Hell Ship (17 page)

Ray smiled patiently.
“As it happens, yes. This is a war, a war against a shadow empire that has controlled our nation from its very inception. We all took the same oath; to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; the Templars are our greatest enemy, subverting the very principles of freedom that we—and all those who went before—pledged to defend with our blood. I will see them brought down. And I will use their own treasure to do it.”

Dane looked at Bones, saw the slight head shake; the unspoken warning had not changed:
Don’t trust him
. He turned back to Ray. “Yeah. Well, good luck with that.”

“You made it possible, Maddock.
You did what even they could not do; you found Hancock, found the key. What do you say? Will you join me in the fight against America’s true enemies?”

“Sorry.
I’ve got a job.”

“Told you,” muttered Scalpel.

Ray seemed neither surprised nor disappointed. He checked his watch again. “So be it. Our transaction is complete. I have what I came for, and you have your answers.” He turned away, waving his hand in a circular motion to signal the helicopter pilot to prepare for takeoff.

“That’s it?” said
Alex. “You’re just going to leave us here?”

Ray
ignored the question. He trekked toward the Huey and did not look back. Scalpel however lingered, his gaze fixed on Dane. “Time to settle up, Maddock.”

“So much for guarantees,” muttered Bones.

“Oh, I’m not going to kill you. I just wanted to savor this moment. You left me for dead, so the least I can do is return the favor.” Scalpel stopped, as if suddenly struck by inspiration. “You know, actually there is one other thing.”

He raised his arm high overhead, wincing as the motion taxed his damaged shoulder, and then brought it down in a chopping motion.
“Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

The meaning of his parting gesture became clear a moment later as one of the hovering helicopters
tilted forward and began moving toward them. Alex drew close to Dane, pressing herself against his back as if he might shelter her from what was coming, but the helicopter passed overhead without slowing and continued out over the breakers.

Bones’ eyes went wide in horror. “Gabby!”

The
Jacinta
vanished in a flash of light beneath a rising pillar of black smoke.

The thunderclap of the explosion and a hot shockwave driving splinters and spray buffeted Dane and the others.
He wheeled on Scalpel, but the mercenary was already aboard the Huey, and lifting off. He hadn’t believed Ray’s assertion that Scalpel was innocent of Don Riddell’s murder, and here was proof that Alex had been right about them not leaving loose ends.

Now, they
were the only loose ends remaining.

Dan
e looked around, desperate to find cover, but the expected hailstorm of bullets did not materialize. Instead, the three helicopters banked away from the island, and headed for the eastern horizon.

Bones continued to stare in horror
at the shattered smoking remains of the
Jacinta.
The blast, probably from a satchel charge, had obliterated the superstructure and nearly broken the boat in half. It took less than a minute for water to inundate the broken vessel and pull it under the surface.

Alex
was also staring in disbelief. “I don’t get it. Why kill her and leave us alive?”

“We’re stranded here now,” Dane answered.
“He didn’t spare us; he left us to die, stuck on this rock, just like Trevor Hancock. If we’re lucky, that is.”

“Lucky?”

“You may have noticed that Ray was in a hurry to get out of here. These islands are disputed territory. China, Vietnam, and Malaysia, among others, have claimed them, and while they aren’t exactly ready to go to war over them, they all keep a close eye on what goes on here. They might not bother with a visit from an idle fishing vessel, but an intrusion by three helicopters would definitely get their attention. And chances are very good that they noticed that.” He pointed to the dissipating black cloud that marked the place where
Jacinta
had broken up. “So, there’s a better than even chance that a Chinese or Vietnamese patrol boat is already on its way here.”

“To rescue us?”

Dane shook his head. “To arrest us.”

“Surely if we explain—”

“Right,” snarled Bones. “We’ll just tell them that a crazy mercenary tricked us into finding a lost treasure so that he can destroy a bunch of secret modern Templars. Hey, we might as well let them know that we’re SEALs while we’re at it. Worst case scenario…they actually believe it.”

“Oh.”
Alex sagged in defeat.

Dane took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter. Because we’re not going to be here.”

Alex
did not seem heartened by Dane’s declaration, but Bones perked up. “You got a plan?”

“
It’s more of a mission statement right now,” replied Dane, with a dangerous gleam in his eye. “It goes something like this. We get off this island. We go find what Ray wants before he does. And if we get another chance, we don’t make the mistake of leaving anyone for dead.”

“Amen, brother.”

“Even if we get off this island,” said Alex, “we don’t have the medallion anymore. How are we going to find the Templar treasure without the key?”

“We have this.”
Dane held up his hand, palm facing her. There, stamped deep into his skin, etched in blood, was a perfect outline of Trevor Hancock’s medallion.

South China Sea

Professor
didn’t feel
good about leaving Maddock and Bones in the middle of the mission, but he agreed with Maddock’s decision to break radio silence and contact Maxie. Professor didn’t necessarily believe in a centuries old Templar conspiracy, but he knew that the people who did believe—the fanatics who were desperate to wrap themselves in something mysterious and powerful—were capable of anything and were very, very dangerous.

That potential for danger made every mile, every minute of this race for port, pass with excruciating slowness.
Four hours after parting company with Maddock and Bones, they were less than a fourth of the way back to Manila. It would be at least another day before they could call Maxie, and of course, let the world know that they had found the wreck of the hell ship
Nagata Maru
.

After that, he and Willis would move purposefully back to rendezvous with their comrades.

Professor was on the open-air flying bridge of the
Sea Sprite
, one hand resting on the wheel, keeping the boat on course. He was mentally calculating the length of the return trip—again—to pass the time when he heard Willis call out to him. “Hey, Professor. Check our six.”

