The Passage (70 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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He didn't know how it all hung together. But he had to admire how beautifully Harper had positioned himself. Only the CMS custodian had ready access to codes. No one but a combat systems department member could have stolen MAMs kits and sabotaged program tapes. And Harper had volunteered to lead the ship's security team, giving himself access to small arms, ammunition, equipment, keys—everything he needed to take over a ship. Dan understood all the security drills now, too late. Harper had been rehearsing, using the excuse of honing their readiness for Gitmo, but really planning how to take
Barrett
over quickly and efficiently.
A distant howl. His breathing stopped as he listened, not daring to hope. Then he dropped the dividers and leaned forward, staring around the sky.
Two black specks swept toward them. Jets, but the flat nose intake, the stubby backswept wings told him they weren't American. The MIGs came on low to the water and swept over their mast tops, rattling the glass in the windows with a low pass. Yeah, he thought bitterly, everything was in the plan, even the air show.
He'd known Jay Harper was smart, but he'd wondered sometimes how motivated he was. Now he understood. He'd been motivated all right, but not by what Dan had thought.
Because judging by the standards of traitors, spies, and murderers,
he rated a 4.0 right down the line. Dan sucked air through his teeth, then forced himself to plot another fix, knowing that every minute that went by made it less likely they would escape.
 
 
HE held the new course for half an hour. The bridge felt lonely, solitary, with only one other man where usually there were six or eight. No one was working on the forecastle. No sounds came from the signal bridge, no rattle of shutters or shouted commands. It felt spooky. Harper called twice to check on them, insisting on speaking both to him and the helmsman each time. He didn't say where he was calling from. The headland slowly slipped past, tan hills and, rising behind them, green mountains, the Sierra Maestra. The MIGs circled overhead, and to either side the gunboats rolled in the golden sparkle of
Barett's
wake, dogging her steps like border collies herding a sheep.
As dawn flooded the world with heat and light, he made out something on the horizon ahead. Gradually, it drew closer, taking on a shape he recognized with dread and apprehension: the long, straked hull, low and gray, and reflected beneath it, in the eerily calm, slightly undulating mirror, the pyramidal superstructure, bristling with guns and missile launchers … . As the two ships closed on converging courses, he lifted his binoculars to confirm the hull number.
Yes, he thought then, though he'd known it the moment he saw her upperworks over the curve of the sea.
Gut heavy with foreboding, he looked across the water at the
Razytelny
.
The 21MC clicked on. “Bridge? Harper here. You make out a Russki destroyer ahead, shipmate?”
Dan leaned forward and pressed the key. Through numb lips he said, “Yes.”
“Okay, great. Stop engines and heave to.”
“All stop,” he told the man behind the helm. He heard the double ping as the engine room answered.
Barett
coasted ahead, gradually slowing. The helmsman let go of the wheel and stepped back, but Dan told him to stay where he was and keep her head steady as she lost way. He went out on the port wing, into an already hot, calm, airless day, looking down on a smooth oily-looking sea. Cuba was a jagged darkness to starboard, more distant now as they left the point behind. High clouds hovered behind the mountains like tethered blimps. He propped his elbows on the splinter shield. Holding the binoculars with the tips of his fingers, he centered them on
Razytelny.
A crinkling of the sea at her bow told him she was making five
or six knots, steaming nearly parallel to
Barrett
on a gradually converging course. Sailors moved purposefully about her decks. Forming up? Yes, falling into ranks. A bustle of activity on the boat deck.
A chill ran up between his shoulder blades as he realized that the Soviets were mustering a boarding party, getting ready to take possession. Yet it was not so much frightening as uncanny. A sense of déjà vu, as if this all had happened before, only strangely reversed … .
Then he remembered: It had—on an Arctic night, the sea black and rough and freckled with ice, and he and the Kinnicks getting ready to lower
Reynolds Ryan's
motor whaleboat. It had been raining then, an icy, freezing diagonal mix of rain and sleet that pelted down out of invisible clouds, soaking their foul-weather gear in seconds. The seamen had crushed and shoved past him into the boat, settling on thwarts sweet-smelling with glycol antifreeze. Loose ice had slid around the floorboards. And across the water, that time, the madly rolling hull of a surfaced submarine.
Today, everything was so strangely mirror-imaged, he wondered if a mysterious nemesis had arranged it as revenge. The sea was hot and bright and calm. And this time, the Russians were coming to him.
Suddenly, he realized the last seconds were ticking away. The Soviets were taking their time, but once forty or fifty armed sailors had boarded, taking
Barrett
back would be impossible.
He felt something very like panic, and at the same time, a fatal resolve. Even if Harper didn't kill him, once they got to Cuba, they could expect the standard treatment for those who fell into Communist hands: prison, starvation, humiliation, beatings, interrogations, pressure for confessions, endless propaganda, mock trials. It might be months before they were released or exchanged. It might be years.
He'd thought about it, and he just flat wasn't going to go along with it. He just wasn't going to let them take his ship without a shot fired in her defense.
He turned his head slowly, checking the helmsman with his peripheral vision as he bent to examine the radarscope. His only chance was to charge this masked son of a bitch. If he had to die, he'd die trying to kill him. And that was most likely exactly what would happen. He didn't have good odds, alone against an alert, armed man.
But it was all he could think of to do.
He leaned back slowly, looked casually into the chart house, then strolled in. The helmsman's eyes followed his every step. He came out again, crossed to the starboard wing, noting exactly where the man stood, where he'd propped the shotgun against the console. If
only he could make him step away from the wheel. The door to the starboard wing grew slowly ahead of him like a bright portal to another life. Through its shining oval, he saw the sparkling sea, the distant violet and green of a forbidden land. What a calm, beautiful day. Legs, hands tingling numb. So scared. He hoped Nan had a good life. He hoped she remembered her daddy.
