Havoc - v4 (25 page)

After ten minutes Crenna began to lower the hook into the water. Cali and Jesse must have reached the hold. A minute later the crane rotated a few degrees and another twenty or so feet of steel cable disappeared into the river.

“They must be hooking onto the crates,” Mercer said.

“Won’t be long now.” As if to punctuate the statement one of the deckhands came over to the barge’s rail and looked down onto the cabin cruiser. “They’re about ready to lift. Your boss said we should put on the gas masks now.”

“Oh right.” Stan rummaged through one of his trunks and came away with an armful of NBC (Nuclear/ Biological/Chemical) hooded gas masks. He tossed them up to the deckhand and took out two more for himself and Mercer.

“What happens when we get them to the surface?” Mercer asked.

“We’ll bag them, and get them back to the dock. We have a hazmat truck standing by.”

“Not planning on warning the people of this fair city that you’re hauling a thousand pounds of plutonium through their streets?” Mercer teased.

“Please. On any given day there are a couple of tons of radioactive material on the roads. Only reason why there hasn’t been an accident is because we don’t advertise it and invite out all the wackos.”

The crane’s big diesel bellowed and Mercer saw the drum at its rear begin to turn ever so slowly. “They’ve got them.”

He could imagine Cali and Jesse in the dark hold making sure the crates didn’t snag or smash against anything as the crane dragged them out. For another five minutes the crane spooled back cable in a delicate balance of horsepower, wind, and current. Then everything came to a standstill. Mercer couldn’t understand it. He looked across and could see Crenna in the crane’s cab. He leaned far back in his chair and had his arms crossed.

“They must have the crates out of the hold,” Mercer said, finally understanding. “He wants Cali and Jesse topside before he brings them up, in case there’s a problem.”

Moments later Cali and Jesse Williams bobbed to the surface at the rear of the cabin cruiser. Stan and Mercer quickly helped them aboard. When Crenna saw that the divers were safely out of the water, he started drawing back cable and retracting the telescopic boom to reduce tension on the crane’s hydraulic systems. In moments the crates emerged dripping from the river and hung suspended over the barge’s deck.

The roar of the crane’s diesel masked another, deeper sound until it was almost at the work site. The powerful outboard on the bass boat that had gone by earlier sent an arcing fountain of water into the air as it approached the barge at nearly forty miles per hour. Mercer had been busy helping Cali off with her equipment and only sensed the fast-moving craft when it entered his peripheral vision. He saw that the four men in the sleek boat were focused on the barge, and three of them brandished automatic weapons.

“Down,” he shouted, shoving Cali to the deck. As he whirled he saw the Bertram fishing boat that had been tied to the pier suddenly come alive, a boil of froth at her transom as the captain slammed the throttles to their gates.

Mercer had kept his hand grip close at hand the entire day. He ripped open the zipper, fumbling for a frantic second, and pulled out an MP-40 Schmeisser. The weapon was the standard German submachine gun during World War Two. Mercer had bought it from Tiny, who’d taken it in trade on a gambling debt. He jammed a thirty-round magazine into the receiver and racked the slide. He stuffed six more magazines into his jeans pockets. While not the most accurate weapon, the gun’s high rate of fire made it devastating at close range.

The fast-moving bass boat was still twenty yards from the barge when the three gunmen opened up with their Kalashnikovs. Crenna’s crew fell flat to the deck and Crenna himself leapt from the crane. He dove behind the big air compressor as rounds pinged and ricocheted off the barge’s metalworks. He tore off the gas mask and sat there panting.

Ducking behind the cabin cruiser’s gunwales, Mercer shoved the grip to Cali. “There’s a Beretta in there.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I just wanted to be ready.” He addressed Stan Slaughbaugh and Jesse Williams. Both were huddled at the transom and neither looked like he’d ever been on the receiving end of an ambush. “Go forward into the cabin. Fire up the engines, then stay down.” The two NEST scientists complied wordlessly.

The bass boat continued to roar up the river, the sustained automatic fire popping over the throb of the big outboard. It looked to Mercer as if they were going to jump onto the far side of the barge. He chanced looking over his shoulder. The Bertram fishing boat had crossed half the river and was coming on strong, her blunt bows buried behind a creaming froth of water. The captain was in the high bridge while the other two were stationed on either side of the stern deck. They both carried weapons—Heckler and Koch HK-416s, the German arms manufacturer’s latest assault carbine. The compact weapons fired NATO 5.56-millimeter ammunition and were fast becoming the popular choice among the world’s elite military units.

