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It was crazy.
Or was he just influenced, mentally contaminated by the ravings of his jug-headed friend?
Gerber pointed to the water. “We can dive out through there!”
Jackson followed Gerber, but only visually. His feet had been rooted to the spot thanks to fear and indecision.
That momentary pause extended the OSHA inspector’s life and allowed him to see that Gerber was right. The younger man tripped, having snagged a small wire.
A loud hiss erupted immediately, and Gerber folded over, agonized as he passed through what must have been a cloud of poison. Gerber coughed, kicked, gurgled, then his limbs fell still.
Behind Jackson, the boatyard was a blazing inferno, hot flames racing up the gangplank they’d left behind. On instinct, Jackson threw the hatch shut, hoping that the steel would delay the inevitable blast of heat. He then looked back at Gerber, lying twenty yards away, forever stilled by an invisible hand that crushed the life from his lungs.
Jackson looked around. Surely there must have been some other way out. He couldn’t sit still forever, but there was an unseen assassin that killed instantly in front of him, or there was the slow, agonizing demise of burning alive behind the hatch, which was swiftly growing warmer, even as he leaned against it.
There was a railing ahead and a twenty-yard drop into the water. Maybe he could make it through the invisible poison gas, swim beneath it and reach the small locks that emptied out into the harbor. Jackson had little else to choose from, so he hurled himself forward, vaulting the rail.
Instead of sailing into the water with grace and speed, an agonizing spasm contorted him in midfall, his lungs feeling as if they had been filled to the brim with hot sauce. He didn’t know how much of the gas he’d sucked in, but it didn’t matter. His change in pose, midfall, granted him one small mercy.
Dropping twenty yards to the water headfirst, without his hands breaking the surface, resulted in his neck shattering, bones driven deep into his skull.
Instantly dead, Jackson didn’t have to worry about drowning or suffocating from the effects of the nerve gas released inside. The waters also would preserve his corpse for a month as the inferno melted steel, rendering the submarine pen an utterly unrecognizable stack of twisted, deformed and charred metal. In the cold waters off Norfolk, Bernie Jackson’s lifeless form entered a long sleep, never seeing the light of day until thirty days hence.
* * *
NATALIE CHASE COULD ONLY imagine the string of luck that had got her this cruise of the Spanish Canary Islands with some of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen. She ran her fingers through her blond curls, calling attention to her face as the guys walked past. Their eyes were agog with all of the women in bikinis who were out on the deck. There must have been two dozen guys, all of them with washboard abs. Not a single extra chin in the bunch.
The crew of this yacht kept their eyes on everything, the one small hindrance to Natalie’s admonition that the way to really pick up people was to go topless, leaving nothing to the imagination. The captain of the yacht was a handsome man, if likely twice Natalie’s age of twenty-five. She couldn’t tell what kind of body he had under his uniform, but he was tall, square-shouldered, with a disciplined, finely groomed beard and piercing eyes.
He was the most tantalizing item on this oceangoing all-you-can-eat buffet of beefcake. Captain Raul Espinoza was classically Spanish, with dark hair, skin sun-burned to a pleasing even tan, and clear, cool blue eyes. He was still virile; the salt and pepper of his beard and hair gave proof to that, in Natalie’s eyes.
The young men around her were fit and trim and handsome, but there was an aloofness to Espinoza that made her feel as if she needed to get to him. He didn’t have wealth, but he had every ounce of manliness that Natalie could imagine.
There were still the other crew members, swarthy, scruffy, dark-eyed, seeming more as if they belonged in a pirate movie than working on the decks of a miniature cruise ship. They had scars, and hands that looked made more of callus than flesh and bone. Their knuckles were especially distorted, swollen with pads of skin that seemed liked the armor plate on some movie superhero’s suit than the result of working on engines and such.
“Come up to the deck,” Espinoza said, interrupting Natalie’s thoughts. “And this time, it’s captain’s orders. Everyone topless. No excuses.”
Natalie pursed her lips, trying to decide whether she was ready to walk half naked on deck. Espinoza’s voice had held the lilt of self-satisfied humor. Could she do it?
Over the past two nights, at least four men had seen the goods, and Natalie knew they hadn’t been disappointed.
Captain Espinoza was going to be there, from the sound of things. She could endure the leers of the scraggly, battered-looking pirates if she could present herself to him.
