Assault on the Empress Page 18

  He had heard each episode of the grisly execution drama unfold over the PA system. And he knew then how it would be resolved. The British, whose ship-of-the-line this was, would have no choice but to send in their crack Special Air Service people, perhaps the best unit-sized counter-terrorist force in the world. But then he had seen them planting the charges of plastic explosives in the main hold, left the area immediately, seen the evidence of more plastique planted elsewhere. He’d had elementary demolitions training. Not that he qualified as any expert, but he knew enough to recognize a setup that would be enormously difficult if not impossible to safely defuse.

  Thomas Griffeth had always prided himself on making advantage out of adversity. If the Empress Britannia went down, then “Alvin Leeds” would go down with it, and the Russians would think the United States had lost the ampule, enhancing the strategic advantage possession of the ampule represented. The Russian program to duplicate the processes by which the contents of the ampule had been developed would not need to be so accelerated when they were convinced that the Americans didn’t have it.

  “Alvin Leeds” would die, taking his precious cargo with him. But Thomas Griffeth, his military pistol and spare magazines hidden on his body, would find the means to escape, confirm the chances, return to the electrical box where he had stored the ampule, then get away.

  He had climbed down into one of the lifeboats from the deck above; despite the cool temperatures, the air beneath the heavy tarp was stiflingly warm. Sentries moved about on the deck above and below, but when it was safe to do so, he would peer out. After looking at it several times, he decided. The yacht. There was no one aboard her in open view, likely no one aboard her at all. And under cover of darkness, he could slip her moorings and get her round behind the Empress’s radar image and make good his escape with the ampule. The British vessel off the port bow would be none the wiser until it was too late, nor would the sentries aboard the Empress. There was always the chance a stray shot would get him, but here the only certainty was death. He would wait until just before dawn, slip below and retrieve the ampule, then make for the yacht….

  “Mr. Hughes?”

  “Yes, Lewis?” Hughes was into his black BDUs and securing equipment, Babcock doing the same.

  “What if we can’t locate the ampule? I mean, what if we can’t find Leeds or something’s happened to him?”

  “Well, what alternatives suggest themselves?”

  “The SAS will go over the ship with a fine-tooth comb. They’d find it. And we don’t want that to happen, especially since no one’s telling them how dangerous it is. And there’s always the possibility that if this O’Fallon has the Empress wired, we can’t neutralize the explosives. I mean, you’re the expert. There are some charges that can’t be defused, right?”

  “Indeed there are. So, then what will we do, Lewis?”

  “Get everybody off the Empress and scuttle her, right.”

  “Yes,” Hughes agreed. “Yes. That’s just what we’d do, Lewis. Help me with this parachute harness—needs tightening over here.”

  Babcock started working the strap.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  There was no sign of any of the crew, and as they moved through the bowels of the Empress, all they found were more signs of explosives planted with radio detonators, the detonators so constructed that even a genius with explosives, like Darwin Hughes, would likely have been unable to defuse them safely. The explosives were planted, as best Cross could tell (and Comstock concurred with his judgement), to blow out a fore-to-aft gash on either side of the Empress below her waterline. Coupled with the massive explosives package in the hold, which would blow off much of the forward section of the vessel and gut the base of her hull with a hole big enough to drive a truck through, she would sink in minutes. There wouldn’t be time to lower her lifeboats; or, if they were lowered already when she blew, there wouldn’t be time enough to get far enough away to avoid the lifeboats being sucked down after her.

  It was a perfect setup for mass murder, Cross realized, and the only way to prevent the deaths of all passengers and hands was to prevent O’Fallon and his gang of hijackers from using the detonators.

  Because Liedecker was with them, with his superior firsthand knowledge of the Empress’s layout below decks, it proved a relatively simple matter to lose the party of hijackers who had followed after them once they evacuated the hold. Armed with an adequate number of automatic weapons, they had the equipment to go after O’Fallon and his men, but a plan was still lacking.

