Eden's Gate (17 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Eden's Gate
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“We have the only guns on the ship.”
“That's right, so let's use them.” Zimmer checked his watch. “In a little more than twelve hours this ship will be on the bottom in
five hundred fathoms of water. There'll be no survivors. No mayday will be sent. No one will suspect a thing until we're reported overdue in Miami. By then we'll be long gone. I don't want anything screwing up my share of this operation.”
“Mr. Browne is going down with the ship.”
“I don't have any argument with that, Helmut.”
“When the ship sinks he's going to be very much alive. Locked in his cabin. Knowing that there's not a thing he can do to prevent his own death, with plenty of time to think about how he got himself into such a deadly predicament.”
Zimmer gave him an evil grin. “You're a sadistic bastard, I'll give you that much. What'd he do to you?”
“He interfered in places he should not have interfered.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“He went to bed with my wife.”
Zimmer started to say something, but then thought better of it, and just shook his head.
“Are we on schedule for our rendezvous?”
“We'll be there at two this morning, which means we have our work cut out for us starting at one.”
“We'll meet back here then,” Speyer said. He tossed off his schnapps and left.
The first officer, Spiro Metaxas, listening on the ship's phone which Zimmer had left on, came in. He looked nervous. “Crossing that bastard is a risky business,” he said. He was short, gnarled and misshapen like an olive tree, and just as dark and tough.
“You worry too much. That's my concern,” Zimmer told him. “We're going to come out of this in good shape. Once we get the diamonds up to Washington and the organization pays us off we'll be on easy street.”
Metaxas, who was a hard-headed Greek and had seen just about everything, wasn't convinced. “Killing the crew isn't going to be so simple either.”
“One of the main charges will go off right below the crew's mess deck. All you have to do is get them there, just like we planned. Make some excuse to get the hell out, and … boom.”
“Then what?” Metaxas asked sourly. “After Washington, I mean.”
“Then I never want to see your ugly face again.” Zimmer laughed. He poured a schnapps for his first mate and another for himself.
“Relax, Spiro. When this is over you'll be a millionaire. You can go anywhere and do anything that you want. You'll be a free man. You can buy your Greek island and be king.”
 
They had their dinner at 8:00 P.M., the tension in the dining room so thick that it could be cut with a knife. Afterward Lane went back out onto the quarterdeck to be alone and to smoke a cigarette. He was getting the feeling that they were never going to make it to Havana. It was the way Zimmer and Speyer kept exchanging glances, making offhand comments like schoolyard bullies trying to keep a secret about who they were going to pound next. Something was going to happen in the middle of the night, maybe a mutiny or something.
Once the ship had settled down for the evening, he was going up to the radio room to find a ship-to-shore phone. Florida was just over the horizon to the northwest, and sometime between now and the dawn he figured he was going to be needing help a lot more than he needed answers.
“What are your plans once you're no longer impecunious?” Gloria asked, coming up behind him.
She wore another sundress, her shoulders bare, the neckline very low. The lights from the ship's superstructure and from the stars were perfect for her. She looked fifteen years younger than she was.
“I thought that I would throw a big party. Copacabana, maybe.”
“Sounds wonderful,” she said, smiling wistfully. “I'm getting tired of Montana.”
“You'll have Havana, if that's any consolation.”
She pursed her lips seductively and inclined her head. “I lied to the captain when I told him that the thing I hated most was a coward. What really gets to me is boredom.”
“Then change your life.”
“I'm trying to, John, but it's never that easy.”
“I'm sure that your husband's lifestyle provides plenty of excitement. Germany and now this, wherever it's leading you.”
The captain came out on deck and didn't see them standing at the stern rail. He got what looked like a grappling hook and a coil of line from a locker, and when he straightened up he spotted them.
“Good evening,” Lane said.
“Excuse me,” Zimmer replied. He nodded and ducked back inside.
“Strange—” Gloria said.
“Gotta run,” Lane told her. “Ta-ta.” He followed the captain inside in time to see the hatch leading down to the catwalk between the double hull close.
 
