“Harry, come on,” he called into the cabin.
Still at the helm, Harry jiggled the throttles until the two craft were perfectly in sync before looping a bungee cord around the wheel to keep her on course. He snatched up his cane and joined Mercer on the aft deck.
Mercer handed him the rope, pointing out that Foch had tied a loop at its end. Knowing what to do, Harry placed his prosthetic leg into the loop and did something behind at his ankle to lock the joint. He held the line steady as Mercer climbed to the looming ship, his assent covered by two of the Legionnaires.
Hands grabbed at him as he reached the railing and they dragged him over. He landed in a heap, swiveling around even as the Frenchmen began to haul Harry up the side of the ship. He added his strength to theirs, and seconds later Harry’s silver crew cut appeared. Harry steadied himself for the final effort and then he was with them. He unlocked his ankle and gave it an experimental flex.
“I feel like a pirate taking a galleon on the Spanish Main,” he whispered, pulling the pistol from the corpse Foch had stuffed behind a ventilator.
“We’ll call you Graybeard the Geriatric,” Mercer teased.
That they had just climbed aboard a ship carrying several thousand tons of explosives hit them all at the same moment. They exchanged nervous glances. A blast of that magnitude wouldn’t blow them apart, or even vaporize them. Such a detonation would atomize them. The concussive force would be enough to render their bodies to their basic building blocks of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and the few others that made up a human.
It would be like standing on the surface of a sun at the moment it went supernova.
“Let’s go,” Foch said, taking point.
The deck planking was slick with rain and twenty years of spilled oil and solvents. The metalwork had been so often painted that the underside of the railings were pebbled with hardened drips as thick as cake frosting. What machinery they could see looked frozen with grime. Had she not been tapped for this operation, the Englander Rose should have been sitting in a breaker’s yard ready for the cutting torches.
With Foch in the lead and Rabidoux covering their rear, they crept under the belly of the lifeboat and edged toward a hatchway. The door was open a crack, probably left by the sailor who’d challenged them. Foch peeked through the opening and then slowly swung the door open with the barrel of his FAMAS, one of his men standing by so he could cover the lieutenant.
“Clear.”
They rushed into a utilitarian corridor that ran the length of the squat superstructure. He led them to the shelter of an open closet reeking of disinfectant.
“Harry,” he asked, “with little space on their submersible, what is the minimum they could leave aboard this ship during a canal passage?”
“I can feel by the way she vibrates she’s diesel powered,” the former ship’s captain answered. “Meaning they could pull everyone out of the engine room. Realistically, there could be as few as three, but no more than ten.”
“D’accord,” Foch said, then lapsed into silence.
“This is your show, Lieutenant,” Mercer prompted. “How do you want to do it?”
He needed only a second to form his plan. “Rabidoux, lead Mercer, Harry, and Captain Vanik to the bridge. The rest of us will sweep the ship to prevent some hidden fanatic from blowing the charges himself. If you need backup pull a fire alarm and we will get to you as fast as we can.”
“Bon chance,” Mercer said to Foch as he followed Lauren and Harry behind Rabidoux’s lead.
Lauren walked just a step behind and to the left of the young Legion noncom, her M-16 ready to cover their flank. Harry stayed a few paces back with Mercer walking sideways behind him so he could cover their rear and still add firepower if they came upon any crewmen or guards.
The hallway was deserted, and when they climbed narrow stairs set in an echoing well, they came out on another empty passageway.
“Which way?” Rabidoux asked.
Harry thought for a moment. “Head aft, there’ll be central stairs that run from the bridge to the bilge. It’s the most direct route.”
The halls smelled of salt and rust, aged by a long career tramping around the globe. There was little in the way of amenities on board. The walls were painted metal and the decks were laid with peeling linoleum tile. The lights were bare bulbs in little cages. Passing a door marked “Head” left them moving through a reeking miasma of stale human waste.
The attack came without warning.
One moment they were closing in on the stairs and the next second the hall was filled with automatic fire. Mercer dove to tackle Harry, making sure to hit him in his fake leg. At the same instant Rabidoux pushed Lauren to the floor and counterfired with a sustained burst from his assault rifle.
The soldier who’d fired at them ducked around a corner as the metal edge he used as cover sparked like a Catherine wheel under the onslaught of 5.56mm rounds.
Lauren moved forward under the covering fire, slithering on her belly across the filthy floor. She had her M-16 to her shoulder and crawled using only the wiggle of her hips and what grip she could get with her elbows. Mercer shifted onto one knee, hugging a wall, and waited for the Chinese guard to appear again, his body shielding Harry’s prone form.
The soldier ducked his head around the corner as soon as Rabidoux intentionally drained his magazine. Through the whirling smoke, his eyes naturally locked on the tallest target—Mercer. He never saw the slender shape less than three yards in front of him. Lauren adjusted her aim in the fraction of a second the soldier gave her and put one round through his neck and one into his forehead.
She waited for two heartbeats before moving forward. Once she could see around the corner that had hidden the guard, she called back, “All clear.”
The sudden attack had robbed their element of surprise so they mounted the stairs at a run, Mercer and Rabidoux moving side by side, step in step. Lauren and Harry remained a half flight below them as they corkscrewed up the decks. They reached the bridge level without incident, and when they saw the solid door blocking their progress, they understood why. Whatever crewmen were still in the upper decks had barricaded themselves in the wheelhouse. The hatch was solid steel, dogged tight and locked from the inside. Nothing short of a satchel charge, which they didn’t have, would blow it open.
“Is there another way?” Mercer asked Harry.
“Not on this level. We’ll have to go down one and then try to get in from outside. When we approached I saw a stairway leading from there up to the wing bridge.”
Mercer looked at his watch. “We’re running out of time.” He keyed his throat mike. “Roddy, what’s your situation?”
“We’re almost between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill. We’re expecting the sub to try to divert us any moment.”
“You’re ready for it?”
“They used this trick to get me fired once. They won’t get away with it a second time.”
Mercer looked to Harry again. “What about going up one deck and just jumping onto the wing bridge?”
“You’ll either take them by surprise or they’ll take you,” Harry said seriously. “But it sounds better than trying to fight our way up from outside.”
They backtracked to the stairs and climbed up a dim shaft that ended in a flat hatch. It took all Mercer’s strength and a push from Sergeant Rabidoux to unseal the hardened paint that had frozen the portal solid. Heaving against its dead weight they finally threw it open. It dropped flush with the roof of the wheelhouse. Rainwater eased the cordite sting from Mercer’s eyes and he let a few drops trickle down his throat.
From this vantage he could see the Robert T. Change about a quarter mile ahead but the Mario diCastorelli was out of view as the three ships wended their way deeper into the mountains. The hills were bare, blasted rock, chiseled by explosives with the precision of the Egyptian pyramids. Some had been pinned with huge steel rods to solidify them further. Waterfalls splashed to the canal, torrents made greater because the ground was so saturated by the rainy season’s regular deluges. Something Mercer was sure Liu’s experts had counted on.