Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Eckers glanced at the man beside him, saw that he’d taken the blunt wedge of stone from the pouch into his hand, and nodded again.

  “They call us Grim and Reaper,” he said as the rock was smashed forcefully against the left side of Blake’s skull.

  Nimec had surfaced to look over at the pontooner several times after Blake flashed the OK sign with his thumb and forefinger. He didn’t think much of it when he saw the yellow racer approach, except that maybe the Aussie had run across a couple of his water-loving buddies having their own little jaunt off the island.

  On the instance he came up to see lines being cast between the boats, it drew his closer attention.

  “Annie,” he said. “What do you make of ’em? Those guys who came in that racing boat, that is.”

  Swimming in place beside Nimec, she watched a couple of them board the pontooner.

  “They seem friendly with Blake,” she said, and kind of shrugged her shoulders out of the water. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Nimec said.

  He kept watching the boat. Blake had gone around into his pilot’s console, followed by the two men.

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you thinking something’s wrong?”

  He took a moment to consider that, lifted his dive mask over his forehead.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking at, and I’d like to be,” he said, glancing over at her. “If that makes sense.”

  Annie read the expression on his face.

  “It does,” she said. “Should we go back to the boat?”

  “Maybe I should,” Nimec said.

  “You?”

  “Right.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Right,” Nimec said, shooting another look at the boat. “Find out what’s up, then come on back.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, Pete. Where you go, I go—”

  Annie broke off, the words dying on her tongue, her eyes grown wide with shock and confusion as she saw what was suddenly happening on the boat, happening all in a terrible second—the one man raising something in his hand, bringing it down on Blake’s head, then Blake slumping over the console, falling below it onto the deck.

  “Pete!” she cried, and reached out to grip his arm. “Pete!”

  Nimec turned to her.

  “Annie, stay put,” he said.

  “What about you?”

  “I need to swim over there,” he said. “It’s our best chance.”

  Annie shook her head again vehemently.

  “How, Pete?” she said, clinging to him. “What can you do against them alone?”

  He looked at her, unable to think of a reply.

  And then the men aboard the pontooner made any answer he could have settled upon irrelevent as they hurried to the side of the boat, pulled guns from under their wetsuit jackets, and pointed them at Nimec and Annie over the safety rail.

  “Over here,” one of them shouted in a voice that carried clearly over the water. “Both of you. Now.”

  Tolland Eckers faced Nimec and Annie across the pontoon boat’s deck, the Steyr 9mm in his right hand leveled on them. He had donned thin black boater’s gloves as a precaution against fingerprints.

  “It fascinates me how quickly a person’s situation can change,” he said. “Turn from one thing to another overnight. Or sometimes in the blink of an eye. You never know what might happen next.”

  Still dripping water, Nimec stood there in the booties he’d worn under his fins before removing them on the dive platform. He lowered his gaze to where Blake lay fallen in a motionless heap, blood oozing from his temple to mat his thick blond hair against the side of his face. Then he shifted his eyes onto those of the man with the semiautomatic.

  “What you did to him tells me everything I need to know,” he said.

  Eckers shrugged.

  “Does it?” he said. “The poor fellow was enjoying himself when he slipped and took a nasty fall. What I’d call a piece of bad luck, or couldn’t you see?”

  Nimec nodded toward the other man, who was now busy loosening the ropes that secured the racer to the pontoon boat’s gunwale, his own portable weapon in a sling harness at his side.

  “I saw your friend hit him with whatever was in his hand,” he said. “Go ahead and call that a fall, or anything you want.”

  “You know what you know, is that it?”

  Nimec didn’t answer.

  Eckers looked at him and smiled coldly.

  “It’s your knowing too much that changed your situation,” he said. “Changed it in a sudden, drastic way. Turning you from an invited guest to an interloper.”

  “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” Nimec said.

  “Nothing to what I’m saying, is that it?” Eckers motioned toward Annie with the Steyr. “And you? Also without any ideas about why we’re all here? Or do you mean to keep them to yourself like your husband?”

  She just stared at him in silence, as if simply trying to process what was going on. Eckers’s companion, meanwhile, had finished unfastening the lines between the boats and come around to stand slightly off to one side of Nimec.

  “Whatever I saw, or you think I saw, I didn’t tell my wife.”

  Eckers shrugged a third time.

  “Maybe, or maybe not,” he said. “Sadly, I won’t leave maybes swirling around.”

  Nimec felt his stomach tighten.

  “Whatever you intend to do out here, you’re out of your mind to think you’ll get away with it.”

  “Because?”

  “Because of who I work for,” Nimec said. “Because they won’t let up on you or the people you work for.”

  Eckers continued to look at him, his weapon steady in his grip.

  “Accidental deaths happen,” he said. “Your employers can have suspicions. They can search, and investigate, and they can be left with their nagging doubts. But in the end, if the evidence still points to an accident, none of that will matter.”

  Nimec was silent. He hadn’t wanted to use words like death or kill or murder, had hoped to protect Annie from hearing them. But while he’d done a lousy job of protecting her from anything so far, that might be about to change.

