Pandora's Curse - v4

by Jack Du Brul

  “Then give me your gun and hide yourself. We don’t have time to argue.”

  She snapped out of her panic and came down the steps. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the broken figure of Bern Hoffmann. “I’m sorry,” she said. Mercer didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the unconscious man.

  “Come on.” He took her by the hand, and they continued their descent. The sound of the fire alarm was diminished in the stairwell but came back when they emerged a few decks down. They were near one of the spas. Through a glass wall Mercer could see an elaborate gymnasium and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A fire pull station was across the hallway and he yanked the handle. The other team would be doing the same at any pull station they happened across. The alarm panel on the bridge should be lighting up like a Christmas tree.

  Through a set of double doors, Mercer and Anika came upon a number of Convocation delegates milling in a hallway, muttering unanswerable questions to each other about the situation. He kept his weapons from view as they walked down the corridor. He stopped when they reached the far end. There were a number of escape routes in view. He fired the remainder of the thirty-round magazine into the floor. The companionway emptied except for the cordite stench and smoking brass.

  He fitted another clip and racked the slide. They ran for an outside door and emerged on a wooden-floor promenade deck. The cold tang of the sea caressed their skin. In the distance hulked the dark silhouettes of lifeboats on their davits. A number of ship’s officers were checking them in case this turned out to be a catastrophic fire rather than a false alarm. They hadn’t heard the gunfire.

  Running in the opposite direction, Mercer and Anika made their way toward a flight of stairs leading to one of the vessel’s many outdoor cafes. Mercer took the H&K from Anika and refitted the silencer. Two quick shots destroyed the lock on the sliding glass doors and they were back in the ship.

  The hallway beyond the café’s entrance was deserted. Moving carefully because they were exposed, they passed a number of shops and another bar that overlooked an outdoor pool. Across the smooth water they could see a towering funnel lit with floodlights. Neither saw the two figures crossing the pool area en route to an entry door until the door was heaved open.

  The figures, dressed in black and carrying MP-5s with probing laser sights, swept the corridor to their right and turned to look behind them. Mercer and Anika stood just ten yards away. He pushed her down and dove across the hallway as the laser cut the air above him. Mercer rolled onto his knee and fired, a tongue of flame shooting from the Model 12. The fusillade caught the security personnel across the chests, tossing one back onto the patio and standing the other against a wall, his body jerking like a puppet.

  “You said you weren’t going to kill anyone!” Anika shrieked.

  “They were Rath’s men,” Mercer shouted above her screams. “They were carrying German machine pistols, not the Italian ones the Swiss Guards have.”

  She edged closer and recognized the corpse in the hall from the Geo-Research station in Greenland. She couldn’t believe the speed of Mercer’s reaction.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Mercer added and led her away.

  He pulled another fire alarm as they entered a long corridor lined with cabins. As before, a few passengers were in the hallway but not many because rumors of a terrorist attack were already spreading. Mercer glanced at his watch, assuming that the twenty-minute time line had passed. He was stunned to find less than half that had elapsed. Like all combat, time had telescoped into a weird distortion where seconds took hours and hours could vanish in a blink.

  They reached the double doors at the end of the hall just as Swiss Guards poured onto the companionway. Mercer fired a snap burst from his submachine gun, praying he didn’t hit anyone. Pounding the doors against their stops, Mercer pushed Anika ahead of him, taking up a defensive crouch when he found cover behind a large planter overflowing like a jungle. A few seconds later, a pair of Swiss Guards came racing after them. He used the H&K pistol he’d taken from Hoffmann and placed rounds in each of the Guards’ thighs, far enough from the femoral artery so they wouldn’t bleed out.

  “Let’s go.” He’d bought a few more seconds.

  They burst into an empty ballroom. The ornate chamber echoed as they ran toward the glowing EXIT signs on the opposite wall. At the far side, Anika collapsed onto a sofa, her chest heaving to get enough air into her body. Mercer too was winded, but they couldn’t rest here.

  “You’re doing great,” he panted. “Just a little while longer.”

