Текст книги "Deep Six"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Clive Cussler
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70

“Any sign of pursuit?” the river pilot asked, synchronizing the control levers of the helm console with the finesse of a conductor leading an orchestra.

Lee Tong stepped back from the large open window at the rear of the pilothouse and lowered the binoculars. “Nothing except a strange cloud of black smoke about two or three miles astern.”

“Probably an oil fire.”

“Seems to be following.”

“An illusion. The river has a habit of doing weird things to the eyes. What looks to be a mile away is four. Lights where no lights are supposed to be. Ships approaching in a channel that fade away as you get closer. Yes, the river can fool you when she gets playful.”

Lee Tong gazed up the channel again. He had learned to tune out the pilot’s never-ending commentary on the Mississippi, but he admired his skill and experience.

Captain Kim Pujon was a longtime professional river pilot for Bougainville Maritime Lines, but he still retained his Asian superstitious nature. He seldom took his eyes off the channel and the barge ahead as he expertly balanced the speeds of the four engines generating 12,000 horsepower and delicately guided the towboat’s four forward rudders and six backing rudders. Under his feet the huge diesels pounded over at full power, driving the barge through the water at nearly sixteen miles an hour, straining the cables that held the two vessels together.

They hurtled past an inbound Swedish oil tanker, and Lee Tong braced himself as the barge and towboat swept up and over the wash. “How much further to deep water?”

“Our hull passed from fresh to salt about ten miles back. We should cross the coastal shallows in another fifty minutes.”

“Keep your eyes open for a research ship with a red hull and flying the British blue ensign.”

“We’re boarding a Royal Navy ship after we scuttle?” Pujon asked in surprise.

“A former Norwegian merchantman,” explained Lee Tong. “I purchased her seven years ago and refitted her out as a research and survey vessel – a handy disguise to fool customs authorities and the Coast Guard.”

“Let us hope it fools whoever chases after us.”

Lee Tong grunted. “Why not? Any American search force will be told we were picked up and are under lock and key by the finest English accent money can buy. Before the research ship docks in New Orleans, you, I and our crew will be long gone.”

Pujon pointed. “The Port Eads light coming up. We’ll be in open water soon.”

Lee Tong nodded in grim satisfaction. “If they couldn’t stop us by now, they’re too late, far too late.”

General Metcalf, laying his long and distinguished career on the line, ignored Moran’s threats and ordered a military alert throughout the Gulf Coast states. At Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field in Florida, tactical fighter wings and special operations gunships scrambled and thundered west while attack squadrons rose from Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas and swept toward the east.

He and Sandecker raced by car to the Pentagon to direct the rescue operation from the war room. Once the vast machine was set into motion, they could do little but listen to reports and stare at an enormous satellite photomap thrown on the screen by a rear projector.

Metcalf failed to conceal his apprehension. He stood uneasily rubbing his palms together, peering at the lights on the map indicating the progress of the air strike as the planes converged on a circle lit in red.

“How soon before the first planes arrive?” asked Sandecker.

“Ten, no more than twelve minutes.”

“Surface craft?”

“Not less than an hour,” replied Metcalf bitterly. “We were caught short. No naval craft are in the immediate area except a nuclear sub sixty miles out in the gulf.”

“Coast Guard?”

“There’s an armed rescue-response cutter off Grand Island. It might make it in time.”

Sandecker studied the photomap. “Doubtful. It’s thirty miles away.”

Metcalf wiped his hands with a handkerchief. “The situation looks grim,” he said. “Except for scare tactics the air mission is useless. We can’t send in planes to strike the towboat without endangering the barge. One is practically on top of the other.”

“Bougainville would quickly scuttle the barge in any case.”

“If only we had a surface craft in the area. At least we might attempt a boarding.”

“And rescue Smith and Margolin alive.”

Metcalf sank into a chair. “We might pull it off yet. A Navy special warfare SEAL attachment is due to arrive by helicopter in a few minutes.”

“After what happened to those FBI agents, they could be going to a slaughter.”

“Our last hope,” Metcalf said helplessly. “If they can’t save them, nobody can.”

