“I have a good lawyer,” Mercer said without elaborating, then turned to Krutchfield. “Is this as fast as this pig can go?”
“Hell no.” Krutchfield grinned, and the man at the helm dropped the throttles to their stops, the wind on the exposed deck screaming around them now at sixty miles per hour.
Mercer turned back to Hauser and filled him in on what had happened to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline earlier in the day and about Ivan Kerikov. “This is the second part of his plan, sinking a tanker in American waters, polluting the coastline for a couple of hundred miles. Max Johnston was part of this from the beginning, using one of his ships to transport the liquid nitrogen. He knew the ship was going to be scuttled, and to avoid the few billion dollars for the cleanup, he quietly sold his fleet, including the Arctica. He made certain his key people, like this JoAnn Riggs you told me about, remained on board.”
“That’s right. The Petromax Pacifica was to be renamed Southern Hospitality, and the Arabia’s new name is Southern Accent,” Hauser stated.
“You were the wild card, since the Arctica’s former captain, another conspirator I’m sure, was injured and had to be replaced. No offense, but they hired a captain who was at the mandatory retirement age and hadn’t been at sea for a couple years. It would be easy to pin an ‘accident’ on you once you were dead.”
“It doesn’t add up. If Max Johnston sold his tankers, why is the ship still the Petromax Arctica and not Southern Cross?”
“Because early this morning, according to Dave Saulman, my lawyer friend, the sale of Petromax’s fleet to SC&L was canceled. Their ownership reverted back to Johnston, including the responsibility for the two-hundred-thousand-ton oil spill that’s about to occur.”
“I don’t get it.” Hauser looked at Mercer with a blank expression.
“Somehow Kerikov was the money behind Southern Coasting and Lightering, and he planned to double-cross Max Johnston all along. He needed Max’s equipment, the tanker and an offshore oil rig, but didn’t want him as a full partner. There’s still something else at stake that Kerikov didn’t want Johnston a part of. Kerikov kidnapped Johnston’s daughter to ensure that he never revealed his part in this plot. Max would be stuck with the cleanup and couldn’t utter a word about his own complicity,” Mercer replied, then fell silent.
With a hand braced against one of the cabin’s tubular support stanchions, Mercer needed to take time to prepare himself for the attack. If things went according to plan, the SEALs would have little trouble seizing the escape boat and then using it as cover to take the supertanker. Hauser had said there was only a handful of terrorists holding the ship, and SEALs were known to be the best special forces troops in the world. Like their name implied, they were equally comfortable on land as in the water. Taking over a ship, according to Krutchfield, was their stock-in-trade.
On the other hand, Mercer was in no condition to be part of their assault. In fact, he shouldn’t even be breathing right now considering what he’d been through. He was spent. His body was one large aching bruise, and his shoulders, legs, and chest were beaten to the point where he felt light-headed. He had no illusions of himself in a firefight. His reactions were slow, his reflexes dulled by exhaustion. It took him a few moments to notice Krutchfield tapping on his arm.
“Message from Devil Fish,” Krutchfield shouted into Mercer’s ear. “Their sonar says we’re about five miles behind our target and about seven from the tanker. Like you said, this is going to be tight.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Basically, come up next to them, and when we’re abeam, open fire at the same time two of my men jump from this boat to theirs.”
“And if you miss everyone with the first barrage and they manage to radio a warning to the Arctica?”
Krutchfield grinned his boyish smile. He was really loving this. “On my command, the Tallahassee is going to jam every radio transmission within a fifty-mile radius. There’re going to be some pissed off disc jockeys in a few minutes.”
The Juan de Fuca Strait here was wide, more like a broad lake than a strait, forests and cliffs towering on both sides but so far away they appeared to be held at bay by the surging water of the channel. In a different time, under different circumstances, Mercer would have enjoyed the ride. He grimly held on and watched the narrows before them, hoping to spot the telltale wake of the terrorists’ boat. Mercer used the last few moments before contact to borrow some 9mm ammunition from one of the SEALs and transfer it into the clip of Kerikov’s pistol.
“There!” Hauser shouted, his trained eyes finding the distant rescue boat much quicker than those of the younger men. He had a much stronger vested interest in saving the Petromax Arctica /Southern Cross. To the SEALs, this was another hot op, but to him it was personal. She was his ship, his command.
From this distance, the boat was just a white dot on the gray water, its wake like a ghost image behind it. The tanker was still beyond visual range. It was impossible for those on the fleeing craft to see them. The black hull of the SEAL boat was all but lost amid the swells, its unusual silhouette making it all but invisible from beyond five hundred yards. But Krutchfield wasn’t taking any chances. He lifted the radio to his lips as soon as he spotted the boat.
“Devil Fish, this is Mud Skipper. It’s lights-out time. Repeat, it’s lights-out time. Give us seven minutes, monitor, and if there is no contact, jam again until you hear that tanker breaking up. At that point, go to condition Bravo.”
“What’s condition Bravo?” Mercer asked.
“The Tallahassee surfaces, targets the tanker with an MK48 torpedo, and finds out if these assholes are willing to die for their cause.”
Mercer didn’t feel like pointing out that torpedoing the tanker would accomplish the terrorists’ goals for them. But he could not remain silent. “Don’t tell me if you have a condition Charley. I don’t want to know.” He fingered the pistol in his hands, absently clicking the safety.
“Lieutenant, I have an idea,” Hauser said just before they were spotted by the pickup boat. It took only an instant for him to explain and everyone to agree.
They came up to the hurtling craft. She was a fat-hulled pleasure boat, her white freeboards badly discolored by years in the murky waters of the North Pacific, her upper works weathered by the region’s notorious summer rains. She looked tired, and it was no surprise that at twenty knots, her engines were grinding out as much speed as she could muster. Because the terrorist team hadn’t had enough time to make proper arrangements since being shifted from San Francisco, the owner of the vessel was stuffed into a fore storage locker, the contents of his skull adhering his corpse to the fiberglass walls. The men who’d stolen the boat, the crew spirited to Vancouver on Southern Coasting and Lightering’s executive jet to assist JoAnn Riggs, were taking no chances that they would ever be connected to the destruction of the supertanker.
The SEALs’ boat closed the gap between itself and the cabin cruiser so quickly that the navy commandos had to scramble to get themselves into position. Crouching behind the gunwale didn’t offer them any protection if they encountered return fire, but they were invisible as the boat cut into the wake of the cruiser, sluing around until the two vessels were running parallel. Captain Lyle Hauser stood at the helm of the assault boat with Mercer, each looking relaxed in their civilian clothes. Hauser lazily throttled back the twin outboards until both boats were traveling at the same speed, only a few feet separating them, as if to say to the men on the white cruiser, “Hey, look at my new toy.”