Odessa Sea (Dirk Pitt 24)

In his hands, he held the radio transmitter. Aiming it toward the drifting barge, he pressed the transmit button. A second later, two muffled blasts erupted from the rear of the barge, accompanied by small puffs of gray smoke. Vasko smiled, paying no regard to a man in the water clinging to the barge’s hawser.

He turned and noticed Giordino sitting near the rail, leering at him with a sardonic grin.

“Still with us, my short friend?” Vasko said.

“Here to say good-bye.”

“It will be my pleasure.” Vasko leaned inside the bridge and dropped the transmitter into the crate, exchanging it for a loaded rifle.

As Vasko turned in the doorway, Giordino used his teeth to rip open the third bag of powder and tossed it at Vasko’s feet.

Vasko looked down in confusion as a trail of spilt powder ignited from the burning sail and sizzled toward the bundles at his feet. He didn’t have long to look.

The explosion echoed off the hull of the Constellation and covered the tug once more in a white haze.

When the smoke cleared, Giordino approached the shattered wheelhouse.

Vasko lay on the deck, his legs blown off and a look of shock in his fading eyes.

Giordino gave him an unsympathetic gaze, then uttered the last word.

“You can call me Al.”

After watching him die, Giordino stepped to the tug’s stern. He looked downriver and spotted the drifting barge, receding in the distance. A lean, dark-haired man climbed out of the water, then stood and gave him a wave from the prow of his atomic chariot.

86

Pitt was still in the water when he heard the muffled explosions from the far end of the barge. He pulled himself up the cable, rolled onto the deck, and caught his breath. As he labored to his feet, he could sense a slight list to the stern.

He made his way to the cargo holds. Each of the four compartments was covered by a light fiberglass cover. He uncoupled the first cover and found the Russian RDS-5 bomb secured to a large pallet. He regarded it for a moment, then checked the other three holds. They were all empty, save for a rusty drum and some chains in the second hold and a rising swirl of water in the fourth. Pitt guessed the barge had less than fifteen minutes afloat.

He returned to the first hold and climbed inside to examine the weapon. The RDS-5 was slightly bulbous, five feet wide and twelve feet long, tapering to a circular fin assembly. Its smooth black skin was broken by a raised panel near the tail. Pitt peered into the glass-topped panel and saw the bomb was very much alive. A myriad of LED displays glowed with numbers. Next to the panel box, a small dial protruded from the bomb’s surface—a simple depth gauge. He looked back at the panel. Two of the LED displays were marked with labels. One read CURRENT DEPTH and showed zero. The other read CHARGED DEPTH and was fixed at twenty-five feet.

A feeling of dread came over Pitt. While Giordino may have dispatched Vasko, it no longer mattered. The bomb was set to detonate at a water pressure depth of twenty-five feet. When the barge sank, the bomb would go off—simple as that. Pitt considered smashing the displays or shattering the depth gauge but feared the weapon was programmed to detonate with any outside interference.

He scrambled out of the hold and looked around. The barge was a half mile from land. With the barge having no means of propulsion, it would be impossible to get it across the current to the shallows before it sank. He scanned the river. There were numerous small pleasure boats nearby, most flocking to the burning Constellation. But they were all too small to move the heavy barge. Peering toward the bay, he spotted the skipjack he’d seen from the helicopter, tacking downwind.

The barge was listing heavily now, with water beginning to lap at the deck. Pitt gazed back at the skipjack. It was his only option.

The oyster boat had just entered the Patapsco and was sailing near the center of the river, far off the barge’s line. Pitt had to close the gap—and quickly. He ran to the second hold and muscled the empty drum up to the deck. Retrieving bits of rope and chain from below, he fashioned a harness around the drum and attached a twenty-foot leader of rope. He dragged the assembly to the upriver end of the barge and tied the leader to a starboard corner bitt. Then he lowered the drum over the side, letting it fill with water and drag horizontally behind the barge.

The makeshift drogue tugged on the inshore stern, nudging the downriver bow slightly to port. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to put the sinking barge on a more direct path with the skipjack.

Sailing up the river, a grizzled oysterman named Brian Kennedy eyed the barge, noting it was drifting free of a tug. It was clearly sinking, and he turned to take a closer look. His boat, the Lorraine, was a large skipjack, a wide-beamed and highly maneuverable class of sailboat. Designed for oyster dredging on the Chesapeake, skipjacks once sailed in abundance on the waterway. Overfishing saw their decline, and the Lorraine was one of a just handful still in use.

Oystering was out of season, but Kennedy was testing a new sail on his prized vessel. When he saw a tall man wave at him from the barge, he tacked across the river and pulled alongside. Its head end was already submerged, and waves were splashing over its low deck from all sides.

“You better jump aboard, mister, she’s about to go under.”

“I’ve got a live cargo in the first hold I need to pull out,” Pitt said. “Do you have a power dredge?”

The oysterman stared at Pitt. He was dripping wet, yet his clothes were singed and marred with blood. Water splashed around his ankles, and there was urgency in his eyes, yet he stood with a remote coolness.

“Yep, I do,” Kennedy said. “With a freshly rebuilt motor. You’d best be quick about it.”

He swung a boom across that held a large dredge basket from a cable. Pitt grabbed the dredge and hauled it into the hold as the oysterman let out cable from a power winch.

The hold already had two feet of water sloshing around its bottom, with more spilling in from the wave action. Pitt heaved the dredge into a corner and uncoupled the cable from its mount. He groped in the water at the base of the bomb and located a lift chain he’d seen earlier.