  If the evidence still points to an accident, he thought.

  But how could it, if both he and Annie had bullet holes in them?

  He stood watching as Eckers glanced over at the racing boat.

  “Take it out to the ledge,” he said to the two men inside it. “Kettering and I will join you shortly.”

  The man at the wheel nodded, and a moment later the racer’s powerful engines roared to life. Then it turned in the water and sped off westward toward the buoys, churning up a long, white wake of foam.

  “We’re almost finished now,” Eckers said, looking back at Nimec. “This may give you small comfort, but I’m a professional and will be”—he hesitated a beat—“as efficient as possible.”

  Nimec had kept his eyes locked on Eckers’s, peripherally aware of the man he’d called Kettering sidling closer. How did they intend to do it? He needed to buy some time. Seconds, minutes, whatever he could.

  “Except your plan won’t work,” he said, thinking hard. “You figure you’ll ride this boat out to the ledge, or outcrop, or whatever it is. Wait there till the tide goes down, make it look like it crashed and took on water, then head away with your friends. Could be you’ve even got a Mayday logged somewhere so you’re covered on that end.” Nimec paused a second, took a deep breath, wishing again that he could have spared Annie from what he needed to say. “But we won’t stand around waiting for you to drive us into the rocks,” he resumed, then. “Not if we’re going to die anyway. We’ll try to stop you and you’ll have to use that gun of yours to stop us. And the people who come out searching won’t stop till they find our bodies. You know that. You need them to find us for this to seem real. And they see bullet holes, there goes your accident.”

  Eckers’s cold
smile reappeared, but Nimec believed he saw something in his eyes that conflicted with it.

  “Gamma hydrooxybutyrate,” he said. “Ever hear of it?”

  Nimec looked at him. He hadn’t, but he wasn’t giving that away.

  “It’s a drug classified as a sedative and anesthetic,” Eckers said. “Short form nomenclature, GHB. Common street names ‘soap,’ ‘scoop,’ ‘grievous bodily harm,’ ‘easy lay’ . . . although by now the kids who use it for date rape have probably replaced them with a dozen others, our youth culture always being in a hurry to move on.”

  Nimec watched him silently. Watched his eyes. And at the same time remained watchful of Kettering.

  “As far as you’re concerned, the important things to understand about GHB are that it’s odorless, tasteless, and instantaneously induces rapid sleep or coma at elevated doses. And it becomes undetectable soon afterward,” Eckers said. “In fact, it’s synthesized from a chemical that’s normally manufactured in our brains . . . that’s present in every one of us . . . and that increases its concentration in a human body as death occurs. Which makes it a forensic pathologist’s nightmare, and a defense attorney’s dream. Especially in the form my own people have developed.”

  Silence. Nimec had realized he was almost out of time, his thoughts racing along as he listened.

  “Your drug doesn’t change anything,” he said. “You use it on one of us, you think the other’s going to stand and watch? Knowing you can’t chance shooting that damned gun of yours? Or you want to convince me you’ve got designer bullets that evaporate and close their own wounds?”

  Eckers looked at him. Again something turned in his eyes. And again Kettering slipped closer to Nimec, easing slightly behind him, almost breathing down his neck.

  And then Eckers extended the Steyr further in front of him.

  “I don’t need both of your bodies to be found,” he said. “There’s Blake, whose skull will have been pounded by the ocean rocks. And then there’s one or the other of you that will be dredged up, it makes no difference whom. Two floaters, a third body lost to the sea, and that will be that.”

  No, Nimec thought. No, it wouldn’t. Because the man holding him at gunpoint was professional, and smart enough to figure he’d probably have gotten in touch with somebody at UpLink about his sightings at the harbor, and that UpLink’s investigators would be more than suspicious if he was the one who disappeared. That happened, they would know without question what took place out here. They would know, and wouldn’t quit till they found a way to prove it.

  Which exposed the gunman’s bluff. He needed Nimec. Needed his body intact to pull off his scheme.

  Leaving Annie—and Annie alone—immediately vulnerable to the gun.

  Nimec did not wait so much as another heartbeat to make his move. Glancing quickly around, he spun in a half circle and snatched hold of Kettering’s wrist with his right hand, wrenching it up and backward as he jammed his left shoulder against Kettering’s chest, driving into him with all the momentum he could summon. Kettering grunted and began to stumble backward, but Nimec held on to his wrist, seeing the hank of cloth bunched in his gloved hand, saturated with the goddamn sleep drug he’d been about to smother him with. Nimec simultaneously jerked the hand up again and twisted it over and around, slapping it over Kettering’s face, holding it there over his nose and mouth.

  “Stop or I’ll kill the bitch!” Eckers yelled, waving his Steyr as he moved forward in a kind of charge. “You hear me, I said sto—”

  “Down, Annie!” Nimec said, shouting over him. And she did, hurling herself flat to the deck as he whipped Kettering around in front of him, pushing his suddenly limp body between Eckers and himself while reaching for the stock of the submachine gun against Kettering’s side, tearing it from its harness, and getting his finger around the trigger to squeeze off a two-round burst.

