Meanwhile, the port side gang reached Chris’s passageway and lit up the air around him. He stepped aft, out of their firing lane, but it occurred to him that the portside gang might circle around and trap him, so he went farther aft, returning outside to the quarterdeck, where the OOD and POOW imposters lay dead. Now he had more room to maneuver, but so did the enemy.
Chris opened a starboard hatch facing aft and went through. When he reached the first ladder, he descended two decks. Blood splatter stained the deck, bulkhead, and overhead. As he changed directions and headed to the bow, toward the CIC, a voice shouted behind him in broken English. “Stop! You, stop!”
Chris turned into another passageway athwart ship and ran to the port side, desperately clinging to the increasingly impossible hope of sneaking into the CIC and stopping the missiles. He took a ladder up but only ascended one deck before he heard someone coming down the ladder from above. Chris stepped off — to the approaching sound of more tangos.
41
He glanced at his watch: T-minus twenty minutes. He hurried out of the passageway and into the crew’s berthing. His feet stuck to dried blood that covered the deck. Crimson stained the yellow privacy curtains on racks where napping sailors now slept permanently. He followed the blood smears on the deck that led to the lounge. He opened the door and aimed inside — more blood. Three sailors lay dead on the couch, and others were heaped on the floor like refuse. The TV was still on. Those who didn’t have weekend duty and had families were at home, while those with duty and those with no family were on the ship, dead. Anger burned through Chris’s arteries.
He poked his head out the starboard side of the berthing and looked forward — nothing. Then he checked aft — Professor Mordet’s head was poking out from a passageway, looking the other way. With only a fraction of a second to decide and fury boiling inside, Chris took the shot — and missed.
Mordet pulled back, then his head — and a submachine gun — reappeared low to the ground. He fired.
Chris backed into the sailors’ berthing.
“Ron Hickok taught you Flash-Kill, did he not?” Mordet called.
“He did. But he refused to teach you. That’s why you killed him. You thought if you ate him, you’d learn.”
“Très bien, mon ami.”
“I can’t imagine you killed him in a fair gunfight, and I can’t imagine he’d be taken alive, so how’d he die?”
“Explosives in his pillow with a pressure detonator,” Mordet said. “It did not take a large amount of explosives; even so, his head blew clean off.”
Chris’s gut knotted up. “So tell me, after you ate him, what did you learn?”
“Everything,” Mordet said. “The strength of my belief to launch those missiles is stronger than your strength of belief to stop me.”
“You didn’t learn Flash-Kill,” Chris replied knowingly.
“What did you learn?”
“I learned that people like you are too impressed with their own bullshit.” Chris leaned out of the berthing and fired twice. The first shot caught Mordet in the shoulder, and the second just missed his skull. He made no sound.
Chris’s pistol was empty, so he ejected the empty magazine and smoothly loaded his last. Then he hurried quietly on the balls of his feet through the berthing. He came out on the port side and rushed through the passageway to an intersection where he faced an athwart passageway and hoped to shoot Mordet in the back, but the professor was gone. Chris could follow the blood trail, but that had probably occurred to Mordet, too, and Mordet could be waiting to greet him.
As much as he wanted to kill Professor Mordet, it wasn’t his primary objective; preventing the missile launch was. He checked his watch: T-minus five minutes.
If I can’t reach the CIC to stop the launch, what else can I do?
On the starboard side, three tangos spotted him, and he blasted at them. They returned fire. Chris was quicker, more accurate, and more mobile. Although he won the gunfight, he’d spent valuable ammo doing it and only had half a magazine left.
He crept up a nearby ladder. Before he reached the deck above, Mordet appeared on the deck below and fired a burst up at him, missing. The clanging sound and the sparks from each round hitting metal were terrifying. Breathe.
He pushed onward, clearing the top of the ladder, then turned, aimed below, and squeezed off a two-round burst. In the narrow confines of a passageway armed only with a pistol that was low on ammo, he was trapped. He tried to conserve ammo, but Professor Mordet busted caps at him like the flames of perdition.
Looking for more space to maneuver or some other tactical advantage, he opened a hatch and stepped outside onto the main deck. One of Mordet’s shots struck Chris’s pistol and knocked it out of his hand. As he bent over to pick it up, Mordet burst through the door.
Chris picked up his weapon, but Mordet was already pulling the trigger. Chris’s heart sank.
Click.
Mordet was out of ammo. Chris aimed and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Something was wrong with his pistol. He backed away from Mordet to buy enough time to clear his weapon malfunction.
Professor Mordet seized the moment and charged Chris, who quickly tapped the bottom of the magazine and racked the slide. He reacquired Mordet in his sights and fired. Nothing. Mordet hit Chris like a middle linebacker, and they both landed hard on a cell of the Tomahawk missile’s Vertical Launch System (VLS) imbedded in the deck. The oxygen rushed out of Chris’s lungs.
Mordet pinned Chris under him and spoke in a trancelike euphoria: “Souls must eat souls, that’s how souls grow.” He opened his mouth.
“Eat this.” Chris pistol-slapped Mordet on the side of the head, and then Chris rose to his feet.
Although dazed, Mordet struggled to his feet, too.
Chris holstered his pistol.
“You have become weaker, and I have become stronger,” Mordet said. He punched, but Chris sidestepped, caught his wrist with one hand, and pushed his elbow with the other until Mordet’s bone made a sickening snap. He cried out. Chris stomped at an angle on the outside of Mordet’s knee, and the bone sounded off like a firecracker. Mordet screamed as he sank to the deck. Sobbing, he propped himself up with his good arm as he tried to use his good leg to stand.
Chris side-stomped his standing arm, fracturing it near the elbow and laying him out again. Then Chris picked up Mordet’s good leg and kneeled on the outside of his kneecap until it popped. Mordet shrieked.
Mordet twisted his head around until he could see his opponent. Tears streamed down Mordet’s face, but he forced a smile. “Now you are going to break my neck?”
“Now you’re going to realize where you are.”
Mordet turned his head. He saw he was lying across the ship’s missile launching cells.
“You can call off the launch,” Chris said. “Or you can fry. It’s your choice.”
Mordet chuckled. “Bravo, bravo. You do not disappoint. And I promise not to disappoint you. I will feast on the souls of the dead and rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”
“Before, you said you were the Teumessian fox that can never be caught. Now you say you’re a phoenix about to rise from the ashes. Which are you?”
Mordet seemed puzzled.
“Are you the fox or the bird?” Chris asked.
Mordet stammered, “I–I-I’m…”
“You’re a fool. Soon to be a cremated fool.”
An alarm sounded overhead from a PA system. “What’s that?” Mordet asked.