Valhalla Rising (63 page)

Kanai had achieved the tactical advantage.

He was gratified at the way the battle was going in his favor. He threw a glance astern and saw both of the larger Coast Guard cutters battered and nearly reduced to burnt-out derelicts, drifting helplessly. There would be no further worry from surface ships.

With the police helicopters held at bay, he knew he wasn’t home free, not yet. The
Mongol Invader
may have been closing in on the Verrazano Bridge, but Kanai was certain that whoever was in command of the intercept operation would call in military jet fighters before the ship reached relative safety under and beyond the bridge.

D
over checked his body for wounds. He was bleeding from shrapnel cuts on his left shoulder and the side of his head. He felt for his ear and found it dangling by a shred of flesh. Out of frustration more than pain, he pulled it away and stuffed it in his pocket, certain that a surgeon could sew it back on later. He picked his way across the shattered wheelhouse. Dead and wounded men spread across the deck. They were young men who shouldn’t be treated like this, he thought absently. This was not a war with a foreign enemy of the United States. This was a battle over internal economics. None of the slaughter made sense to him.

The cutters had been sitting ducks against the concentrated fire from at least four portable shoulder-fired guided-missile systems. He could feel the speed falling off and the ship slowing down. The damage below her waterline was severe, and she was beginning to sink.

Unable to assess the harm to the
Timothy Firme
on the other side of the
Mongol Invader,
but assuming the worst, Admiral Dover ordered the only officer of the
Firme
still standing to turn the cutter toward the nearest shore and ground her. The Coast Guard’s struggle against the nightmare ship was finished.

The last throw of the dice, Dover thought grimly. Clutching the radio, he ordered in the three Air National Guard F-16C fighters that had assembled and were circling a few miles out to sea. He instinctively ducked as a missile from the LNG tanker flashed in front of the bridge and burst harmlessly in the water a hundred yards beyond. Then he crouched and peered over the railing, his eyes turned skyward.

He changed the frequency on his radio and said slowly, distinctly, “Blue Flight, Blue Flight, this is Red Fleet. If you hear and understand me, attack the LNG tanker. Repeat, attack the ship. But for God’s sake, don’t strike the tanks containing the propane.”

“Understood, Red Fleet,” replied the flight leader. “We will concentrate our fire on the stern superstructure.”

“Try for the engine room under the funnel,” ordered Dover. “Do whatever it takes to stop her and stop her quickly without setting off the gas.”

“I copy, Red Fleet. Launching attack
now.
”

The Blue Flight leader sent his two wingmen in, one five hundred yards behind the other, while he circled to observe the results of the strike and follow up should his lead planes miss the target. He feared that by being too cautious his pilots would fire too far aft on the stern and as far as possible from the tanks, missing the ship completely. As it turned out, his fears were set in the wrong direction.

The first pilot banked and rolled as he dropped in an almost vertical dive. Aiming his fighter arrow-straight for the machinery room deep beneath the big funnel of the
Invader,
he locked in his missile guidance systems on his target, which was becoming hidden by smoke from the burning Coast Guard cutters. But a split second before he could press his fire switch, a surface-to-air missile fired from the LNG tanker blasted his F-16 into a giant fiery pyre that burst like a fireworks rocket. It seemed to hang for a moment, no longer a sleek fighter jet but a shattered and flaming pile of scrap falling crazily in a thousand pieces and splashing into the sea.

“Break off!” shouted the flight leader to the second aircraft.

“Too late!” broke in the pilot. “I’m locked on —”

He spoke no more. There was no time to take evasive action, no pulling out of his approach dive. No time to react. Another missile belched from its launcher and his plane exploded into a second fireball, which also seemed to hang suspended before plunging into the waiting arms of an apathetic sea, not more than a hundred yards from the watery burial shroud of the first F-16.

The flight leader froze, unable to believe what he had witnessed. Two of his closest friends, National Guard pilots who had responded to the emergency, both businessmen with families, suddenly incinerated within seconds of each other and now lying within the wreckage of their aircraft on the bottom of lower New York Harbor. Numb with revulsion, he was too paralyzed with shock to launch another attack. Instead, he turned his aircraft away from the death and destruction and flew back to the National Guard field on Long Island.

Dover watched the destruction of the two aircraft in stunned horror. He understood instantly what it meant. Everybody on board the cutters, rescue boats and helicopters knew. The loss of the pilots was appalling, but their failed mission to stop the LNG tanker before she passed into the upper harbor spelled disaster now.

He suddenly straightened in awe as one of the small thirty-five-foot Coast Guard rescue boats abruptly shot across the water at full speed in the direction of the stern of the
Mongol Invader.
The crew, clutching the tops of their life vests, spilled over the sides as the boat’s skipper gripped the helm and kept his bow on a straight, undeviating course toward the huge ship.

“Suicide,” Dover thought wonderingly. “Pure suicide, but God bless him.”

Small-arms fire erupted from the
Invader.
Bullets clouded the rescue boat like swarms of hornets and whined around the young man at the helm. Splashes seemed to cover every inch of the water around the thin fiberglass hull. The man at the helm could be seen shaking the spray from his eyes with one hand while he gripped the wheel with the other. The little red, white and blue ensign flew stiff in the morning breeze.

After seeing the fighter jets crash, people had stopped their cars on the bridge and were standing in crowds along the railing, watching the drama unfold beneath them. The eyes of the men in the remaining helicopters were on the rescue boat, too, every man and woman silently urging the boat’s commander to jump overboard before the collision.

“A glorious act of defiance,” Dover muttered to no one but himself. “Close enough!” he yelled, knowing he could not be heard. “Abandon the boat!”

