Chapter 76

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Clive Cussler Ghost Soldier

Mike Maden

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Juan skidded to a halt just shy of the door entrance, his breath shortened by his aching rib cage.

He shot a quick glance around the corner, expecting the Vendor to open fire on him. But all Cabrillo saw was a steep staircase of hand-hewn rock climbing into the darkness. Fresh boot prints marred the emerald-green moss on the nearest steps.

With gunfire still raging behind him, he raised his weapon, turned the corner, and charged in.

Cabrillo’s bare foot hit the first step and he bounded up to the next. But when his bare artificial foot hit the slimy moss, his leg slipped out from under him, crashing him into the steps. Nothing registered in his nerveless carbon-fiber leg, but his left shin felt like it had been cracked with a tire iron. He picked himself up and continued the steep climb, careful to step where the Vendor had already parted the moss.

Suddenly the air split with the sharp retorts of pistol fire from above, the sound magnified by the narrow rock walls, lighting up the darkened stairwell like flashing strobes. Rock shards slashed Juan’s face as he dropped to the stairs, flattening himself as best as he could. He raised his P90 blindly and unleashed a fifty-round torrent of unaimed bullets up into the dark.

More pistol shots rang out. One of the rounds grazed Cabrillo’s temple like a branding iron. He jammed himself up against one wall of the staircase, hoping to avoid the next shots as he fumbled to reload another mag.

“Time to die, Mendoza!” the Vendor called from the top as he ripped off five more rounds. Bullets spanged just millimeters from Cabrillo’s head.

Cabrillo located the Vendor’s distant position up the stairs by the sound of his voice, raised his gun, and pulled the trigger. Fifty more rounds spat out of his weapon in a deafening roar.

Juan slapped another mag in.

His last.

He pulled the trigger and let fly again.

★Aboard the Spook Fish

An insane plan began to coalesce in Callie’s mind.

She slammed the throttles to the stops and threw the Spook Fish into the path of the Ghost Sword, twenty times the length of her tiny submersible. She maneuvered her fragile vehicle gingerly, careful to not let the mass of the larger vessel smash into her as she guided her ballast pods onto the Ghost Sword’s deck.

Even before she landed, Callie’s fingers flew across the drone panel controls. She gave it a specific command, but few instructions. There wasn’t any need to. The whole point of AI-driven robotics was that the machine would self-direct faster and better than she could. Besides, there wasn’t any time.

As soon as she sent the command, the robot launched out of its pod, but it didn’t travel very far. It immediately began wet-welding the Spook Fish’s steel alloy ballast pods to the smooth deck of the Ghost Sword. She had no idea if the two metal surfaces could be joined, but she was out of options. The smooth curves of the Ghost Sword’s hydrodynamic hull had no points of purchase, no protrusions, no handholds. There just wasn’t any place for her drone’s gripping hand to grab hold. Even if she had gripped it, what would she do? Her engines weren’t powerful enough to stop it.

For a brief moment she even thought about putting the Spook Fish nose-to-nose with the larger vessel in hopes of either slowing her down or misdirecting her. But the chances of maintaining a stable position between two curved surfaces were next to zero even if the AI navigator was in control. It would be like trying to balance one bowling ball on top of another. Just one sharp turn of the Ghost Sword’s round nose would send the Spook Fish spinning, and leave it trailing in its speeding wake.

The drone’s camera pumped images of the welding operation onto Callie’s monitor, the sparking arc light flared on the screen. The drone was making quick progress. She just wasn’t sure it was quick enough to finish the job before the bigger sub reached top speed and threw the Spook Fish off the deck.

And even if it did, would the welds even hold?

★Juan lay on the rocky staircase littered with dozens of spent shell casings. His ringing ears strained to hear the sound of the Vendor’s crashing steps escaping farther upward into the dark or the bark of more rounds fired his way. He heard neither.

He lay still, listening.

Nothing, he told himself, except the drip of water hitting stone a few steps above.

Cabrillo’s hopes began to rise. Had he killed the man he’d been chasing for so long? Or had the merchant of death slipped the noose again?

Juan slowed his breathing, hoping his ringing ears would clear. He needed to find out if the man was dead or if he had finally escaped.

Or lying in wait in the dark.

Cabrillo rose on unsteady feet, raised his P90, and engaged the weapon light. He hadn’t used the light before because he didn’t want to give his position away. But now in the dark it was his best friend. He flashed the passage up ahead. His heart sank. He hoped to see the Vendor’s bullet-ridden corpse draped over the stone steps, but he was long gone.

