Charon's landing

On the other hand, Mercer was in no condition to be part of their assault. In fact, he shouldn’t even be breathing right now considering what he’d been through. He was spent. His body was one large aching bruise, and his shoulders, legs, and chest were beaten to the point where he felt light-headed. He had no illusions of himself in a firefight. His reactions were slow, his reflexes dulled by exhaustion. It took him a few moments to notice Krutchfield tapping on his arm.

“Message from Devil Fish,” Krutchfield shouted into Mercer’s ear. “Their sonar says we’re about five miles behind our target and about seven from the tanker. Like you said, this is going to be tight.”

“What’s your plan?”

“Basically, come up next to them, and when we’re abeam, open fire at the same time two of my men jump from this boat to theirs.”

“And if you miss everyone with the first barrage and they manage to radio a warning to the Arctica?”

Krutchfield grinned his boyish smile. He was really loving this. “On my command, the Tallahassee is going to jam every radio transmission within a fifty-mile radius. There’re going to be some pissed off disc jockeys in a few minutes.”

The Juan de Fuca Strait here was wide, more like a broad lake than a strait, forests and cliffs towering on both sides but so far away they appeared to be held at bay by the surging water of the channel. In a different time, under different circumstances, Mercer would have enjoyed the ride. He grimly held on and watched the narrows before them, hoping to spot the telltale wake of the terrorists’ boat. Mercer used the last few moments before contact to borrow some 9mm ammunition from one of the SEALs and transfer it into the clip of Kerikov’s pistol.

“There!” Hauser shouted, his trained eyes finding the distant rescue boat much quicker than those of the younger men. He had a much stronger vested interest in saving the Petromax Arctica /Southern Cross. To the SEALs, this was another hot op, but to him it was personal. She was his ship, his command.

From this distance, the boat was just a white dot on the gray water, its wake like a ghost image behind it. The tanker was still beyond visual range. It was impossible for those on the fleeing craft to see them. The black hull of the SEAL boat was all but lost amid the swells, its unusual silhouette making it all but invisible from beyond five hundred yards. But Krutchfield wasn’t taking any chances. He lifted the radio to his lips as soon as he spotted the boat.

“Devil Fish, this is Mud Skipper. It’s lights-out time. Repeat, it’s lights-out time. Give us seven minutes, monitor, and if there is no contact, jam again until you hear that tanker breaking up. At that point, go to condition Bravo.”

“What’s condition Bravo?” Mercer asked.

“The Tallahassee surfaces, targets the tanker with an MK48 torpedo, and finds out if these assholes are willing to die for their cause.”

Mercer didn’t feel like pointing out that torpedoing the tanker would accomplish the terrorists’ goals for them. But he could not remain silent. “Don’t tell me if you have a condition Charley. I don’t want to know.” He fingered the pistol in his hands, absently clicking the safety.

“Lieutenant, I have an idea,” Hauser said just before they were spotted by the pickup boat. It took only an instant for him to explain and everyone to agree.

They came up to the hurtling craft. She was a fat-hulled pleasure boat, her white freeboards badly discolored by years in the murky waters of the North Pacific, her upper works weathered by the region’s notorious summer rains. She looked tired, and it was no surprise that at twenty knots, her engines were grinding out as much speed as she could muster. Because the terrorist team hadn’t had enough time to make proper arrangements since being shifted from San Francisco, the owner of the vessel was stuffed into a fore storage locker, the contents of his skull adhering his corpse to the fiberglass walls. The men who’d stolen the boat, the crew spirited to Vancouver on Southern Coasting and Lightering’s executive jet to assist JoAnn Riggs, were taking no chances that they would ever be connected to the destruction of the supertanker.

