Veil of the Goddess (28 page)

The small ship was so covered in filth and rust that Ivy couldn't even guess what color it had once been. No flag flew anywhere onboard. A pump poured a steady stream of rusty water into the Marmara Sea.

Two gangplanks provided access to the ship, but Ivy ignored them. Instead, she swarmed up a line that tied the ship to the wharf, entering at the bow.

Zack waited until she was on board, his Kalashnikov silently fanning the deck, and then followed while she covered him scanning for any hint of movement on the deck.

Ivy hadn't spent much time around ships, but something seemed wrong. Why weren't there sailors on deck? Surely they should be loading and unloading. Even if most of their merchandise moved at night, wouldn't they pretend to be legitimate?

Mustafa, Cejno, and the bodyguards were almost invisible as they covered the ship's gangways, hiding themselves in the clutter of the wharf. They were willing, but Ivy wondered how much actual damage they could do with a collection of overpriced handguns. Maybe she should have swapped weapons with Mustafa, giving him a gun with some range and firepower. But she'd made her decisions and it was too late to change them.

Zack climbed over the bow and kept moving, leapfrogging her hiding place next to a small crane.

He crouched next to a stack of ropes and waved her forward. She moved, leapfrogging him in turn as each provided cover for the other, protected each other, worked as a team.

She wasn't a professional soldier, had once looked forward to getting back to real life, but she was glad she'd had the chance to experience the teamwork and co-dependence that the infantry creates and requires. Like a circus trapeze artist, she was willing to let go of her connection to safety and fly, knowing that Zack would be there to catch her.

She skidded to a stop when she saw Zack wasn't giving her cover. He was looking at a lump on the ship's deck.

With an abrupt change of focus, she realized that the lump wasn't the pile of trash she thought she'd seen. It was a body.

"Murdered,” he whispered. “His throat was slit."

She swallowed hard, then nodded. “No wonder it's so quiet. The Foundation got here first."

Zack held up his hand, dripping with the dead man's blood from where he'd tried to find a pulse. “Maybe. But this body is still warm. He hasn't been dead much more than five minutes and nobody has left the ship in that time. They're still on board."

For a moment, the soft swish of bilge water being pumped into the sea was the only sound Ivy heard.

Then she noticed the stream of blood from the corpse into the scupper. “That isn't rusty water, it's bloody water being drained. We're on a slaughter-ship."

He nodded. “Maybe. And maybe we should get off and rejoin Cejno and Mustafa. The Foundation Agents are going to have to get off sometime and we can trap them when they come."

She considered. She'd seen too much death when she'd been in Iraq and didn't have any sick compulsion to see more now. Unfortunately, the easy way was too risky.

"They may plan on helicopter evacuation or to head out to sea. The Navy is only a few miles away, you know. We've got to stay on board until we know their plans."

"You're right. Damn."

She liked the fact that he didn't argue with her, didn't try to hold to positions that weren't right. Most of the guys she'd known over the years would assume she was wrong just because she was a woman.

"I'm moving toward the stern."

He nodded and Ivy checked to make sure no Agent head had popped up from below the decks before sprinting to the next cover.

Another corpse, his face distorted by a second grin cut into his throat, met her in what seemed to have been a smoking area. A cigarette butt still smoldered on the deck.

She felt for a pulse with one hand while waving Zack forward with the other.

No pulse, but there was movement. A large freight hatch groaned, then slowly opened.

Zack hit the deck about ten meters short of his next hiding place, rolling away from the hatch as he brought his Kalashnikov into firing position.

"What should we do with the priest?” The distinctly Midwestern America accent left no doubt in Ivy's mind that they'd discovered Foundation Agents.

"This thing weighs a goddamn ton."

"Adams, you're on report. I've spoken to you about that language."

"Sorry, Jones."

It wasn't the same Jones who'd gotten wounded in Mosul, Ivy saw. Apparently they weren't very imaginative with the names.

"We going to take the priest on board the carrier?” Adams asked. “Not sure the choppers have that kind of heavy lift capacity."

