It seemed almost impossible. But it was either that or splash down in the ocean, call for a pickup, and float around for several hours, hoping not to attract any hungry sharks.
He drifted past the ship, four hundred feet high and wide to port. He had twenty seconds. As he passed the superstructure, he could see a figure on the bridge but no lookouts. He doubted anyone on the blazingly lit ship could see him. Their night vision would be nonexistent in all that light.
He started to turn.
Turbulence from the accommodations block caught him and threatened to spill the air from his chute. He recovered, and swooped in behind the boat.
Below him he saw the end of the deck and the churning white water of the ship’s wake. Beneath that wake, a pair of twenty-foot screws would be spinning at a hundred rpms, like a monster-sized blender just waiting to dice him up.
He angled himself forward, picked up some speed, and began dropping fast. He pulled hard on the lines, but it was too late. The wind whipping around the ship blew him backward. He missed the deck, and dropped farther, headed for the white water below and a grisly death.
He tried to turn away, but the swirling wind reversed, sucking him forward like a scrap of paper swept along in the wake of a passing car. The surge of wind threw him toward the aft end of the ship. He saw a flash of huge white letters reading “ONYX,” and then he was tumbling into an open space between the main deck and a deck beneath it.
The impact jarred him, and then flung him forward, as the parachute’s lines caught on something around the opening. He landed flat on his back and was almost immediately yanked backward toward the rail. The turbulent air behind the ship had filled the chute again, which now threatened to drag him off the deck and back out once again.
Backward, forward, backward. Kurt had had enough.
He hit the instant release on his harness, and the parachute was sucked out over the water. It fluttered and faded and finally vanished in the gloom behind the great ship.
He was on board. Despite all risks and logic to the contrary, he’d landed safely on the Onyx. He thought about Joe’s long list of warnings regarding what could go wrong and almost laughed. None of those things happened. But Joe had never once mentioned lighted decks, wind shear, and getting chopped up by the ship’s propellers.
Looking around, Kurt had to wonder exactly what he’d landed in. The dark open space reminded him of the fantail at the aft end of an aircraft carrier, the huge area between the main deck and the hangar deck.
A few ladders descended toward the water. A pair of hatchway doors looked to be shut tight, and to his left were a few ratty deck chairs and a bucket filled with cigarette butts. Fortunately for him, no one had been sitting out there, having a smoke, as he came in for a rather ugly landing.
Fairly certain no one had noticed his arrival, Kurt pulled off his helmet and disconnected the oxygen bottle. With a hard fling, he launched both out into the night.
He heard no splash. The wind and the wake of the ship were too loud for that.
With those items gone he moved to the darkest corner of the unlit opening and dropped to one knee.
Kneeling in the dark, Kurt slipped a 9mm Beretta from a side pocket and began screwing a silencer into the barrel. His senses were on overload. He listened for movement.
He could hear little beyond the throbbing of the engines and the hum of machinery. But before he could move, the handle on one of the doors turned. The starboard hatchway opened, and Kurt pressed himself farther into the dark like a spider trying to hide in a cracked bit of concrete.
Two figures walked out illuminated by the interior light until the hatch door slammed shut.
They walked to the rail.
“I can tell that you’re impressed,” he heard a male voice say, a voice he immediately recognized as belonging to Andras.
Unable to believe his luck, Kurt’s hand tightened on the Beretta. But then the other voice spoke, and Kurt recognized it as well. A female voice. A Russian voice. Katarina’s voice.
“I don’t know how you people built such a thing without the world knowing,” she said. “But much as I hate to admit it, it’s rather an incredible design. I suppose I should thank you for the tour, and the food and the wine.”
“Now you understand why your superiors will be interested,” Andras said.
“Yes,” she said. “I suspect they will be fascinated with what I have to tell them.”
Kurt’s mind whirled as he listened to her speak. He certainly didn’t blame her for using any method she could think of to earn her captor’s trust and a chance at freedom, but the words she used made it sound like something bigger was in play here.
Before anything more was said, a crewman opened the hatchway door.
“Radio call for you, Andras,” the man said. “Coming in from Freetown. It’s urgent.”
“Time to go,” Andras said.
He led Katarina toward the door, guided her through first, and then followed. The swath of light widened and then narrowed and vanished as the heavy steel door clanged shut.
If there had been any doubt in Kurt’s mind before, it was gone now. The Russians wouldn’t be interested in a random supertanker. The ship had to be something more, which meant all the odd structures and anomalies probably had some purpose. Kurt was pretty sure it wouldn’t turn out to be a benevolent one.
Getting to his feet, he moved to the bulkhead door which Andras and Katarina had gone through a minute before. Silently, he applied torque to the handle. He moved it slowly until it clicked.
He cracked the door a quarter inch and looked down the passageway. With no one in sight, Kurt opened the door wider and slipped inside.
53
GAMAY TROUT STOOD beside her husband Paul in the operations center of the USS Truxton. The activity aboard it and the other ships in the battle group had increased to a frenetic pace over the past few hours.
The ship was being readied for battle, and it wasn’t alone. Helicopters had fanned out not only from the Truxtonbut from the group’s flagship, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Shortly after that, she heard the scream of jets launching and flying off in full afterburner. The sound was unmistakable even though the Lincolnwas five miles away.
Until now she and Paul had not been officially updated, but she guessed they were about to find out what was going on.
The ship’s captain, Keith Louden, stepped forward. An average-sized man, with short gray hair and sharp hawklike eyes, he was in his early fifties, fit and trim.
“As I’m sure you’re aware,” Louden began, “we’re about to take action against a hostile enemy. An enemy that has already destroyed two of our satellites with some kind of weapon designed around a particle accelerator.”
Gamay took a deep breath. “Are we safe here?” she asked, remembering the bodies they’d seen in the Kinjara Maru, blackened and burned.
The captain nodded.
“According to the experts at the Pentagon, this weapon operates on a line-of-sight trajectory. That is, it fires in a straight line, something like a laser. Unlike a bullet or artillery shell, or even a ballistic missile warhead, it can’t hit anything around the curvature of the earth. So we should be out of harm’s way in our present position. But once a ship or plane pops up over the horizon, that’s a different story.”
The captain went on to explain the situation, relaying what was known about Sierra Leone, the threats Djemma Garand had made, and the military’s planned response.
As the captain spoke he walked them over to a touch-screen monitor. On it they saw the section of Sierra Leone’s coast where the weapon and the oil platforms were located. A curved line across the screen flashed in red.
“That’s the horizon,” the captain told them. “Anything that goes beyond that line, whether it’s a ship or plane or missile, is likely to be incinerated within seconds.”