The Prometheus Deception (15 page)

But he did not expect Bryson to come around the winch toward him. Now Bryson was just a few feet away from the second security guard. A sudden shout came from the first man, a declaration that Bryson was not there, an unprofessional move. The second man, just inches away from Bryson, turned, distracted.

Move!

Now!

Bryson lunged and tackled the man to the deck, slamming his knee into the man's stomach. The man gasped as the air left his lungs, and as he reared up, Bryson slammed his elbow into the man's throat. He could hear the crunch of cartilage as he vised the man's throat in a hammerlock. The man roared in pain, which gave Bryson the opportunity he needed to grab the security man's gun, try to wrench it out of his hand. But the security guard was a professional, and he would not give his weapon up so easily; despite the great pain Bryson was inflicting, Calacanis's soldier struggled, refusing to yield the pistol. Gunfire came from the other side of the deck, fired by the first gunman as he ran toward his colleague, which was jarring his aim. Bryson twisted the weapon around until the man's wrist cracked; the ligaments tore audibly, and the gun now turned back toward the man's own chest. His index finger jabbed at the trigger, finally grabbed it, and Bryson bent his wrist and fired.

The soldier arched backward, his chest punctured. Bryson's aim was perfect, even in the confusion of the struggle; he had hit the man's heart.

Grabbing the weapon from the limp fingers, he sprung to his feet and began firing wildly in the general direction of the running man, who stopped to fire back, knowing that firing while running made for terrible aim. That instant's pause was the window Bryson needed. He let loose a volley of semiautomatic fire, one round piercing his attacker's forehead. The man toppled to one side, crumpled against the railing, dead.

For a few seconds he was safe, Bryson calculated. But he could hear footsteps on the deck, growing louder and coming closer, and he heard the accompanying shouts, and that told him he was hardly safe at all.

Now where?

Immediately up ahead he saw a door marked
DIESEL GENERATOR ROOM
. This had to lead to the engine room, which at the moment seemed the best place to escape. He raced across the deck, yanked open the door, and ran down a steep, narrow set of metal stairs painted green. He was in a large, open area that was deafeningly loud. The auxiliary diesel generators here were in operation, providing power for the ship, since its engine was off. With several large strides he ran across a railing that circled the room above the mammoth generators.

Through the rumble he could hear that his pursuers had followed him down here, and in a moment he saw several silhouetted figures racing down the metal steps, visible only as shadows in the dim light with its sickly green cast.

There were four of them, running down the steep stairways with a stiffness, an awkwardness, that puzzled him for a moment, until he saw that two of them were wearing night-vision goggles, the others carrying sniper rifles outfitted with night-vision scopes. The outlines were unmistakable.

He raised the stolen pistol, quickly aimed at the first man down the stairs, and—

Suddenly all was darkness!

The lights in the room had been extinguished, probably from some central control room. No wonder they carried such equipment! By eliminating all light they hoped to gain the advantage provided by their sophisticated weaponry. On a ship such as this, a floating arsenal, there would be no shortage of such matériel.

But he fired anyway, into the darkness, in the direction toward which he had been aiming just a second or two ago. He heard a cry, then a crash. One man was down. But it was insanity to just keep firing into the darkness, using up precious ammunition when he had no idea how many rounds remained in the weapon and had no way to obtain any more.

It was what they wanted him to do.

They expected him to respond like a cornered animal, a drowning rat. To flail away desperately. To fire into the darkness with abandon. Use up the ammunition pointlessly, foolishly. And then, aided by their night vision, they would easily hunt him down.

Blinded in the darkness, he extended his arms, felt around for obstacles, both to avoid and to hide behind. The men wearing infrared monocular night-vision units, the lenses strapped against their eyes by means of a head harness and helmet mount, were doubtless also carrying handguns. The others had rifles fitted with advanced infrared weapon sights. Both allowed the user to see in total darkness by detecting the differentials in thermal patterns given off by animate and inanimate objects. Short-range thermal-imaging scopes had been used with great success during the Falklands war in 1982, in the Gulf in 1991. But these, Bryson recognized, were state-of-the-art RAPTOR night-vision weapon sights, lightweight, super accurate, with extreme long-range accuracy. They were often used by combat snipers, mounted on their .50 caliber sniper rifles.

Oh, dear God
. The playing field was hardly level, as if it ever was. The noise of the generator seemed, in the darkness, even louder.

In the pitch blackness he saw a tiny, dancing red dot flit across his field of vision.

Someone had located him and was aiming directly at his face, his eyes!

Triangulate! Estimate the sniper's location based on the direction from which the infrared reticule was aiming at him. This wasn't his first time as the target of a sniper with a night-vision scope, and he had learned to estimate the distance of the shooter.

But every second he paused to aim gave his enemy, who saw him as a green object against a darker green or black background, time to aim as well. And his enemy knew for certain where he was located, whereas Bryson was relying on luck and rusty experience. And how could he possibly aim at blackness? What was there to aim at?

He squinted to bring up available light, but there really was none to be summoned into his eyes. Instead, he raised his pistol and fired.

A scream!

He had hit someone, though how well he couldn't yet tell.

But a second or two afterward, a bullet spat against the machinery to his left, pinging loudly. Night vision or no, his enemies had missed. They did not seem to care whether their rounds struck the generator or not. The machinery was encased in steel, heavy-gauge and durable.

That meant they did not care what they hit, or whether they missed.

So how many more were there? If the second man was indeed down, that meant two remained. The problem was that the generator was so loud he could not hear footsteps approaching, nor the ragged breathing of a wounded man. He was in effect both blind
and
deaf.

As he raced down the catwalk, one hand outstretched before him to protect him from striking unseen objects, the other grasping his weapon, he heard gunfire again. One round whizzed so close to his head he could feel the gust of wind against his scalp.