The first aircraft to arrive on the scene was not a screaming jet fighter but a Navy four-engined reconnaissance plane that had been diverted from weather patrol. The pilot, a boyish-faced man in his middle twenties, tapped his co-pilot on the arm and pointed down to his left.

“A towboat pushing one barge. She must be what all the fuss is about.”

“What do we do now?” asked the co-pilot, a narrow-jawed slightly older man with bushy red hair.

“Notify base with the cheery news. Unless, of course, you want to keep it a secret.”

Less than a minute after the sighting report was given, a gruff voice came over the radio. “Who is the aircraft commander?”

“I am.”

“I am, who?”

“You go first.”

“This is General Clayton Metcalf of the Joint Chiefs.”

The pilot smiled and made a circular motion around the side of his head with an index finger. “Are you crazy or is this a gag?”

“My sanity is not an issue here, and no, this is not a gag. Your name and rank, please.”

“You won’t believe it?”

“I’ll be the judge.”

“Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant.”

“Why should I doubt you?” Metcalf laughed. “There was a great third baseman by that name.”

“My father,” Grant said in awe. “You remember him?”

“They don’t hand out four stars for bad memories,” said Metcalf. “Do you have television equipment on board, Lieutenant?”

“Yes… yes, sir,” Grant stammered as he realized who he was really talking to. “We tape storms close-on for the meteorologists.”

“I’ll have my communications officer give your video operator the frequency for satellite transmission to the Pentagon. Keep your camera trained on the tow-boat.”

Grant turned to his co-pilot. “My God, what do you make of that?”

71

The towboat surged past the lookout at the South Pass pilot station, the last outpost of the muddy Mississippi, and swept into the open sea.

Captain Pujon said, “Thirty miles to deep water.”

Lee Tong nodded as his eyes studied the circling weather plane. Then he picked up his binoculars and scanned the sea. The only ship in sight was his counterfeit research vessel approaching from the east about eight miles off the port bow.

“We’ve beaten them,” he said confidently.

“They can still blow us out of the water from the air.”

“And risk sinking the barge? I don’t think so. They want the Vice President alive.”

“How can they know he’s on board?”

“They don’t, at least not for certain. One more reason they won’t attack what might be an innocent tow-boat unloading a trash barge at sea.”

A crewman scrambled up the steps to the pilothouse and stepped through the door. “Sir,” he said, pointing, “an aircraft coming up astern.”

Lee Tong swung the binoculars in the direction of the crewman’s outstretched arm. A U.S. Navy helicopter was beating its way toward the towboat only fifteen feet above the waves.

He frowned and said, “Alert the men.”

The crewman threw a salute and hurried off.

“A gunship?” Pujon asked uneasily. “It could hover and blast us to bits without scratching the barge.”

“Fortunately no. She’s an assault transport. Probably carrying a team of Navy SEALS. They mean to assault the towboat.”

Lieutenant Homer Dodds stuck his head out the side jump door of the chopper and peered down. The two vessels looked peaceful enough, he thought as a crewman stepped from the pilothouse and waved a greeting. Nothing unusual or suspicious. The armament he had been warned about was not visible.

He spoke into a microphone. “Have you established radio contact?”

“We’ve hailed on every marine frequency in the book and they don’t answer,” replied the pilot from the cockpit.

“Okay, drop us over the barge.”

“Roger.”

Dodds picked up a bullhorn and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Ahoy, the towboat. This is the U.S. Navy. Reduce speed and slow to a stop. We are coming aboard.”

Below, the crewman cupped hands to his ears and shook his head, signaling he couldn’t hear above the exhaust whine of the helicopter’s turbines. Dodds repeated the message and the crewman made an inviting wave of his arm. By now Dodds was close enough to see he was an Oriental.

The speed of the towboat and barge dropped off, and they began to roll in the swells. The pilot of the helicopter played the wind and hovered over the flat deck of the barge in preparation for Dodds’s assault team to jump the final three or four feet.

