Plague Ship (25 page)

“I’m afraid I’m out.” Eddie admitted, but then his face brightened. He tapped his radio mike. “Eric, crash the UAV into the jeep.”

“What?”

“The drone. Use it like a cruise missile. Hit the passenger compartment. It should still have enough fuel on board to blow up on impact.”

“Without it, we won’t be able to pick up the Chairman,” Stone protested.

“Have you heard from him in the past five minutes?” The question hung in the air. “Do it!”

“Yes, sir.”

NO SOONER HAD CABRILLO hit the pavement in front of the jeep, its driver hit the gas. Juan had a fraction of a second to flatten himself and reach up, as the bumper loomed over him. He grasped its underside, with the jeep picking up speed, dragging him down the road. He reached up higher to get his backside off the rough pavement, while rubber was chewed off his boots.

He hung on like that for a couple of seconds to catch his breath. He’d lost the mini-Uzi but still had a Glock in a holster at his hip. He doubled his grip with his left hand and used his right to grab his earbud and set it in place in time to hear the last exchange between Eddie and Eric.

“Negative on that,” he said, his throat mike easily negating the engine roar inches from his face.

“Juan,” Max shouted in jubilation, “how are you?”

“Oh, I’m hanging on.” He tilted his head back so he could look up the road. Even with everything upside down, he saw two sets of car taillights and the unmistakable flicker of rifle fire from one of them. “Give me thirty seconds and the van’ll be in the clear.”

“That’s about all the time we have left,” Linda cautioned.

“Trust me.” With that, Cabrillo tensed his shoulders and pulled himself higher, so that he was lying across the bumper just out of the driver’s view. Clutching the grille as tightly as he could, he cross-drew the Glock from its holster with his left hand. He pushed off with his right to vault over the hood.

He drew down as he came up, double-tapping the driver in the chest. At this range, the plastic bullets would have been fatal, had the driver not worn a Kevlar vest. As it was, the two slugs hit with the kinetic energy of a mule, blowing every molecule of air out of the driver’s lungs.

Cabrillo scrambled across the hood, clutching the wheel as the driver released it, his face already a deathly white as his mouth worked soundlessly to draw air. Cabrillo kept to the middle of the road by looking back at where they’d been rather than forward where they were heading. It didn’t help that the driver kept his foot pressed to the gas pedal.

Juan had no choice but to reach over the dash with his pistol and shoot the man in the leg. Blood splattered the dash, the driver, and Cabrillo, but the shot had the desired effect. The driver’s foot came off the gas and the jeep began to slow. When they were down to twenty miles per hour, Cabrillo leveled the pistol between the driver’s pain-seared eyes. “Out.”

The driver jumped clumsily, falling to the macadam, clutching his bleeding thigh and coming to a stop in a heap of abraded skin and broken limbs.

Juan swung over the lowered windscreen, settled into the driver’s seat, and started after the first jeep. In his mirror, he could see a set of headlights barreling down the road and rightly assumed it was another contingent of Responsivist guards. The tenacity of their pursuit set off all sorts of alarm bells in his mind, but that was something to think about when they were well away from here.

The men firing at the van had no reason to suspect Juan’s jeep as he came up behind them, even as the third jeep narrowed the gap. They flashed under a sign announcing in both Greek and English that they were fast approaching the entrance ramp for the New National Road and its vital bridge over the Corinth Canal, so it was the timing, not the execution, that worried him. It would have to be perfect. The ramp was coming up on their right. The third jeep was fifty yards back, and bullets continued to ping off the side of the van ahead.

“Linda,” Juan said, eyeing the jeep in front and the one coming up behind him, “speed up as fast as you can go. Don’t worry about losing the tires. Just floor it.”

The van started to open a gap between it and the jeep, but the jeep’s driver fed it a bit more gas and closed the gap again. Cabrillo came up to the jeep’s bumper and hit it with what police refer to as PIT, or Precision Immobilization Technique. The impact wasn’t very hard and didn’t need to be. The trick was to hit in such a way that the back end of the target vehicle gets spun around.