  They checked the antechamber beyond the ballroom and began walking more normally, their weapons hidden from the two Muslim clerics arguing in Arabic despite the wailing fire alarms.

  They moved through several more passages, firing indiscriminately at walls and ceilings, spreading fear wherever they went. At one point Mercer found a stack of the ship’s newspaper awaiting delivery to the cabins. He stuffed handfuls of them into a ventilation grate and set them on fire. Considering the size of the vessel, it would take many minutes for the smoke to be detected, but he hoped by then it would have diffused all over the ship. More confusion. More panic. They dodged in and out of two more firefights with roaming Guards, each time escaping to a lower deck and blending with frightened passengers until they were safe.

  By now Mercer was thoroughly lost, but he guessed that all passages on the each half of the catamaran eventually led to one of the atriums. As they walked down a hall, keeping watch for pursuing Guards, Mercer spotted a sign indicating the atrium was just ahead. He broke into a jog, with Anika beside him. She’d emptied all her clips but continued to carry the silenced H&K.

  They entered the atrium one level below the dining room where Mercer had met the televangelist and his wife. The cavernous space was deserted. Hunched to minimize his size, he led Anika to one of the bridges to get to the center of the ship so they could then lose themselves in the starboard hull, an area they hadn’t been to yet.

  A piece of the bridge’s brass railing exploded the same time Mercer heard the whip crack of a pistol shot. He pushed Anika to the carpet and covered her with his body. It felt like the shot had come from across the mall-like atrium and one level up. He chanced a look and saw a dozen Swiss Guards lining the upper railings. Some of them were headed to the escalators. The Guards would reach the ends of Mercer’s bridge long before he and Anika could escape.

  “Drop your gun,” Mercer whispered to her, visually checking distances in the opposite direction of the group of Guards.

  “Why?”

  “I’m saving your life,” Mercer said. “Do it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Mercer’s grim tone sounded like a final good-bye.

  As soon as Anika laid the pistol on the floor, he grabbed her by her collar and hauled her to her feet. Making sure the Model 12 was on safe, he put her in a hammerlock and jammed the weapon into the side of her head. Her scream was no act.

  “One step closer and I kill her.” Mercer’s shouted warning stopped the approaching men dead. He kept twisting in place so no one could get an accurate shot. Because Anika was so short, using her as a shield was a lot harder than he’d envisioned. “All of you drop your guns and back up.”

  A few guards pulled their aim high, but none of them relinquished their grips. The men coming down the escalator took up firing stances. Had any of them had laser sights like Rath’s troops, they would have taken a shot. Still, Mercer’s weaving form danced in and out of the crosshairs of eight different shooters.

  “Let her go,” a Guard officer shouted in rough English. “We will not fire.”

  “Drop your weapons.” While Mercer wanted them to think he was unstable, the anxiety straining his voice was very real. This situation went far beyond anything he’d ever experienced. One twitchy finger and he and Anika would be shredded. “I’ll kill her, I swear to God.”

  Come on, keep me talking, keep up the d
ialogue. I need a minute more. The way he was holding Anika allowed him to see his watch. His twenty-minute deadline was up in forty-five seconds. After that, he didn’t care what happened. Ira and Erwin were more than capable of alerting the CIA about Gunther Rath.

  “You don’t want to do this,” the Guard captain called down in a soothing voice. “We can talk about it.”

  “No!” Mercer shrieked, allowing his voice to become hysterical. He wanted the Swiss edgy and nervous. It would throw off their aim. “Lorna Farquar’s dog bit me, and I will hold this woman until she apologizes.”

  The absurdity of Mercer’s demand had the desired effect. For a fraction of a second the Guards’ concentration wavered. He whispered, “See you later,” in Anika’s ear, pushed her to the floor once again, and threw himself backward, blindly vaulting over the railing behind him.

  The rush of the free fall left his heart in his throat and the sound of Anika’s cry fading like a distant whistle. Mercer wouldn’t know if his leap had been accurate until he hit. He could only see the waterfall looming over him if he tipped his head back. The falls seemed to have come to a standstill as he plummeted at the same speed as the water. The drop was twenty feet and took more than a second — more than enough time for the quicker of the Guards to react. Automatic weapons opened up like chainsaws. Spray from rounds hitting the falls landed on Mercer and then he himself landed. Flat on his back. In the pool at the base of the falls.

