Ira placed his lips to Mercer ear and screamed, “You think Rath will have to slow too?”
Mercer shook his head no. It was too loud to explain that Rath’s larger boat was designed for these kinds of open-water waves. They had been lucky to make up nearly three-quarters of Rath’s lead and could only hope not to lose any ground as they powered northward.
The sea grew rougher still, and with the first blush of dawn smearing the eastern horizon, the wind kicked up. Mercer’s knees burned from the constant flexing and his hands ached from maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the wheel. His feet were soaked from water sloshing around the cockpit and a numbness was creeping up his calves. Through the salt-streaked face mask, he continuously scanned the sea for a glimpse of a wake or a running light. So far nothing.
Behind him, Klaus Raeder threw up.
Mercer spotted a wave twice the size of anything they’d encountered just before it hit. He whipped the wheel into the surging wall of water and the Riva rocketed up its face in a gut-churning swoop. Launched from the crest in a corkscrew flight, the boat landed with her gunwale almost awash and she would have capsized if Mercer hadn’t jerked the wheel in the opposite direction and slammed the throttles to their stops. Before he could fully recover, the next monster wave hit them broadside and water poured into the cockpit. This time there was nothing he could do but pray the wave passed under them before the Riva floundered.
The speedboat tumbled into the trough and Mercer had enough time to kick her around again so they sluiced through the third large wave in the set. It was a masterful demonstration of driving and Ira gave him a wide-eyed stare of disbelief. Mercer’s matching incredulity showed it had been luck and not skill.
The Riva’s bilge pumps cranked overtime.
With no idea when the next big series would hit, Mercer pointed to the west to tell Raeder to keep watch. The German tapped him on the shoulder in acknowledgment. Settled again on their northerly direction, Mercer throttled back slightly for better control and continued their pursuit.
Five more times they hit high rolling sets of waves, and each time Raeder gave Mercer enough warning for him to steer into them. The ranks of swells between the big ones were still large enough to sink the boat, but Mercer had found their rhythm and kept them safe.
After another hour, what appeared at first to be a pinprick of light ahead and slightly to their left slowly revealed itself as a lighthouse. They were approaching the eastern side of the Reykjanes Peninsula, very close to where Iceland’s Keflavik Airport was located. Mercer racked his brain to remember the geography of the area. As he recalled, the only accessible village on this part of the peninsula was the small fishing community of Grindavik, about ten miles farther along the coast.
Assuming Rath would follow the most direct course to Iceland and would need to steal a truck to complete his escape, he edged the Riva to starboard and increased their speed when they entered the coastline’s protective cover. The twin engines sang.
The dawn grew to a white-and-gold ribbon, and the nature of the coast became more clear, forlorn, and tortured by its volcanic creation. Mercer could see the outline of a couple of volcanoes like elongated triangles on the flat plain beyond.
Also revealed in the growing light was a distant speck of white on the water: the wake of a boat running hard. When the others spotted it too, Raeder passed a machine pistol to Ira Lasko and kept one for himself. The cold and misery of their trip was lost in the desire to see it through.
The Njoerd’s launch seemed to grow in size as they approached. The little town of Grindavik was still dark but visible, and they would be abeam of Rath’s boat at least a mile before they reached it. Swaying in time with the boat’s motion, Ira jacked a round into the chamber of his MP-5.
Mercer steered for the stern of the offshore launch, masking the sound of his approach with the other powerboat’s thundering diesels. They needed only a few seconds in range to disable the steel-hulled craft, and as long as Rath and his crew kept their focus on the town they would never know they’d been spotted. Mercer slowed the Riva, matching the launch’s speed when it was just twenty yards ahead. He could see the name Njoerd painted on her flat transom. Beyond, he saw four heads, one of them with streaming blond hair.
Just as Ira raised the H amp;K to his shoulder, some instinct made Greta Schmidt look behind her. Mercer couldn’t hear her shouted warning, but her mouth moved in frantic command. Ira squeezed the trigger, and a flat spray of bullets kicked up spray at the spot the launch had been an instant before. Dieter had reacted to Greta’s screams with the exceptional reflexes that made him such a skilled racer. He began slewing the larger boat in a random slalom that was impossible to accurately track with a submachine gun. Ira couldn’t risk randomly firing at Rath’s boat in case he hit one of the hostages. Mercer backed off the throttles, not wanting to overtake the swishing launch. The race would only end when they reached shore.
Greta had disappeared from their view for a moment. When she emerged from the forward part of the launch, she had a pistol in one hand and a hostage in the other. Her greater size and strength all but smothered the struggles of her victim, the scantily dressed Lorna Farquar.
While his life had hardened Mercer to violence, he was not immune to it. There was no way he could brace himself to what he knew was about to happen. Lorna must have realized her fate too because her writhing became desperate. Greta’s expression didn’t change as she clubbed the woman behind the ear with the pistol and shoved her limp form off the back of the boat.
Instinct told Mercer to ignore the motionless body that bobbed in the launch’s wake and concentrate on Gunther Rath and the last Pandora box. That was what was important. Yet his humanity was a much stronger drive than any personal desire for justice.
There was no hesitation.
He chopped the throttles, holding fast against the steering wheel as the Riva dropped from plane like a head-on collision. Rath’s boat thundered away while Mercer swept the Riva in a tight circle to recover the evangelist’s wife. She lay facedown, her skimpy dress peeled from her body by the impact with the water. Her flesh was white against her translucent panties, already looking lifeless. With the Riva’s Mercruisers burbling, Mercer drew up next to her, edging wheel and throttle so the speedboat pirouetted and Klaus Raeder could grab her. He heaved her across the gunwale.
As soon as her feet cleared the frigid water, Mercer opened the throttles again. He looked over his shoulder in time to see clear water erupt from Lorna’s mouth and her body convulse in a coughing fit that sounded over the throb of the engines. She curled into a ball and retched again. She’d be shivering for the next couple of hours and her head would ache, but she’d be all right.
Rath was a quarter mile ahead, angling in toward the wooden jetties fronting Grindavik. His launch didn’t slow until the last second, its wake slamming fishing boats into each other and the floating docks. The one permanent pier thrusting out in the water was a concrete structure with a high-bowed purse seiner snugged against one side. A battered van was parked on the dock, and five early-morning fishermen talked amiably as they prepared the boat’s lines. Rath ordered Dieter to the other side of the pier, and the driver deftly coasted the last few yards. One of the security men leapt from the launch to secure a rope to the rusted cleats. Another man followed him, his attention on the fishermen, theirs on his gun.
As Mercer brought the Riva in toward the town, two other gunmen appeared at the big launch’s transom and unleashed matching sprays of automatic fire. The range was extreme, and yet Mercer had to sheer away from the stream of bullets, cutting a deep crescent in the sea. Like a shark kept at bay, he cruised just beyond the limit of the weapons, patrolling back and forth restlessly, seeking an opening that would never come. Rath held the superior position, and until he’d loaded his hostages and the Pandora box into the truck, Mercer, Ira, and Raeder could do nothing but wait.