“Admiral Lasko made me understand how important this is.” He flipped the pistol in his hand and presented it butt first to Mercer. “If at all possible, I would like it back.”
The antique weapon now hung in a waterproof pouch from Mercer’s belt, its two magazines loaded from Booker’s stash of ammunition.
The tracking chip Sykes had secreted on the PBY indicated the plane had landed for an hour at a spot directly on the equator, two hundred miles east of Tarawa, so they were heading there now. The PBY had taken off again and was currently sitting just off the island of Tuvalu, presumably its role in the operation complete.
For the first leg of the rendezvous flight, they cruised at comfortable speed and altitude, but the plan Mercer and Book had devised would require some fancy piloting as soon as they neared the operational limits of the Akademik Zhukovsky’s radar. The Osprey’s copilot kept an eye on the threat board; as soon as they were painted by the tracking ship’s radar, the pilot would drop them to the deck so fast the operators on the former Soviet tracking ship would assume they’d seen a false return.
Two hours into the flight, after full night had settled in, that’s exactly what happened. Without warning, the engines seemed to die, and the plane fell out of the sky like a brick. The Osprey had such poor lift on its own that without constant thrust from the engines it went into free fall. They dropped fourteen thousand feet so fast that Mercer felt weightless, and certain they would never recover. Booker was actually whooping like a cowboy, and even the young loadmaster seemed to be having the time of his life.
It was only at the last possible second that the engines began to take the strain, only this time they were partially translated for vertical flight. When the big rotors began chewing into the air, the express ride to hell came to a gentle end, with the Osprey just fifty feet above the waves and cruising along at a mere thirty knots.
A minute later the pilot spoke to the loadmaster over his intercom helmet, and the young man unclipped from his seat and approached Mercer. “Pilot says we have the fuel to make it to your target flying low and slow like this, but after you jump we can only fly this way for another ten minutes before we’re going to need to transition back to normal flight. Egg-beating like we are right now sucks up the JP-8. There’s a chance we’ll be back on their radar then, and your cover will blow.”
“Understood. Once we’re aboard the jig’s up anyway.”
The kid gave him a thumbs-up and went back to his seat.
A few minutes later, the young Marine cocked his head like a dog hearing a piercing whistle while he listened to another report from the pilot. He nodded as if he could be seen and unstrapped himself once again. “Pilot says we just got a radio query from a boat calling itself the Jarwyne. Our gear tells us it’s your target. Anyway they bought our line about us being a cargo ship. We’re moving at the right height and speed that we look like a ship’s superstructure on their radar. Pretty slick, huh?”
Mercer didn’t tell the kid that it was his idea to approach the Zhokovsky at night like this. “Very slick,” he said over the racket.
They would fly about four miles west of the Russian ship, supposedly as they were making their way to Hawaii with a load of containers. It was far enough to suppress the distinctive echoing thrump of the rotors but not so far that Booker and Mercer would be floundering around the tropics.
Since they had arrived in the Pacific, days ago, Mercer had kept his mind focused on putting an end to this. Abe’s ghost was about to find, if not peace, then a little justice. Now, as they were almost at their target, doubt began to creep up on him — doubts about himself, his ability to carry out his self-assigned mission, and doubts about his right to mete out punishment as judge and executioner. And like other times when these feelings surfaced, he crushed them down. No sane person would question the need to protect himself from a rabid animal, and that’s what these fanatics had proven themselves to be.
He thought about the mercenary and about how that chance encounter had changed their lives. For Mercer it was the beginning of a lifetime of service to his country, in ways he’d never thought possible. Since that first firefight, he’d taken up arms a hundred times to defend the defenseless, and he did so without question or need for recognition. That day had made him a better person, someone willing to step in when others stepped back. It had been a momentous point in his life. He imagined it had altered the South African too. He had seen the pain in the other man’s eyes, and the savagery with which he had pursued the lightning stones. A lifetime of physical disfigurement had clearly had psychological ramifications. That one shot was a single act of both creation and destruction…of the good Mercer had perpetrated, and the evil from which the South African hadn’t turned away. Mercer knew the final echo of that bullet’s journey was about to die out. Soon one or both of them were going to die. There was simply no other alternative.
A red light flashed next to the rear cargo ramp.
“Game time,” Book shouted.
Mercer purged all thoughts of the past, and he stood with Book against the bulkhead.
A minute later, the young loadmaster lowered the rear cargo door. A wash of humidity and spray whipped into the cargo bay. They each picked up one of the carrying handles of the used Jet Ski they’d bought in Fiji. Mercer struggled. They shuffled forward until they were standing over the precipice. Fifty feet didn’t seem that high, and thirty knots didn’t seem that fast, until you were looking backward out of an aircraft from which you had to jump. Then the ocean looked miles below and flashed past in a dizzying blur of speed.
As the aircraft came directly abreast of the distant tracking ship, the pilot slowed almost to a stop and dipped the Osprey thirty feet closer to the sea.
The two men were grateful for the courtesy. They leapt in perfect synchrony, and just before they crashed into the phosphorescent water, they both pushed off of the Jet Ski so they landed well clear of the 250-pound watercraft.
Mercer came up spitting water and swam over to the bobbing machine. Booker reached it a second later. They checked that the duffel strapped to the old Kawasaki was in place. Running without lights, the Osprey was just a distant drone that quickly faded to silence.
“Ready?” Sykes asked.
“Let’s do this.”
While the Jet Ski was capable of speeds in excess of thirty knots, the two men clinging to it kept it humming at just about five. They didn’t want to generate excessive noise, and they certainly didn’t want to be noticed on radar. “Slow and steady” was how Book proposed they reach the Akademik Zhukovsky, and that’s just what they did. It was awkward for the two men to cling to the slender little craft, designed to be ridden by one person standing on the rear deck, but they made it work. It rode so low that occasional waves broke over its bow and doused the duo, but with dive masks in place it was nothing more than an annoyance.
It took a little under an hour to cover the distance, and Booker checked his wrist compass constantly. With the former Russian ship running as dark as their Osprey had been, they only realized they had arrived when they were almost on her. There was no moon, and while the stars were bright, the big ship seemed to have been swallowed whole by the night.
They were less than four hundred yards away before Mercer could see that the slight disruption of the star field along the horizon was actually their target. He pointed it out to Sykes so he could adjust their bearing slightly. With its three giant dish antennas pointing skyward, the ship looked massively top heavy. As they drew closer, they could see bits of light leaking from a few portholes. Book killed the Jet Ski, and for another ten minutes they watched the Zhukovsky from a distance, looking for any movement that gave away the presence of roaming guards. They saw nothing except a shadowy figure in the darkened wheelhouse who twice walked out onto the wing bridge. At one point another man had opened a hatch and stood at the rail to enjoy a late-night cigarette; when he was finished, he pitched the butt into the sea so it looked like a tiny meteorite that winked out when it hit the water.