Cali saw where Mercer was looking and gasped. They were trapped. Even if they untied from the barge, the Bertram would easily outrun them. She drew a bead on one of the sport fishermen with her pistol when the vessel was fifty yards out. Mercer had turned back to see the bass boat decelerate as it came abreast of the barge. The men were still firing, although Mercer couldn’t see Crenna or any of his deckhands. A snap burst from one of the gunmen hit the hydraulic controls that anchored the barge to the river bottom. Hydraulic fluid pumped from the reservoirs like lifeblood. Mercer looked back and was about to tell Cali to stay put when he saw her about to fire on the Bertram.

“No!” he shouted and pushed her hand into the air.

The Bertram was thirty yards away, close enough for Mercer to see the look of concentration on Booker Sykes’s face as he drove the boat across the river. Mercer didn’t know the two Special Forces operators with him. They hadn’t been part of Sykes’s Delta Force team when they escorted Mercer into a Tibetan monastery once run by Tisa Nguyen’s father. Calling Sykes to provide security had dredged up fresh memories of the events leading to her death, but Mercer wouldn’t let his pain hamper the ongoing investigation.

“They’re with me,” he said. “They are Delta Force commandos. The commander’s name is Sykes. Cover me.”

Mercer eased over the gunwale and onto the deck of the barge. He could feel that the hydraulic system had failed and the barge was responding to the wind and waves, but so far he couldn’t tell if it was caught in the Niagara River’s relentless current.

The bass boat was so low to the water that he couldn’t see it on the far side of the barge. He found cover behind a chain locker and waited for the gunmen to expose themselves again. Sykes arced the Bertram well behind the barge and was about to engage from the Canadian side of the river when another bass boat appeared around the north tip of Grand Island. Mercer counted four men in it as well, bringing the total number of attackers to eight. When he looked back to the first bass boat, he caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the men lunging onto the barge.

His initial plan if they were attacked was to wait until he and Sykes could take out all the gunmen in a surprise counter ambush, but the sheer numbers made that option untenable. Another gunman raised himself over the low flank of the bass boat. His classic Middle Eastern features told Mercer two things. One was that the gunmen had probably received training in some terrorist camp in Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia. The second thing he knew was that they were here to fight to the death.

The Arab was exposed for only a fraction of a second but it was enough time for Mercer to bring the Schmeisser to bear. The old submachine gun bucked in his hand like a living thing as he fired off a five-round burst. Four of the rounds went wide but the fifth blew the gunman off the barge in a spray of blood.

The counterfire from the other three terrorists was swift and sustained. The sound of bullets striking the chain locker was horrific. It felt like the noise would shake Mercer’s teeth loose from his jaw. But even over this racket he heard Sykes and his team engage the second bass boat, their assault carbines adding to the gun battle raging across the width of the river.

Mercer waited until the firing stopped to blindly fire a few rounds over the chain locker and scamper to better cover near the crane. He nearly tripped over the prone form of Brian Crenna. He was huddled partially under the crane with one of his deckhands.

“What the hell is going on?” Crenna shouted over the roar of automatic weapons.

Mercer ignored the pointless question. “Where are your other two men?”

“Billy jumped over the side.” He pointed out over the water. Mercer could see a man swimming toward Grand Island. “He’s a good swimmer. He’ll make it. I don’t know about Tom.”

The second bass boat raced around to their side of the barge, Sykes’s big Bertram trying to keep up with the faster and more nimble craft. While one of the gunmen fired at the Bertram, two more raked the cabin cruiser. Several shots went wide and slammed into the crane’s turret, forcing the three men to cower further, as if trying to burrow into the steel decking.

“Listen,” Mercer said when the outboard faded. “I’m going to cover you. Get to the cabin cruiser and get out of here.”

He changed out the half-depleted magazine for a fresh one, waited a moment for Crenna and the deckhand to get ready, then ducked under the extended boom and cut loose with the Schmeisser. He raked the far side of the barge in a continuous sweep from stem to stern. The gunmen were out of sight so he nodded to Crenna. The two men took off in a loping run, covering the thirty feet to the side of the barge in seconds. Both vaulted over the rail and onto the cabin cruiser’s deck.

