With three minutes to go till the nuclear missiles fired, Zemir was dead and IG-88 held the control console. Twenty of them, with MetalStorm guns!
He needed some kind of distraction, a really big distraction.
'Call Rufus,' he said to Knight.
'You sure?'
'It's the only way.'
'Right,' Knight said. 'You're a truly crazy man, Captain Schofield.' Then Knight spoke into his throat-mike. 'Rufus. How is Plan B coming along?'
Rufus's voice came in. 7 got the nearest one for you! And she's one big momma! I'm a hundred yards out, engines running, and pointed straight at your
One hundred yards away from the Talbot, a second supertanker was powering through the storm with Rufus at the helm.
Waiting its turn to unload its cargo at Cherbourg, the giant 110,000-ton container ship, the MV Eindhoven, had been sitting at rest in the Channel, its engines idling, when Rufus had landed the Black Raven on its foredeck.
Now, but for Rufus, it was empty, its sailing crew of six having wisely decided to depart on a lifeboat after Rufus had strafed their bridge windows with two M-16s.
'What do you want me to do!' Rufus shouted into his radio.
On the Talbot, Schofield assessed the situation.
The Rufus Plan was always meant to be a last resort—a means by which Schofield could sink the false supertanker if he failed to disarm its missiles.
He stole a glance at the control console and its barricade and suddenly his blood froze.
Demon Larkham was looking directly back at him. He'd spotted them.
The Demon smiled.
'Rufus,' Schofield said. 'Ram us.'
17:42:10.
Demon Larkham's men charged out from behind their barricade, winding their way between the missile silos, their MetalStorm rifles blazing.
Coming after Schofield.
Schofield led Mother and Knight over to a lifeboat positioned beside the open cargo door on the starboard side of the hold.
'Quickly,' he yelled. 'Get in!'
They all dived into the lifeboat, then snapped up to return fire.
The IG-88 men closed in.
Schofield fired hard. So did Mother and Knight, trying to hold them off until Rufus arrived.
But the IG-88 troopers kept advancing.
'Come on, Rufus,' Schofield said aloud. 'Where are you . . . ?'
And then—magnificently—Rufus arrived.
/
It sounded like the end of the world.
The shriek of rending metal, of steel striking steel.
The collision of the two supertankers on the surface of the English Channel, veiled in sleeting rain, was an awesome, awesome sight.
Two of the largest moving objects on the planet—each nearly a thousand feet long and each weighing more than 100,000 tons— collided at ramming speed.
Rufus's stolen tanker, the Eindhoven, ploughed bow-first right into the port flank of the Talbot, hitting it perfectly perpendicularly.
The sharpened bow of the Eindhoven drove like a knife into the side of the Talbot, smashing into it like a battering ram.
The port flank of the Talbot just crumpled inward. Seawater gushed in through the gigantic gash the Eindhoven created in its side.
And like a boxer recoiling from a blow, the entire supertanker rocked wildly in response to the impact.
At first, it rolled to starboard, so great was the force of Rufus's ramming strike. But then as seawater began to enter the Talbot en masse, the missile-firing supertanker tilted dramatically—and fatally—back to port.
At which point it rolled over onto its left-hand side and began to sink.
Fast.
The scene inside the missile hold of the Talbot would have made Noah gulp.
In here, the impact had been a thunderous experience.
Not even Schofield had been prepared for the sheer power of the blow, or the sudden appearance of the Eindhoven's pointed bow thrusting unexpectedly right through the port-side wall of the missile hold.
In response, the entire hold had swayed to starboard, throwing everyone off their feet.
Then seawater began to enter the hold through the gigantic gash—in monumental proportions.
A tidal wave of water, ten feet high and utterly immense in its force, rushed into the hold, swallowing several members of IG-88 in an instant, lifting forklifts and cargo containers and missile parts clear into the air.
The water rushed underneath Schofield's lifeboat, lifting it off its mounts. Schofield immediately released the craft from its davits and gunned the engine.
Within seconds, the hold's floor was completely under water, the water level rising fast.
And as it filled, the Talbot rolled dramatically to port—toward the fatal gash, tilting at least 30 degrees—and Schofield, blasting forward in the motorised lifeboat on the level surface of the water, saw the whole hold all around him start to roll.
17:42:30
From outside, it all made for a very unusual sight.
The Eindhoven was still embedded in the side of the Talbot— while the Talbot, taking on water in incredible quantities, lay foundering half-tilted on its left-hand side, literally hanging off the bow of the Eindhoven.
But so great was the weight of the water rushing into its belly, the Talbot was actually driving the bow of the Eindhoven under the surface as well—as such, the Talbofs long foredeck and bridge tower remained above the waterline, slanted at a steep 30-degree sideways angle, while its left-hand flank drove the Eindhoven's bow relentlessly downward, toward the waves.
On board the Eindhoven, Rufus didn't need to be told what to do. He raced for the Raven, still parked on the foredeck of his tanker, climbed into the cockpit and lifted off into the rain-swept sky.
17:43:30.
Inside the rapidly-filling Talbot, Schofield was moving fast.
In fact, very very fast.
His motorised lifeboat whipped across the surface, slicing in between the now-slanted missile silos with Mother and Knight positioned on its flanks, shooting at their enemies floating in the water. It was like speedboating through a forest of half-fallen trees.
After the impact, Demon Larkham and most of his men had all made for the starboard side of the hold—the high side—the only part of the hold still above water.
Schofield, however, cut a beeline for the control console at the forward end of the missile hold.
17:43:48
17:43:49
17:43:50
His lifeboat carved through the chop, his two loyal shooters blazing away, killing IG-88 men as they whistled by.
The lifeboat came alongside the elevated control console. The wire-frame control console was also tilted at a dramatic angle, barely a foot above the rising waterline.
'Cover me!' Schofield yelled. From where he stood in his lifeboat, he could see the console's illuminated display screen, saw stark red numerals on it ticking downward in hundredths of a second—the countdown to missile launch.
00:01:10.88 00:01:09.88 00:01:08.88
The digitised hundredths of a second whizzed by in such a blur that they looked like 8s.
Schofield pulled his CincLock-VII unit—the one he'd taken from the French—from a waterproof pouch on his vest and once again saw the unit's display.
White and red circles hovered on the touchscreen.