Feeling like a stock-car driver gunning for the lead, Juan hit the jeep a second time, just as the driver corrected from the first impact. This time, there was no saving it, and Juan had to crank his wheel hard to the left as the Responsivists’ four-by-four careened out of control, swinging in a wide arc across the road, before its two left tires hooked and the jeep began to flip over and over, shedding bits of sheet metal and the bodies of its occupants as it rolled.

The jeep came to rest on its roof, lying across the single-lane entrance to the thruway, effectively blocking it. Linda’s back was covered, and she was clear to make her run for the bridge. Juan kept watching his rearview mirror. The party in the third jeep slowed as they approached the on-ramp but must have soon realized their quarry had escaped, because they accelerated again after Cabrillo, who continued to drive toward the heart of Corinth.

NO ONE IN THE OP CENTER could believe what they saw from the flying drone until Eric radioed Cabrillo. “Is that you in the second jeep, Chairman?”

“Affirmative.”

“Nice piece of driving.”

“Thanks. How’s everything look?”

“Linda and her team are in the clear. There are no other vehicles coming out of the Responsivists’ stronghold, and, so far, your fireworks display hasn’t caught the attention of the local authorities. We’re about two minutes from entering the canal. George just came in from the hangar and will be taking over the UAV.”

“What about my route through town?”

“Last sweep looked clear. As soon as Linda reaches the bridge, you’ll have primary aerial coverage.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

Wearing his flight suit with the pant leg cut off and a large bandage taped to his thigh, George Adams settled himself at a computer, keeping the injured leg extended stiffly.

“How you doing?” Max asked, trying to sound more gruff than normal to hide his guilt.

“One more scar to impress the ladies. Hux only needed eight stitches. I’m more worried about the Robinson. Talk about giving something the Swiss cheese treatment. There were eleven holes in the canopy alone. Okay, Stoney, I’m ready.”

Eric flipped UAV control to Adams so he could concentrate on getting the big freighter through the Corinth Canal.

First proposed during Roman times, a canal across the narrow isthmus was beyond their capabilities. Being master engineers, the Romans built a road, which the Greeks called the
diolkos
, instead. Cargo was removed from ships at one end, and both freight and vessel were loaded onto wheeled sleds that were dragged by slaves to the other terminus, where the ships were refloated and reloaded. It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the technology had evolved to excavate a proper canal and save modern cargo vessels the one-hundred-and-sixty-mile journey around the Peloponnese. After a failed French effort, a Greek company took over and completed the canal in 1893.

At a little less than four miles long and only eighty-two feet wide at sea level, there wasn’t much to note about the canal except for one special feature. It was carved through solid rock that soared more than two hundred and fifty feet above the ships transiting through it. It was as though an ax had cleaved the living rock to create the narrow passage. A favorite tourist activity was to stand on one of the bridges that span the canal and peer down at the oceangoing ships far below.

Had it not been for the lights of the tiny town of Poseidonia, the view on the
Oregon
’s main screen would have looked as though the ship was racing toward a cliff. The canal was so narrow it was difficult to spot. It was just a fractionally lighter slash on the dark stone. An occasional headlight swept along the main bridge a mile inland.

“You sure about this, Mr. Stone?” Max asked.

“With the high tide, we’ll have four feet clearance on each side of our wing bridges. I can’t promise I won’t scrape some paint, but I’ll get us through.”

“Okay, then. I’m not going to watch this on TV if I can get the live show. I’ll be up on the bridge.”

“Just don’t go outside,” Eric cautioned, a little uncertainty in his voice. “You know. Just in case.”

“You’ll do fine, lad.”

Max took the elevator topside and emerged on the dim pilothouse. He glanced aft, to check where crewmen were making preparations under the direction of Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski, two of Linc’s best gundogs. Crewmen were also stationed at the bow.

The ship was steaming at nearly twenty knots as it made its approach. Though the canal is used today primarily by pleasure boats and sightseeing craft, any large vessel was towed through by tugs because of its tight confines and speed was limited to just a few knots. Max had supreme confidence in Eric Stone’s ship-handling abilities, but he couldn’t ignore the tension knotting his shoulders. He loved the
Oregon
as much as the Chairman and hated to see even a scratch mar her intentionally scabrous hide.

