“Joe, I’m pinned down.”
“It’s coming from the roof of the hotel,” Joe replied, firing off a couple of bursts at the building to give Kurt some relief.
Kurt caught sight of the sniper ducking behind the low wall on the roof. He could see that the man had just a regular rifle with no scope.
“That guy’s a hell of a marksman,” Kurt said, scrambling to a new position and adding a few shots to the ones Joe had fired.
By now, the men who’d been knocked over by the explosion were getting to their feet. One went for his rifle, swinging it toward the cabin where Joe was hiding. Before the man could fire, Renata popped open the skylight and shot twice. The gunman took both shots to the chest and fell off the boat into the water.
His partner ran.
Renata aimed for his legs, hitting him in the back of the knees and cutting him down, but keeping him alive for a later interrogation.
More shots tore in from the roof of the hotel and the thugs Kurt and Joe had tied up went down like bowling pins. Considering they’d been working the divers to death, Kurt didn’t shed any tears.
“Push them in,” Hassan could be heard shouting. “Push them in now!”
Up on the bridge, the D’Campions were shoved forward. They fell thirty feet, hitting the bay with a resounding crash and disappearing beneath the surface.
“The hostages are in the water!” Kurt shouted, ducking as another spread of shells hit the boat. “I’m still pinned down. I can’t get over the side. Joe, can you get to them?”
“I’m on it,” Joe shouted.
Joe was dealing with sporadic gunfire from someone tucked in behind the vehicles and stray shots from the shack where Hassan had hidden. He shut the valve on one of the air tanks, cut through a length of the attached line with his knife and then pulled the tank free.
He moved to the far side of the cabin, used the tank to smash out the window and then tossed it through.
“Zavala signing off!” he called out.
He ran forward and dove through the shattered window with perfect form, knifing into the water without a shot coming his way.
Once submerged, Joe kicked hard, swimming downward and reaching the tank.
He turned the valve, let a flow of bubbles out and put the end of the hose up into his mouth. Not the best way to get air, but it would work.
He turned and swam back under the dive boat, heading for the base of the bridge. The bay was like a pool and he quickly spotted the D’Campions struggling on the bottom, lit up by shafts of golden sunlight.
With the tank cradled under one arm, Joe kicked hard and used his free hand as well. For a man used to swimming with fins, the progress was agonizingly slow. He reached the sand at a depth of fifteen feet and used his feet to push off. He was almost under the bridge when the first bullets began stabbing down through the water toward him, leaving long trails of bubbles in their wake.
From his position on the flybridge, Kurt realized the danger. The water in the bay was clear as glass and almost as flat. The gunman on the bridge could see Joe easily. By the time Joe reached the D’Campions, he would be directly under the proverbial gun.
Trapped, but unwilling to see the D’Campions drown or his friend shot full of lead, Kurt did the only thing that seemed rational to him: he went all in.
He grabbed the block of C-4, set the timer to five seconds and pressed ENTER. With a flick of his arm, he tossed it toward the shack. The explosive landed close and the blast rocked the building, knocking half the roof off, and collapsing it one wall at a time like a house of cards.
Hassan wasn’t inside. He was already out and running toward parked cars.
With the distraction of the explosion creating a brief lull in the shooting, Kurt grabbed the throttles of the dive boat, shoved them forward and then turned the wheel. Because they’d backed into position in case they needed to make a quick getaway, the bow was pointed toward the open waters of the Mediterranean. But as Kurt turned the rudder to the stops, the boat curved back around and went straight for the bridge.
Twenty feet down, Joe was swimming inverted, holding the tank between himself and the strawlike trails of bubbles that marked each bullet that came his way.
He pulled the air hose from his mouth, releasing an eruption of bubbles that he hoped would hide his true position. The bullets kept coming, hitting all around him like a meteor shower. One grazed his arm, slicing a fine line in his skin that instantly began to bleed. Another hit the base of the air tank but didn’t penetrate.
He made it into the shadow beside the D’Campions and allowed each of them to breathe from the stream of air.
On the bridge, the shooter was getting frustrated. Hassan and the others were driving away. “Finish them before you leave,” Hassan had ordered.
The shooter pulled back, replaced the empty magazine and switched to full auto. Aiming back down through a hole in the bridge, he gripped the barrel. The bubbles were distracting, but each time his prey took a breath from the air hose, the bubbles cleared just enough. He zeroed in and readied himself to pull the trigger.
A red-and-gray shape flashed into the space and slammed into the stanchion that supported the bridge. The old structure shook and groaned.
For a second, the gunman thought the bridge would topple, but it steadied and the dust cleared. The gunman looked back down through his firing slot.
The grinning face of the silver-haired American was looking up at him, holding one of the APS rifles.
“Don’t!” the American said.
The gunman tried anyway, snapping the barrel of the rifle downward as quickly as he could.
It wasn’t fast enough. A single, odd-sounding shot rang out.
In some corner of his mind, the gunman recognized that sound as the report of the APS rifle’s heavy bolt, normally fired underwater, but in this case fired in the air. The thought was a flicker, brushed away by the impact of the five-inch projectile.
36
Two days after his vacation was supposed to have ended, Paul was doing anything but relaxing. He was studying the geological printouts, running a computer analysis on the sound waves, with a program he’d downloaded from NUMA headquarters, and brewing a fresh pot of coffee all at the same time. He was on his own since Reza’s original geologist had either been kidnapped or run off to join the rebels several weeks before.
“Look at this,” Paul said as the computer finally printed an interpretation of the sound waves for him.
Gamay looked over, bleary-eyed. “What is it? More squiggly lines? How exciting.”
“Your enthusiasm’s not what it used to be,” Paul replied.
“We’ve been looking at this stuff for hours,” she said. “One chart of zigzag lines after another, running the data through filters and computer programs and comparing it to squiggly-line pictures from other parts of the world. At this point, I feel like you’re just testing my patience. Not to mention my sanity.”
“Tests you’re not exactly passing with flying colors,” Paul said, needling her.
“In which case I can kill you and claim temporary insanity. Now, what am I looking at?”
“This is sandstone,” Paul said, pointing to one section of the printout. “But this is a layer of liquid at the bottom of that sandstone. There’s still water down there.”
“Then why can’t the pumps pick it up?”
“Because it’s moving,” Paul said. “It’s subsiding, down into this secondary, deeper layer of rock and clay.”
“Meaning what?”