While some of the guards were noisily opening all the doors and climbing in the trucks to check for intruders, others were sweeping their lights underneath.
That made hiding below no longer an option. And if they made a run for it now, they’d have ten angry guards hot on their trail.
Juan looked up and pointed at the top of the truck. Linc nodded that he understood.
Juan gave the hulking former SEAL a boost so he could reach the lip of the truck’s roof. Linc slithered up and over, then leaned down to give Juan a hand. With a yank, Juan was on the roof. They flattened themselves as they heard the voices approaching.
Both of them kept their submachine guns at the ready. If one of Tagaan’s men got the bright idea to look up above, it was going to get very messy.
• • •
IT’S THE VIETNAM MISSION all over again, Eddie thought, while MacD loaded a barbed bolt into his crossbow. Except, this time, he’d be using the zip line to escape instead of sneaking aboard a moving train.
Eddie unspooled the other end of the line so that he and Murph could tie it to the bunk frame as soon as it played out. If the Magellan Sun’s captain figured out what they were doing, they’d have very little time to get down to the free-fall lifeboat before the guards opened fire.
A drill whined outside the door, and Eddie could see the bit bore through the bottom. A tube was inserted through the hole, and he could hear an acetylene torch fired up.
Smoke began to belch into the room.
“Time to go,” MacD said, shouldering the crossbow. He aimed at the bright orange hull of the lifeboat and fired.
The bolt whizzed away, tethered to the nylon line. It embedded in the roof of the lifeboat, and Eddie and Murph pulled the line taut and quickly wrapped it around the bunk frame, while billowing smoke poured into the room.
MacD was the first out. He crawled through the window and threw a nylon strap over the line. He zipped over to the lifeboat and landed on the roof.
While Murph did the same, MacD opened the rear door of the lifeboat and went inside. Eddie knew that simply jumping overboard into the water to climb back in the waiting Gator would have exposed them to murderous fire from the deck of the Magellan Sun. The lifeboat would allow them to put some distance between them and the ship before they boarded the sub.
By the time Murph made it to the lifeboat’s roof, the smoke inside the crewmen’s room was nearly suffocating. Eddie held his breath and squeezed through the window just as the door was bashed open, pushing the desk back. Voices shouted for them to put down their weapons, but Eddie was already gone.
He landed on the lifeboat, cut the zip line, and ducked inside, slamming the door behind him. MacD and Murph were already strapped in.
Now that the smoke inside the crew quarters had dissipated enough for the guards to see that they’d escaped, bullets peppered the lifeboat. Though they couldn’t penetrate the thick plexiglass windows, an alarming number of shots were making it through the fiberglass hull.
Eddie took the nearest seat and yelled, “Go! Go!” before he even had his four-point seat belt buckled.
MacD pulled the lever to launch the lifeboat, and gravity did the rest, the boat sliding down the rails. Eddie got his belt snapped together just as the boat hit the water, hurling him against the straps.
The lifeboat plunged into the water, then bounced back up above the surface. MacD started the motor, and the boat surged forward. No more bullets hit them, but Eddie wouldn’t rest easy until they were back aboard the Gator.
“Linda, we’re on our way to you,” he said. “We’ll rendezvous five hundred yards off the port bow.”
“Meet you—” Linda replied, abruptly pausing. “Hold on. I’ve got some strange movement on board the Magellan Sun.”
“What do you mean?”
“It looks like three of the containers are opening up.”
Eddie unstrapped his belts and went to the small window by the captain’s seat, where MacD was driving the boat.
He peered at the cargo ship they’d just escaped from. Men were taking potshots from the railing with assault rifles while others pointed at the fleeing lifeboat.
But what had him most worried was the three gun barrels jutting out from where false containers had covered them.
It was the fire control system Murph had discovered. These weren’t small-caliber machine guns meant to repel boarders. They looked like four-inch cannons big enough to sink a Coast Guard cutter, and they were slewing around to aim right at the lifeboat.
• • •
WHILE HIS MEN finished searching the area around the truck convoy, Tagaan watched the Magellan Sun from the dock, irate that infiltrators had made it aboard unseen. He’d learned his lesson after the debacle at the chemistry lab compound and had acquired a drone to watch over the cargo ship as it unloaded, supplementing the radar watching for any boats or ships. The only vessel to pass anywhere near was an old tramp steamer five miles to the north.