Plague Ship (Oregon Files 5)

CHAPTER 14

THE OREGON’S BOW CUT THROUGH THE DARKENED waters of the Ionian Sea with ease. Her revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines could have pushed her through four feet of pack ice just as effortlessly. They were just west of Corinth, having rounded the Peloponnesian Peninsula, and were driving due east to get into position. There was little maritime traffic around the ship. What showed on the radarscope were a couple of coastal fishing boats, probably trawling for squid feeding near the surface at night.

For the moment, Eric Stone was pulling double duty. Seated in his navigator’s station, he had control of the ship, but he had turned one of Mark Murphy’s computer monitors toward him so he could take over flying the UAV still circling over the Responsivist complex. When they got closer to shore and steering the ship would demand his full concentration, he would turn the drone over to Gomez Adams, who was on final approach in the damaged Robinson.

“Oregon, this is Gomez.” Hali had put the helicopter’s comm channel on the overhead speakers. “I have you in sight.”

“Roger, Gomez. Commencing deceleration,” Max said from the captain’s chair. “Five knots, if you please, Mr. Stone.”

Eric made a few keystrokes to slow the volume of water gushing through the Oregon’s drive tubes until he could reverse the pumps and drop the ship down to the required speed. They had to maintain some headway in order to keep the ship from rolling with the swells and complicating Adams’s landing.

Max spun his seat so he could see the damage-control officer standing at his station at the back of the room. “Fire teams ready?”

“In full gear, sir,” he said immediately, “and I’ve got my fingers on the triggers for the water cannons.”

“Very good. Hali, tell George we’re ready when he is.” Max keyed the intercom to the hangar where Dr. Huxley was standing by. “Julia, George is only a couple of minutes out.”

A bullet had only grazed the pilot’s calf, but Max Hanley felt as guilty as if the entire team had been wiped out. No matter how anyone tried to rationalize it, Juan and the others had put themselves in danger because of him. And now the mission, which should have been simple, had thoroughly fallen apart. So far, George’s flesh wound was the only injury, but Juan had dropped off the tactical net and Hali couldn’t raise him. Linda had Linc, Eddie, and Kyle with her in the van, and they reported a heavily armed jeep in close pursuit.

For the hundredth time since the Chairman was first ambushed, Max cursed their decision to use only nonlethal weapons. No one had expected an army of armed guards. Hanley still hadn’t yet considered the implications of so many weapons at a cult’s compound, but it didn’t bode well. From everything he’d heard and read since his ex had called him, the Responsivists weren’t violent. In fact, they eschewed violence in all its forms.

How this connected to the mass murder aboard the Golden Dawn, he didn’t know. Were the Responsivists at war with some other group? And, if so, who were they? Another cult no one had heard of, a group willing to kill hundreds of people just because the Responsivists believed in population control?

To Max, none of it made sense. Nor did it make sense that his only son would get mixed up with a group like this. He so wanted to believe that none of it was his fault. A lesser person would have been able to convince himself of just that. But Max knew where his responsibilities lay, and he had never shied away from them.

For now, he compartmentalized his guilt and focused on the big screen, where a window had opened with a camera view of the helipad over the Oregon’s aft-most cargo hatch. Lit only by the moon, the damage to their R44 looked extensive, as George flared the chopper over the stern railing. Smoke poured from the engine cowling in dense waves that were twisted into a wreath by the whirling blades.

This was another example of why no one ever questioned Adams’s courage. He’d flown the crippled chopper over twenty miles of empty sea rather than do the safe thing and land it in some farmer’s field. Of course, that would have raised all sorts of questions with the Greek authorities. And the Chairman’s plan C called for everyone to be on the boat and in international waters as quickly as possible.

George hovered the helicopter a few feet off the deck and slowly lowered it. An instant before the skids kissed, a massive gush of smoke erupted from the chopper’s exhaust. The engine had seized, and the Robinson smacked into the landing pad hard enough to crack a strut. Max could see George calmly shutting down the helo’s systems, one by one, before unstrapping himself. As the hangar elevator began to descend, George looked straight at the camera and threw a cocky, one-sided grin.

One safely home, Max thought. Six more to go.

WITH A FLAT REAR TIRE, the rental van drove like a pig. Linda had to wrestle it through the corners, as she maneuvered them toward the New National Road, the main artery back off the Peloponnese. Her rearview mirrors were thankfully clear, but she knew that wouldn’t last. While Linc prepared the ropes, Eddie scrounged the inside of the van for anything they could use to slow their eventual pursuers. Linda had used a laptop to control the UAV, so that was useless, but she had installed a rolling chair and a small desk Eddie could toss out the back doors. He’d also pooled all their weapons and ammunition. He had three pistols and six extra magazines of plastic bullets. The rounds would probably blast through a windshield but bounce off tires like spitballs.

They flashed through tiny villages that clung to the sides of the road, a clutch of stucco buildings, homes, a taverna with seating under grape trellises, an occasional staked goat. Although foreigners were building vacation houses along the coast, just a mile or two inland it looked as if life hadn’t changed in this part of the world for a hundred years.

Something caught Linda’s eye, a flash in the mirror. There had been no other traffic this late at night, so she knew it had to be the headlights of one of the jeeps she’d spied back at the compound.

“We’re about to have company,” she said, and pressed the accelerator a bit harder, balancing speed against the burst tire’s shredding.

“Let them get right up to us,” Eddie called from the rear of the van, his voice jumping in time with the flattened wheel. He had one hand on the door handle and the other on a pistol.

The jeep had to be doing eighty miles an hour and ate the distance in seconds. Peering out the back window, Eddie watched them come and realized they weren’t going to tuck in behind the van but come alongside it.

“Eddie!” Linda cried.

“I see it.”

He threw open the door when the jeep was ten yards back, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. His first rounds bounced off the jeep’s hood and grille, but the next few found the windshield. They punched neat holes through the glass, forcing the driver to swerve and slow. For a moment, it looked like he was going to roll the four-by-four, but at the last second he cranked the wheel in the opposite direction of the jeep’s slide, and its left wheels crashed back to the pavement.

Almost immediately, he started after the fleeing van.

“Linc, down! Linda, hold on,” Eddie shouted when the guard in the jeep’s passenger’s seat raised himself over the windscreen. He cradled an assault rifle.

The gun’s chattering and the metallic whine of bullets chewing through sheet steel came at the same time. The windows in the van’s back doors exploded, showering Eddie Seng in a cascade of diamond chips. Metal crackled with heat where rounds punched through, and one bullet ricocheted inside the van before embedding itself in the back of Linda’s chair.

Eddie raised his second pistol over a window frame and fired blindly, while Linc used his body to shield Kyle Hanley’s unconscious form.