They passed a long breakwater to starboard, and the collision alarm sounded through every compartment on the ship. The crew knew what was coming and had taken the proper precautions.

Small bridges running along the coast roads spanned each end of the canal. Unlike the high truss bridges that towered over the water, these two-lane structures were just above sea level. To accommodate ships transiting the waterway, the bridges could be mechanically lowered until they rested on the seafloor so that vessels could pass over them. Once the ship was clear, the bridges were cranked back into place and cars could cross once again.

With her bow configured and reinforced to crash through sea ice, the
Oregon
slammed into the bridge, riding up on it in an earsplitting squeal of steel. Rather than crush the bridge, the tremendous weight of the hull snapped the locks that held it in place and it sank under the hull. The
Oregon
came back down with a tremendous splash that sloshed back and forth against the canal sides and dangerously slewed the ship.

Max looked up. It was as if the canal’s featureless rock walls reached the heavens. They dwarfed the ship, and, up ahead, the automobile and railroad bridges looked as light and delicate as girders from his boyhood Erector set.

The tramp freighter continued to charge through the canal, and, to Eric’s credit, he kept it dead center, using the
Oregon
’s athwartship thrusters with such delicacy that the flying bridges never once touched the side. Max chanced stepping out on one and walking all the way to the end. It was foolish and dangerous. If Eric made a mistake, a collision at this speed would tear the platform off the superstructure. But Max wanted to reach out and touch the stone. It was cool and rough. At this depth, the canal remained in shadow for most of the day, so the sun never had the chance to warm it.

Satisfied, he hurried to the bridge just as the
Oregon
heaved slightly and the railing smacked the canal wall. Eric shifted their heading infinitesimally, so as not to overcorrect, and centered them once again.

“Linda’s van is just about at the New National Road bridge,” Gomez called over the intercom. “I can see the Chairman, too. He’s still got a good lead on the jeep chasing him.”

“On my way down,” Max said, and moved for the elevator.

THE DAMAGED TIRE finally shredded a quarter mile from the bridge, and they covered the distance riding on the rim, sparks shooting from the back of the van like a Catherine wheel. The sound was like fingernails across a chalkboard, something Linda hated more than any other noise in the world. She wasn’t sure what made her happier when they reached the center of the span: that they were almost home free or that the unholy shriek had ended.

Franklin Lincoln threw open the side door as soon as they stopped. He could see the
Oregon
fast approaching and heaved three thick nylon climbing ropes off the bridge. The ropes were secured around the van’s seats and through a frame member that was exposed in the cargo area. They uncoiled as they fell through space and came up just ten feet shy of the sea.

Linda quickly jumped out of her seat and donned her rappelling gear—harness, helmet, and gloves—while, two hundred feet below them, water frothed at the
Oregon
’s stern as reverse thrust was applied to slow her. With the power of her massive engines, she lost headway almost immediately.

Linc had already strapped himself into a harness used by tandem parachute jumpers, and, with Eddie’s help, they had clipped an unconscious Kyle Hanley to him. The three of them then secured themselves to the lines and waited for word from down below.

On the
Oregon
, crewmen at the bow grabbed the dangling ropes and guided them aft as the vessel crept forward, making sure they didn’t become entangled with the superstructure, communications antenna, or any of the hundreds of things that could snag them. As soon as the men reached the aft deck, Max ordered his people to go.

Never one to be bothered by heights, Linda stepped onto the guardrail and started lowering herself from the bridge. Eddie was on one side of her, and Linc, carrying Kyle, made his way down the other. They lowered themselves down the bridge’s underpinning girders, and then, suddenly, they were dangling two hundred feet over their ship, nothing holding them in place but the three-quarter-inch lines.

With a whoop, Linda shot down her rope like a runaway elevator. Eddie and Linc quickly followed, almost free-falling through space before using their rappelling harnesses to slow their descent. They touched down at almost the same time, and stood still so that their crewmates could unhook them from the ropes. The lines’ trailing ends were quickly knotted around cast-iron bollards bolted to the ship’s deck.