Professor
craned his head around and stared out across the cabin cruiser’s frothy wake. He expected to see a very familiar motor yacht closing on them, but there were no other vessels to be seen. Instead, there was a black speck in the sky, coming out of the west, and getting larger with each passing second.

Willis climbed halfway up the ladder to the flying bridge, so that only his head and shoulders were visible. He held out a pair of binoculars.

Professor trained the field glasses on the speck and confirmed his worst fears; it was a helicopter and it was chasing their wake. By the time he lowered the binoculars, the aircraft was close enough that he didn’t need them to confirm his identification. Five seconds later, the noise of its rotors was audible over
Sea Sprite
’s chugging engine, and five seconds after that, the bird passed overhead.

“Think it’s our old friends?”

Professor nodded. “Checking to see if we’re who they think we are.”

The helicopter banked to the right and turned a broad circle to come up once more from the boat’s rear.

“And now they know,” sighed Professor.

“Don’t sweat it, Prof,” declared Willis.
“My daddy always used to say, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, and I’ll be a damned fool if you fool me again.’”

“Uh, can you translate that from redneck to English for me?”

“It means, I remembered to pack the cutlasses.” Willis slid down the ladder rails and vanished from sight.

“Impetuous youth,” muttered
Professor, though in fact Willis was two months his senior. He trained the binoculars on the approaching helicopter. The pilot had turned the craft so that is was traveling sideways toward them, which presented a poor aerodynamic profile, but gave the men in the rear of the craft a clear shot at the boat…literally. One man appeared to be looking directly at him, over a gun with a very large bore barrel.

Looks like a Milkor MGL,
thought Professor. The weapon fired 40-millimeter grenades from a six-round revolver-style cylinder. There was one just like it in their team room back at Coronado.

Th
e MGL let out a puff of smoke.

Professor
dropped the glasses and hauled the wheel to starboard. The boat had only just begun to move when a geyser of water erupted to port. Professor felt the energy of the explosion ripple through the hull.

“Hold it steady, Prof!”
shouted Willis from the lower deck.

“
Are you insane?” He assumed that his counterpart was going to shoot back and needed a steady firing platform, but if he kept the boat on a straight course, the next grenade would land in his lap.

“I just need five seconds.”

Professor muttered a curse under his breath. A straight line was a definite no-go, but a sweeping turn might give Willis those precious moments of stability he’d asked for. He doubted the grenadier would be fooled for a full five seconds, but if Willis didn’t accomplish something by then—

There was a boom—like a mortar round being fired—from the lower deck, and as heat and smoke washed over
Professor, his first thought was that they’d taken a direct hit. Then he saw a finger of orange fire, with a tail of white smoke, streak toward the aircraft and impact right behind the open rear compartment.

The helicopter came apart in mid-air.

Willis’ whoop of triumph was mostly drowned out by the explosion. A few seconds later he appeared, holding the spent launch tube of an M72 light anti-tank weapon.

“Ho
w do you like that for a cutlass?” Willis said, grinning.

Dane plunged headfirst
into the rising wave and felt it tug at him as its energy passed by. He kicked furiously to the surface, and kept going until the waves were behind him.

The saltwater had a faintly oily taste to it, and Dane could f
eel the thin sheen of diesel on the surface as he drew closer to the place where the
Jacinta
had gone down. Pieces of debris—fiberglass, wood and foam—were already washing ashore, but what Dane needed was too big and too heavy to be carried in on the tide.

Bones had offered to make the journey out, but one look at the pain in the big man’s eyes had been enough for Dane to give him a pass.
Bones never showed much emotion; he usually hid his feelings behind a mask of sarcasm, or drowned them in drink. This was different. Dane didn’t know what sort relationship his teammate had with Gabby, but despite her betrayal, this tragedy had hit Bones hard. Dane wasn’t about to send him out to investigate the place where she had died.

He trod water in the center of the spreading oil slick, breathing deep for nearly a full minute to saturate his blood with oxygen.
Then, after filling his lungs with one last breath, he dipped beneath the water and dove for the bottom.

For just a moment, he felt the familiar peace of the water’s embrace.
True, he was doing it on a single breath—which under the best of circumstances, he could make last about three and a half minutes—but even with its time limitations, free diving—unencumbered by bulky equipment, artifice and technology—just felt more natural than SCUBA. Then, through the dark blurry water, he saw the shattered remains of the
Jacinta
, and his joy dissolved.

The bow end of the vessel looked no different than it had when on the surface, but twenty feet back, the familiarity ended.
The boat looked as if a giant had stomped his foot down amidships. The destruction was bad enough, but Dane knew that the tangle of broken bulkheads and fractured fiberglass was also the final resting place of a young woman who’d been guilty of nothing more than a bad decision.

He kicked harder, feeling the faint excess carbon dioxide
in his extremities and the impulse to exhale and suck in fresh air. He pushed that urge out of his mind. According to his watch, he’d only been under for forty seconds. He had plenty of time.

A flash of yellow drew his eye.
It was
Baby
. The little ROV was intact, lashed to the foredeck and still connected to its 500 meter long spool of reinforced coaxial cable which served as both a tether and a control link. The control unit had no doubt been destroyed in the blast, but Dane reckoned the cable might have its uses. He swam to the device and loosened the bungee cords restraining it. The ROV’s ballast tanks had been purged during its last ascent, so it was already buoyant, but the cable kept it from drifting away. He left it there and continued searching the wreck for anything else that might facilitate their escape.