Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  Ted shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  “Then you’re going to take the copter out several hundred meters and start circling the ship. Zig and zag and pop and drop to keep them guessing. Got it?”

  Ted swallowed hard. “Got it.” Suddenly he smiled. “Jinking. Just like laser tag, only for real.”

  Toni grinned wolfishly. “Just like laser tag.”

  Dash and Chance found themselves wandering like lost children in the mansion of an evil witch. From the salon, they’d passed through the piano bar, and trotted hastily past the circular staircase that Dash was pretty sure Dmitri had used when he had left them.

  Beyond the staircase Dash paused; the med bay was on the port side. She could not help herself, she stuck her head in to see what Dmitri had for emergency first aid. A quick scan, and Dash muttered, “Unbelievable. So much boat, so little preparation for the unforeseen.” She ran in, opened a couple of drawers, and came back out. “Not even a scalpel to be found. This must be improved upon.” They continued onward.

  Eventually, they found themselves in a small room with two chairs set to look out the wraparound windows overlooking the bow. A quick glance told them the situation was still evolving. The Russian cruiser was heading toward them, tailed by the entire little fleet of naval antagonists. A small California Coastal Patrol yacht, apparently a hydrofoil, had kicked up its speed and was racing past the American cruiser in a determined effort to reach and pass the Russian.

  “This is not good,” Chance stated the obvious.

  Dash frowned. “Let us see if we can find Dmitri.”

  Chance stared at her. “And then what?”

  Dash smiled. “And then we persuade him to choose a wiser path.”

  Chance smiled back. She had just started leading back the way they’d come when they heard gunfire. Chance hesitated. “What’s that?”

  Dash pushed her gently forward, and they picked up speed. “I believe that that is the thing going wrong that Dmitri had been expecting. How do you say it in American Westerns?”

  “’Here comes the cavalry?’”

  Dash nodded. “Precisely.”

  Ted shouted, “There’s another guy with a gun.” Calming a little, he added, “Down on a lower deck, amidships.”

  “Good,” Toni replied. “He can’t shoot through the ship to hit us when we touch down.”

  And so it was. Toni touched down, then jumped out. Ted lifted away, and Toni rolled to her feet running.

  She’d been thinking about the tactical situation while driving the copter and had concluded that the strategic key was the bridge. If she could take the helm and turn the ship back to the BrainTrust, she’d have more time to deal with everything else. Two guys outside with guns, surely more inside with Dash, and Dmitri someplace. Grab Dmitri and offer a trade?

  The bridge was two decks above her, just in front of the copter pad. The front of the bridge had no entrance, just glass. You had to enter the bridge from an internal staircase or from the pad. As she raced around the starboard side to hopefully avoid the gunman on the port side, she wondered if the gunman that had been on the pad was still there.

  There was no real exterior deck here, but the streamlined, sloping sides supplied adequate traction for her running shoes. Thus she came silently upon the copter pad from a direction that no one would expect.

  And there he was, Vasily was his name if she remembered correctly from the party, watching Ted buzz by. The gunner seemed unable to decide whether to spend more ammo firing at the copter. Just as well, since Ted was uncomfortably close. But the boy did make a great distraction.

  Toni was behind Vasily before the bastard had any clue she was there. She hooked a foot in front, pushed him forward, and tried to remember her Krav Maga instructor’s words. Keep your fingers apart and strike at an angle, this way you have a greater probability of making contact with his eyes. Make sure your fingers are hard and strong while striking. Ah, yes. She remembered now.

  The gunman tripped and fell. She spread her fingers as specified and let his own falling weight drive his eye into her middle finger. By the time he hit the deck he was no longer interested in the proceedings, literally half blind. He squeezed the grip of his gun convulsively, tapped the trigger, and grazed his own chest and shoulder with a burst of bullets, leaving a light jet of blood spewing across the deck. Toni put a knee in his back, reached underneath, and wrested the weapon from the gunman who, as her instructor might have said, had lost situational awareness. She smacked his head against the deck a couple of times just to be sure.

