Assault on the Empress

by Jerry Ahern

  Cross nodded, throwing his weight to the wheel that operated the locking mechanism, the armatures moving in a zigzagging pattern as they pulled the bolts from their receptacles. Cross stepped back, Vols swung open the door.

  It was all or nothing. They both knew that.

  Beyond the door was a catwalk and as Cross and Vols stepped through the door simultaneously, the cargo hold yawned open below them, the light from the battery-operated lanterns by which the terrorists had set their explosives yellowed now and nearly dead.

  O’Fallon wasn’t there yet.

  Cross took to the catwalk steps, both fists on the rails, skidding down to the next landing, Vols running, flipping the railing to the landing, just behind him. Cross kept running, his eyes scanning the door opening into the bottom of the hold, seeing no one. He kept running.

  He flipped the rail and came down in a crouch on the deck of the hold, his left leg screaming at him that he was an idiot, Vols still coming, Cross sweeping the hold with the muzzle of his H&K, settling it on the door. Still no one.

  Vols rasped from behind him. “Here, behind these crates. There’s a way up on top of them if we need it.”

  Cross only nodded, walking backwards slowly, the submachine gun still aimed toward the door. He dodged behind the packing crates, Vols there, his knife already out. “So,” Vols whispered, barely audible, “you’re one of these commando chappies? You Americans are versatile, indeed. Pianist. Commando. Do you do rope tricks?” And Vols smiled.

  “And you’re one of these slimeball KGB guys, huh?” Cross grinned.

  “Oh, the slimiest, yes. Are you? One of them?”

  “I was. What’s a decent guy like you doin’ with an outfit like the KGB?”

  “Almost sounded like that old line about ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing,’ etc., for a moment. What am I doing with the KGB? Right now, I’m not so sure. Usually, just my patriotic bit for Mother Russia and all that. Whatever you do, if we get out of this flap alive, don’t go back and tell your CIA that I helped you. The crowd at Derzhinsky Square won’t be too happy with me at any event by then.”

  “I’d never tell anybody that I had a KGB Major as a friend—don’t worry,” Cross hissed, eyeing the door.

  “You mean that? I mean, the friend part?”

  “Yeah. Wanna make somethin’ of it?”

  “Actually, I feel the same way. And don’t worry. I’d never admit to having a money-grubbing corrupt capitalist exploiter of the working classes for a friend either.”

  Vols shifted his knife to his left hand, extending his right hand. “Let’s hope we never meet professionally, hmm?”

  Cross took it. “Amen.”

  And then he heard a child crying and he looked back to the doorway. Nothing in sight, but he heard the child again. He set the safety on the H&K and shifted it back, his right fist closing on the haft of the Magnum Tanto, his left unsheathing the smaller Tanto he’d borrowed from Jenny Hall.

  The larger blade he held against his right forearm, edge outward, the smaller blade he held like a dagger.

  He felt Vols tap him on the shoulder, gesturing toward the top of the crates. Cross nodded. Vols sheathed his knife, started to climb.

  Cross looked around his position. Ropes of plastic explosives were entwined everywhere. If something went wrong, he’d never have the chance to know it.

  There were the cries of many children now, the hesitantly defiant voice of a young girl, the blunt sounding threat of a boy whose voice hadn’t quite changed. And the children were herded and pushed inside the hold like animals, some of the smaller ones thrown to the steel deck plates.

  And he saw O’Fallon. It had to be O’Fallon. Eyes like death, the face of a prophet or a madman, perhaps both. There was an Uzi submachine gun slung casually off his right shoulder, a revolver in his right fist.

  Slouch hat, brown corduroy sportcoat, lighter corduroy slacks, a cigarette hung from his mouth, the mouth downturned at the corners.

  “Keep the the little bastards quiet, Martin! Paddy—that bitch with the loud mouth—” and he gestured toward a girl of about thirteen, dissheveled looking but pretty, the flashing blue eyes and dark curls and upturned nose only marred by the braces visible as she opened her mouth to scream or curse O’Fallon. “That one—miss prissy, there. Cut her damn tongue out if she lets out a peep, Paddy.”

  “Right, Seamus,” and Paddy—a leer on his face that said he liked to do other things with young girts—drew his right hand from his coat pocket and there was a loud click. A switchblade, the blade itself of enormous seeming proportions. He leaned toward the girl and she screamed.

  “Cut that foul tongue out of her head!” O’Fallon shrieked, both his hands going to his head, rubbing at his temples. “Cut it out of her head, Paddy!”

  He wasn’t just a devil. He was also stark, raving mad, Cross realized.

  Paddy started for the girl. She screamed again and O’Fallon stomped his feet and shrieked unintelligibly.

  Cross looked upward, not for inspiration but for some sign of Hughes and Babcock. No flare. Nothing.

