The Prometheus Deception (16 page)

She gave him a stare that was at once forthright and defiant and whispered, “No
time
for explanations right now. I'm undercover here, too. Following arms transfers to certain parties that want to blast Israel back to the Stone Age.”

Mossad,
he told himself. But her accent told him she was Lebanese, from the Bekaa Valley; something wasn't quite right. Would a Mossad field operative be Lebanese, not Israeli?

She cocked her head as if hearing some distant noise he could not perceive.

“This way,” she said abruptly, vaulting up the steel stairs. He followed her to a landing, then out a hatch that opened into a long, empty, dark corridor. She paused for a moment, looked both ways. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that the tunnel went on and on, as far as he could see. It seemed to run the entire length of the ship, from bow to stern; it appeared to be a little-used service alley. “Come!” she hissed, suddenly breaking into a run.

Bryson followed, lengthening his strides to adjust to the woman's lightning-fast pace. He observed that her tread was odd: springy and light, virtually silent. He emulated her, realizing that she was attempting to minimize the reverberation against the steel surface—both to keep from being heard and to be able to listen to any followers, he guessed.

Within a minute, when they had run a few hundred feet down the dark tunnel, he thought he heard a muffled noise coming from the aft end, behind them. He turned his head, noticed a shift in the pattern of the shadows at the far end. But before he could say anything to her, he saw her swerve to the right and flatten herself against the steel bulkhead, behind a vertical steel girder. He did the same, though not a second too soon.

There was an explosion, a burst of automatic gunfire. Bullets spat into the bulkhead, ringing, clattering against the deck.

Whipping his head to his left, he saw a plume of flame shooting from a machine gun at the far end of the tunnel, the shooter shadowy and indistinct. There came another burst of gunfire, and then the killer was running down the corridor toward them.

The woman was struggling with a hatch cover. “Shit! It's painted shut!” she whispered. With a quick glance back down the long, dark passage at the approaching assassin, she said, “This way!” Suddenly leaping forward, away from the protective shelter of the bulkhead and its steel girders, she raced ahead. She was right to move; otherwise, they would be trapped here, obvious targets. He peered quickly around the girder, looked back, and saw the shooter slow his pace, raise his Uzi submachine gun, and aim it directly at the woman.

Bryson did not hesitate. He pointed his pistol toward the killer, squeezed the trigger twice in succession. One round exploded; the second squeeze of the trigger produced nothing more than a small click. The chamber was empty, as was the magazine.

But the shooter was down. The pursuer's Uzi crashed to the deck as he tumbled awkwardly to one side. Even from this distance Bryson could see the man was dead.

The steward turned back with a grim, fearful expression and saw what had happened. She gave Bryson a quick look of what might have been appreciation, but said nothing. He raced to catch up with the woman.

For the moment they were safe. Now, suddenly, she veered off to the right and stopped abruptly at another section of bulkhead, also divided by vertical girders. She leaned over, grabbed a bar that was mounted over an oval opening in the bulkhead the size of a manhole, and agilely swung her feet into the hole like a child playing on monkey bars. In an instant she had disappeared. He did the same, though somewhat more awkwardly: as physically agile as he was, he lacked her apparent familiarity with the ship.

They were in a box-shaped, low-ceilinged compartment that was almost totally dark, the only light coming from the dim service alley. When his vision adapted to the dark, he realized they were in a square space that connected to another one, by means of another manhole, and then another, and another. He could see clear across to the other side of the ship. This was a thwartships passage, he realized, the sections separated by heavy steel girders. She was peering into the next compartment, then without warning she grabbed on to the bar and swung her body inward, feet first.

He followed suit, but the moment he got to his feet, he heard her whisper, “Shh!
Listen!
”

He could hear the distant hammering of footsteps on steel. The sound seemed to be emanating from the service alley from which they had come, and also from a level above. It sounded like at least half a dozen men.