  AK-47 in hand, Toni charged through the back door onto the bridge. Except it wasn’t the bridge. It was an elegant conference room, with an elegant mahogany table, perfectly circular, eight chairs all set like they were ready for the Knights of the Round Table. It seemed unlikely to Toni that Dmitri used this room often. He didn’t seem like a Round Table style of leader. She rushed through into the next room.

  She’d found the bridge at last. A man in a perfectly tailored captain’s uniform looked back at her.

  “Turn the ship around,” she ordered.

  “Sir, Mikhailov would not—”

  Toni fired a three-round burst through the window by the captain’s head. “Turn the ship around.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dash had insisted on making a detour before taking the staircase to find Dmitri. So they had gone back into the piano bar and turned right into a starboard-side dining room. A china cabinet sat in one corner. Dash rifled the drawers and drew out a gleaming silver prize. “A steak knife!” she exclaimed. She held it up, letting the light reflect in all directions. Like everything else on the yacht, it was as beautiful as it was functional. “Not as sharp or as well balanced as my scalpel, but not bad.”

  Chance’s eyes widened. “You’re planning to use that on Dmitri?”

  Dash dropped her hand to hold the knife by her side. “Of course not.”

  Chance looked at the knife thoughtfully. “Even so, could you threaten to use the knife?”

  Dash gripped the knife hard and gave Chance her fiercest, most threatening expression.

  Chance covered her mouth to cover bubbling laughter. After she recovered, she offered practically, “We’ll persuade him some other way.”

  They heard heavy footsteps outside, quickly drowned by an engine, and froze. Looking out the long window, they could see Alexei running toward them. Fortunately, he seemed entirely distracted by something outside and behind him. He lifted his rifle and let off a long burst as a copter soared by.

  Dash gasped as she recognized the pilot. “Toni!” she exclaimed. Then she put her hand over her mouth in dismay, watching the man just outside on the open deck. He had surely heard her.

  But the glass was thick, and the copter noise, loud enough to be heard even inside, masked her shout. Alexei looked in frustration outward toward the bow for a moment, then turned and ran back the way he’d come.

  Chance pulled Dash away from the window, back to the piano bar. She turned to Dash to ask about strategy. “Do we go after Dmitri, Alexei, or Toni?” she asked.

  Dash frowned in concentration for a moment. “Dmitri is still the right person,” she concluded. “If we have him, he can take care of everyone else.” They turned toward the staircase.

  And the deck slid out from under their feet as the ship heeled over.

  Alexei watched forlornly as the copter disappeared around the bulkhead in front of him, flying toward the bow.

  He hated this damn boat. Staircases everywhere, none of them in the right place or going in the right direction. He was on the outer edge of the second deck and there was no way to go forward, or even into the ship, except to go back to the stern and come back through the salon from there. Bah! So back he ran, figuring he could at least grab Vasily or Gleb and get them involved in some real work rather than just hanging out with the pretty girls.

  Alexei just hated the way Dmitri treated him and his partner like unkempt half-wolves. Su
re, he’d been known to have a little rough sex from time to time, but the rape charges had always been thrown out. He knew perfectly well how to behave with ladies.

  But when he ran into the salon he found that there were apparently no ladies there, either figuratively or literally. He stopped dead for a second, then spotted the tied-up and blindfolded bodies of his comrades. He started to roar in rage, then swallowed it—no sense giving away his location to anyone listening.

  What had the little girls done, anyway? While he’d never thought Gleb and Yefim were in his own class, he’d always thought they were reasonably competent. From the bruises on their heads, he thought they might have been hit with baseball bats. Odd—there were no bats on board.

  A little care seemed in order. He forced himself to reassess the girls as combatants.

  If he ran into them, he’d take them. But for the moment the copter was the threat. He had to get to the upper decks. Sigh. He’d have to go through the piano bar, up the staircase through Dmitri’s suite, hopefully avoiding a demand for a full report on things he didn’t know yet. He accelerated across the salon. Then the ship slid sideways, throwing him into the doorframe on the entrance to the bar.

  He just hated this damn boat.