  And the enormity of the Empress below decks convinced Cross of two things: First, they would not find Alvin Leeds unless sheerly by accident; second, finding whatever it was exactly that had been taken from the Russians, if Leeds had hidden it, equated on level of difficulty with a blind man searching for a needle in a haystack while wearing metal mittens.

  They sat in a circle on the floor in the mouth of a massive ventillation pipe, secure from observation above or below and with clear fields of fire fore and aft, their voices low as they spoke to avoid them being carried. “We tell this O’Fallon monster that we’re armed and that if he and his men don’t leave the Empress, they’re in for it,” Jenny Hall said with all the authority of Moses reading the riot act to the People of Israel. Unfortunately, she lacked the same wisdom, Cross realized.

  “We can’t do that. A: Once he stops laughing he’ll remember he’s supposed to be killing hostages; B: He already knows we’re reasonably well armed and I doubt he’s preparing to depart; C: In for what? Once we lose what little element of surprise we’ve got, then what? We’re still outnumbered. He still has hostages. If you’re gonna play in the mud, you gotta expect to get your dress a little dirty, kid.”

  “I’m not wearing a dress. But there has to be some kind of solution besides just killing and more killing.”

  “You think I like it? You’re nuts. You’re still beautiful. I still love you. But, you’re a friggin’ nutball.”

  “Eat it,” she sneered.

  “Really,” Comstock interjected. “I think this is getting us nowhere. We can’t find Leeds. Can’t find this precious thing he’s taking away from our Russian chums. We can’t just sit about waiting for O’Fallon to kill more hostages or blow up the bloody ship. ”

  Cross looked at Liedecker. The man shrugged his shoulders. “I have a responsibility to the passengers and the crew as a ship’s officer. It seems clear to me that, overall, fewer lives will be endangered if we take some positive action. I know nothing about explosives, terrorists or anything else. But my parents survived the Nazi era, and one time my mother told me that all of them, those who weren’t Nazis, distrusted the Nazis, distrusted war as a means of achieving greatness—that all of them kept waiting for something to happen, for someone else to stop what was going on. But no one ever did until the war ended, and by then, so much had changed forever. I think we must do something; or else, this madman will blow up the Empress and every one of the passengers and the crew will die for certain.”

  Cross looked at Jenny Hall. “What’s Leeds got?”

  “What?”

  “What’d he steal from the Russians, Jenny?”

  “Some kind of lab sample. That’s all I know,” she said almost indifferently.

  “That’s, ah, not entirely true, is it Miss Hall?”

  Cross looked sharply at Comstock.

  “Unless I miss my guess, you know exactly what it is, or they wouldn’t have sent you along to serve as nanny for it, would they?”

  Her pretty eyes hardened.

  “What the hell is it, then?” Cross asked, not knowing who to ask. Did Comstock know? Or was he baiting her with a bluff that seemed to be working?

  “Why would anybody have told you?” Jenny whispered.

  “The question is, why won’t you tell us?” Comstock smiled.

  Cross closed his eyes, shook his head to clear it. “What’s the deal, here, huh?”

  “Now perhaps Miss Hall really doesn�
�t know, and the United States government just trusted a foreign secret service with more information than one of their own officers. Is that it?” Comstock asked her.

  “It’s a sample of biological warfare agent,” she said so softly Cross could barely hear her.

  “Biological warfare what?”

  Comstock cleared his throat. “It’s some sort of viral agent. Very deadly. Causes flu-like symptoms for about twenty-four hours, is what we got. Then after that, the virus mutates as the patient of course gets worse and worse. It attacks the cerebral cortex and kills, death in thirty-six hours after infection and incubation. They told us, too, there’s no vaccine against it. Our undercover people got some word on it, by the by, while involved in something else and we’ve done our best to monitor the development. Might have tried stealing it ourselves if you Yanks hadn’t beaten us to it.” He smiled. “The idea, I presume, behind CIA going after it was that our Russian chums wouldn’t dare use it if both sides had it. And, if my days down at university haven’t gone all foggy on me, it seems it might be capable of being airborne. Aren’t most influenza strains?”