She spoke quickly, in a low voice. “I'm sure they've found the one you killed. Which tells them you're armed, probably a professional.” Her English was heavily accented but remarkably fluent. Her intonation seemed to be questioning, though he couldn't see her facial expression. “Although it's obvious you are, if you've survived this far. They also know you—we—can't have gotten too far yet.”

“I don't know who you are, yet you're risking your life for me. You don't owe me anything, but an explanation would be appreciated.”

“Look, if we get out of here, we'll have time to talk. Right now we don't. Now, do you have any other weapon on you?”

He shook his head. “Just this damn thing, and it's empty.”

“Not good. We're way outnumbered. There are enough of them to fan out, search every passage, every hold. And as we've just seen, they're equipped with some serious weaponry.”

“There's no shortage of it on this ship,” Bryson remarked. “How far are we from the containers?”

“Containers?”

“The boxes. The cargo.”

Even in the semidarkness he could see a white flash of smile as she realized what he was saying. “Ah, yes. Not far at all. But I don't know what's in them.”

“Then we'll just have to look. Do we have to go back out to the service alley?”

“No. There's a passageway cut into the floor of one of these box girders. But I don't know which one, and without lights, we run the risk of just stepping down into it.”

Bryson reached into a pocket, retrieved a book of matches, lit one. The compartment instantly lit up with a feeble amber light. He walked over to the next opening, the rush of air extinguishing the flame, and he lit another. She ran alongside and looked into the adjoining space. “There it is,” she said. Bryson waved the match out just before it burned down to his finger. She reached out her hand to take the matchbook; he handed it over, understanding that, since she was in the lead, she had the more immediate need.

As soon as the darkness returned, she grabbed the steel bar, lifted her feet, and thrust them through. As she pulled herself erect by means of another handhold mounted inside the next compartment, she tapped her feet against the deck, searching out solid steel. “Okay. Careful.”

He swung himself through the manhole, alighting carefully, keeping to the edges of the compartment floor. She was already descending into the vertical passage by means of a steel ladder that was welded in place. As Bryson waited to follow her down, he heard loud footsteps approaching, accompanied by shouts; then he could see a beam of light from a powerful flashlight illuminate the service alley they'd come from. He ducked down to the steel floor just as a flashlight beam shone directly at them. The light moved from side to side slowly.

He froze, his face pressed against the cold steel. He was aware of the loud ship's Klaxons, still blaring ceaselessly, but strangely, they had become almost background noise against which he could now hear other, more subtle, sounds.

He held his breath. The light moved to the center of the passage, then stopped, as if they had located him. He felt his heart hammer so loudly he swore it was audible. Then the beam moved off to one side and was gone.

The loud footsteps seemed to be passing by. “Nothing here!” a voice called out.

He waited a full minute before allowing himself to move. It seemed an eternity. Then he gingerly felt around for the smooth round edges of the opening in the floor until his fingers encountered the jutting steel of the ladder.

In a few seconds he, too, was climbing down the ladder.

They seemed to be descending for hundreds of feet, though he knew it had to be less than that. Finally the ladder came to an end, and the two of them were crawling through a long, dark horizontal tunnel whose floor was damp and smelled of bilge water. The tunnel was so low that they could not stand erect. The footfalls of the pursuers were now so distant and muffled they were all but inaudible. The woman moved rapidly through the tunnel, bent over, almost crab-walking, and Bryson found himself doing the same. Then the tunnel branched to the right, and she grabbed hold of another vertical metal ladder and began climbing nimbly upward. Bryson followed, but this ascent was a brief one; it led to what looked like another alley. The woman lit a match, whose flame revealed that on either side of the alley were steep, high corrugated-steel walls; in a moment, he realized that the walls were in fact the ends of steel shipping containers packed closely together. The walkway ran between two long rows of containers.

She stopped, knelt, lighted another match, and inspected a label plastered at the end panel of one container. “Steel Eagle 105, 107, 111…” she read quietly.

“Knives. Field-grade, tactical-ops. Keep looking.”