  His chest soaked with blood, Eckers wobbled on his feet a moment, looking straight at Nimec as Kettering sagged and then fully collapsed between them. Then his eyes rolled up in his sockets so that only their whites were visible, and he also dropped to the deck.

  Nimec turned, hurried to Annie, knelt beside her.

  “You all right?” he said, taking hold of her arm.

  She nodded, started to push herself onto her knees, trembling all over.

  “C’mon, honey,” Nimec said, helping her up. He shot a glance around toward the buoys across the water. “We’ve got to move fast.”

  “That’s it,” said the racer’s copilot. He’d heard the report of the Steyr TMP come echoing across the water perhaps a second before. “They’ve done the woman.”

  At the wheel in the silence following the gunshots, Harrison lifted his binoculars to his eyes and peered eastward. Having reached the safe passage lane marked by the buoys, yards from where the broken points of the ledge had emerged above the receding tide, he had only to follow orders and wait for Eckers and Kettering to bring the pontooner in their direction. By the time it arrived, enough of the formation would be out of the water for the pleasure boat and its unconscious passengers to be driven into the rocks, a seeming mishap that would claim the lives of both the guide and their prime target. The woman’s body would need to be transferred to the racer and disposed of separately, and Harrison assumed the job would fall on him, as it had with that bookkeeper and the hired men who’d come to take him off the island. Carving them up had been unpleasant but not unprecedented—Harrison did whatever was required and accepted his pay, that was all.

  His lenses focused on the pontoon boat now, he suddenly straightened and cursed under his breath.

  The racer’s copilot looked at him. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Harrison let the binocs sink down from his face.

  “They’re still standing,” he said, disconcerted. “Both targets.”

  A stunned pause.

  “How about Eckers?”

  “I can’t see him,” Harrison said.

  “Kettering?”

  Harrison had raised the glasses back to his eyes.

  “No,” he said.

  The copilot looked at him again. “Shit,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

  Harrison shook his head.

  “You read reports on that Sword op,” he said. “There was nothing in them to indicate it would be simple.”

  Silence.

  “How do we carry on?” said the copilot.

  Harrison reached for the ignition and their engine revved.

  “First we’ll need to get on top of that boat,” he said. “Then we need to decide.”

  His hands on the pontoon boat’s wheel, Nimec glanced back over his shoulder and spotted the racer approaching from the vicinity of the underwater ledge. When he’d heard its outboards come to life only moments ago, it had been too far off to see with the naked eye. The pilot was pushing it hard.

  “Annie,” Nimec said. “Think you can hold us steady?”

  Beside him in the pilot’s station, Annie stood gripping the radio handset she’d used to contact UpLink’s temporary facility across the channel, providing its operators with Nimec’s coded identifiers for emergency assistance. Nodding, she clipped it into place on the console, eased closer to him.

  “I can try,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  Nimec looked at her.

  “This boat’ll move at forty-five, fifty miles an hour if I really pour it on,” he said. “The racer can double, maybe triple that speed.”

  “We won’t be able to outdistance it.”

  “No,” he said. “But we might not have to.”

  She shook her head to indicate her confusion.

  “Think about it, Annie,” he said. “Those guys on our tail are handcuffed as far as how they can finish their business, same as the ones who stayed aboard with us. Their whole setup depended on making it look like Blake ran us into the outcrop.”

  It took barely a second for understanding to flood Annie’s eyes.

  “They won
’t want to shoot,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m betting,” Nimec said. “And fast as their boat travels, ours is a lot bigger and heavier. They try to ram us, it’ll be the racer that takes the worse beating.”

  Annie nodded. Then, not quite lost to their hearing under the growl of the vessel at their rear, a low moan rose from where Blake lay sprawled on deck.

  “He needs a doctor,” she said. “If we don’t get him some medical help . . .”

  “I know, Annie,” Nimec said. “But we can’t do anything for him until we shake loose that chase boat . . . and for that I need you to take the wheel.”

  She nodded again, shifted places with him.

  “I’ve got us headed southeast toward that wilderness preserve Murthy talked about,” Nimec said, and motioned toward the instrument panel’s compass and GPS displays. “Keep us on course.” He hesitated. “And if there’s any gunfire, keep your head down.”

  Annie looked at him, fingers around the wheel now.

  “I thought we’re betting against that,” she said.

  Nimec squeezed her shoulder.

  “Just in case,” he said, and slid from behind the console.

  Nimec examined the Steyr he’d taken from Annie’s attacker and set its firing lever to full-automatic mode. He’d already ejected its magazine, determined it had plenty of rounds left, then palmed it back into its slot. If he was right and the chase team was still locked into its original plan, a few bullets would be all he needed.

  He stood with his back to the pilot’s station and looked out beyond the pontooner’s stern. The speedboat was close and getting closer, spray flying off to either side of its windscreen, water sheeting off its flanks, a white chop of foam trailing behind it. Seabirds squalled overhead or launched from the water in flapping clouds, terrified by the loud roar of its powerplants.

  Nimec saw the racer angle off to starboard and hurried to the safety rail. Then he waited, his finger on the trigger.