  Cross stared at Jenny Hall. “I’m a bloodthirsty killer because I want to fight terrorists rather than surrender to them? And you’re Miss Pureheart because you’re smuggling biowarfare materials aboard a passenger vessel?”

  “What if—and this is just a theory, of course …” Comstock began. “But, what if the Empress Britannia does blow up? Couldn’t the heat of the explosion drive this virus up into the atmosphere and the prevailing winds take it across Europe or something? And don’t viruses and nasty things like that thrive in warmth?”

  “Mein Gott,” Liedecker murmured.

  “Epidemic. A manmade plague?” Cross asked, rhetorically really.

  “We didn’t develop the thing. The Russians did!” Jenny insisted.

  “Ironic, isn’t it, that the champion of Western democracy would unleash it then, what?”

  She looked at Comstock as if she wanted to kill him.

  Cross asked a question then that had started gnawing at him and worked its way up until he couldn’t do anything but ask it. “This Alvin Leeds-does he know what he’s got?”

  Jenny closed her eyes and the life was gone from her face. “No. He doesn’t know anything about it except that if he opens it, breaks it or otherwise releases it the stuff could be dangerous.”

  Comstock laughed. “And they say we British are the masters of understatement!”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Let’s go over it once more,” Darwin Hughes said slowly. Babcock looked at his Rolex. Five minutes until they were to move to the door, seven minutes before the door would be opened, nine minutes before they would leap out into the predawn blackness over the target. “There’s a small transponder inside the equipment package. The transponder will activate automatically when the chute opens. If the chute doesn’t open, I don’t think the package would survive the impact sufficiently that anything would be useable. The transponder’s signal will only carry for about five hundred yards; so, it is imperative, Lewis, that you spot the third chute as it opens. Once the package hits the water, the flotation device will activate, but there’s only enough flotation to keep it just slightly above the surface. So, you won’t be able to spot it visually. And with the seas getting choppier down there, that goes double. I’m going to the yacht as soon as I ditch my parachute, then getting aboard her.”

  “The chute for the equipment package is rigged to the altimeter?”

  “Right.”

  Babcock nodded. “You go to the yacht and take out anyone aboard her, then I join you with the equipment package and we gear up, then go up onto the Empress.”

  “From what I recall of her, that time I was aboard her, the deck plans haven’t changed at all when compared to the diagrams. That’s an advantage, having at least a vague physical familiarity with the terrain we’ll be working. What then?”

  “We’re on board and we remove any sentries in the immediate vicinity as quickly as possible. Then we recon to ascertain where the bulk of the hostages are being held.”

  Hughes nodded, glancing at his watch. “Then we ascertain as best as possible where the control for the demolitions is headquartered. We take out the demolitions control—”

  “And we take action to free the hostages, physically freeing the ship’s officers first so they can supervise the evacuation.”

  Hughes smiled, the lines in his cheeks furrowing deeply, his eyebrows cocking upward. “With all those people in lifeboats, once we have the job done, no Russian submarine’s going to dare surface. They wouldn’t have the room.”

  “And we find Cross and the girl and this Russian guy and then we get Leeds to take us to the ampule.”

  “Sounds so easy, doesn’t it?” Hughes smiled again. And he looked at his watch. “Time, lad.” Hughes offered his hand. Babcock took it.

  Hughes started into his helmet, Lewis Babcock doing the same, Hughes starting to check Babcock’s equipment. “Good!”

  Babcock turned and did an equipment check on Hughes. Both men bent to the cargo package, checking that it was secure, that the chute was rigged properly to it. They hefted the cargo package—it wasn’t tight—and brought it to the door.

  The crewman who had bobbed in and out several times throughout the journey stood beside the fuselage door. Hughes secured his helmet chin strap, then pulled his oxygen mask up. Babcock did the same. “Let’s go on oxygen then one last radio check.” The headset radios were an emergency item only, radio silence to be maintained unless one of the two of them were in imminent danger.