Even as he concentrated on finding a target, Mercer noticed that the far bank of the river was moving ever so slightly. When the last round had cycled through the gun, Mercer ducked back under the crane, and as he changed out the magazine he looked at the near bank. Intellect overcame the adrenaline surging though his veins and he realized the land wasn’t moving at all. The hydraulic anchors had failed completely and the barge was at the mercy of the Niagara River. And in the few seconds it took to reload the Schmeisser he realized the barge was accelerating. The wind had picked up again and he estimated they were going six knots.

Mercer was certain the cabin cruiser didn’t have the power to tow the barge against the current. He needed to get to the tug moored to the far side of the craft if he was going to prevent them all from plummeting down the falls. Failing that, he had to get the crates of plutonium ore into the special bags so they wouldn’t smash open when the barge went over.

“Cali,” he shouted. “We’re adrift. Cast off and get out of here.”

“What about you?” she shouted back without revealing herself.

“Sykes can pick me up.” For the moment, though, Mercer didn’t know where his friend was. The Bertram and the second bass boat had gone upriver. He would just have to trust that Booker Sykes would take out the second group of terrorists and return before it was too late.

Cali and Crenna spoke for a second and she covered him as he inched his way to the controls of the cabin cruiser. Cali wanted Crenna to use the cruiser to push the barge to shore so he opened the throttles and put the rudder hard over. The ropes securing the cruiser to the barge strained as the tired motor roared. To Mercer’s surprise and delight it seemed like her plan was working. The nine-hundred-ton barge slowly rotated and seemed to be heading for the Canadian side of the river. The gunmen on the bass boat hadn’t expected such fierce resistance so it was taking them a few seconds to regroup, but when they heard the cruiser they opened fire again. The windshield and side windows exploded, covering Crenna in a shower of glass, while chunks were ripped from the cruiser’s upperworks. It was a fluke shot that hit the cleat securing the cruiser’s bow to the barge. The boat slewed away from the metal side of the barge before Crenna could bring the wheel over or throttle down the engine. The tension on the rear cleat was too much and it gave way, tearing a large section of the transom in the process.

The gunmen continued to fire as the two craft separated. The rear deck was chewed up by the barrage, forcing Cali to dive into the cabin. Greasy smoke began to boil from the engine cowling and the motor started to sputter. As soon as Crenna drove them out of range, Cali mounted the four steps to the cockpit. “We have to go back.”

“Forget it, lady. You ain’t paying me enough for this. I’m going to pick up Billy and call the Coast Guard.”

“Mercer will be dead by the time they get here.”

“That’s his problem.”

Cali cursed herself for emptying the Beretta. She wouldn’t have shot Crenna but she certainly would have threatened him. “Okay, I’ll drop you off at the dock but I’m going back.”

“Not on my boat you’re not. Bad enough I might lose my tug and the crane if she don’t ground.”

Cali exploded in rage. “Those crates we raised are filled with plutonium,” she shouted. “If they fall into the hands of a bunch of terrorists I’ll make sure you’re charged with treason and shot.”

He looked at her. Cali’s eyes blazed with fury and her breath came in heaving gasps. Just as he was about to agree, a wave of heat washed over them. They turned in unison. The rear of the boat was a wall of flame. A bullet had severed the fuel line and the raw gasoline had ignited. “Jesus,” Crenna yelled. “Everyone off the boat. Now!”

Stan, Jesse, and Crenna’s third mate scrambled from the cabin. More familiar with watercraft, the mate knew instantly that the boat was going to burn to the water line, so he threw himself over the side. Stan and Jesse saw that Cali and the captain were crawling out through the shattered windshield and they jumped into the swift-flowing river.

Cali grabbed a pair of flotation rings that hung just below the windscreen and jumped into the water with Crenna right behind her. The shore of Grand Island was only a hundred yards away, and once everyone was together and holding on to one of the rings, they struck out. The boat drifted past. The fire had already spread to the cabin and flames shot from the cockpit. Tears of frustration stung Cali’s eyes. By the time she reached shore and found another boat it would be too late.