“Comin’, Nat?” Derek, one of her recent conquests, asked. His gaze didn’t meet her at eye level. He wanted a repeat performance, and Derek, all dimples and bright white smile, would be an absolutely great consolation prize. He had just the right amount of “man pelt” on his upper chest, neither a thick hair shirt nor the smooth, overly waxed self-conscious shiny pectorals. His trail was all but unbroken, from clavicle down into his board shorts.
Natalie nodded.
Derek’s smile couldn’t have been more obvious if it had been put up in neon.
Natalie reached behind her, undid the string holding her top on and slid out. It was warm, sunny, and the kiss of the sun on her not-yet-tanned tits was something new. Something fun. She could get used to this kind of attention. Natalie wasn’t going back to Indiana with a single tan line. That was it.
She got up and spotted something on the water, just past Derek’s shoulder. It was everything the yacht they were on was not. It was dirty, grunting out smoke, with rust all along its sides. She could see the nets on it. A fishing boat.
And more sea men, no doubt.
Natalie began to have second thoughts about displaying her wares for not one but two boatloads of men. Derek slid his arm around her waist, his lips brushing her cheek.
“Come on, beautiful. We have a special party to get to,” he told her.
Derek’s nearness, the strength of his arm holding her around her waist, the smell of his just-washed hair, pulled her worries away from the boat. She gave his muscular shoulder a nibble, and he reciprocated by leaning down for a warm, passionate kiss.
“Time’s wasting, beautiful people!” Espinoza announced once more.
The two jogged toward the deck.
There, Espinoza stood on a railing overlooking the party deck. All fifty of the passengers were here, and Natalie hadn’t seen such a collection of smooth, unlined faces, flowing hair and tanned skin in her life. There were more than a few with pale patches where they had avoided going topless, as well, but in those same faces, she saw the giddy excitement of an experiment with sexual freedom and the dismissal of traditional bans on nudity. One girl looked as if she were a sneeze away from ripping off the thong that covered the few inches of her flesh that weren’t exposed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to our ship,” Espinoza said. He began to unbutton his jacket, sliding out of it. The rest of the bridge crew was there. They were younger and in fairly good shape, as well, though as they peeled out of their shirts Natalie could make out the scar tissue on each of them. Captain Espinoza was especially marked up, but that only made him even more interesting. He had lived a life of danger and peril, and her imagination ran away with her.... The brave, blue-eyed captain risking life and limb, battling smugglers and rescuing half-nude maidens from wicked pirates, bringing them to the safety of his bed and the warmth of his strong arms....
“You think that you are quite lucky to be on board this ship,” Espinoza said. “But you each have been chosen to come here for one specific purpose.”
Natalie watched him, but lost herself more in his chest, broad, with salt-and-pepper hair where scars didn’t leave bare patches. He was muscled, but not overly so. Lean and tall, he had lived a life of activity, showing in how he was tightly built without taking on the obscene distortions of a bodybuilder.
He took out a small nylon pouch and began handing out syringes to his bridge crew. He pushed the needle into his pectoral muscle and squeezed the bulb. There was a slight grunt of discomfort, and then he resumed talking.
“We needed your identifications, your luggage, your general appearances,” Espinoza said.
Natalie looked to the fishing boat, growing ever closer. There were women on the deck of that ship, as well as men.
“This was an excuse to get you all together in one spot, with a minimum of cleanup,” Espinoza said.
Suddenly people to Natalie’s right began coughing, jerking spasmodically. The wave of those falling ill spread quickly through the crowd. Natalie took a frightened breath, then she lost control of her hands and arms. Her head snapped upright and she could feel her teeth tear open her tongue as her jaws clenched violently shut like a bear trap. Blood and froth oozed over her lips as her legs gave way and she slumped to the deck. Derek was beside her, vibrating as if he were some child’s doll malfunctioning. The only signs that he was even alive were the spurts of blood through his nose, broken as he’d fallen onto his face, as his lungs tried to suck in fresh breath.
Vomit burst from Natalie’s stomach, and she felt her bladder release, as well.
“The Sendero Luminoso thanks you for the donation of your lives,” Espinoza’s voice echoed in her ears. “We promise to use them well, you spoiled little children.”