The SEALs’ boat closed the gap between itself and the cabin cruiser so quickly that the navy commandos had to scramble to get themselves into position. Crouching behind the gunwale didn’t offer them any protection if they encountered return fire, but they were invisible as the boat cut into the wake of the cruiser, sluing around until the two vessels were running parallel. Captain Lyle Hauser stood at the helm of the assault boat with Mercer, each looking relaxed in their civilian clothes. Hauser lazily throttled back the twin outboards until both boats were traveling at the same speed, only a few feet separating them, as if to say to the men on the white cruiser, “Hey, look at my new toy.”

On the cruiser, the three men huddled in the flying bridge looked startled when they saw the sleek craft pull up next to them. To allay their fears, Mercer and Hauser waved enthusiastically, smiling as if this were nothing more than a pleasurable afternoon jaunt. Krutchfield and his SEALs were still out of sight.

“What’s the layout?” Krutchfield was crouched behind Mercer, a machine pistol in his hands.

Mercer kept his smile in place as he spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I see three men on the bridge. Arabs, I’d guess. No visible weapons, but all of them are wearing windbreakers that could conceal just about anything. It looks like there is at least one more in the cabin below. I see movement in one of the small windows. I can’t tell if he has a gun.”

“SEALs, we go in thirty seconds,” Krutchfield called quietly to his team. “Captain Hauser, ease us forward by about twenty feet, and when I yell out, bring us back abeam and put us right against her side.”

Hauser acknowledged the order by grabbing the throttles. Instantly, the attack boat pulled ahead of the cruiser, cutting through the wedge of water that peeled off her bow. Mercer waved again but got no response.

The timing of the SEAL commandos was uncanny. Krutchfield hadn’t even shouted when the boat’s regular helmsman bumped Hauser from the conn and burped the engines, bringing them back alongside the weathered cabin cruiser. The three men on the pleasure boat’s deck turned in unison as they started to overtake the odd- looking craft that had just passed them. But by the time they suspected anything was amiss, three of the SEALs had appeared over the gunwale and opened fire while Krutchfield and another commando leaped the narrow gap between the two speeding craft.

The H amp;K MP-5s the SEALs carried whined like buzz saws, pouring a hundred rounds into the cruiser in just a few seconds, blowing off pieces of fiberglass and worn woodwork, dicing the three men at the controls. There was a steady pulse of return fire from the boat’s lower cabin, the distinctive chattering crash of an AK-47. Krutchfield’s partner was caught halfway through his leap to the cruiser, the Russian-manufactured weapon stitching across his Kevlar body armor. None of the bullets pierced the vest’s ballistic material, but the hydrostatic shock tossed him into the empty space between the boats, his body vanishing in the clouds of cordite smoke that fouled the air. He hit the water with a bone-breaking splash, but his scream went unheard as the running battle continued.

Another burst from the SEALs tore a jagged hole in the hull around the porthole where the shots had originated. There was a brief scream piercing the sounds of automatic fire, and suddenly it was over. Krutchfield was at the controls of the cruiser, standing proud in an ankle-deep mire of blood and shattered bodies. He cut the engines at the same time as his helmsman slowed the assault boat, both craft hissing to a slow crawl, the echoing sounds of the battle dying away.

Mercer was the first from the SEAL boat onto the cabin cruiser, whose name he saw was Happyhour, with Hauser only a breath behind him. Krutchfield’s other two SEALs swarmed over next, like extras in a pirate movie, their eyes bright with battle lust, their gun barrels hot from the fray. The helmsman arced the assault boat away from the Happyhour, carving a tight crescent in the Strait to pick up their fallen comrade, the powerful motors bellowing like caged animals as he gave them their head. While Krutchfield heaved bodies over the side of the captured boat, his two teammates ducked down the narrow steps to the belowdeck cabin. By the time Krutchfield had finished, they were back on the bridge. One of them, a compact Hispanic with a gap where one of his teeth had been, was wiping his knife against a napkin he’d taken from the galley. Red smears bloomed from the blade’s passage.

“There were two of them, jefe,” he remarked casually, slipping the blade back into its inverted scabbard on his combat harness.

“Shit,” Krutchfield exclaimed. He turned to look over his shoulder at the distant wake of his boat.