was an RPG-7, a venerable Russian-made tank killer. The rocket popped from the launcher a second later, its motor engaged, and it streaked across the barge. Mercer threw his hands over his head just as the rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the tug’s wheelhouse. The explosion shattered the big windscreen, allowing most of the blast to vent away from Mercer, but the overpressure wave was a crushing weight that seemed to suck the air from his lungs and left his ears ringing. He could no longer hear the roar of Niagara Falls only a mile or two downstream.
Mercer slowly sat upright. He hadn’t been hit by any debris, but the pilothouse was ruined. There was no way now to stop the barge from going over the falls and he had just minutes to get the crates into their protective bags. He looked down the river. There was a structure of some sort jutting into the water from the Canadian side. It was the water intakes for a massive hydroelectric power plant. The barge had drifted too close to the American side for it to be drawn toward the intakes. Instead it was steering for the rapids that preceded the most powerful waterfall in North America.
A movement caught Mercer’s eye. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. A man in a black jumpsuit had just landed on the center of the barge, his parachute billowing before he cut it away. A second man landed a moment later. Above them a dark helicopter began to descend toward the barge. The gunmen must have thought Mercer had died when the tugboat was hit because they cheered and ran up to embrace one of their comrades. The second parachutist, who was Caucasian rather than Arab, made straight for the crates.
Mercer steadied his submachine gun on the edge of the tug, took careful aim, and fired. His rounds stitched through the group. One of the parachutists was hit across the hips and collapsed, screaming in agony as bright blood pumped from his femoral artery. Two of the gunmen were raked across the chest because no matter how Mercer fought his Schmeisser, he couldn’t stop the barrel from climbing. The last gunman and the second parachutist dove for the bass boat. Mercer didn’t give them time to recover. He charged across the deck shouting incoherently. He was halfway there when the barge slammed into another rock and stopped dead. He staggered but didn’t fall. He reached the edge of the barge and was about to fire into the bass boat when he realized there was no point. It had been caught between the barge and the rocks and had been crushed flat. Only the big outboard had survived the impact and to Mercer’s eye even it looked a little narrower than normal.
The river kept the barge pressed tightly to the rock, and as Mercer stood over the ruined bass boat, panting, it seemed like it was jammed solid. A few hundred yards away he saw a billowing cloud of mist as the river dropped nearly two hundred feet to the gorge below. He checked the gunmen. All were dead with the exception of the man with the shattered hip, but he had already slipped into a shock-induced coma as he bled out. Mercer wasted no more time with them.
The helicopter the two men had parachuted from came within two hundred feet of the barge and Mercer opened fire. He missed at that range but the big chopper pirouetted in the air and thundered over the Canadian border and out of view.
Having logged hundreds of hours running everything from a twelve-thousand-ton walking dragline to a compact skip loader, Mercer had little trouble deciphering the controls to Crenna’s crane. He retracted the boom and lowered the crates until they were a few inches from the deck. He jumped from the cab and carefully arranged the bags so he could close them around the wooden chests. He was about to lower the crates that last little bit when he felt the barge move again. The current had found a tiny angle to exploit and started swinging the craft around the rock. The deck began to move and the grind of metal against stone reached a fierce crescendo as the barge came free and was again drawn toward the falls.
Mercer hurriedly lowered the crates and ran back out to the deck. He scanned for the helicopter as he wrestled the first crate into place and began closing the bag. There were four different seals. First there was a wide adhesive strip, then Velcro, and then a heavy-duty zipper. Those took seconds. It was having to lace the bag closed with wire that took several minutes.
The barge continued to hit against rocks. It would hold steady for a minute or two, then continue downstream while the flat bottom constantly scraped against the shallow bottom. Three shots in rapid succession made him drop flat and pick up his Schmeisser. He looked around. There was no one. Then he looked upstream and saw Booker Sykes standing at the stern of the Bertram, his assault carbine resting on a cocked hip. The Bertram was a wreck. Part of the bow was smashed in and the hull was riddled with bullet holes. Mercer could just imagine what was left of the second bass boat.