  He went deep and slapped against the concrete bottom of the four-foot-deep faux lagoon. The water crashed back over him, swirling with bubbles from the air forced from his lungs. He lay at the bottom of the pool, his entire body aching until he opened his eyes and saw streaks of silver slashing the water. The Guards were firing down at him.

  With no breath to hold, Mercer swam under the falls and emerged in a hollowed space that housed the pumps needed to create the aquatic effect. Beyond was an access hatch so workers didn’t have to wade through the pool to service the machinery. Soaked and struggling to refill his lungs, Mercer kicked open the hatch and emerged in a utility corridor.

  It wouldn’t take long for the Swiss Guards to figure out where he went. Anika, he felt, would be treated well by the Swiss. They knew her as a hostage, not an accomplice. It would be hours before they discovered she wasn’t part of the Convocation, and by then Mercer hoped to have the whole situation wrapped up.

  Once he got his bearings, he descended several decks, explaining to a few crew members he passed that he’d been doused fighting a kitchen fire. It took about five minutes to navigate to his destination, and once he was there, he found the door locked. Nonessential crew must have been ordered to their cabins until the nature of the emergency could be determined, he realized.

  He knocked and a second later the English youth who’d already lost a pair of sneakers opened the door. “Hi.” Mercer grinned. “Remember me?” He showed the submachine gun, and with wordless resignation, the boy let him into the room. His roommate stared wide-eyed from his bunk. Mercer didn’t bother tying them this time. He just “borrowed” another pair of shoes, jeans, a Manchester United sweatshirt, and a long-billed Benetton cap that slid on his bald head.

  As he closed the door he heard the Englishman say to his roommate, “I told you I wasn’t playing kinky games with that guy from housekeeping.”

  Mercer tossed his weapons into a laundry cart. With a spare key card to Vatutin’s room, he could only pass as a panicked passenger if he wasn’t armed to the teeth. If everything had gone according to plan, Gunther Rath should be on his high-speed motor launch with Greta Schmidt and the Pandora box while Erwin and Klaus Raeder were speaking with the Sea Empress’s captain about stopping him. In all, Mercer felt pretty damned pleased with himself, even if he walked like he had a massive sunburn on his back. Every square inch of skin stung, and he knew he’d be black-and-blue for weeks.

  He took an elevator back to the passenger area and a minute later fitted the magnetic card into the lock and fell into Vatutin’s room. The Orthodox priest and Hilda Brandt were already back from their excursion. The large woman looked stricken when she saw that he was alone. “Wo ist Anika?”

  Mercer lowered himself into a chair and closed his eyes, letting the fear and tension wash out of his body. “She’s fine. The Swiss who have her think I took her hostage. They don’t know she was with us.”

  Hilda looked to Vatutin and the Russian translated the answer as best he could. “Sehr gut,” she said.

  “You guys have any trouble?”

  “Nyet,” Vatutin said. “We separate from Mr. Lasko after theater, then come back here five minutes ago.”

  There was a knock on the door, shave and a haircut but only one bit. It was Ira’s signal and Mercer reached behind him to flick open the handle. “Goddamn, that was fun,” Ira said, crashing onto the bunk. “But if I were the pope, I’d reconsider my security arrangements. Those Swiss Guards never got close.”

  A few minutes later, the fire alarm cut off at the same time Vatutin’s phone rang. Hilda picked it up and handed it to Mercer. “I can tell by the silence,” he answered, “that you’ve succeeded.”

  “Yes and no,” Erwin Puhl said from the captain’s stateroom. He sounded sick.

  “What happened?” Mercer sat forward in his chair, suddenly tense again.

  “Raeder explained to the captain what was going on, how we aren’t really terrorists and that Gunther Rath was the true threat. The captain said that, fifteen minutes ago, the ship’s computer reported the marina doors had been opened. He dispatched two officers to see what was happening, and they reported back that Rath’s boat was gone. We’ve tried to raise Rath in the cabin he commandeered, but no one’s answering.”

