Assault on the Empress (18 page)

Cross stood up. He licked his lips nervously. He had experience with explosives, but nobody except an idiot liked dismantling something already set to go off. And these things were. He wished Darwin Hughes were here, because Hughes was the best explosives man Cross had ever seen. Cross set to work, using the Gerber with its spearpoint blade as his probe, starting on the first confluence of plastique ropes.

The announcements had stopped coming and Cross prayed that the killing of hostages had stopped as well. Comstock joined him. “I'm not half bad at this stuff. May I?”

“Please. Those guys looked like a bunch of schlubs.”

“Schlubs?”

“No talent dumb asses.”

“Ahh.” Comstock nodded as Cross looked at him for an instant.

Then Cross put his attention back to the explosives. “But I don't think they were. You have any experience with hidden detonators?”

“A bit. Let's have a look.”

“See if you get the same idea I do,” Cross said. He lit a cigarette. Smoking wouldn't cause the stuff to blow.

“Yes,” Comstock nodded, probing with the knife, “this one for sure. Fake detonator here, as you supposed, but beneath it buried in the plastique—oh. well. So much for this.”

There was some movement coming from decks above them now, but Cross didn't think that O'Fallon had enough manpower to launch a major attack, at least not so rapidly. “Liedecker. You any good with a rifle?”

“Try me.”

“Good. I'll do that. Burrow in someplace and shoot the first thing that moves above us, right?”

“All right!”

O'Fallon's men would know about the charges and be doubly reluctant to shoot down at them; the terrorists, after all, weren't trained combat marksmen, just a bunch of homicidally delinquent sociopaths. Cross didn't feel safe, but the danger wasn't so immediate, either.

Cross looked at Comstock. “Any brilliant ideas?”

“And I was just about to ask you. One thing, while we think, let's get that bullet fragment out of your leg.”

“I was afraid you'd remember.”

They found some shelter beneath a reasonably solid steel overhang that supported a wide conveyor belt used to move cargo, Comstock taking out a Zippo lighter much like Cross's own, heating the primary blade of the Swiss Army Knife copy they'd taken off the dead man near the ship's armory. As Comstock fanned the blade on the air to cool it, he said under his breath, “Those are radio detonators, you know.”

Cross nodded, saying nothing.

“And,” Comstock continued, “I'd wager if our friend has that degree of sophistication, he's likely planted similar devices aboard the yacht they used to intercept us. Which means we can't get out of here with this thing Alvin Leeds is carrying, and we can't stay here either. Stickier than I'd supposed, actually. As soon as you have some marvelously innovative idea beyond the obvious one of getting O'Fallon and neutralizing his detonators, let me know, would you?”

Cross started to say that he didn't have any marvelously innovative ideas, but then Comstock started probing for the fragment in his leg and it was all he could do to keep from screaming or biting off his tongue.

Then Jenny Hall started to speak, her voice lifeless sounding. Her jaw was bruising where he'd knocked her out, and there was a reddish mark where he'd slapped her. It had all gone wrong between them, he knew. “I know you did what was practical. Abe, I know you did. But I'm going to have to live with those deaths for the rest of my life. If I'd turned myself in, maybe they would have stopped.”

He wanted to tell her they would only have killed her. But there wasn't any use to doing it….

Babcock looked up from what he was doing. Hughes was inspecting the parachutes. All the weapons had been serviced, all the magazines loaded, the edges of the knives touched up. Babcock smiled momentarily at that. Hughes had brought one of the Cold Steel Magnum Tantos to give to Cross. Babcock shook his head. The drone of the aircraft was not so terribly loud, just incessant. Babcock looked back to the deck plans he studied. There were acres of deck space, hundreds of people O'Fallon was using as a shield. And what would a man like Alvin Leeds have done with the ampule? At first, he would have hidden it someplace accessible only to crewmen like himself. That much seemed obvious. Restrict the access and you restrict the number of people who might stumble onto it. But if Leeds had kept himself free, had he left the ampule in its original hiding place? Was it on his person? What were his plans? Was he just going to wait for the hostage crisis to be resolved? Did Leeds know that the contents of the ampule were capable of producing death on an almost unprecedented scale?