She moved on to the next container. “Omega Technologies—”

“Electronic warfare components. Jesus, they've got everything here. But that's not going to do us any good.”

“Mark-Twelve IFF Crypto—”

“Crypto systems for transponders or interrogators. Try the next bay. Hurry!”

Meanwhile, Bryson was squatting in front of a container in the row opposite, trying to make out the label by the dim light emitting from the woman's match a few feet away. “I think we got something here,” he said. “XM84 stun grenades, nonlethal, nonfragmentation. Flash-and-bang.” He muttered to himself, “I'd prefer something lethal, but beggars can't be choosers.”

Quietly, she continued to read aloud: “AN/PSC-11 SCAMP.”

“Several-Channel Anti-jam Man-Portable. Keep going.”

She waved out one match and lit another. “ANFATDS?”

“Army Field Artillery Tactical Data System. Not going to help us much either.”

“AN/PRC-132 SOHFRAD?”

“Special Operations High Frequency Radio. Nope.”

“Tadiran—”

He cut her off. “Israeli telecommunications and electronics maker. From your homeland. Nothing we can use.”

Then he noticed the label on the adjoining container: M-76 grenades, and M-25 CS riot grenades, used by the military and police for crowd control. “Here we go,” he said excitedly, though restraining the volume. “This is exactly what we need. Now, do you know how to open these things?”

She turned back toward him. “All we need is a bolt-cutter. These containers are high-security-sealed to prevent pilferage—they're not really locked in any serious way.”

The first container came open easily once the high-security seal was snapped off. The metal lashing gear crisscrossing the front end of the nine-foot-high container slid out quickly, and then a door opened. Inside were stacked wooden crates of grenades and other armaments: a veritable Aladdin's cave of weaponry.

Ten minutes later they had assembled a pile of assorted arms. Once they had familiarized themselves with how to use them and how to keep them from going off accidentally, Bryson and the woman began stuffing the smaller objects, the grenades and ammunition and the like, into the pockets of their Kevlar body armor plates. The larger objects, they secured to their shoulders and backs by means of makeshift holsters, rucksacks, and slings of rope; the largest ones they would simply carry. Each wore Kevlar helmets with attached face shields.

Suddenly there came an enormous crash from directly overhead, then another. The screech of metal scraping against metal. Bryson slipped into the narrow gap between two containers and wordlessly signaled to the woman to do the same.

A sliver of bright light appeared above as a trapdoor in the ceiling appeared to open, actually an opening in the hatchway covering this bay of the cargo hold. The light came from high-intensity flashlights, several of them, in the hands of three or four of Calacanis's soldiers. Behind them, beside them, there were others, many others, and even from this angle, diagonally below, Bryson could see they were heavily armed.

No! He was expecting a confrontation, but not here, not so soon! There had been no opportunity to formulate a strategy, to coordinate with the nameless blond woman who had for some reason become his accomplice.

He seized the grip of the Bulgarian-made Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle and slowly angled it upward, mentally running through his options. To fire at the men from here would be the equivalent of sending up a flare confirming his location. Calacanis's men couldn't be certain that Bryson and the woman were here.

Then Bryson caught a glimpse of the array of large weapons that lay abandoned on the steel walkway floor. That told his enemies that they had guessed right, or rather, that they had accurately pinpointed the sounds from below—that their quarry was either here or had just been here.

But why weren't they firing?

When you're outnumbered, go on the offensive. His instincts told him to fire first, to pick off as many of his pursuers as he could, whether it gave away their positions or not.

He raised the Kalashnikov, peered through the low-light, variable-intensity illuminated sight to zero the reticle, and squeezed the trigger.

An explosion, followed instantly by an agonized scream, and one of Calacanis's soldiers toppled from the ramparts above all the way down to the steel ramp a few feet away. Bryson's aim was precise; the man, struck in the forehead, was dead.

Bryson pulled into the shadows of the recess between containers, bracing for the full-automatic explosion of gunfire that he knew would be the response.