  “Hold it!”

  Cross looked toward the doorway. It was Jenny Hall, her shiny .45 automatic in both tiny fists, the muzzle aimed for O’Fallon’s head.

  Cross started to move. There wasn’t time. The third flunkie to O’Fallon stepped from the shadows beside the doorway and the pistol in his right fist belched a tongue of flame as the hold reverberated with the sound waves of the gunshot. Paddy grabbed the dark-haired girl by the hair in the same instant and brought the knife down toward her mouth as she screamed, the scream lost in the gunshot. A small child shrieked with fear. Cross’s right hand snapped outward as his body lunged, the blade of the Magnum Tanto swinging outward in a ninety-degree arc, intercepting Paddy’s switchblade. “Try me, asshole,” Cross snarled.

  “Now!” It was Hughes’s voice. Cross didn’t know from where, and there was no time to look, Paddy throwing the girl against Cross, then diving toward him with the knife. Cross stumbled, turned to push the girl behind him, felt the knife as it skated over his ribcage. Cross shoved the girl away and wheeled, hacking outward with the larger Tanto, drawing off Paddy’s blade. He saw a blur of movement as Vols dove from the top of the stacked packing crates onto the back of one of the other terrorists. Cross’s left hand snaked forward, the mini-Tanto striking for the throat, missing as Paddy dodged, wheeled, his knife streaking toward Cross’s face. Cross snapped his head back, nearly losing his balance, the tip of Paddy’s blade missing Cross’s face by inches. Cross’s left leg snapped out as he wheeled right and ducked. The toe of his left foot hammered against the side of Paddy’s right knee. Paddy stumbled back.

  Cross finished the turn, both blades ready in his hands, spinning in his fingers.

  He saw Hughes and Babcock coming down the catwalk steps, Hughes flipping over the rail from the last landing, throwing himself toward the man who’d shot Jenny, Babcock running straight for O’Fallon.

  And then the devil voice he’d heard, hated over the loudspeaker during the hostage executions, came in a high-pitched shout. “Freeze! Or the detonator gets its pretty button pushed, now!”

  Cross held his blades, his eyes passing from Paddy—who stood stock still—to Babcock—stopped dead in his tracks less than six feet from O’Fallon—to O’Fallon himself. O’Fallon’s right hand was raised high over his head, a small box in his outstretched fingers, thumb poised over a red button.

  “Ya bloody peelers! We’ll be together in Hell!”

  Cross started to move, a blur of motion at his left, Vols diving for O’Fallon. Hughes—Cross saw the gun rising in Hughes’s hand. Babcock was hurtling himself toward O’Fallon.

  And then a carrot-haired boy, not much more than an older teenager—the one O’Fallon had called Martin—jumped up as if he were going for a slam dunk in basketball, his hands closing over O’Fallon’s right hand, O’Fallon hurtled back against the bulkhead. O’Fallon’s left hand moved. There was the
blast of a gunshot and the carrot-haired boy was blown back. Babcock’s head impacted O’Fallon in the crotch, the revolver discharging a second time. Vols threw his body upward, hands groping for O’Fallon’s hand that held the detonator. Hughes fired, O’Fallon’s right cheek blown away. Cross was suddenly there, not knowing how he’d gotten there, but simply being there, his right hand arcing downward, the long-bladed Tanto’s blade biting through flesh, catching an instant, then passing through, O’Fallon letting out a hideous shriek as his thumb was severed.

  Cross saw it, the thumb flying outward, the detonator, its antenna extended, tumbling from the thumbless hand. He threw himself after it, his body twisting as he impacted the deck plates, the Tanto falling from his fingers, his hands reaching.

  His hands closed over the detonator, his own right thumb almost depressing it.

  He saw a blur of motion coming for him. It was Paddy, still with his knife. Lewis Babcock twisted round and in his right hand was his pistol. The Beretta fired twice, then twice again, Paddy’s body spinning, falling, Cross edging back to avoid the knife as Paddy fell.

  “We did it,” Hughes said quietly. And he turned for the doorway. Children were screaming. “God forgive me this,” and the Beretta in Hughes’s hand fired once. Cross twisted over onto his stomach and looked toward the doorway. The last of the terrorists slumped against the bulkhead, turned around, eyes wide open in death, then slipped to the deck as if he were just sitting.

  Darwin Hughes turned to the children, dropped to his knees, holstering his gun. He tore off the mask which covered his face. “Children. I’m sorry you saw this. But there was no other way.” Some of the children began approaching him, the grey hair, the smile Cross knew was there, like an exceedingly fit, melifluous voiced grandfather cum hero. He outstretched his arms, drawing some of the children to him, holding them. “There are bad men in the world. You all know that. And sometimes, to stop bad men, we have to be bad ourselves. But none of you—none of you walk away from this taking human life cheaply. You have your lives. Respect life whether it’s yours or someone else’s.”

