“I can’t nail Bullethead,” Austin said. “Even if I do, his pals could go on a shooting spree.”
“What we need is a tank,” Zavala agreed.
Austin stared at his friend and punched him in the shoulder.
“You’re a genius, Joe. That’s exactly what we need.”
“I am? Oh, hell,” he said as if something had occurred to him. “The Humongous? That’s an ROV, Kurt, not an Army tank.”
“It’s better than nothing, which is what we’ve got,” Austin said.
He quickly outlined a plan.
Zavala saluted to show that he understood, then turned and sprinted off to the remote-control center. Austin slipped through a door to the ship’s garage and turned the lights on. The Humongous had been pulled up close to the doors in preparation for the search for the sunken ROV the next morning.
The Humongous was about the size of a Land Rover. It was built with treads that allowed it to crawl along the sea bottom. It had a flotation pack full of foam that held the instruments, lights, and ballast tanks. Six thrusters allowed for agile, precise maneuvering in the water, and it carried a battery of still and television cameras, magnetometers, sonar, water samplers, and instruments that measured water clarity, light penetration, and temperature.
The pair of now-folded mechanical manipulators that extended from the forward end could be operated with surgical precision. Their claws could pluck the tiniest of samples from the bottom and store them in a collection cage slung under the front of the vehicle.
A couple hundred feet of umbilical tether had been coiled behind the ROV. Austin stood in front of it, waiting, as precious seconds went by. Then the vehicle’s searchlights snapped on, and the electric motors began to hum.
Austin waved his arms at the camera. Zavala saw him on the monitor and waggled the manipulator arms to signal that he was at the controls.
Austin went around behind the ROV and climbed on top. Zavala gave the vehicle power. The Humongous lurched forward and crashed into the double doors, pushing them wide open. As it emerged onto the deck on grinding treads, Zavala waved the manipulators around and worked the claws, adding to the dramatic effect.
Marla’s would-be executioner whirled around to face the garage doors and saw what looked like a giant crustacean heading directly for him. Marla took advantage of the distraction, scrambled to her feet, and made a run for safety. One of the other commandos saw the third mate trying to escape and aimed his weapon at her fleeing figure.
Austin snapped off a stuttering fusillade that stitched a row of holes across the man’s midsection. The clean-shaven man and the other commando took cover behind a crane and peppered the oncoming Humongous with hundreds of rounds. The unrelenting gunfire blasted away its searchlights, then a lucky shot found its camera.
Inside the control room, the screen went blank. Zavala kept the vehicle moving at full speed, but without electronic eyes he was having trouble controlling it. The Humongous veered drunkenly to the right, came to a jerking stop, then shot off to the left. It went through the same moves again, peppered all the while by the hail of bullets. Fragments of plastic, foam, and metal filled the air until, finally, the shooting triggered an electrical fire.
Austin gagged on the acrid smoke filling his nostrils. He could feel the Humongous disintegrating beneath him. He dropped off the back of the erratically moving ROV and ran to one side of the ship, dove behind a tall air vent, hit the deck, and rolled several feet. He stopped and fired a blast directly above the stroboscopic muzzle flashes in front of him. It was his turn for a lucky hit. One of the guns went silent. Austin kept on shooting until he emptied his gun of bullets.
A moment later, the clean-shaven man took advantage of the lull and ran for the side of the ship.
Austin stepped out into the open, pointed his empty gun at the fleeing man, and yelled, “Hey, Bullethead! Don’t leave so soon. Fun’s just starting.” Austin raised the gun to his shoulder.
The man stopped and turned to face Austin from twenty feet or so away. The Humongous was now ablaze, and the man’s face and strange green eyes were visible in the light of the flickering flames. A smile came to his evil features.
“You’re bluffing,” he said. “You would have shot me if you had the chance.”
“Try me,” Austin said, squinting with one eye as if taking aim.
Either the man didn’t buy Austin’s bluff or he didn’t care. He raised his own gun, and Austin thought he was going to shoot, but instead the man let out a snarl and dashed toward the railing, firing from the hip as he ran. Austin ducked for cover, and when he dared look again, the man had disappeared. He heard the sound of an outboard motor starting and ran to the railing. The boat was already up on plane, and within seconds it had disappeared into the darkness.
He stared at the pale wake foaming the water and was listening to the motor fading into the night when there was a new sound on the deck behind him.
Footfalls.
Austin pivoted into a crouch, only to relax when he saw why the man had decided to bolt. Zavala had emerged from the control center and was trotting toward him. They both grabbed fire extinguishers from a bulkhead and sprayed the Humongous with foam.
“It sounded like World War Three out here,” Zavala said after they had the blaze under control. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
“Thanks to your timely appearance,” Austin replied. “Wish I could say the same for the Humongous,” he added with a tinge of guilt in his voice.
Zavala gazed in wonder at the smoldering ROV, its components scattered around the deck.
“I can see now why the video died,” Zavala said.
“That’s not the only thing that died,” Austin said.
He went over to the bodies lying on deck. He removed the mask from the man who had tried to kill Marla, revealing a cruel face with Asian features. The second man was Asian as well. Austin surveyed the deck, which was covered with cartridge shells. The smell of cordite hung in the smoke-filled air.
“Now we know why the B3 was attacked,” he said. “Doc Kane . . . We’ve got to talk to him.”
“Good luck!” Zavala said. “Doc made it pretty clear that his work was none of our business.”
Austin’s lips tightened in the smile that, in Zavala’s experience, had always presaged trouble.
“That’s too bad,” Austin said in an even tone. “Because I’m making it our business.”
CHAPTER 15
SHANGHAI, CHINA
THE LICENSE PLATE ON THE SILVER MERCEDES S65 AMG sedan that emerged from the parking garage under Pyramid Trading Company’s fifty-story building displayed only the number 2, suggesting that the car’s owner enjoyed extreme wealth. Vanity plates were auctioned off for millions of dollars to affluent and superstitious bidders who believed that the low numbers would bring good luck.
To reinforce that good luck, the car’s skin was fashioned from rocketproof armor plate and its tinted-glass windows were bulletproof. The underside was fortified against street bombs. The six-hundred-horsepower V-12 engine under the hood could push the car’s speed up to two hundred miles an hour.
An armed guard wearing denim fatigues sat in the front seat next to the driver. For added security, the Mercedes was sandwiched between two four-hundred-ninety-three-horsepower Mercedes G55 AMG SUVs. Each SUV carried a driver and five guards armed with Chinese-made, lightweight Type 79 submachine guns that had firing capabilities of five hundred rounds per minute.
The three-vehicle motorcade followed a route that took it away from the high-rise apartment complexes and glitzy clubs around the Oriental Pearl Tower, the tallest building of its kind in the world. The car and its escorts sped along the banks of the Yangtze River, then turned off the highway and headed toward the destitute neighborhoods that are the embarrassing underside of the largest and wealthiest city in the People’s Republic of China.