Primary Command

* * *

Luke leaned on the Lada, pretending to smoke a cigarette. Everybody around here smoked, so he figured it might help his disguise. He had tried it a couple of times before in high school but never caught the hang of it. He liked football better.

He took a drag, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, then let the whole mess blow out again. It tasted like smog. He nearly laughed at himself. If anyone was watching, they would see how ridiculous he looked.

He pitched the lit cigarette into the gutter.

The Lada was parked fifty yards from the security gate of the small port. Frenchy was over there at the gate, asking the guards for directions. There was a small knot of men, silhouettes in the fog, shadows thrown by the yellow lamps, talking and laughing through the gate. Frenchy was kind of a funny guy. He could crack anybody up.

Frenchy was smoking effortlessly. Smoke one down to the nub, pitch it, and light another one. That was Frenchy.

Suddenly gunshots rang out. They came from the other side of the wharf. Three hundred yards away, Luke saw the muzzle flashes of the guns.

POP! POP! POP! POP!

Now men were shouting. A man screamed in terror, a high falsetto wail.

Someone opened up with a heavy gun, full auto. Luke could hear the metallic stomp of the rounds being unleashed.

DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

Now the guards were running away from the gate, back toward the action. That was Luke’s cue. Just like that, they were in.

But then Frenchy did something unexpected. As soon as the guards turned from him, he had a gun in his hand. He took a two-handed stance and started firing. His shots were LOUD.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

He shot the running guards in their backs. They spun to face him, and he shot them in their fronts. Poor guys, they didn’t know if they were coming or going.

“Frenchy!” Luke almost shouted, but didn’t.

“Dammit!” he said instead.

The man hated Russians. Luke knew that going in. Don knew it. Big Daddy knew it. But no one expected him to start killing Russians the second he got a chance.

Luke reached into the car and pulled out the heavy bolt cutters. He set the incendiary beneath the dashboard for one minute. Then he dashed to Frenchy’s side.

“You’re my driver! You’re not supposed to kill anybody!”

Frenchy shrugged. “Russians,” he said. “Cowards.”

“You shot them in the back.” To Luke the implications of that were clear. Who’s the coward around here?

But it wasn’t clear to Frenchy. He nodded and smiled. “Yes. I did.”

Luke put the clippers to the thick chain looped through the fence links and cut it. He dropped the cutters and shoved the gate open. Now they were really in.

Ba-BOOOOOOOM!

Ahead of them, a massive explosion ripped open the night.

A flash of light appeared. On the heels of that came a sound like boulders rushing downhill. An avalanche. The explosion rent the sky in oranges, reds, and yellows. For a split second, it turned night into day. It was not what Luke expected.

The explosion was so big that the ground trembled violently. Luke nearly lost his feet. Everything went sideways. For a moment, he thought the explosion was enough to tear the docks off their moorings. A giant flaming fireball went straight into the sky.

Ed’s boat had hit like a torpedo.

That was going to bring people. No doubt about it. Luke pulled his gun out, an MP5. His weapon of choice. The murder weapon. He started to run.

Frenchy was several steps ahead of him. The big Chechen reached the first man down, a guard who was trying to crawl forward, and finished him with a shot to the back of the head. BANG. Without pausing, he moved on to the next one. BANG.

Cold-blooded. He had just been sharing a laugh with these guys.

Three guards were still running out ahead of them. It was too late to let them live. Frenchy had scuttled that. Luke sprayed them with the MP5. They all dropped.

Now Luke was moving fast. He blew ahead of Frenchy, left him to clean up the mess. Ahead, the freighter, the Yuri Andropov II, was on fire. Oil or gasoline on the surface of the water had also caught. The whole area was fast becoming an apocalypse.

How much TNT had they put in that speedboat?

BOOM! Another explosion went up behind him. The Lada.

A second later, a smaller explosion went up. The Lada’s gas tank. Good. That flaming car at the gate would add to the confusion when the cavalry got here.

Luke reached where the freighter was docked lengthwise along the pier. The heat here was already intense, though the fire was on the other side of the boat. Flames ten stories high reached into the night. The fire shouldn’t be that…

BOOOOM!

Another long explosion rent the night, ripping out from somewhere inside the freighter. The docks trembled and Luke was nearly knocked off his feet again. The wind from a blast wave hit him.

What the hell was going on?

The ship was secured to the pier with giant shipping chains. Luke strapped his gun to his back, crossed the low barrier along the dock’s edge, grabbed a chain, and swung out over the water. He pulled himself, moving like a spider along the shipping chain on a diagonal up to the first deck.

There was no one on this deck. He moved along the catwalk, fast but careful, much like a cat himself. He came to a steel stairway. Gun out again, he moved cautiously to the top. Already, he could hear sirens behind him. Reinforcements were on their way. He’d better make this quick.

He stopped just short of the top of the steps and poked his head over the top. This was the deck. It was loud up here. A clarion bell was shrieking. Across the deck, the fire surged. Men had reached the firefighting equipment and were attempting to put the fire out. They sprayed it with powerful hoses—flame retardant or water, Luke couldn’t tell. From the smoke and the flames, all he could really see were vague forms moving through the chaos.

GA-BOOOOM!

Another explosion came, this one from directly beneath the firefighters. The deck erupted upward, and the men flew into the air, their bodies lit up like torches.

Luke stopped. He popped the magazine out of his gun and slipped it into his jacket. It was probably half-full. He pulled out a new forty-round magazine, slid it into the gun, and drove it home with his fist.

He gazed out at the deck. Flames shot through the hole. Burning corpses, ten, maybe twelve, littered the ground.

Ordnance.

The ship was a floating weapons depot. What else would cause these explosions? The Russians had loaded up this old rust bucket freighter with bombs. Was this what they were reduced to? That hadn’t been in any intelligence assessment Luke had…

BOOOM!

Another explosion ripped through the ship somewhere.

Now the fire just burned, unchecked, the flames crackling, the heat coming off it in waves. This thing was going to disintegrate. It was going to blow apart. It could happen any time. There wasn’t a moment to waste.

“Oh, man.”

Luke got up and ran across the deck, through the surge of heat. At the far end was a corridor. He raced along it. There were heavy steel doors on either side.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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