by Jerry Ahern
“Here.” And Liedecker stepped up onto a roulette table. “Everyone was given a lifeboat assignment when they came aboard. We will have to alter that procedure. Families whose last names beginning with the letters A through M will assemble on the portside of the casino—to my left,” and he began gesturing to his left.
Cross tapped Comstock on the shoulder. “Still game?”
“As a matter of fact, I am old boy.”
“Count me in,” Jenny Hall told them, coming to stand beside them, fully dressed now. “I took another Uzi and rounded up a half dozen more spare magazines.”
Cross smiled at her. “All right.” They started out of the casino….
Seamus O’Fallon screamed his orders from the stage. “All the children in the bathrooms. Get ’em, lads!”
Paddy Kehoe, still wiping off his knife, tapped two of the others on the shoulder, young Martin one of them, then sprinted off toward the restrooms where the British children—more than a dozen and a half of them—were incarcerated.
“All of ya—your damned SAS won’t save ya!” And he looked to the half dozen men he had left. “Jack. You’ve got the responsibility, lad. Bunch the hostages around ya and take ’em topside. Demand that they withdraw. Hurry!”
There were screams, the voices of people begging not to be separated from their children. As O’Fallon stepped from the stage, a woman in a stained dress ran to him and fell to her knees at his feet. “Please, my children!”
O’Fallon kicked her away. “Paddy!”
“Comin’, Seamus!” They were dragging some of the children, pushing the rest, O’Fallon fighting his way through the crowd toward them as Jack and the other lads assembled the adult hostages around them.
O’Fallon reached Paddy, Biff, and young Martin and the children. “All right, now, lads, stick with me.” And he bent down to a little girl and swept her up in his arms.
“Let me go!”
“Shut your bloody little mouth, girl,” O’Fallon hissed, crushing her close to him. “Each of ya grab a child into your arms. Can’t shoot when you’re holdin’ a kid. Come on!” The radio detonator was in his pocket. All he needed was to flip the cover and pull the antenna and push the switch into the on position. But if he led the SAS a merry chase through the bowels of the Empress, he’d take more of them with him.
“Come on, lads!” The headache was intensifying….
Darwin Hughes skidded on his boot heels, throwing himself against the flat of the bulkhead, then edging forward along its length. There was an ease led poster advertising a singer named Jennifer Hall and a pianist named Abe Cross.
He peered around the corner, and from between the open glass doors with etched birds and palm trees on them, he saw a group of dissheveled men and women, clothes rumpled and stained, hair uncombed, faces dirty, fear in their eyes, some of the women crying, all of them bunched together, all of them with their hands bound, some of them with adhesive tape patches over their mouthes.
“We’ve got trouble,” Hughes told Lewis Babcock.
Hughes called out. “The game is up! O’Fallon’s men! The game is up! Lay down your weapons and release the hostages!”
“Fuck off, SAS-er. Or they all get it here and now!”
Hughes was warm beneath the mask. Suddenly warmer. He licked his lips. “Look. We aren’t the SAS. We only care about the hostages being freed. Then do what you want. All right?”
He was lying, but it didn’t matter now.
There was a burst of submachine-gun fire and a scream, Hughes stepping partway from cover so he could see, react if he could. Two of the hostages were on the floor, bleeding. The rest, screaming, crying, were bunched around the terrorists so tightly Hughes couldn’t even see how many of them there were.
Hughes ducked back rather than provoke another outburst of killing. Babcock whispered beside him, “Mr. Hughes. The stun grenades?”
“No, no, we can’t. They’d still have time to fire out their weapons into the people around them. It’d be a bloodbath. The same for the gas. Even with the glass enclosure to the seaward side, there’s too much ventillation. Never work in time. Damn!” Hughes hammered his fist against the bulkhead. His mind raced as he ran the options. There were none.
Hughes called out again to the terrorists. “What do you want?”
“A bloody boat.”
