cut through the stale air in the back of the truck and the mix of horror and genuine disgust in his tone gave Marc pause. “They’re just kids…” he said.
“All call signs, attention.” A new voice sounded, and Marc looked up to see a “master transmit” message on the communications panel. “This is Hub White. Primary objective remains the priority. Locate and isolate the device. All other concerns are secondary.”
Marc’s throat went dry. “Mobile … copies.”
“Copy,” said Bell, after a moment, and Marc could almost see the grim twist of the man’s lips as he said the word.
* * *
“Boss,” hissed Bell from the gantry. “We gotta come back for them later.”
Rix didn’t look up as Marshall followed him on to the lower level. “I heard,” he said. “Just give me a bloody second.”
“Boss—” Marshall ventured, uncertain what to say.
Rix cut him off with a stern look. “They might know where the package is, Bill. We can’t just walk on by.” Then, very deliberately, Rix reached for his headset jack and disconnected it from the radio rig.
Taking care to approach without any sudden movements, Rix slung his shotgun over his shoulder and held up his hands, palms out. The youngsters gathered in a knot, almost as if they were trying to protect one another, and the sad, pitiful nature of the act made Marshall feel sick inside. Closer now, he could see the hollowness in their cheeks and the scars on them. Somebody had made a point of hurting these kids, and his grip tightened on the butt of his carbine in anger.
The tallest of them was a girl. She had pale brown skin that made Marshall peg her as Indian, but he was lousy with that kind of thing and for all he knew he could have been a continent or two off her point of origin. She brushed lank black hair back from her eyes and came out of the group to meet Rix.
“You understand me?” he asked her. “We’ve come to help you.” Rix smiled warmly, speaking in a gentle, friendly tone.
There was a voice in Marshall’s ear asking for a status update, but he ignored it, watching the girl and the other kids for any sign of threat. As horrified as he was by the conditions here, he was still a professional soldier, and he wasn’t about to let his guard down.
The girl reached out and took Rix’s hand. She was crying, tears cutting wet streaks through the dirt smeared across her cheeks.
“We’ll take you somewhere safe,” Rix was saying. “We’re looking for something here. You understand?”
She nodded, and pulled on Rix’s arm, pointing at the container. The girl said something in a language Marshall didn’t recognize.
“Boss!” Bell called out from the catwalk. “This is not the time.”
“She wants us to see in there,” Rix replied. He nodded at the girl, encouraging her. “It’s all right, love. Don’t cry. It’ll be fine.”
Marshall tensed as the kid went to the doors at the back of the lone container and pulled at the latch, her effort making it swing open. He had a sudden vision of what might be inside—More children? Stacks of little corpses?
Before Rix could stop her, the girl disappeared inside, lost in the blackness. Marshall raised his carbine and thumbed the touchpad to switch on the torch slung beneath the muzzle. Rix had a flashlight in his hand and was doing the same.
Rods of light probed the dark interior, sweeping over a mesh of cables strung from the roof and the sides of the container walls, connecting back and forth like the work of a mad spider. The cables ended in blocky lumps of plastic that resembled engine parts.
Rix picked one and zeroed in on it. The box was glued to the interior wall with a fat plug of orange epoxy glue. It was the uniform khaki-green of military technology, lined with a string of text in Chinese, and a stencil of the international symbol for explosives. There were dozens of identical components all around them.
Marshall’s torch beam found the girl where she stood at the heart of the wire-web, a black plastic firing box in her shaking hand.
A lead snaked away from the box and into the mess of cables.
“Bomb!” he barked, his mind catching up with what he was seeing.
“Shahiden,” said the sobbing girl, pressing down on the trigger button.
* * *
The micro-UAV’s battery meter fell into the red, and Marc grimaced as the shuddering view from the on board camera became unwatchable. He sent the saucer drone up high over the ship, hoping that he could squeeze the last few drops of power out of it before it gave up the ghost. The wind had worked the little prop engines harder than he had expected, and it had taken a lot of juice just to stay on station. Marc stabbed the auto-return key that would set the drone on a direct course back to the mobile operations vehicle, but he knew that he had left it too late. The drone would fall out of the air into the harbor channel and be lost forever.