"Smith says to kill him,” Jones ordered. “Then pour gasoline on him and throw the veil on top. We definitely don't want to encourage any sort of Mary fetish, and the bosses can't use that kind of power."

"You've got it."

A muffled squawk told Ivy that Father Galen was still alive, at least for the moment.

She waited until they'd lifted both sections of Cross onto the deck and prodded Father Galen up after before gesturing to Zack to stay under cover and then stepping out, her AK-47 aimed directly at the Agents.

"Thank you for returning our items, gentlemen. And we'll take the priest off your hands as well. His superiors have been looking for him."

Jones met her glare with a cool stare of his own.

"You know, Sergeant Winters, you had a great opportunity to walk away.” His hand gestures were probably supposed to be invisible to her. They weren't.

She fired a short burst over his head as a warning that she'd seen through his game. “Stay nice and close together, gentlemen. When I get nervous, I start shooting. Next time, the shots won't be high."

"You're engaged in treason against your nation, Sergeant Winters.” Jones's voice was still cool, seemingly unaffected by the bullets that had just whizzed a couple of feet over his head.

"America needs the Cross,” he continued. “There are those who claim that no weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Iraq. But they are wrong. The Cross was hidden. Just as we knew it would be. Compared to the power of the Cross, all the nuclear arsenals in the world add up to nothing."

"Pretty handy for you that the U.S. invaded Iraq, than, huh?"

Jones grunted out two ha's. “
Handy?
Not at all. We spent years preparing the nation to do the Lord's mission."

Ivy didn't figure Jones was crazy. Maybe he was mistaken about the war being launched just to let some mysterious Foundation grab the Cross. Or maybe he was dead-on-right about who was driving what in America. What she did know was that she couldn't start shooting at a bunch of Americans who were following their government's orders.

Ivy distracted the Foundation Agents for long enough to let Zack get under cover.

He had a bad feeling about the way Jones looked at Ivy—it reminded him of the time he'd seen a shark swallow a smaller predator whole. But Ivy had taken the lead. He'd back her up.

He kept his Kalashnikov at his hip, ready to spray a stream of death at the agents while he let Ivy try to talk her way out of trouble.

The Foundation Agent was smooth. He played Ivy like a piano, appealing to her patriotism, her sense of duty, her Christian faith. He didn't bother talking about little things like why he'd slaughtered an entire ship full of sailors or why, if they were such good Christians, they planned to kill a Christian priest like Father Galen.

After what they'd been through, Zack would have guessed Ivy was immune to that kind of persuasion.

Apparently he was wrong again.

"Do you really want the True Cross to stay in the hands of the infidel Moslems, available for them to use as a weapon against the democratic west?” Jones's voice was smooth, soft, creating doubt where only certainty had existed. “We wouldn't allow them to hold nuclear weapons, would we? The Cross is far more powerful than a bomb. You must understand that. After all, you've been in its presence for days."

Ivy's eyes drooped and she lowered her assault rifle.

Jones signaled Adams who dropped Father Galen, pulled a long knife and stepped toward the unmoving Ivy.

Zack's brain told his finger to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened.

Then he understood. Jones wasn't being persuasive. His talking was only the carrier for his real message. After all the time he'd spent with the Cross, Zack had learned that magic exists, but he still didn't take it into account with his plans. And neither had Ivy.

The Foundation Agent had cast some sort of spell.

If Zack didn't do anything about it, he'd have to watch Ivy die.

That wasn't going to happen.

He told his lips to begin a prayer, thinking the words when his lips refused. “Hail Mary, full of Grace."

By the time he reached the word Grace, Adams had almost reached Ivy.

But he said “Grace” out loud. And his fingers, freed from the spell that had been aimed, after all, at Ivy and not at him, tightened around the trigger.

Adams went down. Jones ducked.

One instant, she'd been frozen, unable to do anything but watch the Foundation Agent approach her with a knife that could have been the twin of the one Smith had used to slit her throat. The next, she was free.