But it was not to be. Just when it looked like the skipper was about to leap clear of the cockpit, a spray of bullets stitched him across the chest and he fell backward onto the work deck. A thousand people gazed entranced as the boat, its engines racing in a crescendo, props churning the water into a froth, struck the big port rudder of the LNG tanker.

There was no fiery explosion, no burst of smoke and flame. The little boat simply disintegrated when it struck the massive steel rudder. The only visible evidence of the collision was a small cloud of dust and debris that sprayed the water. The great menacing ship continued on like an elephant attacked by a mosquito without feeling the bite.

Dover dragged himself erect, not noticing the blood flooding out of his shoe from another shrapnel wound in his right ankle. He watched the massive LNG tanker sail on unmolested. Her bow was almost to a point where it was directly under the bridge.

“Dear God, don’t let us lose her now,” he muttered in abject fear and anger. “God help everyone if she gets under the bridge.”

The words had hardly escaped his mouth when there was an explosion in the water under the stern of the
Mongol Invader.
He stared disbelieving as the bows of the giant ship slowly, inexorably began to make a sweeping turn to port away from the bridge. Ever so gradually at first, then faster and faster.

T
hat big Liquid Natural Gas carrier looks like a line of eight pregnant women lying on their backs in a spa,” said Jimmy Flett, as he stood at the console helm and closed on the
Mongol Invader.

“A helicopter, two cutters and two F-16s blasted to scrap within twenty minutes,” Giordino muttered, eyeing the wreckage floating everywhere, scattered among the waves by the smaller boats that sped through it. “She’s even deadlier than she is ugly.”

“They’ll never stop her now,” Pitt said, gazing through a pair of thirty-by-fifty binoculars at the big ship doggedly heading for Manhattan and her rendezvous with nightmarish devastation.

“She’s about a thousand yards from the bridge,” judged Flett. “Just time enough for us to cut in, submerge and go for her screws and rudders.”

From Giordino’s point of view, it would be a near thing. “We’ll only get one pass. Miss and we’ll never be able to circle and come at her again. Her speed is too great. We couldn’t surface, race ahead of her and submerge for another try until she was long past the bridge.”

Pitt looked at him and grinned. “Then we’ll just have to get it right the first time, won’t we?”

The
Coral Wanderer
skipped over the waves like a smooth, flat stone thrown by a major-league pitcher. Pitt swung his glasses onto the burning Coast Guard cutters. The
William Shea
was crawling toward the Brooklyn shore, the
Timothy Firme
listing and down by the stern. The smaller Coast Guard rescue craft had gathered around to put on extra men for damage control. The New York fireboats also pulled alongside, their pipes and nozzles throwing a shower of water on the sections of the ships that were on fire. This was one time when the hounds were outclassed by a grizzly bear, he thought. He deeply regretted that they couldn’t have arrived sooner and diverted the devastation.

He had acted cocksure in his words of optimism to Giordino, but deep down he felt the chilling fear of failure. He was determined to hinder the
Mongol Invader
and prevent her from entering the upper harbor, even if it meant putting his life and those of Giordino and Flett on the line.

It was too late to turn back; the point of no return had been passed. All trepidation and uncertainty were left far astern. He knew with calculated certainty that Omo Kanai was on board. There was a score to settle, and he felt a growing wave of rage.

He studied the shattered and shell-torn wheelhouse of the
Invader,
but saw no human figures moving inside. The hull below the funnel had more holes than a colander, but they were small and the damage looked slight.

It seemed to take half a lifetime for the
Coral Wanderer
to narrow the gap. Two hundred yards off the starboard bow of the LNG tanker, Flett eased back the throttles and switched on the ballast tank pumps. Faster than Pitt might have thought, the luxury submarine slipped beneath the surface of the water as smoothly as if guided by a giant hand. Once submerged, Flett picked up the speed again, pushing the
Coral Wanderer
faster than her designers had specified. From now on there could be no room for error.

Giordino stayed on the bridge with Flett, while Pitt dropped down to the main cabin and made his way forward to the bow and its big viewing port. Seated comfortably on a suede couch, he picked up a phone set in one armrest.

“Are we connected?” he asked.

“We have you on the speaker,” answered Giordino.

Flett read off the numbers. “One hundred fifty yards and closing.”

“Visibility is less than forty feet,” Pitt reported. “Keep a sharp eye on the radar.”

“We have a computer image of the ship as she sails,” said Giordino. “I’ll let you know what section of the hull we come in contact with.”

Three agonizing minutes dragged by as Flett read off the closing distance. “One hundred yards out,” he notified Pitt. “Her shadow is beginning to show above on the surface.”

Pitt could hear the throb of the
Mongol Invader’s
engines and sense the rush of water under her keel. He peered into the green gloom and barely discerned the white foam that was sliding along her hull. And then her plates materialized out of the murk thirty feet ahead and ten feet above.

“We’ve got her!” Pitt said sharply.

Flett instantly threw the twin screws into reverse, stopping the
Wanderer
before she rammed the
Invader.

“Take us down another ten feet, Jimmy.”

“Ten feet, it is,” acknowledged Flett, sending the
Coral Wanderer
on a course directly under the starboard side of the
Mongol Invader’s
hull.

To Pitt, seated inside the bow observation cabin, it was an eerie sight to watch the great hull sweep over the submarine like a Chinook wind out of the north, a vast mechanical monster with no mind of its own. The beat of the propellers came as a distant pulse but soon increased to the sound of a farm threshing machine. Something caught his eye, a large object that bulged from the bottom of the hull near the keel. But then it flashed from view.