  Dmitri was sitting in the forward cabin of his main suite, looking out over the sea at the gaggle of ships heading his way, talking on his radio, when he heard the first gunfire towards the stern. The voice on the radio spoke. “What was that sound in the background?”

  Dmitri closed his eyes. “Gunfire. You should get here as fast as possible.”

  “Of course. We are coming to full speed.” Dmitri could see the Russian cruiser plowing the sea as it came towards him while his own Buccaneer also moved as fast as she could, a measly fifteen knots.

  Dmitri sat for a few moments wondering what, if anything, he should do. Deciding to comm his captain to see what all his instruments could see, he started to call up the bridge when another burst of gunfire arose, now on the port side. A brilliant silver copter—probably Matt’s new baby, he’d heard about it and was thinking about getting one himself—banked in to touch down on the roof of the deck below him, which was to say, right in front of him just outside the window. He saw Toni jump out as the copter lifted off again. Both Toni and copter moved off to starboard.

  Instead of calling his captain, Dmitri spoke again to the cruiser captain. “Things are getting complicated here. Please send your helicopter.”

  “We should have done that in the first place,” the cruiser captain grumbled.

  Dmitri grunted.

  Dmitri had always joked that all great Russian literature could be summed up as two rats dying in a gutter discussing philosophy. He looked thoughtfully at his wine glass with the gold-enameled lip. At least he wasn’t in a gutter.

  He heard gunfire overhead, from the bridge, and saw fragments of glass fall onto the roof deck in front of him where the copter had landed. He was not as surprised as he could have been when the Buccaneer banked into a turn in violation of his orders.

  As the yacht heeled over, Dash and Chance instinctively grabbed the edge of the lustrously polished mahogany bar in front of a display of bottles of elegant alcoholic beverages. Fortunately, the bottles were snugly set, so although the liquid sloshed, nothing came flying to hit them. Apparently, the piano across the room was dogged to the deck. It stayed firmly planted as the pull of gravity shifted beneath them.

  A soft yelp and a thump caused them to turn and see Alexei, who was not firmly planted at all unless you could say his face was planted against the door frame.

  Chance saw her opportunity. She half-jumped half-fell against him, pinning the AK-47 between them. She rotated her upper body and swung with her fist from the hips. It was not an ideal punch, but the sound of Alexei’s head bouncing off the door frame while his cheekbones crunched was satisfactory.

  Damn! She’d hurt her hand. Careless. She wouldn’t be assisting Dash with any surgery any time soon, except maybe her own.

  Still, she had to take advantage of the momentum while she had it. Alexei weighed about twice as much as she did, was probably even stronger still, and had the damn gun besides. So she twisted into an elbow strike just beneath his ear. This yielded another satisfying double-bang as his head slammed into the door frame again.

  Alexei sagged. The shifting of the boat now pulled her away from him. She prepared to kick but saw it was unnecessary. Pausing only to snatch up the gun, she shouted, “Dmitri!”

  The staircase was right there, and she and Dash ran up it.

  Dash was in the lead, figuring people were less likely to shoot her since she was the one they wanted to kidnap. She heard a click behind her and the snapping of the bolt in a gun, followed by a clank as the magazine hit the floor two decks below them. The bullet from the chamber rolled on a step behind her. She heard Chance mutter, “Guns. I have no idea what to do with them. Best to just make sure it can’t hurt anybody.”

  They reached the next deck, which Dash guessed was Dmitri’s private suite, just in time to see a man who must be the captain coming down another staircase, followed by a glaring Toni. Moments later Dmitri came through the passage from the bow. Toni pushed the captain aside and took careful aim at the yacht’s owner.

  Dmitri pulled up short. After a moment of assessment, he blinked and proceeded to speak with calm dignity. “Well. Looks like it’s time for us to have another chat.” He pointed back up the way Toni and the captain had come. “There’s a nice conference room just in back of the bridge. Shall we move there?”

