Charon's landing

bullets shredded Wolf’s shoulder so that his arm swung uselessly at his side, attached to his trunk by a few scraps of flesh. The flare, its tip burning at several hundred degrees, fell from his deadened fingers, landing with a sluggish splash onto the deck.

Wolf screamed in pain and fell to his knees. He then saw the crimson flare lying beside him, the bright flame shooting from its tip like a tiny rocket motor. He tried to stand, but the wound in his leg and the damage done to his shoulder made his movements so uncoordinated that he pitched forward into the slick. In seconds, he was drowning, unable to turn his face out of the ooze.

As soon as he’d fired and saw that Wolf had dropped the flare, Mercer vaulted over the railing of the catwalk. While the flare had not yet ignited the crude, he didn’t want to push his luck. He landed hard, his legs kicking out on the slippery surface so that he fell on his backside, the impact jarring his buttocks and lower back. Agony crashed against the top of his skull. Sliding more than crawling, he reached for the incendiary, scooping it up and holding it high over his head just as the globules of oil that dripped from it burst into yellow flames that landed on his body. He used his free hand to beat out the tiny fires and carefully got to his feet, shuffling to the Arctica’s railing. He heaved the flare far out into the Strait, well beyond where the oil had leaked from her holds.

“Mud Skipper, this is Devil Fish. Come in, please.”

Mercer stood by the rail watching the flare sputter in the water and didn’t want to respond to the submarine lurking below the ship, but slowly he began to hear an alarming noise. He fished the small radio from his pocket. “This is Mud Skipper. Go ahead.”

“Sonar is picking up a prop signature, twin screws accelerating away. The signal matches that of the cabin cruiser. Can you confirm you are aboard it?”

He looked down the length of the ship, past where the bridge wing jutted out over the side of the huge vessel. Beyond the stern, he could see the Happyhour running from the tanker toward the open Pacific. With Krutchfield and Hauser in the pump room and the rest of the SEALs dead — as well as the Arctica’s crew, only terrorists or JoAnn Riggs could be on the fleeing cabin cruiser.

“Negative, Devil Fish. The boat is carrying terrorists. Can you take them out?”

“Affirmative.”

The swift passage of the USS Tallahassee only thirty or so feet below the surface actually created a disturbance in the water like the movement of some great fish. Mercer couldn’t believe the speed of the attack submarine or its incredible agility as it went off in pursuit of the Happyhour. Watching intently, he waited for the explosion of a torpedo strike against the vessel’s transom, but it never came. The Happyhour was just a small speck near the horizon when suddenly a shining black leviathan rose up from the sea directly behind her.

Like a playful dolphin, the nose of the USS Tallahassee exploded into the wake of the Happyhour, the huge hull coming forty feet out of the water before her incredible weight overcame the inertia of her atomic engines and she smashed back into the Strait, walls of white water blowing out from the impact. Almost as quickly as she appeared, the Tallahassee vanished once again. The submarine crash dove as soon as she broached the surface, and as the Tallahassee sank under the waves she created a huge vortex behind the cruiser as it tried to escape. Four thousand tons of water rushed back into the void the sub’s hull had produced with her brief appearance.

JoAnn Riggs and the pleasure boat Happyhour were sucked into the maelstrom, vanishing as if they had never existed. The cruiser was swamped so quickly by the maneuver that a seagull racing above the white-hulled boat was also drawn under and drowned. A few seconds passed and the broiling water calmed. There was no debris to mark where Riggs had died.

Had Mercer not been watching, he wouldn’t have believed it. One minute he could clearly see the Happyhour racing for the open ocean, and the next it looked as though it had been swallowed by some nightmarish creature, like Jonah being consumed by the whale. Gone. Forever.

“Devil Fish to Mud Skipper, Devil Fish to Mud Skipper. Mission accomplished. Coast Guard reports they will be alongside in two minutes. There are lightering tankers en route to pump off your cargo, and Seattle authorities have been alerted to an oil spill. Response teams are on their way. We are continuing on to our regularly scheduled mission already in progress.”

Mercer smiled at the jubilant voice over the radio, not knowing it was the submarine’s captain but not surprised later when he found out it was. “Roger, Devil Fish. This is Mud Skipper. Over and out and thank you very much.” He began trudging back to the superstructure where a Coast Guard cutter was getting into position to tie up.

With only eight minutes left before detonation, Coast Guard personnel discovered and disarmed the charges placed between the Arctica’s double hull. The tide that Riggs and Kerikov had counted on to dump oil all along the shores of Puget Sound was not nearly as high as predicted that day, and the twelve million gallons of crude spilled, though more than the Exxon Valdez, did not cause nearly the environmental catastrophe as intended.

A chopper flew Captain Hauser and Lieutenant Krutchfield to a hospital, and both survived. Knowing there was only one more detail to take care of, Mercer was beginning to feel he could finally put an end to the entire affair.

The United Arab Emirates

Looking at a globe, it is almost impossible to get any farther away from Seattle than the Persian Gulf. They lie on nearly exact opposite sides of the planet. Yet it was still a little quicker for Mercer to fly first to New York, then continue east across Europe and on to the Middle East, rather than across the Eurasian landmass. He had no recollection of the transcontinental flight. He slept from the moment he boarded in Seattle until the plane barked its wheels in New York. Because the terrorist attack at London’s Heathrow Airport had so disrupted air travel, the only quick flight he could get to Europe was aboard Air France’s supersonic Concorde. He would have preferred a slower mode of transportation since he moved through JFK like a zombie and had planned to keep sleeping on the transatlantic leg of his journey. He managed only a two-hour catnap on the slender missilelike aircraft.

In Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport was absolute chaos as thousands of stranded passengers tried to make their way to the British Isles. Had he been more alert, Mercer would have cared, but as it was, he dozed through the hour layover before his connection to Abu Dhabi.

The brutal glare of the desert sun in Abu Dhabi came as a relief to the cold, damp misery he’d experienced for the past couple of days. It felt as if his bones would need weeks to dissipate the chill of his plunge into the icy water while escaping from Petromax’s oil rig. He carried only a small bag of hastily purchased clothing from Kennedy Airport, so he was through customs in minutes, past the enormous duty-free shopping mall in the airport, and out onto the strip of road abutting the international terminal.

Waiting for his contact, a colonel named Wayne Bigelow, Mercer set his bag at his feet, ignoring the taxi and limousine drivers soliciting fares into Abu Dhabi City, and closed his eyes once again, nodding off as he stood against a lamppost. After he got the chill from his body, his next order of business would be to pay back more of the tremendous sleep debt he’d incurred.

A car horn sounded close by and dragged him back to consciousness. Mercer had formed a pretty good impression of Colonel Bigelow from the telephone call he’d placed back at Sea-Tac Airport and more than half expected to see the old soldier driving a battered Land Rover, one with its top hacked off and a heavy tire bolted to its hood. Instead, Bigelow leaned from the open window of a new Mercedes 600 SEL sedan, its glossy black paint radiant in the sunlight.

“Dr. Mercer, I presume?” Bigelow’s accent was strictly Colonial English, like a voice from a bygone era. His silvered mustache was waxed to needle points, and his face was as dark and weathered as tree bark. Even seated in the luxury automobile, he retained a rigid military bearing. Mercer guessed that when Bigelow died, rigor mortis would actually loosen his spine. He liked the older man immediately.

“What’s left of him.” Mercer pushed himself off the lamppost and, grabbing his bag, walked to the car.