“You have the yacht already,” Hughes called back, stalling.
There was a laugh. “You can have that boat, copper.”
“Look. Fine, we’ll get you a boat. Just release the hostages and you’re all free to go. O’Fallon’s got this boat wired to blow,” Hughes said, gambling, “and the yacht, too. What’s the sense of everybody dying? If you had a point to prove to the Brits, you’ve proved it. Save your lives, damnit!”
“Bleedin’ British lies, copper! We’re comin’ out—don’t try nothin’ or they all dies!” Hughes swapped magazines in his submachine gun.
Hughes looked at Babcock. Lewis Babcock was doing the same. “If you have a brilliant stratagem in mind, Lewis, this is no time to hold back.”
Babcock shook his head.
Hughes peered round the comer. They were coming—but behind them. He blinked his eyes. Through his teeth, Hughes hissed, “Be ready, lad. Only guns.”
Two men were just inside the double doorway, one of them was Abe Cross and the other face—Hughes couldn’t be sure—he thought was the Russian, Vols or Volshinsky or whatever his proper name was.
Cross was armed, but nothing was in his hands except a knife. The Russian was holding a knife, too. “My God,” Hughes hissed to Babcock. “No guns. Be ready with your knife, lad.”
Cross and the Russian were slowly moving forward, each of them in a low crouch. Hughes felt his body tense. The nearest of the hostages was less than three yards from him now.
“We’re comin’ through, we are,” the terrorist who’d spoken before snarled.
“Well. Then come ahead,” Hughes told him, letting his submachine gun fall to his side on its sling, starting to move his hands outward and away from his torso.
Cross jumped. Hughes reached to his fighting knife. The Russian charged forward like a benighted football player trying to break up a huddle instead of a play. Hughes snapped, “Now, lad!” to Babcock, then hurtled himself toward the knot of hostages and the terrorists within it, Cross visible for an instant at the edge of Hughes’s peripheral vision, a head snapping back, a throat slit. Hughes shoved aside a woman, ramming the blade of his knife into the throat of one of the terrorists. A submachine gun discharged. There was screaming. Hughes saw Babcock, left fist flashing out, catching one of the terrorists in the mouth, the right hand driving his knife forward and into the terrorist’s chest.
Hughes felt something cold, then suddenly hot across his back and he stumbled forward as he heard the burst of submachine gun fire. He hit the deck and rolled, his knife slashing across the right kneecap and left thigh of the terrorist. As the man recoiled from the knife, the Russian was suddenly there, driving his smallish blade home like a rapier, into the right side of the terrorist’s neck.
Hughes was up, Cross locked in combat with the last of the men as best Hughes could tell. Babcock stepped forward, swinging the butt of his submachine gun as if it were a baseball bat, the terrorist’s head snapping left, Cross stepping in, driving his knife into the man’s throat to the hilt. The body fell.
Hughes swung his submachine gun on line, covering a quadrant of the lounge foyer at a time.
Abe Cross spoke. “Three more, plus O’Fallon himself. Jenny followed after them. They were going below. Had about eighteen kids with them ranging in ages from early teens to preschoolers. It was either go after them or help you, and you sounded like you needed it.”
“We did, lad. Your Russian friend’s a good fighter.”
“Russ—” Cross wheeled toward Vols, but Vols had his submachine gun up and aimed at Cross and Babcock. Hughes leveled his weapon at Vols.
“Everybody down!” Babco
ck ordered, the hostages still screaming, crying, terrified, huddled around them.
“I have no desire to hurt anyone, sir,” Vols said, a smile on his face but his eyes not smiling at all. “All I want is the opportunity to recover the property stolen from my nation by your nation. Ask Mr. Cross. I’ve assisted him throughout. I only came for the rightful property of my country.”
Hughes lowered his submachine gun. “Well, I’m sorry, Major Vols, but there’s a bit of a problem with that. I found a body on the deck out there, down on the boat deck. It was Alvin Leeds. I bet you know who he is.”