Babcock closed the file containing the plans to the
Empress
. He opened the file with the photographs. Alvin Leeds, as General Argus had put it, was indeed black, like he—Babcock—was. But his skin looked darker in the photographs, front view and right and left profiles. A high forehead, thinner lips than normal and a crooked sort of smile. What was Leeds's real name? He looked then at the photos of the girl singer, Jennifer Hall. Very pretty with strong features and a look in her eyes that was at once defiant, yet gentle. The next photos were not posed, but blown up candids, very grainy. They showed a tall, good-looking man with sandy hair and, as best Babcock could tell from the photos, a look of amusement in his eyes. This was the KGB man, Vols or Volshinsky or whatever.

Babcock turned to the last group of photos. Dark hair that looked as though it had been combed with the fingers and needed a washing. Deepset dark eyes, the face and the look it held almost Rasputin-like in the image it projected. Seamus Colin O'Fallon. Babcock closed the photo file; O'Fallon's face gave him the chills.

The sandy-haired man he had seen prowling about below decks had to be a Russian agent, he had told himself. Otherwise, why would the man have been looking for the ampule? There had been a poker game going with some of the other men from the boiler crew and, once the game had broken up, he had retrieved the ampule from its hiding place, determined to keep it on his person to better guard it.

And then some of the men from the crew had produced guns, shot the Chief when he'd gone after them with a wrench. And he had used the opportunity to slip away, the big military Beretta and the spare magazines for it still hidden among the maze of pipes, and the six rounds in the inherited PPK Alyard had given him not enough to do anything with against four handguns and one of those miniaturized submachine guns.

Then he had decided to hide the ampule again, first retrieving the Beretta then working his way as far aft along the shafts as possible, where the heat from the steam was almost intense enough to make him pass out. But there was a circuit-breaker box with a few inches of free space at its base. He couldn't fit the watertight bag into the gap, nor even the little maroon foam-padded box, but the ampule itself fit there as perfectly as if the space had been made for it and, by pulling down some of the wires, he was able to camouflage its appearance completely.

Planning ahead, he stored the empty maroon case and the watertight, cushioned bag back among the piping, just in case. He would, after all, need something in which to safe!y transport the ampule once he retrieved it.

And then the business was survival, to hide out and wait it out until the hijacking thing was resolved, if it would be resolved at all, or find some other means of getting the ampule to safety if it came to that.

He had heard each episode of the grisly execution drama unfold over the PA system. And he knew then how it would be resolved. The British, whose ship-of-the-line this was, would have no choice but to send in their crack Special Air Service people, perhaps the best unit-sized counter-terrorist force in the world. But then he had seen them planting the charges of plastic explosives in the main hold, left the area immediately, seen the evidence of more plastique planted elsewhere. He'd had elementary demolitions training. Not that he qualified as any expert, but he knew enough to recognize a setup that would be enormously difficult if not impossible to safely defuse.

Thomas Griffeth had always prided himself on making advantage out of adversity. If the
Empress
Britannia
went down, then “Alvin Leeds” would go down with it, and the Russians would think the United States had lost the ampule, enhancing the strategic advantage possession of the ampule represented. The Russian program to duplicate the processes by which the contents of the ampule had been developed would not need to be so accelerated when they were convinced that the Americans didn't have it.

“Alvin Leeds” would die, taking his precious cargo with him. But Thomas Griffeth, his military pistol and spare magazines hidden on his body, would find the means to escape, confirm the chances, return to the electrical box where he had stored the ampule, then get away.