Dodds turned and took a final look at his men. They were lean and hard, and probably the toughest, raunchiest, meanest bunch of multipurpose killers in the Navy. They were the only group of men Dodds ever commanded who genuinely liked combat. They were eager, their weapons at the ready and prepared for anything. Except, perhaps, for total surprise.

The copter was only ten feet above the barge when trapdoors were sprung on the towboat, hatch covers thrown back and twenty crewmen opened up with Steyr-Mannlicher AUG assault carbines.

The.223-caliber shells flew into the SEALS from all directions; smoke and the grunts of men being hit erupted simultaneously. Dodds and his men reacted savagely, cutting down any towboat crewman who exposed himself, but bullets sprayed into their cramped compartment as if concentrated out of a firehose and turned it into a slaughter den. There was no escape. They were as helpless as if their backs were against the wall of a dead-end alley.

The noise of the concentrated firepower drowned out the sound of the helicopter’s exhaust. The pilot was hit in the first burst, which exploded the canopy, hurling bits of metal and Plexiglas throughout the cockpit. The chopper shuddered and veered sharply around on its axis. The co-pilot wrestled with the controls but they had lost all response.

The Air Force fighters arrived and instantly appraised the situation. Their squadron leader gave hurried instructions and dived, skimming low over the stern of the towboat in an attempt to draw fire away from the battered and smoking helicopter. But the ploy didn’t work. They were ignored by Lee Tong’s gunners. With growing frustration at the orders not to attack, their passes became ever lower until one pilot clipped off the towboat’s radar antenna.

Too badly mauled to remain in the air any longer, the crippled chopper and its pitiful cargo of dead and wounded finally gave up the struggle to remain airborne and fell into the sea beside the barge.

Sandecker and Metcalf sat in shock as the video camera on board the weather plane recorded the drama. The war room became deadly quiet and nobody spoke as they watched and waited for the camera to reveal signs of survivors. Six heads were all they could count in the blue of the sea.

“The end of the game,” Metcalf said with chilly finality.

Sandecker didn’t answer. He turned away from the screen and sat heavily in a chair beside the long conference table, the pepper-and-vinegar spirit gone out of him.

Metcalf listened without reaction to the voices of the pilots over the speakers. Their anger at not being able to pound the towboat turned vehement. Not told of the people held captive inside the barge, they voiced their anger at the high command, unaware their heated words were heard and recorded at the Pentagon a thousand miles away.

A shadow of a smile touched Sandecker’s face. He could not help but sympathize with them.

Then a friendly voice cut in. “Lieutenant Grant calling. Is it okay to call you direct, General?”

“It’s all right, son,” said Metcalf quietly. “Go ahead.”

“I have two ships approaching the area, sir. Stand by for a picture of the first one.”

With a new shred of hope, their eyes locked on the screen. At first the image was small and indistinct. Then the weather plane’s cameraman zoomed in on a red-hulled vessel.

“From up here I’d judge her to be a survey ship,” reported Grant.

A gust of wind caught the flag on the ensign staff and stretched out its blue colors.

“British,” announced Metcalf dejectedly. “We don’t dare ask foreign nationals to die for our sake.”

“You’re right, of course. I’ve never known an oceanographic scientist to carry an automatic rifle.”

Metcalf turned and said, “Grant?”

“Sir?”

“Contact the British research vessel and request they pick up survivors from the helicopter.”

Before Grant could acknowledge, the video image distorted and the screen went black.

“We’ve lost your picture, Grant.”

“One moment, General. My crewman manning the camera informs me the battery pack on the recorder went dead. He’ll have it replaced in a minute.”

“What’s the situation with the towboat?”

“She and the barge are under way again, only more slowly than before.”

Metcalf turned to Sandecker. “Luck just isn’t on our side, is it, Jim?”

“No, Clayton. We’ve had none at all.” He hesitated. “Unless, of course, the second ship is an armed Coast Guard cutter.”

“Grant?” Metcalf boomed.

“Won’t be long, sir.”

“Never mind that. What type vessel is the second ship you reported? Coast Guard or Navy?”

