Patriot Games

Highland's idea, something to soften him up, make him grateful to the cop. That was why both his shots had gone into Highland's guts. There was no sense in letting him die fast. But Miller didn't tell his boss that. That sort of thing was not professional. Kevin might not approve.

'Where's that Ryan bastard?' Sean asked.

'Home in America.' O'Donnell checked his watch and subtracted six hours. 'Fast asleep in his bed, I wager.'

'He set us back a year, Kevin,' Miller pointed out. 'A whole bloody year!'

'I thought you'd say that. Later, Sean.'

The younger man nodded and took another swig of whiskey. 'Where are we going?'

'Someplace warmer than this!'

The Cenlac drifted before the wind. As soon as the last terrorist had left, the captain had sent his crew below to check for bombs. They'd found none, but the Captain knew that could just mean they were hidden, and a ship was the perfect place to hide anything. His engineer and another sailor were trying to repair one of his diesels while his three deckhands rigged a sea anchor that now streamed over the stern to steady the ferry on the rolling seas. The wind drove the boat closer to land. That did give them more moderate seas, but to touch the coast in this weather was death for all aboard. He thought he might launch one of his lifeboats, but even that entailed dangers that he prayed he might yet avoid.

He stood alone in the pilothouse and looked at his radios—smashed. With them he could call for help, a tug, a merchantman, anything that could put a line on his bow and pull him to safe harbor. But all three of his radio transmitters were wrecked beyond repair by a whole clip of machine gun bullets.

Why did the bastards leave us alive? he asked himself in quiet, helpless rage. His engineer appeared at the door.

'Can't fix it. We just don't have the tools we need. The bastards knew exactly what to break.'

'They knew exactly what to do, all right,' the Captain agreed.

'We're late for Yarmouth. Perhaps—'

'They'll write it off to the weather. We'll be on the rocks before they get their thumbs out.' The Captain turned and opened a drawer. He withdrew a flare pistol and a plastic box of star shells. 'Two-minute intervals. I'm going to see to the passengers. If nothing happens in… forty minutes, we launch the boats.'

'But we'll kill the wounded getting them in—'

'We'll lose bloody everyone if we don't!' The Captain went below.

One of the passengers was a veterinarian, it turned out. Five people were wounded, and the doctor was trying to treat them, assisted by a member of the crew. It was wet and noisy on the vehicle deck. The ferry was rolling twenty degrees, and a window had been smashed by the seas. One of his deck crew was struggling to put canvas over the hole. The Captain saw that he would probably succeed, then went to the wounded.

'How are they?'

The veterinarian looked up, the anguish plain on his face. One of his patients was going to die, and the other four…

'We may have to move them to the lifeboats soon.'

'It'll kill them. I—'

'Radio,' one of them said through his teeth.

'Lie still,' the doctor said.

'Radio,' he persisted. The man's hands were clasping bandages to his abdomen, and it was all he could do not to scream out his agony.

'The bastards wrecked them,' the Captain said. 'I'm sorry—we don't have one.'

'The truck—a radio in the fucking truck!'

'What?'

'Police,' Highland gasped. 'Police van—prisoner transport… radio…'

'Holy Jesus!' He looked at the van—the radio might not work from inside the ferry. The Captain ran back to the pilothouse and gave an order to his engineer.

It was an easy enough task. The engineer used his tools to remove the VHF radio from the truck. He was able to hook it up to one of the ferry's antennas, and the Captain was using it within five minutes.

'Who is this?' the police dispatcher asked.

'This is the Cenlac, you bloody fool. Our marine radios are out. We are disabled and adrift, three miles south of Lisle Court, and we need assistance at once!'

'Oh. Very well. Stand by.' The desk sergeant in Lymington was no stranger to the sea. He lifted his telephone and ran his finger down a list of emergency numbers till he found the right one. Two minutes later he was back to the ferry.

'We have a tugboat heading towards you right now. Please confirm your position three miles south of Lisle Court.'

'That is correct, but we are drifting northeast. Our radar is still operating. We can guide the tug in. For Christ's good sake, tell him to hurry. We have wounded aboard.'

The Sergeant bolted upright in his chair. 'Say again—repeat your last.'

The Captain explained in as few words as possible now that help was en route to his ship. Ashore, the Sergeant called his superior, then the local superintendent. Another call went to London. Fifteen minutes later, a Royal Navy flight crew was warming up a Sea King rescue helicopter at Gosport. They flew first to the naval hospital at Portsmouth to pick up a doctor and a medical orderly, then reversed course into the teeth of the gale. It took twenty dreadful minutes to find her, the pilot fighting his aircraft through the buffering winds while the copilot used the look-down radar to pick the ferry's profile out from the sea return on the scope. That was the easy part.

He had to give his aircraft more than forty knots of forward speed just to hold her steady over the boat—and the wind never stayed the same for more than a few seconds, veering a few degrees in direction, changing ten knots in speed as he struggled with the controls to maintain something like a hover over her. Aft, the crew chief wrapped the rescue sling around the doctor first, holding him at the open door. Over the intercom, the pilot told the chief to lower away. At least they had a fairly large target. Two crewmen waited on the top deck of the ferry to receive the doctor. They'd never done it before, but the helicopter crew had, dropping him rapidly to ten feet over the rocking deck, then more easily the last few feet. One crewman tackled the doctor and detached the collar. The medical orderly came next, cursing fate and nature all the way down. He too arrived safely, and the helicopter shot upward to get away from the dangerous surface.

'Surgeon Lieutenant Dilk, Doctor.'

'Welcome. I'm afraid my practice is usually limited to horses and dogs,' the vet replied at once. 'One sucking chest, the other three are belly wounds. One died—I did my best, but—' there wasn't much else to say. 'Fucking murderers!'

The sound of a diesel horn announced the arrival of the tugboat. Lieutenant Dilk didn't bother looking while the Captain and crew caught the messenger line and hauled in a towing wire. Together, the doctors administered morphine and worked to stabilize the wounded.

The helicopter was already gone southwest, a grimmer purpose to their second mission for the day. Another helicopter, this one with armed Marines aboard, was lifting off from Gosport while the first searched the surface with radar and eyes for a black ten-meter zodiac-type rubber boat. Orders had come from the Home Office with record speed, and for once they were orders that men in uniform were trained and equipped to handle: Locate and destroy.

'The radar's hopeless,' the copilot reported over the intercom.

The pilot nodded agreement. On a calm day they'd have a good chance to pick the rubber boat out, but the return from the confused seas and the flying spray made radar detection impossible.

'They can't have gone too far, and visibility isn't all that bad from up here. We'll do a quartering search and eyeball the bastards.'

'Where do we start?'

'Off the Needles, then inward to Christchurch Bay, then we'll work west if we have to. We'll catch the bastards before they make landfall and have the bootnecks meet them on the beach. You heard the orders.'

'Indeed.' The copilot activated his tactical navigation display to set up the search pattern. Ninety minutes later it was plain that they'd searched in the wrong place. Surprised—baffled—the helicopters returned to Gosport