He had climbed down into one of the lifeboats from the deck above; despite the cool temperatures, the air beneath the heavy tarp was stiflingly warm. Sentries moved about on the deck above and below, but when it was safe to do so, he would peer out. After looking at it several times, he decided. The yacht. There was no one aboard her in open view, likely no one aboard her at all. And under cover of darkness, he could slip her moorings and get her round behind the
Empress
'
s
radar image and make good his escape with the ampule. The British vessel off the port bow would be none the wiser until it was too late, nor would the sentries aboard the
Empress
. There was always the chance a stray shot would get him, but here the only certainty was death. He would wait until just before dawn, slip below and retrieve the ampule, then make for the yacht….

“Mr. Hughes?”

“Yes, Lewis?” Hughes was into his black BDUs and securing equipment, Babcock doing the same.

“What if we can't locate the ampule? I mean, what if we can't find Leeds or something's happened to him?”

“Well, what alternatives suggest themselves?”

“The SAS will go over the ship with a fine-tooth comb. They'd find it. And we don't want that to happen, especially since no one's telling them how dangerous it is. And there's always the possibility that if this O'Fallon has the Empress wired, we can't neutralize the explosives. I mean, you're the expert. There are some charges that can't be defused, right?”

“Indeed there are. So, then what will we do, Lewis?”

“Get everybody off the
Empress
and scuttle her, right.”

“Yes,” Hughes agreed. “Yes. That's just what we'd do, Lewis. Help me with this parachute harness—needs tightening over here.”

Babcock started working the strap.

There was no sign of any of the crew, and as they moved through the bowels of the
Empress
, all they found were more signs of explosives planted with radio detonators, the detonators so constructed that even a genius with explosives, like Darwin Hughes, would likely have been unable to defuse them safely. The explosives were planted, as best Cross could tell (and Comstock concurred with his judgement), to blow out a fore-to-aft gash on either side of the
Empress
below her waterline. Coupled with the massive explosives package in the hold, which would blow off much of the forward section of the vessel and gut the base of her hull with a hole big enough to drive a truck through, she would sink in minutes. There wouldn't be time to lower her lifeboats; or, if they were lowered already when she blew, there wouldn't be time enough to get far enough away to avoid the lifeboats being sucked down after her.

It was a perfect setup for mass murder, Cross realized, and the only way to prevent the deaths of all passengers and hands was to prevent O'Fallon and his gang of hijackers from using the detonators.

Because Liedecker was with them, with his superior firsthand knowledge of the
Empress
's layout below decks, it proved a relatively simple matter to lose the party of hijackers who had followed after them once they evacuated the hold. Armed with an adequate number of automatic weapons, they had the equipment to go after O'Fallon and his men, but a plan was still lacking.

And the enormity of the
Empress
below decks convinced Cross of two things: First, they would not find Alvin Leeds unless sheerly by accident; second, finding whatever it was exactly that had been taken from the Russians, if Leeds had hidden it, equated on level of difficulty with a blind man searching for a needle in a haystack while wearing metal mittens.

They sat in a circle on the floor in the mouth of a massive ventillation pipe, secure from observation above or below and with clear fields of fire fore and aft, their voices low as they spoke to avoid them being carried. “We tell this O'Fallon monster that we're armed and that if he and his men don't leave the Empress, they're in for it,” Jenny Hall said with all the authority of Moses reading the riot act to the People of Israel. Unfortunately, she lacked the same wisdom, Cross realized.

“We can't do that. A: Once he stops laughing he'll remember he's supposed to be killing hostages; B: He already knows we're reasonably well armed and I doubt he's preparing to depart; C: In for what? Once we lose what little element of surprise we've got, then what? We're still outnumbered. He still has hostages. If you're gonna play in the mud, you gotta expect to get your dress a little dirty, kid.”

“I'm not wearing a dress. But there has to be some kind of solution besides just killing and more killing.”

“You think I like it? You're nuts. You're still beautiful. I still love you. But, you're a friggin' nutball.”