  Cross watched, listened, picked himself up off the floor. It was like listening to Batman or The Lone Ranger, but he didn’t feel like laughing. He started to disarm the detonator but realized his hands were trembling too badly.

  He looked around behind him, remembering Jenny. Vols had her propped against him, and she was breathing. “I wonder if a KGB Major and a CIA case officer could ever make a go of it, Cross?”

  Cross just stood there, then Lewis Babcock, taking the mask from his face, reached out for the detonator. “Give me that.”

  Cross gave it to him.

  Chapter Thirty

  Abe Cross looked out over the twenty-three steps that led down from the front porch. He lit a cigarette. Hughes and Babcock were inside, Hughes being beaten at chess.

  O’Fallon had raped the Empress. Cross himself and Hughes and Babcock had done no better by her, opening her wide to the sea, the last intimate portion of her violated. And after not very much time at all, the Empress had bowed beneath the waves and the ocean itself had seemed to spasm with her coming.

  Over twenty-two thousand feet deep according to the charts. Until diving technology took a quantum leap forward, a detailed enough exploration of the Empress Britannia to recover the ampule from the bottom of the Atlantic would be impossible. And, by that time, the Russians would have reinvented their virus or developed something worse and the United States would have its own version of the virus or its own version of something worse.

  Or just maybe, nobody would want to bother with something like that by then. But Abe Cross doubted that part. Which, he supposed, was the reason he had told Darwin Hughes and Lewis Babcock that he’d come in it with them again.

  It was a clear night and cool.

  Jenny Hall’s voice had been that way on the telephone from West Germany. She would be released in a few days. But no, she didn’t want him to go to all the trouble of flying over. She didn’t know when she’d be back. This time, she wanted to see a little of Europe, not just the nightclubs and lounges, and not just after most sane people were asleep. But when she came back—she would keep up her singing, not the other thing—she would make it a point to call him. She really would.

  Good-bye.

  The telephone rang. Abe Cross felt as if his heart had jumped into his throat. He heard Babcock’s voice answering it. Then, “Abe, it’s for you.”

  He snapped the cigarette into the night and tore open the screen door, crossing the room in three wide strides, almost ripping the phone from Babcock’s hand. “Thanks, Lew.” He spoke into the receiver.“Hello. Hey, listen, we can—”

  “Cross?”

  He knew the voice. He swallowed hard. “Vols?”

  “Don’t ask how I got your telephone number, old man. I’ve always had good connections.” There was silence, the kind between bad jokes from a stand-up comic. “Anyway, thought you’d like to know. I got back to Moscow and what do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know. They were pissed?”

  “No—they gave me a medal! Can you believe that? Anyway, I was going to show Anna—remember the girl I mentioned to you while we were all floating around at sea waiting for your submarine to get us? And by the by, thanks awfully for doing your part about keeping me free.”

  “You’ll never be free there, doing what you do.”

  “Oddly enough, I arrived at the same conclusion. I told the people on Derzhinsky Square that your chaps had gotten the ampule after betraying me and leaving me for dead. Sorry over that, but it was necessary. Rather thought it might give your johnnies the chance to neutralize the military potential of the bloody virus after all, our chaps having less of an incentive and all to use it with you having it.”

  “What did you mean about arriving at the same conclusion, man?” Cross asked.

  “Checked our files, actually. Found out some of our people had been indirectly working O’Fallon for years. Spread chaos in the West; that sort of thing. It didn’t sit well, Cross. Anna and I are in West Berlin now.I’m on a coin telephone from the lobby of your Embassy. Never guess.”

  “You’re not—”

  “We’re defecting, yes. But we’re still patriotic Russians and all that. Not going to tell anything damning to the Mother country. Just enough to qualify for new identities and passports after all the interminable questions.”

  Cross lit a cigarette. “They’ll get you eventually, Comstoek—Vols, I mean.”

  “Eventually’s a long time off. Look here, I don’t think we’ll likely speak again. But, well, maybe we’ll meet again in that place O’Fallon suggested. Good-bye, old man.”

  “Vols—”

  The line went dead.

  “What did he want? Everything all right?” Babcock asked.

  Cross looked at Lewis Babcock, then at Darwin Hughes. The board between them showed that Hughes was about to be checkmated.

  “What did he want?” Hughes asked.

  “Aw, nothing much. Tell ya later. But he did suggest a place where we could get together sometime. But, well, I didn’t have the heart to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” Babcock asked.

  “They don’t let guys like him in down there.” Cross stubbed out his cigarette.

  GREAT BOOKS

  E-BOOKS

  AUDIOBOOKS

  & MORE

  Visit us today

  www.speakingvolumes.us