For a brief moment, all was silent as Alexis struggled to remain conscious. Her gray, swimming vision lied to her, and she stumbled as she reached for something to hold on to. Her fingers tapped across the deck grating, touching burning lubricant and broken glass. The acidic smell of leaking fuel filled her nose and lungs. Nevermind that… the entire ship had shattered itself across the back of the submarine just aft of the conning tower, large scarred patches of the matte-black steel skin of the sub showing through gaping holes in the Fool’s Errand’s hull.
She crawled up the main staircase, trying to keep underneath the growing billows of black smoke. Her fingers touched the Winchester shotgun as if it’d been placed there as a sign from the Almighty himself. God wanted her to fight.
Rolling on her back and cradling the shotgun in her arms, she racked a round into the chamber. She pushed herself to her feet and made her way to the bridge, surveying the jungle of hanging wires and wrecked consoles around her. Dr. Nassiri looked up at her, eyes wide, still in shock.
“What do we do?” asked Alexis. Jonah was already gone, to where she did not know. But some part of her knew he had a plan.
“We follow Jonah,” croaked Dr. Nassiri. He glanced at her shotgun, then down at the 9mm pistol he had in his own hand. Billowing black smoke filled the bridge, and Alexis tried to force open one of the doors. A twisted frame kept it jammed in place.
Dr. Nassiri didn’t wait, he crawled on top of the consoles and through the shattered front windscreen. Alexis followed, more falling than stepping out of the window towards the bow of the crashed yacht, shotgun in hand, intense sunlight splaying across her face as she stepped outside. The yacht had obliterated the quad gun and gunner.
Alexis kicked a deck chair out of the way, winced and pulled a piece of glass out of her leg. At least she wasn’t hit, not as far as she could tell. Adrenaline could do funny things to the brain, she actually felt pretty fucking good right now.
Jonah’s SCUBA gear lay scattered across the deck. One of the anti-aircraft rounds had pierced the rear of a trimix tank in the ensuing chaos, detonating it and putting a massive splintered crater in one corner and embedding jagged shrapnel in the deck, bulkheads and chairs.
And then there he was. Jonah stood perched on the side of the yacht, 1911 pistol in hand, taking a perfect overlook position on the conning tower at just ten feet away. He took a bead on the hatch, waiting for it to move, twitch, anything that would justify sending a hollow-point round through the brainpan of first man to pop his head out like a whack-a-mole.
A wave of uncontrollable laughter washed over Alexis.
Sorry Dad, her brain spat out between shaking giggles. Accidentally wrapped the family Volkswagen around a telephone pole. It didn’t make sense, which made it all the funnier, so much that her eyes teared up and every impulse to fight the inappropriate laughter just made it that much more intense.
Apparently sensing a moment to prepare, Jonah unzipped the front of his wetsuit halfway down his chest, grabbed a pressurized pony reserve bottle of pure oxygen from the deck, and stuffed it in.
Taking a position behind him with Dr. Nassiri at her side, Alexis sincerely hoped if Jonah was shot, it’d be in the heart or head, not in the pony bottle. An explosion like that, so close to his soft tissue and hollow organs would blow him to pieces. Hell, it would be pretty spectacular, probably enough to kill her and the doctor as well. The potential energy stored in air tanks, even in the little ones, was substantial.
The hatch in front of him flew open, articulated by an unseen hydraulic system. All Alexis could see was a Yankees ballcap. The mercenary didn’t even make it to eye level before Jonah pulled the trigger. There was no way Jonah could miss, not at this range. The shot impacted just above and to the left of the white Y, splatting skull against the back of the hatch. The body tumbled down and out of view, landing below with an audible, sickening thump. Jonah hurled the pony bottle after him, hoping it’d go unnoticed with the chaos of a dead man dropping in from above.
Fucking whack-a-mole, thought Alexis as she watched Jonah take a step back, launch into a running start and leap though the air towards the conning tower, gun in hand. He landed with difficulty, catching the railings right in his ribs, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He slid over the hatch entrance and looked down, handgun at the ready. She watched as he took aim at the pony bottle and fired and could feel the shock wave from fifteen feet away as the conning tower shook and belched out a big cloud of white oxygenated vapor.
Jonah stole one glance towards Dr. Nassiri and Alexis with an intense look that made Alexis cold and hot all over, and then he disappeared into the submarine. She heard gunshots, multiple weapons of multiple calibers. The American was in it now, a straight-up, close-quarters, old-school gunfight.
“What do we do?” asked Dr. Nassiri.
Alexis didn’t know and knew the doctor didn’t either. She looked behind her. The ragged hulk of the Fool’s Errand had already given up the ghost, its shattered frame slowly slipping beneath the waves and pulling the submarine down with it. They wouldn’t have their little perch for long. “We follow Jonah,” said Alexis. Forcing her muscles to unfreeze, she pushed herself back, launched into a run and leapt for the conning tower. Unlike Jonah — and with no small amount of pride — she landed perfectly, both feet on the tower, one hand on the railing and one on the shotgun. Must have been all those dance and cheerleading practices before she knew how explain to her mother that she loathed everything about them.
Twelve feet below, in the red-lit control room of the submarine, the mercenary with the Yankees hat lay on his back, one dead, accusing eye staring directly up at Alexis. An entire quarter of his head was completely missing, as his still-struggling heart pumped a seemingly endless supply of blood into a gathering pool. Dr. Nassir made the leap too, landing awkwardly beside her and almost losing his handgun in the process.
Alexis straddled the hatchway, crossed her arms like a mummy, and simply allowed herself to drop. This was going to hurt, a lot.
She fell fucking hard, landing awkwardly on top of the body of the head-shot man, rolling to the side, trying to take some of the momentum laterally without breaking an ankle.
Beside her writhed the two sailors Jonah had hit with the exploding bottle trick. Both were dead, but they didn’t know it yet. They trembled on the ground, mouths foaming with pink-flecked bubbles, lungs destroyed by the concussive force. Alexis had never seen it before; but some deep part of her knew the men had seconds before they lost consciousness, minutes before they were dead. The horror overwhelmed her, and in that moment she would have done anything in her power to save them.
Alexis heard movement from her right and swiveled the shotgun to take aim at a young man, dressed in the horizontal stripes of a Russian sailor’s uniform halfway slumped over a pilot’s console. The young man held his chest, eyes closed in pain, unarmed. The Russian sailor was a slight, good looking man, the type that could have modeled if he were taller. A picture of him wearing a vintage sailor suit in a Ralph Lauren ad flashed before her eyes. Jonah had put two rounds directly into his sternum, throwing him back against the instrumentation panel with a violent impact, splattering blood across the dials. He sputtered, coughing up blood, as he compulsively touched his wounds, stared at his hands, and touched his wounds again.
“Alexis!” shouted a voice from above the conning tower. She looked up to see Dr. Nassiri leaning in like he were at the top of a wishing well. Too scared to shout back at him, she urgently waved him down. She heard a gunshot, felt the fragment of lead fly by her face, heard the zing of a too-close bullet. Gunshots chattered away from the unseen bow section of the submarine. Some of them sounded like automatic rifles — Jonah wouldn’t last long against that volume of firepower.