“Neither. Strictly civilian.”

Metcalf dissolved in defeat, but a spark stirred within Sandecker. He leaned over the microphone.

“Grant, this is Admiral James Sandecker. Can you describe her?”

“She’s nothing like you’d expect to see on the ocean.”

“What’s her nationality?”

“Nationality?”

“Her flag, man. What flag is she flying?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Spit it out.”

“Well, Admiral, I was born and raised in Montana, but I’ve read enough history books to recognize a Confederate States flag when I see one.”

72

Out of a world all but vanished, her brass steam whistle splitting the air, the seawater frothing white beneath her churning paddle wheels, and spewing black smoke from her towering twin stacks, the Stonewall Jacksonpitched toward the towboat with the awkward grace of a pregnant Southern belle hoisting her hooped skirts while crossing a mud puddle.

Shrieking gulls rode the wind above a giant stern flag displaying the crossed bars and stars of the Confederacy, while on the roof of the texas deck, a man furiously pounded out the old South’s national hymn, “Dixie,” on the keyboard of an old-fashioned steam calliope. The sight of the old riverboat charging across the sea stirred the souls of the men flying above. They knew they were witnessing an adventure none would see again.

In the ornate pilothouse, Pitt and Giordino stared at the barge and towboat that loomed closer with every revolution of the thirty-foot paddle wheels.

“The man was right,” Giordino shouted above the steam whistle and calliope.

“What man?” Pitt asked loudly.

“The one who said, ‘Save your Confederate money; the South will rise again.’ “

“Lucky for us it has,” Pitt said, smiling.

“We’re gaining.” This from a wiry little man who twisted the six-foot helm with both hands.

“They’ve lost speed,” Pitt concurred.

“If the boilers don’t blow, and the sweet old darlin’ holds together in these damned waves…” The man at the wheel paused in midsentence, made an imperceptible turn of his big white-bearded head and let fly a spurt of tobacco juice with deadly accuracy into a brass cuspidor before continuing. “We ought to overtake ‘em in the next two miles.”

Captain Melvin Belcheron had skippered the Stonewall Jacksonfor thirty of his sixty-two years. He knew every buoy, bend, sandbar and riverbank light from St. Louis to New Orleans by heart. But this was the first time he’d ever taken his boat into the open sea.

The “sweet old darlin’“ was built in 1915 at Columbus, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Her like was the last to stoke the fires of imagination during the golden years of steamboating, and her like would never be seen again. The smell of burning coal, the swish of the steam engine, and the rhythmic splash of the paddle wheels would soon belong only in the history books.

Her shallow wooden hull was long and beamy, measuring 270 feet by 44. Her horizontal noncondensing engines ran at about forty revolutions per minute. She was rated at slightly over one thousand tons, yet despite her bulk, she walked the water with a draft of just thirty-two inches.

Down below on the main deck, four men, sweat-streaked and blackened with soot, furiously shoveled coal into the furnaces under four high-pressure boilers. When the pressure began to creep into the red, the chief engineer, a crusty old Scot by the name of McGeen, hung his hat over the steam gauge.

McGeen was the first man to vote for pursuit after Pitt crash-landed the helicopter in shallow water near Fort Jackson, waded ashore with Giordino and Hogan, and described the situation. At first there was undisguised disbelief, but after seeing their wounds, the bullet-riddled aircraft, and then hearing a deputy sheriff describe the dead and injured FBI agents a few miles downriver, McGeen stoked up his boilers, Belcheron rounded up his deck crew and forty men from the Sixth Louisiana Regiment tramped on board hooting and hollering and dragging along two ancient field cannon.

“Pour on the coal, boys,” McGeen pressed his black gang. He looked like the devil with his trimmed goatee and brushed-up eyebrows in the flickering glare of the open furnace doors. “If we mean to save the Vice President, we’ve got to have more steam.”

The Stonewall Jacksonthrashed after the towboat and barge, almost as if sensing the urgency of her mission. When new, her top speed was rated at fifteen miles an hour, but in the past forty years she was never called on to provide more than twelve. [2]2
  Speed on inland waterways is rated in miles per hour, never in knots.