Captain Zimmer stopped in the darkness to listen. He'd thought that he'd heard the hatch above closing and then footfalls on the stairs, but all was quiet now except for the ship's noises, and he wasn't sure what he'd heard. It was rotten luck that Browne had spotted him, but the bitch would keep him occupied. And none of them would matter when the rest of his plan was put in place.
He hurried the rest of the way down into the bowels of the ship, opened the bottom hatch, and ducked inside the passageway between the hulls. The stench was nearly overpowering; he kept reminding himself of the millions he was going to make.
He pulled up the grate at the turn of the hulls and then dropped the grappling hook into the stinking bilge, paying out the line with his fingertips.
He snagged one of the handles on the third try and, putting his back into it, pulled the box up out of the bilge. It was a damned heavy thing. He had to wrestle with it to get it up on the catwalk and remove the grappling hook.
He hunched down on his knee and rubbed some of the slime away from the lid. There was no lock or hinges. A bead of solder ran around the top edge, completely sealing whatever was inside from the air. Funny, he thought. Diamonds were supposed to be indestructible. But then the old Nazis had done some crazy shit, especially near the end of the war.
He dug in his pocket and pulled out a folding knife; he was about to start on the solder seal when he heard a movement behind him. He looked up, startled, as Browne came into view.
“What the hell,” Zimmer cried out. He reached for his pistol, but Browne held a small pistol pointed right at the captain's head.
“You'll be dead before you get it out of your jacket,” Browne warned, his voice perfectly calm, as if he were discussing the weather.
“Okay, you win, Mr. Smart Guy,” Zimmer said, spreading his hands.
Browne motioned with the pistol. “Drop the knife into the bilge, like a good man.”
Zimmer did as he was told. “Now what?”
“Now the gun. Take it out of your belt, very carefully, and slide it over to me.”
“This isn't a very big ship and you're outnumbered. Sooner or later we'll get the drop on you. So maybe we can make a deal.”
“The gun first,” Browne said reasonably.
Zimmer considered his options, which for the moment amounted to zero. He did as he was told, easing the big Glock 17 out of his belt, laying it on the grating, and shoving it toward Browne. He watched as Browne scooped up the gun, checked the safety, and stuffed it in his belt. He was a careful man. “Same question as before. Now what?”
“Does Helmut know that you're down here?”
Zimmer shrugged. “I didn't stop to discuss it with him.”
“Maybe you should have. According to him, opening the box will destroy a substantial portion of the value.”
“What does it matter? The box is heavy, so there're a lot of diamonds inside. Even at a discount they have to be worth millions.”
“Helmut promised me ten percent. What's your offer?”
“Exactly zero,” someone said behind him. Lane recognized the first officer's voice by the rough accent.
“Shoot me and your captain dies,” Lane warned.
“Maybe,” Metaxas replied from the darkness. “But you'll die, too, with a bullet in the back of your head. Put the gun down.”
Lane tried to judge the distance. Zimmer looked up at him with a big grin on his face. Lane finally nodded. “As you wish,” he said. He bent over and placed the PSM on the floor grating.
“Hold up, Spiro, he has another gun in his belt,” Zimmer cautioned.
“Look, I don't care who wins. I just want my money,” Lane said.
“Yeah, right,” Zimmer smirked. He stepped forward as Lane spread out his hands. “Don't try anything. Spiro is a very good shot.”
Zimmer reached for the Glock, which was a mistake. Lane grabbed him and spun him around to act as a shield as he pulled out the big gun and thumbed off the safety.
Metaxas fired two shots, both of them wide for fear of hitting his captain. The bullets fragmented on the steel plates, the jagged pieces of shrapnel ricocheting down the passageway. He disappeared into the darkness.
Lane fired one shot, then held up and listened.
Zimmer shoved an elbow into Lane's ribs, and managed to break free at the same moment Metaxas fired two more shots, one of them buzzing past Lane's head, the other hitting Zimmer in the neck, knocking him backward in a spray of blood.
Lane grabbed a handle of the box, hefted it and stumbled as fast as he could into the darkness around the turn of the hull directly at the stern, firing three shots as fast as he could pull them off behind him.
 
Metaxas hunched in the semi-darkness at the foot of the stairs, holding his side. In the dim light from the open hatch above he could see that he was bleeding, but it wasn't too bad. He'd been hurt a lot worse in barroom brawls.
Captain Zimmer had gone down. He'd seen that much before Browne started shooting back. So now the
Maria
, the plan, and the diamonds were his.
“Listen up, Browne, can you hear me back there?” he shouted.
“I can hear you,” Lane called back. “Your captain's dead.”
“I know. So now I am the senior officer, and I'm willing to make a deal with you.”
“Why the hell should I listen to you? As soon as you got the chance you'd kill me.”
“No, I wouldn't, because I need your help now just as much as you need mine,” Metaxas shouted. He moved along the passageway, his right hand trailing on the inner hull.
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard them talking up in the captain's cabin. That's why I followed him down here. I knew that he was coming for the diamonds. We're meeting up with a yacht tonight. They were going to kill the entire crew, me and you included, and then sink the ship.”
“Then what was Zimmer doing down here by himself? And why was the box moved? This wasn't the same place we put it when we boarded in Hamburg.”
“I only heard part of their conversation. I don't know the whole story. I swear it on my mother's grave, on the heart of Jesus.” He edged farther along the passageway to where Zimmer's body lay in a heap next to the open grating. The box was gone. His stomach rebounded sourly and a black rage came over him for just a moment until he got hold of himself.
“If you want to make a deal, toss your gun down and come back here where I can see you,” Lane instructed.
“How do I know you won't kill me and keep the diamonds for yourself?”
“Like you said, we need each other.”
Something cold and hard touched Metaxas on the back of his neck and he stiffened. “Move and you're dead,” Speyer warned softly.
“I'm waiting,” Lane called.
“Just a minute, John, I'm getting the situation under control here,” Speyer shouted. He relieved Metaxas of his gun.
“Did you hear his story, Helmut?” Lane asked.
“That's just what it was, a story. They'd hatched their own plan to kill us all and take the diamonds for themselves. Speaking of which, where are they?”
“I shoved them back into the bilge. I figured they'd be safer there. He moved them.”
“I see that he did,” Speyer said. “Okay, I have the bastard's gun. You can come out now.”
“What if he was telling the truth?”
Speyer motioned for Baumann to go across to the stairway on the port side of the ship in case Browne should try to get out. Baumann immediately understood what was required and he hurried away noiselessly into the darkness.
“We've come this far together without mishap. Like you said, I'm not a man who throws away a valuable asset.”

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