Sykes had fired three shots into the air to get Mercer’s attention.
Mercer waved over at him, then shrugged his shoulders as if to say there was nothing the Delta operator could do to help. Then he went back to work. He had the second bag secured when he started to feel the spray from the falls sprinkling like a light rain, but it quickly grew to a torrential downpour as the barge edged closer and closer.
The sound of the hull scraping bottom set Mercer’s teeth on edge and water began to surge over the deck as it succumbed to gravity. With the third bag sealed, Mercer glanced over. Booker was still on station watching the scene through binoculars. Behind Mercer the Niagara gorge began to yawn open. He could see the city of Niagara and the arching span of the Rainbow Bridge beyond the thundering mist.
He had two minutes or less and still hadn’t thought of a way out of his predicament. There were no large boulders he could jump to between the barge and the edge of the falls, and if he tried to swim to one he’d be sucked over the precipice. The crash of so much falling water echoed in his head and made concentrating difficult. He had the first three seals in place and had just started to lace the bag when Booker fired again. Mercer looked up just as he was hit from behind in a blind tackle that sent him tumbling. He’d recognized the black jumpsuit as belonging to one of the parachutists, when he was kicked under the chin. The parachutist had somehow survived when the bass boat was crushed, possibly by being close to the engine, and had taken this long to extricate himself.
Mercer’s head snapped back and slammed the deck. He fought the dizzying wave of darkness that washed through his mind and rolled clear just as the man tried to smash his heel into Mercer’s nose. The empty hull of the barge echoed with the impact. Mercer grabbed the man’s ankle with both hands and twisted savagely. The man went down and Mercer used his fall to lever himself into a sitting position. He smashed his elbow into the man’s groin as hard as he could and staggered to his feet. The barge had stopped right on the edge of the falls where the water was remarkably only about three feet deep. Niagara Gorge was a void that seemed to stretch forever.
He whirled again as the assassin got to his feet. Mercer recognized him. It wasn’t Poli but one of the men with him when they attacked the Deco Palace Hotel. Mercer’s Schmeisser was on top of the crates and too far, so he simply charged. The two crashed together and fell into the water sluicing across the deck. The water was only a foot deep but the current was relentless. Mercer lost traction on the slick hull plates and shot twenty feet toward the bow before he could dig in his heels and stand. The leading edge of the barge was suspended over open air and the hull continued to grind against the bottom.
That’s when he saw his only chance of salvation. The parachutist had also gotten to his feet, but the wind had been knocked out of him. Mercer splashed to the crates and grabbed up his weapon. The white mercenary reached for a pistol hanging in his shoulder holster, but he wasn’t quick enough. Mercer fired one-handed, the heavy weapon bucking in his hand, and a pair of nine-millimeter slugs slammed into the man’s chest. He fell and was instantly grabbed by the current. Mercer dropped the Schmeisser and lunged for the body, grabbing at the man’s hair just before he went over the bow. He dragged the corpse against the current and in the lee of the crates managed to unhook the man’s reserve parachute.
He hadn’t done enough skydiving to know if he’d put it on properly, but there was nothing he could do about it. The stern of the barge began to rise with the current as it edged toward its tipping point.
Mercer’s biggest threat now wasn’t that he was so high above the gorge. The problem was he wasn’t high enough. While a hundred and eighty feet was a great height, it was nowhere near high enough for a parachute to deploy. It would be no different than jumping without one. Mercer ran to the crane again, spun it on its turntable until it was facing aft to shift the barge’s center of gravity in his favor, hit the levers that raised the boom to its maximum height, and started the hydraulics that would extend it to its fullest length. By doing this he bought himself another hundred feet.
There were ladder rungs welded to the top of the first section of the steel boom, and even as it continued to rise, Mercer started to climb. The next three sections didn’t have any handholds so he had to rely on the strength of his hands to shimmy up the slick boom like a monkey.
He reached the top just as the world began to tip. The barge was going over. The crates slid across the deck