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She thrust downriver with the current at fourteen, then fifteen… sixteen… eighteen miles an hour. When she burst from the South Pass Channel, she was driving through the water at twenty, smoke and sparks exploding through the flared capitals atop her stacks.

The men of the Sixth Louisiana Regiment – the dentists, plumbers, accountants who marched and refought battles of the Civil War as a hobby – grunted and sweated in the nondescript woolen gray and butternut uniforms that once clothed the Army of the Confederate States of America. Under the command of a major, they heaved huge cotton bales into place as breastworks. The two Napoleon twelve-pounder cannon from Fort Jackson were wheeled into position on the bow, their smoothbore barrels loaded with ball bearings scrounged from McGeen’s engine-room supply locker.

Pitt stared down at the growing fortress of wired bales. Cotton against steel, he mused, single-shot muskets against automatic rifles.

It was going to be an interesting fight.

Lieutenant Grant tore his eyes from the incredible sight under his wings and radioed the ship flying the British flag.

“This is Air Force Weather Recon zero-four-zero calling oceanographic research vessel. Do you read?”

“Righto, Yank. Hear you clearly,” came back a cheery voice fresh off a cricket field. “This is Her Majesty’s Ship Pathfinder.What can we do for you, zero-four-zero?”

“A chopper went into the drink about three miles west of you. Can you effect a rescue of survivors, Pathfinder?”

“We bloody well better. Can’t allow the poor chaps to drown, can we?”

“I’ll circle the crash sector, Pathfinder.Home in on me.”

“Jolly good. We’re on our way. Out.”

Grant took up a position over the struggling men in the water. The gulf current was warm, so there was no fear of their succumbing to exposure, but any bleeding wounds were certain to attract sharks.

“You don’t carry much influence,” said his co-pilot.

“What do you mean?” asked Grant.

“The Limey ship isn’t responding. She’s turned away.”

Grant leaned forward and banked the plane to see out the opposite cockpit window. His co-pilot was right. The Pathfinder’sbow had come around on a course away from the helicopter’s survivors and was aimed toward the Stonewall Jackson.

“Pathfinder,this is zero-four-zero,” Grant called. “What is your problem? Repeat. What is your problem?”

There was no reply.

“Unless I’m suffering one hell of a hallucination,” Metcalf said, staring in wonder at the video transmission, “that old relic from Tom Sawyerintends to attack the towboat.”

“She’s giving every indication,” Sandecker agreed.

“Where do you suppose she came from?”

Sandecker stood with his arms crossed in front of him, his face radiating an elated expression. “Pitt,” he muttered under his breath, “you wily, irrepressible son of a bitch.”

“You say something?”

“Just speculating to myself.”

“What can they possibly hope to accomplish?”

“I think they mean to ram and board.”

“Insanity, sheer insanity,” snorted Metcalf gloomily. “The gunners on the towboat will cut them to pieces.”

Suddenly Sandecker tensed, seeing something in the background on the screen. Metcalf didn’t catch it; no one else watching caught it either.

The admiral grasped Metcalf by the arm. “The British vessel!”

Metcalf looked up, startled. “What about it?”

“Good God, man, see for yourself. She’s going to run down the steamboat.”

Metcalf saw the distance between the two ships rapidly narrowing, saw the wake of the Pathfinderturn to foam as she surged ahead at full speed.

“Grant!” he bellowed.

“Here, sir.”

“The Limey ship, why isn’t she headed toward the men in the water?”

“I can’t say, General. Her skipper acknowledged my request for rescue, but chased after the old paddleboat instead. I haven’t been able to raise him again. He appears to be ignoring my transmissions.”

“Take them out!” Sandecker demanded. “Call in an air strike and take the bastards out!”

Metcalf hesitated, torn by indecision. “But she’s flying the British flag, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’ll stake my rank she’s a Bougainville ship, and the flag is a decoy.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Maybe. But I do know that if she crushes the steamboat into firewood, our last chance to save Vince Margolin is gone.”