Then his searching hand struck something hard—a bulkhead. He had come to a wall at one end of the cavernous room. He swung his weapon first to one side, then to the other, each time striking steel railing.

He was trapped.

Then he became aware of the dancing red bead in the darkness, as one of the snipers aimed at the green oval that was, in the night-vision scope, his head.

He thrust the pistol into the air in front of himself, prepared to aim at nothing again. Then he shouted: “Go ahead! If you miss me, you risk damaging the generator. That's a lot of delicate electronic equipment there, microchips easily shattered. Kill the generator, and you kill all the power in the ship—and see what Calacanis thinks about that.”

A split-second of silence. He even thought he saw the red dot waver, though he knew he might be imagining things.

There was a low chuckle, and the infrared reticule passed across his field of vision again, steadied, and then—

The spit of a silenced weapon, and then three more spits, and then came a scream and the sound of another body crashing to the steel floor of the catwalk.

What?

Who had fired at his enemy? Someone had done it—Bryson knew it hadn't been him! Someone had fired a round of shots using a silenced pistol.

Someone had fired at his pursuers—and perhaps even eliminated them!

“Don't move!” Bryson shouted into the darkness at the one remaining gunman he calculated had to be out there. His cry made no sense, he knew—why should any of his adversaries, equipped as they were with night-vision goggles or sights, pay any attention?—but such a shout, unexpected and even illogical, could buy him a few seconds of confusion.

“Don't shoot!” came another voice, faint against the deafening noise of the generators.

A woman's.

It was the voice of a woman.

Bryson froze. He thought he had seen only men descend the metal stairs into the room, but the bulky equipment could easily disguise a female silhouette.

But what did she mean,
Don't shoot?

Bryson shouted, “Put down your weapon!”

Suddenly he was blinded by a flash of light, and he realized that the lights in this room had suddenly gone on! Brighter than they'd been before.

What was going on?

In a second or two his eyes readjusted to the light, and there, standing on a catwalk high above, he could make out the shape of the woman who had been speaking to him. The woman wore a white uniform—the uniform of Calacanis's steward from the dinner that seemed so much a part of the distant past.

On her head she wore a helmet and head-harness, the lens of an infrared monocular night-vision unit obscuring half her face. Yet Bryson recognized her as the beautiful blonde he had exchanged a few words with before dinner, and who had spoken a few hasty words to him just before the violence had begun—words he now recognized as indeed a genuine warning.

And here she was, crouched in a marksman's stance, gripping the butt of a Ruger with a long silencer attached, moving it from one side to another, steadily back and forth. He realized, too, that there were four bodies sprawled at different points around the generator room—two from the deck close to the generator, one at the beginning of the catwalk on which he was standing, and a fourth lying a mere six feet away, alarmingly close.

And he saw that the woman was not aiming at him. She was covering him, aiming everywhere else, protecting him against others! The stewardess was standing by a small bank of controls and switches; that was where she had turned the lights on. “Come on!” she shouted over a dull roar. “This way!”

What the hell was going on?

Bryson stared in bafflement.

“Come on, let's go!” the woman shouted angrily. Her accent was definitely Levantine.

“What do you want?” Bryson shouted back, more to stall for time than to elicit any response. For what could this be but a trap—a clever one but a trap nonetheless?

“What the hell do you think?” she shouted, turning her gun toward him, returning to the marksman's stance. He aimed his gun directly at her, and just as he was about to pull the trigger, he saw her shift the barrel a few inches to her right, heard the cough of another silenced round.

And at the same instant he both heard a crash and saw a body topple from the catwalk just above him.

Another sniper with a night-vision-equipped rifle. Dead.

She had just killed him.

The sniper had stolen silently up to him, about to kill him, and she had dropped him first.

“Move it!” the woman shouted to him. “Before any others come here. If you want to save your own life, move your ass!”

“Who are you?” Bryson shouted back, stunned.

“What does it matter right now?” She pushed the night-vision monocular up and off her face, so that it rested on the top of her head. “Please, there's no time! For God's sake, look at your situation, calculate your odds. What the hell
choice
do you have?”

SEVEN

Bryson stared at the woman.

“Come
on!
” she called, her voice rising in desperation. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so already. I've got the advantage, I've got the infrared—not you.”

“You don't have the advantage now,” Bryson called back, his grip steady on his stolen weapon, lowered at his side.

“I know this ship inside and out. Now, if you want to stay here and play games, be my guest. I have no choice now but to get off the ship. Calacanis's security force is large—there are plenty of others, probably on the way right now.” With her free hand she pointed toward an object mounted high on one of the bulkheads near the ceiling of the generator room. Bryson recognized it as a surveillance camera. “He has much of the ship on camera, but not all. So you can follow me and save your life, or you can stay here and be killed. The choice is yours!” She turned quickly and raced down the catwalk and up a short set of metal stairs to a hatch cover. Unlatching it, she glanced back and jerked her head toward the opening, signaling him to follow.

Bryson hesitated no more than a few more seconds before he did so. His mind spun; he tried to make sense of the woman.
Questions!
Who
was
she? What was she doing, what did she want, why was she here?

The woman was obviously no mere ship's steward.

So who
was
she?

She beckoned; he came through the hatchway behind her, all the while gripping his weapon.

“What are you—?” he began.

“Quiet!”
she hissed. “Sound carries far here.” She shut the hatch door behind him and slid home a large deadbolt. The painfully loud noise of the generator room was gone. “This is an antipirate ship, fortunately for us. Specially constructed so passages can be closed, locked.”

He caught her eyes, momentarily distracted by her remarkable beauty. “You're right,” he said quietly yet forcefully, “I don't have much choice right now, but you'd better tell me what's going on here.”