Hauser was finishing in the bathroom when the intercom chimed. “Yes, what is it?”
“Sorry to disturb you, Captain.” It was the helmsman. “First Officer Riggs hasn’t shown yet. I paged her cabin but got no reply.”
“I’m on my way,” Hauser muttered irritably. Riggs’ actions had gone beyond rude. She was showing a serious dereliction of duty.
He threw on his shoes and decided against his uniform coat.
Swinging open his cabin door angrily, he plowed right into Riggs, tossing the smaller woman to the floor in the moment before she knocked. Hauser recovered from his surprise, bending to offer her a hand, a ready apology on his lips. That was when he saw the pistol on the carpeted deck where the collision had knocked it from her grip. Riggs, too, saw the weapon and struggled toward it, her arm outstretched, her fingers crabbing furiously.
He saw a look of murderous rage in her eyes and without conscious thought stepped on her wrist, pinning her hand. Riggs screamed out in startled pain, writhing to twist herself free. He was just about to demand what was happening when a burst of automatic gunfire echoed from the deck above, near or on the bridge. Hauser looked down the hall and saw an armed shadow duck from an emergency exit, dive across the hallway, and fall into the Chief Engineer’s cabin.
Hauser had only moments to react, his mind churning but his instincts forcing him to flight. He couldn’t risk the seconds to scoop up Riggs’ pistol; he just ran. Smashing through an emergency exit, he dashed up the utilitarian stairs, his chest heaving. He paused at the top landing and pressed his ear to the door that led to a short passageway and the bridge.
Trained for and seasoned by danger his entire life, an armed conflict aboard his ship went far beyond his experience. Yet Hauser’s first thoughts weren’t about the situation. He thought instead of his wife, white-haired and wrinkled but still the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. Her grave expression as he boarded his flight to Alaska filled his mind and her almost disapproving gaze galvanized him into action. She’d warned him not to take this command, and suddenly he agreed with her.
Still, he was responsible for the safety of the ship and its crew. The automatic gunfire could mean only one thing. Terrorists were seizing his ship and Riggs was helping them. Thirty seconds had elapsed since he’d first bumped into her, and already he was forming a plan. He had to get to the bridge to send a distress call.
How many more of the crew were working with them? Hauser couldn’t even guess.
The door Hauser was hiding behind was halfway down the hallway that connected the bridge to the supertanker’s main elevator. Once he committed himself, there would be no cover until he gained the bridge; the hall would be like a shooting gallery. Gathering the courage he never recognized he possessed, Hauser took a deep breath, threw open the door, and ran faster than he’d ever moved before.
One of the men assigned to replace the tanker’s name guarded the closed doors of the elevator, the body of a crewman at his feet, shot to death as he tried to escape. He was turned away when Hauser dodged from the emergency stairwell.
The bridge was only a couple of dozen paces away. Hauser had seen the terrorist the moment he committed himself, but there was nothing he could do about it now. A dozen paces to go. The gunman finally noticed Hauser, raising his Israeli-made Uzi machine pistol at the same instant. Four paces. Hauser could hear the subdued ping of the radar repeater through the open bridge door. Three paces.
The hallway exploded. The Uzi opened up like a chain saw, bullets screaming, tearing into the walls, ricocheting into the bridge. The hallway filled with acidic smoke, deafening noise, and the full thirty-two rounds from the weapon’s stick magazine.
The carpet caught a few of the rounds and the left side wall caught a few more but the majority raked across the control panel of the supertanker and slammed into the windscreen, creating round spiderwebs in the inch-thick glass. The helmsman was almost cut in half, two nearly separated chunks of his body crashing to the deck in a widening pool of blood. Hauser had escaped the fusillade by diving the last few paces to the bridge and rolling around the thick wooden pedestal of the chart table.
The leaden sky was still dark, night oozing onto the bridge through the windows and portholes, gathering in the shadowed corners. A bullet had cut a wire somewhere in the tangled maze behind the controls, killing the lights with a blue arc of electricity as the system shorted. The emergency lights kicked on, and an alarm pierced the air shrilly. The murky bridge smelled of smoke, ozone, and blood.
Hauser had managed to gain a few seconds, but he hadn’t escaped yet. There were two separate emergency distress systems located on the bridge console, but he didn’t have time to reach either of them. His only choice was to get out onto the flying bridge where the international orange canister of the EPIRB sat in its bin. If he could reach it and toss it over the side of the vessel, the contact with the saltwater would activate the system and send a distress call over a satellite uplink. He’d worry about his options after that.
Forcing himself to ignore the helmsman’s corpse, he crawled toward the insulated door to the flying bridge, his arms shaking so badly that they almost couldn’t take his body weight. The rank sweat of fear slicked his body, bathing him in a clammy chill. Although he’d spent most of his adult life aboard supertankers, he’d never fully appreciated how wide they were until he was forced to crawl across the bridge of one, the fear of an assassin’s bullet urging him onward.
He made it to the door, his body tensed for the inevitable shot in the back, but it didn’t come. He couldn’t understand what was delaying them. He stretched up from the floor, reaching for the handle to temporary freedom when an unfamiliar voice called out sharply.
“Stop where you are.”
Hauser ignored the order. With a burst of adrenaline he un-dogged the door, throwing his weight against the icy wind that raced across the ship. He fell out onto the snow-covered flying bridge. A pistol cracked three times in rapid succession, the shots landing just inches from Hauser’s slithering form, kicking up tiny geysers of snow and creating glowing hot spots on the metal deck that smelled of burned steel. He moved as fast as he could but with a tired resignation. The flying bridge was a dead end. He was trapped.
The outside visibility was only about thirty feet. Snow, sleet, and freezing rain slanted against him, forced by nature and the movement of the ship into a forty-knot gale. He wasn’t dressed for this kind of weather; the cold and wet soaked through his uniform shirt, and only fear kept him from shivering to death. Hauser knew that he wouldn’t last more than fifteen minutes before hypothermia robbed him of control over his own body. The pistol roared again, the bullet fired blindly into the twisting storm but passing close enough to Hauser to make him duck. Hypothermia wouldn’t have the time to kill him.
Lyle Hauser had never considered himself a brave man. True, he had done things that others wouldn’t, like jumping aboard a burning barge when he was twenty to save a deckhand trapped by the flames. He had always just done whatever he felt was necessary. If others saw his acts as brave and heroic, well, that was up to them. Hauser was just doing his job.
His job right now was surviving. There was only one option, and it would take all the bravery he possessed. He raced to the end of the bridge wing and stopped to pick up the two-and-a-half-foot-tall canister of the EPIRB, but it was gone, the brackets empty. Riggs must have removed it as a precaution when she began taking the vessel. Out of time, Hauser looked over the chest-high railing of the flying bridge. All he saw below was a curtain of white, but somewhere underneath his position was the balcony of the second deck, no more than fifteen feet away. If he could land on that narrow perch, he had a chance of escaping, finding a place to hole up for a while and consider his next move. But if he missed the scant promenade that surrounded the next level down, the main deck was a drop of forty feet, and if he missed that, the North Pacific would kill him the moment he hit.