Surfacing slowly, he pressed his cheek flush against the algae-slick hull of the wooden barge. There was no gunfire. Just shouting and the slap of cheap plastic flip-flops and running feet coming toward him. He panted as quietly as he could, trying to get oxygen back in his bloodstream.
He felt a soft thudding against his cheek, footfalls on the barge deck.
If he could only talk to them, make them understand that he was no threat to them. Of course, he understood, that was a ridiculous thought. Right now, escape was his only chance to survive.
He looked down the row of boats for shelter. About forty yards down, a modern twin-hulled catamaran lay among the many old-fashioned wooden boats. If he could swim the full distance under water, he could hide between the two hulls of the cat. He was skeptical about making it, though. A ten-yard gap yawned between the cat and the next boat. If he came up in that gap, they’d have a good chance of blowing his head off.
Gideon took a couple of deep breaths, then dove again. He could scarcely see anything in the brown water, just dark shapes floating above him. He passed one boat, then a second, then a third. Don’t push too hard, he told himself, trying not to burn up all his air.
How many boats had there been between the barge and the cat? He couldn’t remember. Then he saw the pale wobbly sky above him. He was in the gap now. Ten yards from the cat. Well, it had looked like ten yards from where he’d been before. Now that he was here, he was afraid it might be more. His lungs were already burning.
Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.
His vision narrowed as he felt the oxygen deficit shutting down his brain. Just a few more yards.
But the urge to breathe was getting hard to suppress. His arms and legs felt like rubber. He could see the wavering dark shape of the cat, two long dark streaks of shadow running down into the water.
Stroke, kick. Stroke, kick.
Everything was getting gray now. He wasn’t going to make it.
Stroke, kick.
Then . . . something dark.
Forcing the cobwebs from his mind, he kicked once more before surfacing. A gasp broke from his lips. He hoped it wouldn’t be audible from the quay. Air rushed into his lungs as he panted again, so weak that he could barely hold on to the nylon rope that trailed into the water near his hand.
But he had made it.
Above him was the fiberglass deck of the cat. He took two weak strokes, repositioning himself underneath the center of the deck. He couldn’t see the quay. Nothing was visible except the lower hulls of the nearest boats. If he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him.
There was some more shouting. Obviously the men who’d been after him were getting frustrated. Occasionally they fired into the water, shooting at nothing.
Then, after a while, it all stopped. No shouting, no shooting. Just silence.
Now that the excitement was over and he had time to think, he also had more time to get worried. How was he going to get out of here? He supposed he could work his way from boat to boat until he reached the end of the quay. But what then?
The jihadis would be on the lookout for him now. He had no friends here, no money, no contacts, no phone or radio. Gideon hung on to the nylon rope, treading water with as much physical economy as he could manage.
He waited for what seemed an endless amount of time, then worked his way down to the end of the cat and looked out. A row of boats bobbed gently in the water. The quay was deserted.
Then he saw it. At the far end of the dock was a large modern speedboat. Crudely painted on the stern was some sort of large monkey. It had wild eyes and its mouth was wide open in what was either hysterical laughter or a threatening grimace. Gideon whispered a silent apology to the kid from Indiana for having doubted him, as he worked his way silently through the water toward the speedboat bearing the image of a screaming monkey.
Sometimes the jihadis reappeared on the quay or on the boats. They seemed to be looking for him—but not that hard. They must have assumed that he had drowned or been shot, because they didn’t seem to be breaking their necks to find him.
Finally, he was getting close. Another forty yards and he’d reach the speedboat. As he swam slowly and silently past an old wreck of a fishing boat, a face appeared over the side. Two black eyes stared right at him. He froze. It was an old woman, toothless and wrinkled, her head covered with a black scarf. For a moment neither of them moved. She was caught as much off guard as he was. His heart hammered in his chest.
Finally, he lifted one finger to his lips. The old woman continued to stare. Then her head dem"±€isappeared.
He waited for a cry, a noise, an alarm. But he heard nothing.
The old woman hadn’t given him away. Maybe she was no more a fan of the jihadis than he was. He took a few last strokes, found himself alongside the boat with the monkey painted on its hull. He worked his way to the front, found a mooring line, grabbed it, and swung himself up onto the deck. For a river speedboat, it was a sizable craft, well over twenty-five feet. In the front was a sort of wheelhouse. Behind that, a deck lined with tie-downs and sturdy alloy cargo rails, which were clearly designed to carry some kind of freight.
Housed in the aft were a pair of massive inboard engines. Gideon wondered what kind of freight required being carried at forty or fifty knots. Probably not anything legal, Gideon reflected, when he smelled cigarette smoke.
Before he had a chance to see where it was coming from, the door of the wheelhouse opened and a small man stepped out. A thin brown cigarette protruded from his mouth. His face was horribly disfigured, lipless, so that he had to clench the cigarette between the few rotting teeth still in his mouth. Had the man been burned or was it some kind of congenital deformity? Gideon couldn’t tell, but the guy looked a lot like a screaming monkey.
Gideon's War and Hard Target
The man’s face was so arresting, in fact, that it took...
He was barking at Gideon in a sharp, raspy voice. Although Gideon didn’t understand the words, he didn’t need a translator to understand their meaning. Don’t move, asshole! Or some less polite equivalent. So he didn’t move.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KATE SLIPPED INTO THE control room, brushing her still-damp auburn hair. “What’s their ETA?”
Big Al set down the radio handset. “Just talked to the pilot. He’s two minutes out. He’s got the ambassador on board, along with the State Department press attaché, plus this Earl Parker guy, two marine bodyguards, and a Secret Service agent. And he’s got that engineer, Cole Ransom.”
“Where are the news crews?”
“On a second chopper, right behind the first one.”
“How’s that supposed to work? They can’t both fit on the deck.”
“The news chopper will hover.”
The last thing she wanted was a bunch of newshounds wandering around her rig. “After it’s over, I want the news crews restricted to the mess or the rec room. Tell them it’s a safety issue.”
“I got you.” Big Al nodded.
The radio crackled. “Obelisk, this is State four-seven-one, request clearance to land.”
Kate looked at the security camera monitors. The chopper deck was visible on one of the small windows. Big Al keyed the handset. “Clearance granted, State four-seven-one.”
“I better get up there,” she said.
As she prepared to move, she felt it again—a slight tremor coming up through the steel deck. In her last conversation with Ransom, the engineer had said that he was confident that the passive damping system would hold as long as the seas stayed below thirty-five feet. Waves that high occurred rarely in the South China Sea, and even then, only during the harshest typhoon conditions.
She scanned the control room equipment, checking the gauges, dials, and readouts. It was a habit with her. From the moment she accepted this job, she had felt compelled to know every last detail about what was happening on her rig at all times. And she knew that she wouldn’t have a chance to check anything again until after her VIP guests were gone. Her eyes settled on the wave height monitor. The moving average graph was inching slowly upward. A large red number gauged the height of the latest wave.