  “What’s the problem? Sounds to me like everything went exactly as planned. Ira can now call Director Barnes at the CIA and have Rath intercepted. We won, Erwin. Relax.”

  “We didn’t win, Mercer. Remember when you tried to reach your FBI friend and were told communications were out because of the solar max?”

  “Yeah, we figured it was Rath blocking outgoing signals.”

  “It wasn’t. The solar max has killed all radios and satellite phones on the ship. Ira can’t call anybody. Nobody can. We’re cut off.”

  TEN MILES NORTH OF THE SEA EMPRESS

  Conversation outside the launch’s cockpit was impossible with her twin Saab turbo-diesels at full throttle. The sea was calmer than could be expected, so the forty-foot craft once stowed aboard the Njoerd shot across the low waves like a thoroughbred. Gunther Rath was in the throttleman’s seat while Dieter, the professional car racer, manned the helm. Greta Schmidt and two of Rath’s security people were strapped against the bench seat behind them. Because of the boat’s offshore capabilities, no one actually sat. Rather, they leaned into specially designed C-shaped cushions that allowed them to use their knees to absorb impacts.

  Everyone was armed. Everyone was tense.

  The Pandora box was secured in the forward cabin accessible through the low door between the drivers’ positions. With it were four “guests.”

  Thanks to the confusion Mercer created, their escape from the Sea Empress had been relatively simple. Soon after the initial burst of automatic fire at the atrium, Rath understood Mercer’s intentions weren’t to kill, merely to spread enough panic to ensure he left the ship. The German knew he was being manipulated, hated it, but had little choice. Raeder would need just a moment alone with the cruise ship’s captain and Rath’s plans were finished. Once he’d taken his hostages, he and Greta raced for the marina, avoiding any area where gunfire was reported. After making certain the Njoerd’s launch was fueled and ready, they wrecked the eight large shuttle boats stored in the garage by smashing holes in their fiberglass hulls with sledgehammers.

  From the radar repeater on the Empress’s bridge, Rath knew the Italian destroyer was eight miles south of the luxury liner, protecting her seaward flank, and would be unable to pursue the launch once they swung north t
oward Iceland, ninety miles away. With the solar max at its zenith and even the most powerful marine radios hampered to a few miles’ range, the Italians were deaf and mute.

  Rath was making the best of the disasters that had befallen him and maintained optimism that they would be able to recover the sunken Pandora boxes and turn them over to Libya. If he couldn’t, he was confident that the single box in his possession would guarantee a financially secure future for him and Greta.

  He figured he only needed a two-hour head start to escape Iceland once they reached its shores. It would take twice that time just for the Empress to get close enough to the island to report what had happened. By then Rath would have sent a chopper to the Njoerd, and he and Greta would be on a leased jet for a hop to Tripoli. He looked over his shoulder to where she huddled in her parka and offered her a reassuring smile. They’d be okay.

  Mercer would have slammed down the phone if Rath’s unimpeded escape hadn’t been entirely his fault. It didn’t matter that the rest of his team had agreed with his assessment about the communications from the Empress. He’d made the call to let Rath go and radio the authorities afterward. And now the German was miles away with one of the boxes and there was nothing he could do to stop him.

  Like hell there wasn’t. The idea came to him in a moment of clarity that overwhelmed his swelling feelings of defeat. “Erwin, put Raeder on the phone.”

  “You’re on a speaker phone here in the bridge,” the president of Kohl said at once. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Rath will be heading to Iceland. Turn the Empress northward and tell the captain to push the engines as far as they will go.”

  “Herr Mercer, this is Captain Heinz-Harold Nehring.” The voice was accented but commanding. Mercer imagined a ramrod-straight veteran who’d seen and done it all. “The Sea Empress is capable of twenty-eight knots. We will never catch Rath. His boat is too fast. I recommend we alert the destroyer Intrepido with signal flares and, once we are close enough for voice contact, have them take up the hunt.”