Corsair

Alana beat out the ashes where they seared her skin, ripped her T-shirt over her head, and with nothing to protect her skin but the thin cotton she worked on snuffing out the fire by hand. All the while, Linda and the gunmen traded shots over her head.

By the time Alana extinguished the last of the stubborn flames, her shirt had all but burned up, and most the skin on her palms was gone, leaving behind nothing but raw red meat that hurt like nothing she’d ever experienced in her life.

The pain was so intense, she couldn’t crawl on her hands and knees, but rather had to slither like a snake to return to the others.

Linda shined a penlight on Alana’s injuries and gasped.

“I’ll be all right,” Alana managed to say.

“Cover your ears,” Mark Murphy whispered urgently.

He waited a beat, studying the array of winking flashlights over the touchhole of one of the Saqr’s great cannons. When he thought the time right, he slipped a timer pencil into the gun’s touchhole, where it sank into the plastic explosives he’d rammed down the barrel. Between it and the muzzle was a cannonball made up of dozens of small metal spheres fused lightly together.

The timer went off, detonating the plastique, and the gun belched the grapeshot in a ten-foot tongue of flame. The ropes secured to the cannon to prevent the recoil from pushing it across the deck failed at full stretch, and the two tons of bronze rocketed through the opposite rail and plowed into the steep riverbank below the pier.

The impact of the grape was lost in the gun’s mighty roar, but when Murphy looked out to where he’d aimed two of the three flashlights were no longer there.

It was as if the cannon’s blast had signaled the end of round one and the beginning of the second. The gunmen opened up with renewed fury, rounds chewing at the Saqr as if to tear it apart piece by piece. The three Corporation operatives fired back, but the weight of the onslaught kept them pinned.

The cry of the terrorists’ charge carried above the din. They were coming with everything they had.

Eric took a glancing bullet to the shoulder when he tried to shoot back and stem the tide. Unable to hold his rifle against the wound to aim, he flicked to full auto and raked the ground thirty feet from the Saqr’s side, creating a curtain of lead the terrorists couldn’t penetrate.

When the rifle bolt snapped back on an empty magazine, Murphy took up the duty, blasting away in a desperate bid to break the charge. His gun, too, fell empty. Linda screamed like a Valkyrie as she hosed the dirt. It didn’t matter if she hit anyone. The intention was just to keep the terrorists back long enough that their courage would fail and they’d retreat for cover.

Bullets whizzed all around her, but to her absolute relief she saw the muzzle flashes were coming from farther and farther away. The charge had broken. They had stopped them.

She slipped down below the bulwarks, her entire body vibrating as an aftereffect of her rifle’s recoil, and she was covered in oily sweat. “You guys okay?” she called to her people as the gunmen’s fire slowed.

“I took one to the shoulder,” Eric reported from the darkness.

“I’m still pissed at myself for not grabbing the night vision goggles from Linc,” Mark said bitterly. “We go spelunking, and I forget the most important piece of gear we would need.”

“Alana?”

“I’m here,” she called softly, her voice pinched with pain.

“Mark, give her something from your med kit.” The sound of gunfire that had risen and fallen erratically over the past ten minutes dribbled away to silence.

Everyone’s ears rang, but not badly enough to miss a man’s voice calling out from the cavern entrance. “I will give you this one chance to give yourselves up.”

“Holy crap,” Eric exclaimed. “I know that voice.”

“What? Who is it?”

“I listened in when he and the Chairman were talking aboard the Oregon. That’s the harbor pilot, Hassad or Assad or something.”

“That explains the ambush on the coast road,” Murph surmised.

“Doesn’t change anything for us, though.” Linda thought for a moment, then shouted back, “I think General Austin McAuliffe said it best when he was asked to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge. In a word: nuts.”

Murph grumbled sarcastically, “Oh, that’ll go well for us.”

Round three started in earnest.

THIRTY-FIVE

THE FIRST PIECE OF GOOD NEWS CABRILLO HAD HEARD IN a while was that he was familiar with the supertanker slowly overtaking the Libyan frigate. She was the Petromax Oil ULCC Aggie Johnston, and several months earlier the Oregon had saved her from being hit by a couple of Iranian torpedoes by firing one of their own at the sub that had launched them.