Vols’s right eye twitched.
Hughes said, “I searched him quite thoroughly. We were briefed concerning the viral agent. He didn’t have it. There was nothing on him to indicate where he’d hidden it. Is the Empress wired?”
“Radio-controlled detonators,” Vols said. “Cross and I—we inspected them. They are booby-trapped. Can’t be defused, I doubt even by an expert.”
“And you know what will happen to the viral agent if it becomes heated and gets into the upper air currents, don’t you?”
“You are telling me the truth, then? Finding the ampule is hopeless?”
Hughes nodded. “Finding the ampule is hopeless. We’ve got to scuttle the ship before O’Fallon can blow it. It’s the only way to neutralize the contents of the ampule.”
Vols looked at Cross. “I trust you, Cross. Is he telling me the truth?”
“Yes. He’s telling you the truth.”
Vols nodded. He looked at Babcock, then at Hughes. “I would think a truce might be in order, then, sir. We have to free those children.”
“Good man,” Hughes said softly.
He heard Cross saying, “Russian, gee whiz.” And as Hughes looked, Vols lowered his submachine gun and Cross clapped him on the shoulder.
“This is ridiculous,” Lewis Babcock remarked. “Let me look at your back,” and he came over to Hughes. “Looks like a graze. The vest deflected it.”
Hughes looked to the hostages huddled around them. “All right. Give me your attention, please. The crisis is over for you, but we have to get all of you off the Empress …”
“My children!” a woman screamed from beside him. Hughes dropped to a crouch before her, gently helped her to her feet. “That devil’s got my—”
“We’ll get them back for you, ‘ma’am. We specialize in fighting devils.”
And the hostages all began to stand now, Babcock and Cross and the Russian, Vols, aiding them to their feet. There wasn’t much time left.
Cross said, his voice low, “All the ship’s officers. They’re dead on the floor in there, in the lounge, hands cuffed behind them, bags over their heads, strangled or throats slit. She’s right about the devil part.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Darwin Hughes, Lewis Babcock, Vols and Abe Cross moved into the companionway, a lipstick slash arrow pointing the way as Jenny Hall followed after O’Fallon and his men and the hostage British children.
They paused at the head of the companionway steps, Cross buckling on the gunbelt Hughes and Babcock had brought for him, drawing the Magnum Tanto and its sheath from his trouser belt where he’d placed it and stuffing it between the front of his pistol belt and his abdomen. He took back the H&K from Vols, whom he’d given it to as he put on the belt.
Hughes started down the companionway steps, virtually no light here at all; but, to have used their flashlights would have alerted anyone ahead of them. All they were able to risk was one of the mini-lights, the beam shielded within a fist and moved up and down the bulkhead surface to look for more arrows, more signs Jenny had passed this way following after O’Fallon.
The course they followed was taking them inexorably deeper into the bowels of the Empress Britannia, and suddenly Cross knew exactly where O’Fallon was headed.
Vols whispered in his ear, “I know where O’Fallon’s going—the madman!”
“To the cargo hold,” Cross whispered back. He stopped Hughes and Babcock. “Vols and I both agree. There’s only one place he’s going. He may want to die, but he won’t want to drown like the rat he is. He’s taking the kids to the main cargo hold where he’s got most of the explosives.”
“Is there a faster way to get there? To beat him there, maybe?” Lewis Babcock asked.
“There might be,” Vols volunteered. “I just had a flash of an idea. O’Fallon took his men and the children below decks immediately to get out of sight. He thought the SAS was coming and his game was up. But wouldn’t it be more direct to cross along the boat deck, and then rope it down into the cargo hold or something?”
“Vols is right,” Cross said slowly. “If we go back topside and cut over, then the two of you follow them, we’d at least have them between us.”
“Quickly, then,” Hughes began. “You’ve both seen the explosives. What are the chances a gunfight would set things off? Any chance of using stun grenades or gas?”