Natalie winced, reaching up as Espinoza glared down at her. Her specifically. Those blue, cool eyes she’d once lost herself in were now cold, hard, angry.
Darkness settled on the girl as the nerve gas finally took full effect.
Minutes later, gloved hands would hoist her over the rail, dropping her and the other young murder victims onto the ocean floor.
CHAPTER ONE
One month later
The cold waters of the harbor beyond the boatyard
looked inhospitable to Hermann Schwarz as he walked through the wreckage of what used to be the Heyerdal Hull Company. A month ago, this place had been torched in an act of terrorism by a radical antiwar group. The incident had been investigated thoroughly by the NCIS and Norfolk police and fire departments due to the nature of Heyerdal’s naval contracts and the extensive fire damage. Someone with a lot of skill had torched the facility, incinerating what hulls remained and leaving bodies almost completely unrecognizable in the conflagration.
Schwarz was here with his Able Team partners, Carl Lyons and Rosario Blancanales, and together the three of them were looking for connections. Across the Atlantic, thousands of miles due east, the Canary Islands were experiencing one of the most unusual hostage crisis situations the world had ever seen.
La Palma was one of a scattered assembly of volcanic islands that formed the Spanish Canaries, a dot in the Atlantic that was home to eighty thousand souls and a tourist destination for millions more. It also, strangely enough, was the lynchpin in a white paper about a mega-tsunami that would devastate the East Coast of the United States, as well as the British Isles, Spain, Portugal and potentially the nations ringing the Mediterranean.
Because Heyerdal had been owned by the Jeopardy Corporation, which had also sponsored the white paper, it was a slim lead for Stony Man Farm and its efforts to suss out the situation. While the world’s eyes were locked on a vacation paradise under siege by madmen, the men of Able Team were looking for a handle on why La Palma was the focus of such interest.
Schwarz cast around, realizing that something was wrong but unable to put his finger on it. There was wreckage extending out into the water, the most spectacular of which was a gutted freighter that had been devastated by fire. He kept being drawn back to this, and noted that Carl Lyons, a former Los Angeles P.D. cop, also was focused on the strange vibe.
Schwarz was as comfortable with the metaphysical as he was with the very solid and real world of electronics and computer systems, and one of the things he strongly believed was that the human mind was attuned to pick up data that was outside of the realm of the five ordinary senses. He had been present when Lyons spoke of “the feel” of a crime scene. This was before the popularization of forensic psychology, and Schwarz had always been certain of some more-than-standard instincts displayed by his partners.
“What do you have, Ironman?” Schwarz asked.
Carl “Ironman” Lyons, the leader of Able Team, remained still, his gaze focused on the gutted hulk. “What did they say was in here?”
“Wreckage. It was gutted by the fire,” Schwarz explained. “But you already knew that. You went over the files three times on the trip over here.”
Lyons nodded, his face a grim mask.
“And you’re wondering why someone would start a fire inside a hulk like that?” Schwarz asked.
Again the silent nod of agreement.
“They only found nine of the OSHA team, too,” Schwarz said.
Lyons looked at a temporary gangplank that had been erected for investigators to look within the wreckage. Schwarz followed him up and overlooked the carnage within. Plenty of high-definition images had been taken of the madness left over from the arson inferno.
“Did they bring in divers?” Lyons asked.
“I’m not going to be Watson to your Holmes, homes,” Schwarz quipped. “They moved in as far as they could under the docks, but the wreckage made it impossible to get inside the hull here.”
“And they didn’t drop anyone down into the water here,” Lyons muttered, looking through the doorway. There was no latticework left to stand on, though he could see a small shelf where one of the bodies had been recovered. The flames had been insanely hot, yet there remained a small bit of surviving human tissue, carbonized, that could mark the OSHA inspector’s corpse.
“Underwater metal. Not a safe place to go high diving,” Schwarz returned.
Lyons nodded. He stared at the lifeless, black reflective pool beneath. Schwarz didn’t like the intensity of his friend’s focus.
“I said...” Schwarz started, his voice rising.
That didn’t stop Lyons. He took one step through the door and plummeted into the water below.