“Eat it,” she sneered.

“Really,” Comstock interjected. “I think this is getting us nowhere. We can't find Leeds. Can't find this precious thing he's taking away from our Russian chums. We can't just sit about waiting for O'Fallon to kill more hostages or blow up the bloody ship. ”

Cross looked at Liedecker. The man shrugged his shoulders. “I have a responsibility to the passengers and the crew as a ship's officer. It seems clear to me that, overall, fewer lives will be endangered if we take some positive action. I know nothing about explosives, terrorists or anything else. But my parents survived the Nazi era, and one time my mother told me that all of them, those who weren't Nazis, distrusted the Nazis, distrusted war as a means of achieving greatness—that all of them kept waiting for something to happen, for someone else to stop what was going on. But no one ever did until the war ended, and by then, so much had changed forever. I think we must do something; or else, this madman will blow up the Empress and every one of the passengers and the crew will die for certain.”

Cross looked at Jenny Hall. “What's Leeds got?”

“What?”

“What'd he steal from the Russians, Jenny?”

“Some kind of lab sample. That's all I know,” she said almost indifferently.

“That's, ah, not entirely true, is it Miss Hall?”

Cross looked sharply at Comstock.

“Unless I miss my guess, you know exactly what it is, or they wouldn't have sent you along to serve as nanny for it, would they?”

Her pretty eyes hardened.

“What the hell is it, then?” Cross asked, not knowing who to ask. Did Comstock know? Or was he baiting her with a bluff that seemed to be working?

“Why would anybody have told you?” Jenny whispered.

“The question is, why won't you tell us?” Comstock smiled.

Cross closed his eyes, shook his head to clear it. “What's the deal, here, huh?”

“Now perhaps Miss Hall really doesn't know, and the United States government just trusted a foreign secret service with more information than one of their own officers. Is that it?” Comstock asked her.

“It's a sample of biological warfare agent,” she said so softly Cross could barely hear her.

“Biological warfare what?”

Comstock cleared his throat. “It's some sort of viral agent. Very deadly. Causes flu-like symptoms for about twenty-four hours, is what we got. Then after that, the virus mutates as the patient of course gets worse and worse. It attacks the cerebral cortex and kills, death in thirty-six hours after infection and incubation. They told us, too, there's no vaccine against it. Our undercover people got some word on it, by the by, while involved in something else and we've done our best to monitor the development. Might have tried stealing it ourselves if you Yanks hadn't beaten us to it.” He smiled. “The idea, I presume, behind CIA going after it was that our Russian chums wouldn't dare use it if both sides had it. And, if my days down at university haven't gone all foggy on me, it seems it might be capable of being airborne. Aren't most influenza strains?”

Cross stared at Jenny Hall. “I'm a bloodthirsty killer because I want to fight terrorists rather than surrender to them? And you're Miss Pureheart because you're smuggling biowarfare materials aboard a passenger vessel?”

“What if—and this is just a theory, of course …” Comstock began. “But, what if the
Empress Britannia
does blow up? Couldn't the heat of the explosion drive this virus up into the atmosphere and the prevailing winds take it across Europe or something? And don't viruses and nasty things like that thrive in warmth?”

“
Mein Gott
,” Liedecker murmured.

“Epidemic. A manmade plague?” Cross asked, rhetorically really.

“We didn't develop the thing. The Russians did!” Jenny insisted.

“Ironic, isn't it, that the champion of Western democracy would unleash it then, what?”

She looked at Comstock as if she wanted to kill him.

Cross asked a question then that had started gnawing at him and worked its way up until he couldn't do anything but ask it. “This Alvin Leeds-does he know what he's got?”

Jenny closed her eyes and the life was gone from her face. “No. He doesn't know anything about it except that if he opens it, breaks it or otherwise releases it the stuff could be dangerous.”

Comstock laughed. “And they say we British are the masters of understatement!”