Cross closed his eyes, picturing the hold. He opened his eyes. “We fired down into the hold and took out six of their guys. But we waited until they were leaving through an access door and as far away from the explosives as they could get and still be in sight. That’d be the only way. Stun grenades could be effective, but O’Fallon’s men—”
“Would shoot the children,” Babcock supplied.
Cross said, “Yeah. Same with gas unless it were instantaneous in effect.”
“Too strong an updraft, I’d think,” Vols interjected.
“He might be right,” Cross agreed. “There are four of them, counting O’Fallon. There are four of us and Jenny. If we could box ’em in, we could go after them like we did the guys topside by the lounge.”
“Let’s not forget that O’Fallon will have his detonator with him, could use it instantly in any likelihood,” Hughes murmured. “But it’s the best plan we’ve got. Abe, you and Major Vols try to cut them off. We’ll stay after the girl and meet you there.”
“We’ll need some kind of signal for when we’re all in position and ready to hit,” Babcock said, sounding as if he were thinking aloud.
“I’ve got a flare pistol,” Hughes said. “We’ll have to assume both of you are into position ahead of us. When we’re in position, I’ll fire the flare and then we go for it, instantly. Because we won’t have any time.”
“Better brief Jenny where to take the kids.”
“Good idea, lad. Tell me something—you and Jennifer Hall—anything I could say to her that would instantly take care of the introductions?”
“Tell her I’m sorry I clipped her in the jaw.”
Cross heard Hughes chuckle softly. “All right. Good luck.” Hughes started past him, Babcock after him. Cross started back up the companionway steps, Vols right behind him.
They reached the boat deck level, the sun already beginning to rise over the water, the sounds of shouted orders and boats’ winches and children crying filling the air, the lifeboats lowering, better than a half dozen of them visible in the water below.
Cross ran, his left thigh burning from the dugout bullet fragment, Vols sprinting along beside him, the Russian’s left arm stiff at his side, but a pistol clutched in the left fist, and an Uzi in his right.
People stared at them as they ran, shrieked in terror from the sight of armed men running, Cross shoving past the lines for the lifeboats, no time to explain.
He saw Liedecker ahead, increased his pace. “Liedecker! Liedecker!”
“Cross!”
Cross shouldered past more of the fleeing passengers, getting to Liedecker, grabbing the man by the shoulders. “All the hostages are accounted for as best we can tell. Except about eighteen children. All the ship’s officers were murdered …”
“Gott in Himmell …” And Liedecker made the sign of the cross.
“Look. We’ve gotta have a lifeboat standing by if one’ll hold ’em.”
Liedecker’s eyes seemed glazed. He was stunned. Cross shook the man. “Liedecker!”
; “Yes, all right. A lifeboat for eighteen children. I will personally see that it is standing by. You and Herr Comstock—you go to rescue them?”
“To try, yes.” And Cross edged through the crowd, picking up his pace, shouting back to Liedecker as he ran, shouldering ahead, “Remember! Eighteen kids, then shove off! Don’t wait for us! Remember!” But he knew his words would be lost by now in the frantically shouted orders, the men and women and children searching for loved ones, clamboring aboard the lifeboats.
They reached the spot above the cargo hold as best Cross could tell, swinging over the deck rail to peer toward the hull, confirming the opening there well above the water line, the opening sealed.
“Over here, Cross! I say, here!” Cross looked around, spotted Vols by steps leading below, Vols shouting again, “This way!” Vols vanished into the well for the steps, Cross shoving his way after him, reaching the steps, starting down in a run. He could see Vols for an instant as the steps diagonaled back and downward off the landing below. Cross started taking the steps two at a time, jumping the last three to the landing, taking the next flight down, flipping the rail to the landing from four steps up, right behind Vols now, Vols tripping, catching himself, jumping to the landing below.
There was a door, watertight and massive, a warning sign proclaiming entry restricted. “The hold,” Vols panted.