Schwarz reached out, his throat tight as his friend splashed down, twenty yards below. A sixty-foot drop was something that was akin to making the same jump sixty feet to concrete. The standard limit for Olympic-class diving was off a ten-meter board, and while the record was 172 feet documented, he didn’t believe that Lyons had the kind of training for that, not when he was jumping into a tangle of twisted metal. For a ten-meter dive, the FINA—Fédération Internationale de Natation—recommendation was four and a half to five meters of depth to allow for a glide to a halt.
Lyons went in feetfirst, as far as he could tell. Maybe that would help.
“Carl!” Schwarz called after him.
Lyons’s head, blond hair matted dark brown against his scalp after his dunking, broke the surface and he spit out water.
“Come on in, Gadgets,” Lyons returned. “Better yet, go get a rope.”
“You are a complete freak, Carl,” Schwarz snapped. It took him ten minutes to locate some rope, by which time Rosario “Pol” Blancanales, the third member of the team, had joined him. Blancanales didn’t seem surprised in the least that their leader had done something as stupid as Schwarz claimed. Lyons didn’t think he was indestructible, but he also knew that sometimes you had to push your limits to accomplish a task.
“Brought two spools, in case you found the tenth body,” Blancanales called down.
Lyons nodded. “Toss down that rope first, then anchor it. I’ll help with bearing that weight.”
“We’ll need a tarp. He’s been down there for thirty days,” Schwarz mused.
“It’s not pretty,” Lyons said. He held something up. It was small, metallic and red. “Got a present for you.”
“Think it’ll work after a month in the drink?” Blancanales asked. “In salt water?”
“Depending on how secure the SIM card was, I could recover data from it,” Schwarz returned. “All depending. I’ve got a reader in my Combat PDA. We all do.”
Lyons surfaced once more, and both men could see that he’d tied an x-harness around the shoulders of a dead man, his skin shriveled, body seeming like a mummified prune. He then waved for the next rope.
With that, Lyons was back up after a minute of climbing the knotted line.
“How did you know you’d be all right down there?” Blancanales asked, helping their drenched partner to the top of the gangplank.
“I had my combat boots on. Reinforced ankles designed for parachuting, so I figured that if I hit anything feetfirst, the boots would at least keep my feet and shins from exploding before I flexed,” Lyons answered. “Wouldn’t have been something a dive crew leader would authorize...”
“You do realize that your health insurance, in that case, would have been a 9 mm slug through the head, right?” Schwarz asked.
Lyons shrugged, then produced the cell phone from his pocket. “Here you go, Gadgets.”
Blancanales set off to obtain a tarp for the body of the OSHA agent.
Blancanales’s jog slowed, though. A sudden deceleration that was all the warning Schwarz and Lyons would need.
An instant later the two men hurled themselves down the gangplank, diving for cover as a stream of automatic gunfire ripped the side of the incinerated hulk.
Able Team had arrived and had only incidentally recovered potential evidence of what had happened during the firebombing here at the boatyard. But now, when a shadowy group of assassins opened fire, their original plan had succeeded. Acting as nosy investigators, they had drawn conspirators out of the woodwork, conspirators who might actually have information about the deadly group who had seized control of an entire island.
Now all they had to do was to survive the hard contact.
* * *
CARL LYONS DIVED INTO a shoulder roll, bullets zipping past him. The assassins were firing high because they’d started shooting when he and Hermann Schwarz were at the very top of the gangplank, and never got a chance to catch up. As it was summer, he and his allies had been clad for the warm Virginia weather, alleviated slightly by being on the Norfolk waterfront where boatyards caught the cool breezes off the Atlantic.
Unfortunately such warmth restricted the amount of firepower each could carry beneath their windbreakers that had been emblazoned with the letters DOJ in deference to their cover as Justice Department deputies following up on an arson investigation. The size of their weaponry was limited to enticing whatever death squad was on hand into believing they had the upper hand, an overwhelming advantage.
It was a Hail Mary strategy, a blind toss accompanied by a wild prayer, and it was one that Able Team had not only grown used to, but had also perfected. As such, they had come fully prepared for a war.
As much as the trio would have loved to have kept full-blown assault rifles and rocket launchers on hand, they needed to lull the conspirators behind the Norfolk arson into believing that they were ripe and easy targets, armed with nothing more than the standard Glock 22s
issued to federal service deputies. The choices in that regard could be limited, if Able Team hadn’t had the services of John “Cowboy” Kissinger, one of the world’s best weapon smiths.
