“Nein!” Wolf shouted.
Patroni hadn’t moved, seemingly oblivious to the gun held against him, a lazy smile still on his face. He stood before the open access door of the launch detection board. His hand was inches from the breaker that fed power to the panel.
The guard pulled back, tucking his Uzi against his side, arcing the weapon to cover the other crewmen. His eyes didn’t rest on one spot for more than a moment before flicking on. Everything he saw was a potential target.
JoAnn Riggs exploded off her chair, rushing across the bridge in just three quick strides, her right hand raised to strike Patroni. Although she hadn’t known the Chief Engineer long, she knew that this outburst wasn’t consistent with his personality. There was something odd going on. Wolf stepped forward just as the black radio clipped to his waist crackled.
“I think I’ve found somebody,” said a disembodied voice.
The electrician was the first to move; he spun up from his position on the floor, a heavy torque wrench in his fist. He let the tool fly. The shining chrome flashed as it sailed across the space between him and the trigger-happy guard. Wolf yanked his pistol from its holster and fired even before he was sure of his aim, but the nine-millimeter slug caught the electrician under his right arm, tearing through the pad of muscle, puncturing both lungs, and tearing his wildly beating heart into shreds.
Patroni’s reaction had been a fraction of a second quicker.
Hauser’s own life meant nothing. It was forfeit the moment his ship was seized, and in his final seconds he realized that and accepted it. The flare burned brightly as it bored its way into the man’s chest, blistering and bubbling his flesh as it ate him.
He was sickened by the sight of the dying terrorist, and nothing could have prepared him for the man’s unholy scream. The gunman couldn’t clutch at the burning wound in his chest. Even in his agony, his nervous system knew enough to keep his hands away from such intense heat. The temperature in the lifeboat skyrocketed from thirty degrees to one hundred and twenty degrees in a just a few seconds, hissing smoke filling the enclosed space with a noxious combination of charcoaled flesh and burned phosphorus.
From outside, the craft looked like a Japanese lantern, its toughened support struts standing out starkly against the crimson fire burning within. Smoke coiled from it only to be swept away by the stiff breeze created by the tanker’s forward momentum.
The terrorist had dropped his Colt.45 when the flare had tunneled into his chest, but unbelievably he began reaching for the Uzi slung around his neck, the molded plastic grip of the Israeli weapon fitting neatly to his hand. Even as he burned, even as his life boiled away, he raised the machine pistol, leaning forward so he was half in and half out of the life raft. His last act on earth would be to send a fusillade into his killer. The Uzi’s stubby barrel came up, his finger squeezing slowly, ready to send Lyle Hauser to oblivion.
The torque wrench hit the guard in the throat and his gun dipped before he could pull the trigger. Bullets raked across the bridge, shattering glass, chewing through the control panel, and destroying more of the delicate electronics within. Four holes appeared in the electrician’s chest and his already lifeless body was launched through the bullet-weakened main windscreen.
George Patroni was already in motion, oblivious to the destruction around him. He barreled into JoAnn Riggs, shouldering her aside even as she swung at him. Her hand connected with the back of his head and would have stunned a normal man, but Patroni was a man possessed. Even as nine-millimeter rounds sprayed the bridge, Patroni was tearing at the guts below the launch detection panel, pulling at wires and circuit boards, overriding the manual system and launching all three boats simultaneously. Frigid air blasted into the bridge, whipping away the smell of the discharged shots. Patroni’s shoulder block had dropped Riggs to the deck in an untidy tangle, where she frantically clutched his legs.
Wolf’s H amp;K spat once, then again, the second round no more than an afterthought as Patroni pitched forward, arms outstretched as he fell against the helmsman’s station, ragged holes blooming on his drab overalls like summer flowers. The helmsman was already dead, a chunk of his skull having vanished during the first seconds of the melee.
Patroni had planned to launch Hauser without anyone noticing. He could have done it so surreptitiously that it would have gone undetected until the next day or possibly never at all. He’d discussed it with the electrician, convincing the frightened man that the risk was worth it. JoAnn Riggs and her followers, he’d said, would never have suspected anything.
How many more of his crew would die tonight in reprisal, Patroni thought as he died.
AT the last possible second, even as the barrel of the Uzi was facing Hauser, George Patroni succeeded. Heedless of the terrorist standing at the entrance of the lifeboat, the mechanical davits swung outward, yanking him off his feet and fouling his aim. Machine gun fire ripped through the roof of the lifeboat as the dying terrorist hung in the hatchway, his feet dangling high above the tanker’s frothing wake.
Lyle Hauser was too stunned to react. The flare’s noxious smoke had created such a dense cloud that he couldn’t clearly see what was happening. The automatic launch sequence continued, dropping the lifeboat so quickly it felt as if gravity had found new strength.
At the full extension, there was only a two-foot gap between the lifeboat and the flat stern of the
Hauser screamed maniacally as the larger section of the body fell into the boat with him, sizzling like a steak on a summer barbecue. The lifeboat hit the ocean with a bone-jarring crash, a cascade of water spilling in through the open hatch. An instant later an arc of electricity flashed through the lines securing the lifeboat to the
The two lifeboats stowed port and starboard hit the water at the same time as Hauser’s, but the supertanker’s forward momentum caused both to capsize and sink only moments after being released. Because it was located in the stern of the tanker, Hauser’s craft remained upright, though the ride was rough until it slipped from the ship’s wake.
Nearly overcome by the chemical smoke of the phosphorus flare, Hauser kicked at what was left of the terrorist, forcing the charred member out of the hatch and into the water. Despite his revulsion at the burned and blistered hunks of flesh that coated the bottom of the hatch, Hauser forced himself to close the aperture.
It was two minutes past midnight.
Not knowing what had transpired on the bridge to allow him to escape, Hauser wanted to make certain he made the best use of what providence had given him. With the radar still out, he knew that Riggs would never be able to find the lifeboat in the empty expanse of the North Pacific. But it was possible that she could triangulate his position if he made his distress call too early. The lifeboat’s radio was small, with only a limited range in the best of conditions. To make it work properly, and to protect himself, Hauser had to get far away from the ship and much closer to shore and hope that someone was listening this dark night. He was two hundred and thirty miles from the coast and, unknown to him, the nearest receiving post was an eleven-year-old boy charged with monitoring the radio aboard his father’s fishing trawler.
The boy was fast asleep.
Miami, Florida
Widowed for so many years that getting to work at ungodly hours was the norm, David Saulman moved through the maze-like warrens of his office like a lord, turning on lights and grabbing express mail envelopes from the desks of his associates as he made his way to his personal suite. A coffeemaker slaved to the light switch in the