She raised her weapon and fired a burst, but Jones had moved impossibly fast. Other than Adams's corpse, a few feet from her where Zack had shot him, only Father Galen remained in sight.

She ducked back herself just in time to avoid being hit by a hail of semiautomatic fire.

"They'll radio for more help. We've got about five minutes before the Navy gets here,” Zack said.

Another couple of shots clanged off the ship's steel hull near her, the ricochets spraying her with paint chips and rust. They'd reached a kind of standoff but, as Zack had just reminded her, the other side could summon a lot more help than she could.

That wouldn't help them, though, if their prize had already vanished. And the agents had lifted the Cross to the deck before they'd ducked back for cover.

"I'll get the Cross."

"You'll get shot,” Zack said.

"Maybe.” But men armed only with knives and pistols tend to duck when someone is shooting at them with an assault rifle.

She fired a couple more bursts in the directions she thought the Agents had shot from, then scooped up the Cross.

"I'll help,” Father Galen said. “Thank you for coming to rescue me.” He waved the veil like a flag. “Mary must have protected me."

She didn't bother telling him he could have rotted for all she cared.

"Get off the ship,” she ordered. “Cejno is waiting."

"Okay.” He put his bulk in full forward motion. Even full speed wasn't too fast for the overweight priest, but the ship wasn't that big either.

An agent popped his head up and fired a shot after the priest, but Zack disturbed his aim with a burst from his Kalashnikov.

The priest stumbled when he hit the gangplank but he kept going. Ivy fired another quick burst, then another, until her AK-47 locked. She was out of bullets.

"Cover me."

Ivy scooped up both sections of Cross.

Although the Agents had complained about the Cross's weight, it seemed almost weightless to her.

She didn't dare turn around and head for the gangplank. Instead, she kept moving forward.

Single large-gauge shots sounded like low rumbles over the higher-pitched chatter of Zack's Kalashnikov. The kinetic energy of a bullet smashed the Cross into her side and twisted her around. Once again, though, the Cross saved her—admittedly in a much more mundane way than before. Still, she wasn't complaining.

She leapt off the side of the ship into the waiting green of the Marmara Sea.

Wood floats.

She reminded herself of that as the Cross's momentum pulled her deeper and deeper into the salt water.

White streaks, like laser lightshows, cut through the water—bubble trails left by bullets.

There were more of those bullet trails than she would have guessed possible from handguns. And they were closer than comfortable. Water slows a bullet pretty quickly, but that didn't mean those shots wouldn't kill.

She hoped the volume of fire didn't mean the agents had finished Zack off. She'd never had the chance to tell him how she felt about him, hadn't really figured that out herself, for that matter. But he was the best partner, they the best team she'd ever worked on. If she had to go on alone, she didn't know how she'd make it.

She reminded herself she didn't have time for maudlin thoughts. If she bobbed up like a cork next to the ship, she'd be easy prey for the Agents and Zack's survival would be the least of her problems.

The wood's buoyancy slowly overcame her downward momentum and she headed up. Despite her aching lungs, she resisted the urge to head for the surface. Rather than kick for the air, she angled the Cross sections so their lift would move them forward at an angle, away from the death-ship, then paddled to extend the distance.

Her lungs screamed by the time they finally reached the surface but she'd moved maybe twenty yards away from the ship. It wasn't far, but when you're getting shot at with short-barreled handguns, twenty yards can be the difference between safety and certain death.

She mounted the two Cross pieces like they were a waterlogged surfboard and paddled toward the shore where they'd left the cars.

A couple of splashes persuaded her to stay low, but the shooters gave up on her pretty quickly. Instead, they rushed Zack.

Now what?

Zack squeezed off aimed single shots at Agents who popped their heads up above the hatch, but this standoff wasn't going to end in his favor. Within minutes, they would get reinforcements from the nearby aircraft carrier. Even before that, he'd exhaust his thirty-round magazine.

He fired again and heard one of the Agents curse.

A few pistol shots sounded from below the decks. They were firing at Ivy out of their portholes and there was nothing he could do about that unless he wanted to go down after them.

Unless he could get them to come after him.