  The ship was on robopilot, and the views from all the vidcams, radar, and sonar, were up on the wallscreen as everyone sat about the Round Table. They watched the little California Coastal Patrol hydrofoil successfully take the lead from the Russian cruiser. It did no good; they could see the helicopter approaching them at a speed no ship could rival.

  Dash cleared her throat to speak more calmly than she felt. “I say once again. They are only after me. Let me take the little boat on the stern deck and go to them. They’ll leave you all alone then.”

  Toni leapt up in rage. “Over my dead body!”

  Dmitri shook his head. “They would like it that way. We need another plan. Ideally, one that allows me to survive as well.” He looked mournful. “Though that seems most unlikely.”

  They saw Ted fly across the stern, blocking the view of the Russian helicopter for a moment. “Ah, I have it.” He explained the plan. Toni called Ted, and everyone piled out of the conference room onto the copter platform.

  Ted curved in and landed, carefully avoiding Vasily who was curled in a corner of the pad. Dash ran toward the copter, saw Vasily, and paused to point at him. “Is he okay?” she demanded.

  Toni looked uncomfortable. “More or less. I kind of poked one of his eyes out. And knocked him out.”

  Dash glared. “I thought you said you didn’t do Krav Maga?”

  Toni shrugged. “I said I did aikido better. I said I didn’t like Krav Maga. I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. And if you’re up against a guy who’s just standing there with a gun in his hand, it’s quicker.”

  Dash had a dark suspicion. “Just how good are you at aikido, anyway?”

  Toni shrugged. “Last time I competed, third best in Israel. But that was a while ago,” she hastily qualified herself.

  Dash shook her head. She started toward Vasily, hesitated, and stopped. No time. She pointed at Chance. “See what you can do to help him.” She pointed at Dmitri. “And you! Your emergency medical equipment is abysmal. We will speak about it later.”

  She boarded the copter. Ted took off again. As they soared around the ship and off toward the BrainTrust, Dmitri took a deep breath. “Now we’ll see how many hours I have left.” They all went back inside, and Dmitri called the Russian cruiser. “It’s too late. The doctor got away on the copter that just left. Stand down.”

  The Russian cruiser captain cursed. “Pilot! See that silver copter? You heard what Mikhailov
just said. Shoot it down, but do not hurt the doctor!”

  “Captain, I… Are you sure?”

  The captain growled.

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Chance and the others watched as the Russian whirled past them. Chance waved at the pilot, then gave him the finger. “Matt’s copter is faster. No way the Russians can catch up.”

  Dmitri answered gloomily, “It’s not over till it’s over.”

  Dash heard a ping from somewhere in the tail.

  Ted exclaimed, “They’re shooting at us!” He looked at his instruments. “Hang on.” The little copter started to jink once more. “You okay there?”

  Dash was hanging on for dear life to the seat belt straps that crossed her chest. They didn’t hold her in place any better when she clung to them, but it made her feel better. She was definitely developing serious motion sickness. She swallowed. “I am fine,” she asserted gamely.

  “Wow. This is some hardcore laser tag,” Ted chirped. He was clearly not taking the whole situation seriously enough, but Dash did not think that pointing this out would improve his performance. She held on.

  In a few moments, Ted whooped. “Just about to the reef. And we have backup!” Boats, copters, and drones were all speeding toward them. A couple of the copters had landed on the reef. “We’re in the clear now.”

  There was another ping, and their copter started to spin. Ted grunted. “Hold on!” The spinning slowed as he regained control. But they were losing altitude fast, and they hadn’t had much altitude to begin with. “Get ready to jump!” Ted shouted, more excited than afraid.

  The copter hit the water rather gently, then settled. As he popped the canopy, Ted said gleefully. “I designed it to float. Never got to check it out, though. Looks like my design was good.”

  Dash escaped from her seat belt, then from the copter, into water that shocked her whole system with cold. The remains of her sarong wrapped around her legs like Saran wrap, so she untied the sarong and kicked it away. It was ironic, she thought, that she was wearing a bathing suit. It was just as if she’d planned to spend her afternoon swimming away from a gunship. She focused on paying no attention to the violent shivering trying to take control of her limbs.