He and Eddie were racing against an imminent nuclear launch. Failing meant not only their deaths but also the loss of one of man’s greatest discoveries. The benefits of the bikinium were too great to let slip away now, and on a personal level, Mercer wouldn’t allow himself to fail; he’d suffered too much in the past week to not see this completed successfully.
“What’s our ETA?”
“About another ten minutes.”
Mercer glanced at the luminous dial of his Tag Heuer. “According to Lurbud’s threat, the John Dory launches in thirty.”
“I’m already ten knots over the safety limits of this bird in these conditions.”
“Make it twenty knots over and that Mai Tai you wanted will be on me.”
“Christ, I could use it now,” Eddie replied miserably as he torqued more power out of the turbofans.
The chopper rocked and jerked in the storm as Rice fought to keep her below the John Dory’s radar. Her rounded nose nearly skimmed the white spume atop the waves.
“Bingo,” Eddie nearly shouted a minute later. “Target dead ahead.”
“What’s the range?”
“One mile,” Eddie said, glancing again at the neon blue radar screen.
“That’s got to be her. Take us down. I’ll swim the rest of the way. When I jump out, take off again, but be ready to pick me up when that ship blows. Approach from the stern and make sure no one else gets aboard except me and the man I’ll have with me.”
“I told you, we don’t have enough fuel to get back to Hawaii.”
“That doesn’t matter. Someone will figure out we’re here eventually.” Mercer didn’t want to tell Eddie that if the SEAL failed to get through to Pearl Harbor, the President would launch his own nuclear strike against the volcano in just three hours.
“You’re crazy, you know that?”
“It’s the main reason I can’t get life insurance.”
The Sea King’s engines wound down and the rotors whipped the sea into a salty mist as Rice brought her in for a water landing. Mercer waited at the open doorway of the chopper, sweating in the wet suit, the two large air tanks bowing his back. Around his waist he wore a leaded belt and a waterproof bag containing some other items borrowed from the SEALs. A razor-sharp dive knife was strapped to his right calf. The whole time Mercer had struggled into the gear, he had wracked his brain trying to recall everything that Spook had taught him about diving all those years ago in that flooded New York mine.
As soon as the rounded underhull of the Sea King touched the churned-up water, Mercer bit down on his mouthpiece, sucked in a breath of cool air, and launched himself out of the chopper.
The water was warmer than he expected. At first Mercer sank below the surface, then he adjusted his buoyancy by detaching one of the lead weights. He took a bearing from the compass on his wrist and, still underwater, started swimming toward the John Dory.
Mercer had made two potentially fatal assumptions when he launched himself from the Sea King. One was that the ship they had picked up on radar was, in fact, the John Dory. There was a definite possibility that the craft ahead of him was an entirely different ship, one innocently steaming through the area. The second assumption concerned the hull of the Soviet submarine/ freighter. If there was no gap between the submarine’s hull and the fake sides of the freighter, he would have no way of gaining access to the vessel. If he was wrong about either guess, he would be dead long before the Russian missile detonated.
After a few minutes of swimming, Mercer felt a vibration through the water — the pounding engines of a large ship.
Adding a little air to the compensator, he surfaced on the crest of a swell. Through the rain-lashed night, he made out the running lights of a large freighter about two hundred yards ahead of him. His breath hissed through the regulator, rain and spume splattered against his mask.
He ducked back under the surface and continued to doggedly swim toward the John Dory. The backs of his legs were beginning to ache and his breathing was labored.
The sound of the ship’s props filled the silence of the sea, but the vessel itself was still hidden in the gloom. Mercer was hesitant to turn on his dive light for fear of being detected by a lookout on deck, but at last he took the chance.
The knife-edge bow of the John Dory was no more than ten feet away and bearing down on him at eight knots. Mercer dove hard, but his reaction came an instant too late. The steel plates of the ship’s bow scraped along his body, shredding the thick rubber of his wet suit. The thick crust of barnacles grated against Mercer’s skin like a thousand tiny paring knives.
Mercer screamed into his mouthpiece as pain shot through his system, racing through his body to explode against the top of his skull. He felt the gray blanket of unconsciousness falling over his mind, but managed to push it aside by sheer force of will. He wouldn’t allow pain to stop him now. He had only a few seconds in which to find a handhold of some sort before the vessel passed him. And if that happened, he had no chance of ever catching her.
Training the dive light upward, Mercer recognized the smooth curve of a submarine’s hull. At least he had the right ship. He flashed the light to starboard and saw a space between the freighter silhouette and the sub’s hull. He swam into the gap.
When his head broached the surface, he spat out his mouthpiece and gulped down the warm humid air trapped between the steel plating and the sub. The water in the four-foot-wide gap was churned in a vortex that carried Mercer along with the ship.
Since he did not have the luxury of time, he didn’t bother glancing at his watch. He was certain that the sub was getting into position to fire the missile. He immediately set to work. The magnetic limpet mines he’d pilfered from the SEALs’ stores stuck to the hull with a quiet snap; the timers had all been set, and as each one made contact with the sub’s hull, it went active.
As soon as the explosive charges were planted, Mercer began climbing the spiderweb of steel girders that locked the bogus freighter hull to the submarine. Because of his injured ribs and the scuba gear hanging from his back the climb was exhausting. He wished he could dump the dive equipment, but if he hoped to escape with Valery Borodin, he needed it. At the top of the girders, he paused to look at his watch. Four minutes until launch.
Shit.
The sharp steel struts had ripped into his hands; blood poured from the wounds and dripped onto the deck where Mercer stood, just forward of the submarine’s conning tower. The empty superstructure of the freighter soared thirty feet above his head. The cavernous space echoed with the hiss of water sliding across her hull and the beat of her props. The nearly total darkness smelled of diesel oil and saltwater. As quietly as possible, Mercer stashed his scuba gear and dive fins in a corner.
Two minutes.
He crept up the ladder of the rounded conning tower. As he neared the top, he made out muted voices. The language was unmistakably Russian.
He popped his head over the top of the conning tower and gave a friendly smile to the two shocked officers standing at the open hatch.
“Take me to your leader,” Mercer grinned. Exhaustion and the adrenaline he was using as a substitute for real courage had made him giddy.
The two officers produced pistols in record time, leveling them at Mercer’s head. One of them shouted down into the sub. Though Mercer did not speak Russian, he assumed that the captain had just been informed that they had a prisoner. Prompted by curt gestures from a pistol barrel, Mercer went down the hatchway and into the Soviet submarine.