  “Testing one, two, three—Lewis?”

  “I have you, Mr. Hughes. Am I coming through?”

  “Reading you loud and clear, Lewis. Headsets off.”

  Lewis Babcock shut down, checking the readings on his oxygen mask. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We are depressurizing on my mark. Go to oxygen.” Babcock secured his mask, turning on the oxygen supply. The pilot’s voice again. “All personnel are on oxygen. Commence countdown to depressurization. Ten … nine … eight … seven …” Babcock checked each strap, each gauge, checked the position of the Gerber BMF lashed to his right thigh, checked the safety strap and the thong, secured it into the synthetic sheath. “… four … three two … one … MARK!” A klaxon sounded and Babcock reminded himself to breathe, a hissing sound growing progressively louder, his ears feeling strangely hollow, his sinuses starting to run. He sniffed back. The pilot’s voice again. “Cabin is depressurized to atmosphere. I say again. Cabin is depressurized to atmosphere.” The door was starting to open. There was a loud rushing sound of the slipstream passing around the fuselage.

  Lewis Babcock looked to the jump signal. The red light changed in that instant to amber.

  Babcock reached to the gear package, Hughes already starting to move it. The man beside the door, secured into the fuselage with webbing safety straps, reached down, grabbed at the package and consulted a stopwatch. He nodded, Babcock and Hughes throwing their weight behind it as the man at the door drew it outward, the package suddenly gone.

  Babcock looked up.

  Amber light still. He stepped into the door. Green light. Thumbs up from Hughes. A tap on the shoulder from the man at the door. Babcock jumped, tumbling, the wind rush around him deafening for an instant. His arms and tegs—he slowly spread them, getting his attitude correct, sailing forward, arms outspread like the wings of a bird. He saw the package, tumbling what looked like a mile beneath him. But it was only his perception.

  His eyes came to the altimeter. He watched the needle spinning crazily downward, shifted his eyes from it for a moment. The package! He coutdn’t—he spotted it, barely visible against the night as it descended below the horizon, now lost entirely. He checked his altimeter. He swallowed hard. His pulse was racing. It always did when he jumped because the thought of hurtling down into the night, on one level of consciousness, terrified him. And he tried to keep that leve
l submerged in the technical details of the jump.

  He checked his altimeter constantly now, watching the needle, watching the digital readout, ready to pull the ripcord. The numbers were dropping more rapidly.

  “Shit!” Babcock growled into his mask.

  He pulled the cord, the snap, his shoulders hauled up, his body wrenched.

  He thought he saw a splashdown beneath him, but couldn’t be sure…

  Darwin Hughes had waited longer, controlling his rate of descent with body movement, aiming himself toward the white blotch beside the white mass, the yacht moored beside the Empress. Above and to his right, he saw Lewis Babcock’s chute open.

  Hughes glanced at his altimeter. He was getting too old for this sort of thing, he realized almost absently. He could feel his pulse racing maddeningly. Men his age had heart attacks and strokes, were at greater risk. Few men his age did what he did. What would happen if—He pushed the thought from his mind, the altimeter reading right, his angle right. He pulled the cord, his body whiplashing, the sea yawning up below him, the yacht suddenly gone. He turned his head, had it and worked his chute toward it. If someone with keen eyes spotted him from the deck of the Empress and were a good enough shot—But he told himself they would be looking for dozens of men, the SAS coming, not one man or two and a third chute for cargo.

  The water was slamming up faster now and he at once braced and relaxed as he readied to hit.

  He glided into it, but still the impact to his body took his breath away and he gagged for an instant beneath his mask, his body chilled beyond endurance for a split second. And his hands found the quick release for the chute and he punched it, the chute billowing around him, then gone, the weights added to the pack bringing it down. He turned away from it, his face feeling the pressure of his goggle gasket from the water. He broke surface and ripped away his oxygen mask and sucked air, a whitecap crashing over him.