“Boss!” He heard Bell say over the open channel, “this is not the time.”
The drone’s line of sight spun lazily as it spiraled down over the deck of the Palomino, catching the water, the deck, the sky—and for a split second Marc glimpsed the very definite shape of a human being moving at the bow. “Someone there?”
He shot a look at Owen’s screen, but the schematic showed no targets. The locator markers for Sam and Nash were both in static positions on either side of the ship, in cover and standing sentinel.
“I think we have movement on the—” he began
Bill Marshall’s cry of alarm broke over him. “Bomb!”
A crash of howling static screamed through the headsets of everyone in the truck, and a heartbeat later the blast wave hit them.
* * *
The explosive charges inside the container detonated as one, forming a perfect sphere of white fire that blossomed like a miniature sun. The detonation filled the cargo compartment, expanding in milliseconds to throw a firestorm into the ship’s corridors. Everything flammable combusted immediately, walls of lethal heat-buckling steel. Streamers of fire spurted into the air, taking the path of least resistance.
The Palomino was fatally holed at the waterline, the blast punching outward through the inner and outer hulls. Years of neglect heaped upon the old freighter, combined with the careful positioning of the device, broke open flaws in the fatigued frames. Cracking along her starboard side, Palomino immediately began a steep list toward the dock, spilling out fire and splinters of metal. Everything not lashed down juddered and slid across the weather deck as the fires from below took hold, spreading through the interior spaces to boil out of hatches and doorways.
On the seaward side, a slick of burning oil was already spreading in a black halo, and acrid, heavy smoke turned in the air above. The depth of the dock was shallow, but still deep enough to swamp the freighter all the way to the flying bridge. Palomino’s bow dropped as the ship sank into the gray water, dying by the second.
* * *
Marc’s heart hammered against his ribs and he felt dizzy, his blood singing in his ears. The interior of the mobile unit was a mess, panels hanging askew and monitor screens filled with rains of bright static. A wet mess of spilled coffee was everywhere, drooling from a cracked thermal carafe. Owen was kneeling, his face sporting a gruesome cut above his eye and Leon lay on the floor, cursing a blue streak in Hebrew as he tried to right himself.
Marc lurched toward his console and grabbed at it to steady himself. The UAV controls were dead, the monitor showing nothing but the words NO SIGNAL flashing red.
The external cameras looked into a vision of hell. The blast had knocked down some of the stacked containers—one of which had broadsided the truck as it tumbled—but the view was framed by a wall of orange flames and black haze boiling up from the deck of the
sinking Palomino.
Panic and fear surged through him. Marc pulled at the twisted cord of his headset and dragged it back over his head, jamming the earpiece into place. “Mobile Three to all Nomad call signs,” He was shaking with the shock and he pressed down on the sensation, forcing it away. “This is Mobile Three. All Nomad designates respond immediately!”
A hissing chorus of static answered him.
FOUR
Marc sat heavily in his chair in front of the screens, staring at them but not really seeing the slow death of the freighter. Numbly, he paged through the communications protocols, skipping frequencies, going through the OpTeam’s primary and secondary radio channels, repeating his call for any response. He felt dead. Disconnected.
It had all been over in an instant, the flash and shock of an explosion. His thoughts twisted in on themselves. He could only see Sam, Sam’s face and nothing else. All the lies he had told himself about being able to compartmentalize his feelings toward her crumbled in that moment. Was she dead? It seemed too big an idea to hold in his head.
“What the hell did they do?” Owen grunted, probing gingerly at the oozing cut on his head as he rose. “Some kind of booby-trap…?”
One lens of Leon’s glasses was broken, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I can’t raise Hub White,” he reported. The older man’s voice was cold and devoid of emotion. The comradely manner he usually exhibited was gone, suddenly locked away. His hands flew over the keyboard in front of him. “We’ve lost all our comms.”
“This…” Owen was trying to put it all together. “This has never happened before.” He swallowed hard. “The tactical team were on the boat … The boat’s gone.”
Marc shook his head. “There could be survivors, we have to make sure—”
“What we have to do is go, now.” Leon’s reply was hard. He jerked his thumb at the panel leading to the truck’s cab. “Owen, get up there, take the wheel.”
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