“Where you think you're going?”
He took a deep breath. One more look at the sea, then he'd come back in and do it. “Gonna take a bearing; I can't see my marks from inside anymore,” he called back.
The guy nodded. Dan stepped over the knee-knocker into the sunlight. How warm it was on his hands, his lifted face. He smelled flowers, grass, the land. How beautiful the world was. His lungs pumped, getting ready. His heart accelerated, preparing to fight and die. When he went back in, he'd take three steps, pivot as he passed the chart table, and charge. He knotted the leather strap of the heavy binoculars surreptitiously into his fist. If he could slug this asshole with them before he got to the gun, he might live through the next sixty seconds. He glanced out and aft, back toward where the gunboat rolled uneasily, keeping pace—and into George Vysotsky's intent blue eyes.
For a long moment, he couldn't speak, just stared. The XO was crouching below the level of the window, a few feet aft of him. His blond hair stuck up in a ragged cowlick. His bare feet, pale toes splayed, were dug into the wooden gratings of the deck.
In his right hand, extended toward Dan, was a long gleam that he recognized after a puzzled instant as a saber.
“XO,” his lips shaped, but his voice died in his throat. He remembered the helmsman, just inside. He glanced back. The masked head was bent, concentrating on maintaining course as the slowly dropping speed reduced the effect of the rudders. The shotgun lay propped against the console.
Obviously, he hadn't noticed the executive officer yet. But it was a nasty dilemma. If Dan spoke, the helmsman would hear it and look up. But if he didn't say something right now, it looked like the XO was going to run him through. He was already moving forward, point extended. “You bastard,” he hissed. “You one of them?
Are you?”
The point glittered, rising toward his throat. Dan couldn't breathe. He couldn't take his eyes from it.
“No,” he whispered. He motioned frantically. “No. Keep it
down
, XO!”
“What are you doing up here, then?”
“Shut
up!”
But he could see his voiceless whisper, his desperate and furtive gesticulations weren't getting across. Vysotsky wasn't listening.
He had to speak or the exec would kill him. But he couldn't speak, because then Vysotsky would die.
In that interminable frozen instant, while his brain fought with itself, the point pricked into his throat. Dan closed his eyes. He stood motionless, waiting for the lunge.
Then, when it didn't happen, he opened them, to see Vysotsky rise slightly from his crouch, peep quickly through the bottom of the window into the pilothouse, then drop again.
Dan turned his back on both of them, set up the bearing ring, and bent to sight through it. His hands were trembling so badly it took several tries to get a cut on Punta Caleta. He had a crazy desire to jump over the side. But there was nowhere to swim to, and jumping wouldn't help recover the ship. Just then, one of the MIGs circled back, not as low as the first pass, but the thunder gave the exec auditory cover to mutter, “I couldn't sleep. Felt uneasy. Then I heard people moving around outside my cabin. I hid just before they came through my door.”
Dan murmured through motionless lips, “They were waiting for me up here, when I came on watch.”
“The guy at the helm, he one of them?”
“Yeah. He's got one of the riot guns.”
“Is it loaded?”
“I think so.”
“He's forcing you to conn?”
“Yeah. What you want to do, sir?”
Vysotsky murmured hoarsely, “We've got to take the bridge back, then turn her head to seaward and get the hell out of here. They can sink us if they want, after that. At least she'll go down in deep water.”
“Look, if we work together, we can maybe take this guy. I'll distract him. Then you come in from the wing.”
“Can I trust you?”
“You can trust me, sir.” The MIG dwindled toward the hills, and he lowered his voice. He bent as if to take another sight, knowing he couldn't linger out here much longer.
“There's another guy loose,” Vysotsky's hoarse whisper floated up. “I caught a glimpse of him down near the boat deck. Had his back to me. I didn't see his face.”
“One of them?”
“I don't think so. He was in coveralls, but he wasn't wearing the hood.”
“Lost steerageway,” the helmsman shouted from inside. Dan turned and saw to his horror that he'd moved away from the wheel. It turned lazily this way and that.
Without another look at Vysotsky, who was crouched with the
blade gripped in both hands, Dan stepped back inside. He said, “Try to keep her head southeast as long as you can.”
“I did. Told you, we lost steerageway.”
Dan got to the far side of the console. He lifted his hand to his cap, took it off, the motion drawing the man's eyes. He said loudly, angrily, “Oh yeah? Mark your head.”
The tone worked. The eyes in the drab wool mask dropped, seeking the compass.
Now
,
XO,
Dan thought, wanting to look toward the door but knowing he couldn't. Do it
now
.
From outside came the clack of a wooden grate being stepped on.
The helmsman's eyes flicked up instantly from the gyro and widened as Vysotsky bulled through the doorway. A second later, the short ugly barrel of the twelve-gauge came up as Vysotsky charged, screaming, his blade whipping down in a shining arc of steel.
The blast blew the exec off his feet, shattering the window behind him white around the pellet holes. Blood splattered like rain against the captain's chair, the radar repeater, the double-ought buckshot gouging the housing to bright aluminum. Vysotsky hung on the gyrocompass stand, staring not at the man who'd shot him but at Dan. “You bastard,” the gravelly, hoarse voice said. “You goddamned traitor. May God strike you dead.”
Lenson stared at him, frozen, as Vysotsky's eyes went dull and the sword clattered to the deck. Faintly, Dan heard someone yelling from the deck below, from the open ladder well.

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