Juan’s anger flared, and he found a new burst of energy. He charged up the stairs, his battered ribs stabbing him with every slowing step. The staircase took a slight bend as it followed a seam in the rock. The passage suddenly opened up to a wide, irregular landing. An open doorway stood ten feet ahead. Beyond it were industrial lights and a workshop.

Cabrillo charged for the door, hoping the Vendor hadn’t found his way to an escape vehicle. Just two steps from the doorway, a steel door slid shut on powerful pneumatics. Cabrillo slowed himself, but couldn’t stop, and he slammed into it, dropping his empty P90.

“Mendoza! You meddler! Time to die!”

Dazed, Juan turned around just as the Vendor charged.

Cabrillo got his fight on, fast. He threw a blizzard of furious fists and vicious, barefooted kicks, each attack aimed to kill, not wound, the larger man.

But the Vendor blunted each blow with blazingly fast counterstrikes. Cabrillo sped up his attack, but the Vendor countered each thrust, laughing maniacally as if playing a child’s game instead of fighting for his life.

The Vendor pressed in, diverting or absorbing Cabrillo’s assaults, then unleashed his own relentless attack with a guttural “Kiai!”

Cabrillo gave as good as he got defensively, his own finely honed fighting skills blunting the Vendor’s iron-hard fists and bone-jarring kicks. But the Vendor’s incredible speed and power took their toll quickly. Cabrillo felt like he was fighting a rock-crushing hammer mill, each strike sending shock waves of pain into his aching limbs.

The Vendor stutter-stepped, feigning in one direction before twisting his torso like a coiled spring. He loosed a roundhouse kick into Cabrillo’s rib cage—in the exact place where the bullets had struck him before. If the ribs weren’t broken before, they were now. The pain radiated through his torso like a shotgun blast, and knocked the air out of him. He stumbled backward and crashed into the rock wall behind him, struggling to breathe.

The Vendor charged in just as Juan’s head cracked against the stone.

His bloodshot eyes flared with delight as his long fingers wrapped around Cabrillo’s neck. He pressed in so close their faces nearly touched. Worse, the Vendor’s more powerful body was pinned against Juan’s so he couldn’t throw any punches or kicks.

The Vendor’s eyes narrowed with grim determination as his grip tightened. Already out of breath from his broken ribs, Cabrillo felt his trachea collapsing beneath strong hands. Another surge of rage adrenalized Juan’s muscles and he struck as hard as he could at the Vendor’s arms to break his grip, but to no effect. The Vendor’s steely fingers were as unrelenting as an iron slave collar.

Robbed of oxygen, Juan’s strength flagged and his eyes began to dim. His fingers clawed at Hashimoto’s hands, but couldn’t get them to budge even a millimeter.

Cabrillo took his last, best shot.

He stomped his heel into the arch of the Vendor’s foot, discharging a 12-gauge shotgun blast out of the weapon hidden in his combat leg.

The Vendor’s foot was ground to hamburger by the double-aught buckshot. He absorbed the mind-shattering pain with a stoic grunt and his leg buckled slightly, but he didn’t loosen his grip.

But the shift in his weight was just enough for Juan to push forward on the Vendor’s weakened leg. He grabbed the Vendor’s shirt and pulled him farther in that direction, increasing the momentum.

With a final, exhausted shove with his bare foot against the wall, Cabrillo sent the two of them tumbling down the stone stairs locked in a death grip.

★The drone’s arc welder sputtered out when the last encapsulated electrode was finally exhausted.

Callie maneuvered the drone’s camera to examine the work. It was well done, considering the circumstances, but it was hardly complete.

She checked her speed gauge. The Spook wasn’t traveling under her own power, but she was racing along at nearly twenty knots pinned to the deck of the Ghost Sword. She glanced back down to the drone’s camera screen. The weld was already giving way. It wouldn’t last long.

She grabbed her mic. “Oregon, Oregon. This is Spook Fish. Mayday. Mayday.”

“Callie, this is Linda. You’re on speakerphone. What’s your status?”

“The Vendor vessel has accelerated to twenty knots and has descended to eighty feet. Are you still tracking me?”

“We are tracking you,” Eric said. “Twenty knots at eighty-two feet and falling.”

“How are you keeping pace with the sub?” Linda asked.

“Long story. Are you tracking the sub, too?”

“Still can’t see or hear her.”

“But you see me?”

“Aye. Your machine is noisy.”

“Linda, listen to me carefully.”

“Go ahead.”

“Use my sonar position for your torpedo fix.”