“No need to be so crass at the end, Mister Mitchell. I intend to let you live long enough to see the bombs detonate, thereby letting you and your oversized ego know that you have failed. After that, I will put a bullet in your head to erase you from my mind,” said Romanov, pulling a pistol from his desk drawer.
“Kill me if you want,” said Mitchell calmly. “But you’re finished. There will be no place in the world where you will be safe. You will be hunted down, and like Bin Laden you will end up a dead man.”
Romanov smiled and shook his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? The world needs oil, and I am the man who can deliver it. Your government will never come after me; I am their only hope for long lasting peace and stability in Russia.”
Mitchell gritted his teeth; unbelievably the man still thought he could buy his way out of the stinking hole he had dug.
“From the look in your eyes, Mister Mitchell,” boasted Romanov, “it is only now that you see I am right. All of your foolish heroics have been for nothing.”
Jackson stepped down off the metal stairs and guardedly looked around the dimly-lit engineering room. It seemed deserted, but his experience and the gnawing in his gut told him otherwise. Moving slowly, Jackson turned 360 degrees to make sure there wasn’t anyone lurking in the shadows, before pulling a couple of charges of C-4 explosive from his backpack and lying them down on a steel worktable. Setting the timers for five minutes, Jackson made his way to the nearest wall and securely placed the charges onto the hull of the ship. Once they exploded, the hole torn into the side of the yacht would be fatal. The ship would sink in minutes.
A faint noise echoed in the shadows.
Jackson spun about, just in time to see a man edging towards him, his hand raised with a wrench clenched in it. Firing from the hip, Jackson fired one round into the man, hitting him squarely in the arm. With a loud clang, the wrench hit the metal floor; the man stood there wide-eyed holding his bloodied arm.
“Now, why did you have to try that?” said Jackson, looking at the injured man. “I hope you can still swim.”
Looking down the business end of Jackson’s weapon, the man stepped back and eagerly nodded before edging his way to the stairs. Realizing that he wasn’t going to be shot in the back, the man turned and hurriedly fled up the stairs.
Movement further down the room caught Jackson’s attention. Realizing that his rifle was more of a liability than an asset in the cramped space, Jackson drew his pistol and then warily moved towards the other end of the engine room.
The red-haired sergeant, a Russian immigrant to the States, sat behind a computer console, his eyes speedily going through Romanov’s business correspondence. A terrified computer operator had been “coaxed” by Sam into opening up the Romanov Corporation’s private files for the marine. Emailing anything and everything of value directly back to the computers at the Polaris Complex, the sergeant was laying bare Romanov’s duplicity, his double-dealing with the Russian insurgents and his plans to cripple the West economically. It was all there.
“Two minutes, then we’ve got to go,” said Sam to the marine as she checked her watch.
The young man nodded without looking up from the computer screen. He intended to use every second he had to finish the traitorous Romanov.
Skimming along barely twenty meters above the white-capped ocean waves, two ghost-gray U.S. Navy F-18s closed in on the Imperator. The lead plane flew towards the yacht, as if it were going to fly straight into it, while the other plane banked away and started to climb into the dark gray sky. At one kilometer out, the lead pilot reached down and flipped a switch on his console and with a deafening roar flew right over the Imperator, its wake rattling the ship as if it were a toy in a child’s bathtub.
The sound of the rapidly approaching plane penetrated deep inside the Imperator. Dmitry Romanov nervously ran his thumb over the remote detonator, his mind suddenly filled with doubt. Had Mitchell been a decoy to give someone time to sink his yacht? Looking over at Mitchell, Romanov was disconcerted to see him sitting there with a confident grin on his face. I’ve had been set up, thought Romanov angrily. Rising from his chair, Romanov looked at Mitchell with hate in his eyes. Slowly he brought up the detonator and then pressed the button.
For a second, Romanov held his breath, expecting an explosion as bright as the sun to flash on the horizon, but nothing happened. Repeatedly smashing his thumb on the detonator, Romanov stared down at the impotent device in his hand, a growing bewildered look on his face.
“It’s useless,” said Mitchell standing. “The plane that just flew over your yacht was configured to do an electronic warfare burn, and every device from your detonator to your ship’s navigational computers were all fried in an instant. You lose, Dmitry Romanov.”
Blinded by his anger, Romanov swore and then hurled the detonator towards Mitchell.
Ignoring the flying remote, Mitchell dove straight at Romanov, smashing him in his chest, sending him flying over the wide wooden desk. His pistol flew out of his hand and fell onto the floor. Mitchell quickly glanced about for the pistol, but could not see it anywhere. Pushing a chair out of the way, Mitchell reached down and grabbed Romanov by the collar. Hauling him to his feet, he sent a fist into Romanov’s stomach, painfully forcing his opponent to double over.
The sergeant swore as the screen flashed and then went blank the second after the plane, piercingly loud, shot over the yacht. “Thirty more seconds, I just wanted thirty more seconds,” he said.
Sam laid a hand on his shoulder. “Time’s up, marine, we have to go.”
Standing up, the sergeant turned towards the cowering computer operators, and in Russian said, “Time to swim. If you can’t, take a life preserver with you, but you are all going over the side, right now!”
The men nodded. With their hands still in the air, they scurried out of the room, rats off a sinking ship.
Pulling a charge from her satchel, Sam placed it on the computer mainframe and set it for three minutes. With the marines once more in the lead, Sam started to make her way back up to the helipad and safety.
The heat inside the engine room was almost unbearable. Jackson was dressed for the freezing temperatures outside, and rivers of sweat poured down his clean-shaven head straight into his eyes. Thick clouds of steam made visibility near impossible. The smooth metal floor soon became slick and dangerous. Someone must have opened the valves, thought Jackson. Trying his best to blow away the annoying sweat, Jackson made his way deeper into the bowels of the ship, looking for the intruder. The sound of chains rattling caught his attention. Edging forward, his pistol aimed into the thick gray cloud, Jackson mentally counted down in his head. He had barely two minutes before his charges exploded, flooding the engine room and him with it. Edging around a turbo, Jackson stopped in his tracks, not believing what he was seeing. An athletic-looking woman in a snug-fitting dry suit was preparing to launch a submersible from a hatch built into the bottom of the boat. For a brief moment, Jackson almost thought he saw a ghost, but he remembered that Jen March had said there were two Romanov daughters.
“Going somewhere?” asked Jackson, stepping out so he could be seen.
Nika stopped what she was doing, looked over at Jackson, and then smiled unnervingly.
Jackson stepped forward, his pistol trained on Nika’s chest. “What’s so damned amusing?”
“You must be one of Mister Mitchell’s friends.”