Carmellini charged through the doorway. Jake pushed Callie forward toward the staircase and ran aft, toward the dining hall, the gun leveled at his waist.
A glance through the door — three of the men were still watching television, though one was looking toward Jake. Perhaps he heard something.
Jake dug in his pocket, pulled out a grenade. He pulled the pin and let the lever fly off. He pushed the swinging door open a couple of inches and tossed the grenade.
The explosion made the doors swing on their hinges.
Then Jake stepped in and emptied the magazine at the men sprawled amid the tables.
As he changed magazines, the cook came running from the kitchen, shooting with a pistol.
The first shot thudded into the bulkhead as Jake was going down, the second hit a chair while he struggled to get the Colt .45 out of his shoulder holster.
Before the cook could fire a third shot, Tommy Carmellini killed him with a burst of submachine gun fire.
“Let’s go, Admiral,” he roared from the doorway. “We got ’em. Let’s get outta here.”
Jake finished changing magazines, then scrambled up. “Go, go, go!” he yelled.
Tommy Carmellini led the way with Callie and Wu right behind. Jake Grafton followed.
Jake called to Tommy, “Get them aboard the other ship and warm up the chopper. I’ll be right along.”
He ran up the nearest ladder to the topmost deck, above the salon, and went to the lifeboat, which had a canvas cover protecting it. Jake used his knife on the cover.
Sure enough, in the bottom of the boat was a can of gasoline that might contain two or three gallons. He shook it. Full, or nearly so.
Jake went to the hatch that led down to the engine room and emptied the gasoline can into the compartment.
From the foot of the ladder leading topside, he tossed a grenade, then scrambled upward.
He was nearly up when a jet of hot gases tore at him, almost causing him to lose his grip, as the explosion shook the ship.
Trying not to breathe the flames that singed his feet and hands, Jake scrambled for the gangway.
He was across the pier and up the gangway on the Barbary Coast when another explosion tore through the China Rose and flames jetted from her hatches.
“Are you all right?” Jake demanded of Callie.
“Yes, yes! Are you all right?”
Before he could answer the adrenaline aftershock hit him like a hammer and he vomited. He leaned against the passageway bulkhead aboard Barbary Coast and whispered, “Sorry about that,” to Nikko Schoenauer, who was standing guard with an AK-47.
“Hey, forget it,” said Nikko, who had overdosed on adrenaline a few times himself.
“Oh, Jake, I love you.” Callie hugged him as tightly as she could while staying away from the shoe polish. She drew back. “You look like the wrath of God.”
He took a good look at Callie under the Barbary Coasts lights, which were brilliantly lit by the ship’s emergency generator. “They really pounded on you,” he said bitterly.
“It’s over. Get me to a hot bath.”
Wu and Schoenauer had a short conversation in Chinese. “Why not take a bath here?” Schoenauer asked the Graftons. “The helicopter can take these two—” he jerked a thumb at Wu and Carmellini—”to the Central District and come back for you in an hour.” He turned to Carmellini and examined the cut on his head. “You need to have that stitched up.”
Jake nodded his agreement.
Wu paused and rested a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Your wife save my life, maybe,” he said in heavily-accented English. “She very strong woman.”
He smiled at Callie and nodded once, then turned to follow Tommy Carmellini.
When Callie was up to her neck in bathwater, Jake told her, “For a while there I thought I might never see you again. When I saw the blood smears in that stateroom, I thought I was too late.”
“I knew you’d come, Jacob Lee. I’ve never been so happy in my life as I was when that door flew open and I realized that terrible blackface apparition standing there was you.”
While the Graftons cleaned up in Barbary Coast’s owner’s stateroom, China Rose burned at the pier. No one came to fight the fire, although the crews of nearby ships gathered on deck to watch her burn.
Flames gradually spread throughout the ship. Finally the aftermost line securing her to the pier burned through, and wave action and the tide swung the stern well away from the pier.
When she sank an hour later in a welter of steam there wasn’t a whole lot left. The black water of the harbor extinguished the last of the flames.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Cross-Harbor Tunnel was jammed when Rip Buckingham picked his way through it. People by the hundreds lounged against the wall and sat in the traffic lanes. Most were armed with weapons taken from the police barracks armory or soldiers who had surrendered in the afternoon, but there weren’t enough weapons to go around.
Appointed officers were busy trying to organize the crowd into military units. To facilitate this process members of each unit were issued distinctive badges that attached to their clothes with Velcro. The plastic badges were in a variety of solid colors and simple shapes, such as circles, squares, triangles, and the like. The rebel organizers, Rip noted, stood in front of their groups and emphasized that everyone in the group must wear the group’s badge, although they never told the volunteers why.
Rip knew. The badges allowed the York units to quickly recognize the wearer as a good guy, thereby freeing up York processing capability for other things.
The enemy would eventually catch on, of course, but by then the recognition patterns would have been routinely changed.
The tension in the air was palpable; it was impossible not to feel it. As Rip walked and listened to the excited conversations, which were echoed and magnified into an infinite chorus by the walls of the tunnel, the power of the moment almost overwhelmed him.
There was nothing these people could not do. They would pound at the rocks and shoals of the tyrant’s forces like an angry sea and sweep them away, winning in the end, as inevitably as the spinning of the earth.
He reached the mouth of the tunnel and walked into the black night. The rebels had killed all electrical power in Kowloon. Looking north one could see the occasional glow of lantern light in a window, but that was all. The Kowloon skyline had completely disappeared. Members of the Scarlet Team were here at the mouth of the tunnel, working by flashlight with items on a long table.
Rip walked over for a closer look. Michael Gao was preparing a tiny radio-controlled airplane, a “bat,” for flight. He held it in his hand, a black toylike thing with a wingspan of eight inches. With a two-bladed prop driven by a minuscule electric motor, the four-ounce bat could fly at about thirty miles per hour for several hours.
Gao nodded at a colleague in front of a control panel, who pushed a button, starting the bat’s engine.
The controller waggled a stick; the ailerons, elevators, and rudder of the plane wriggled in sync. As Gao held the bat at arm’s length, both men studied a monitor on the control panel.
Inside the bat was a miniature infrared television camera that continuously broadcast its signal. This signal gave the controller a real-time look at what lay beneath the bat. The signal was also processed by the York network, increasing the situation awareness of the York units.
When all was ready, Gao tossed the bat upward into the air at a thirty-degree angle. In seconds it disappeared into the darkness, and he reached for another one of the dozen that sat on the table.
“How close is the enemy?” Rip asked.