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With the captain trussed up, Murph held on to him while Eddie opened the door. MacD leaned out and swept the corridor with his crossbow. When he had checked both directions, he nodded that it was clear.
The four of them crept down the corridor single file, with MacD in the lead and Eddie taking the rear. MacD had reached the stairwell just as the radio on Murph’s belt crackled to life.
“I hear them coming,” an accented voice said over the handheld unit.
Someone else rasped, “I said radio silence, you idiot.”
Eddie and the others froze. The captain grinned wickedly at him. He must have alerted while he was offscreen in the corridor before being captured.
MacD backed into the captain just as one of the guards charged up the stairs, firing blindly with his automatic weapon.
MacD and Murph dived out of the way. The captain caught a round in his leg and went down, howling into his gag.
Eddie fired back, taking out the guard with a well-placed trio of shots, but others were running up the stairs. More footsteps were pounding toward them from the direction of the equipment room.
“This way!” Eddie yelled. Murph tried to drag the captain with him, but Eddie shouted, “Leave him!”
They reached the end of the passageway, which had no exit door since they were two stories above the deck. Eddie pushed into the room at the end of the hall, and Murph and MacD followed him in, as bullets plunked into the wall behind them.
It was one of the crew quarters, with three bunk beds, lockers, and a metal desk. Eddie wrenched the desk from its spot and propped it upright against the door.
The guards outside didn’t waste any time. They began pouring rounds into the door, but the bullets were stopped by the desktop. Then the gunfire abruptly ceased.
Eddie could hear the captain say, “I want them alive. Get a tank of acetylene. We’ll smoke them out.”
A single, rectangular window, only two feet wide, overlooked the deck below. If the captain and his men funneled smoke into the room, it wouldn’t be able to ventilate enough air to keep them from suffocating.
Still, the window was the reason Eddie had chosen the room. The free-fall lifeboat was cantilevered in its cradle outside, just twenty feet away and one story down.
“Linda,” he called on his radio, “Eddie here. Extraction is about to get more complicated.” He bashed the glass with the butt of his assault rifle, shattering it. “And tell the Chairman that the ‘stealth’ part of our plan is literally out the window.”
36
“Sounds like our cue to leave,” Juan said to Linc when he heard Linda’s warning. “I think we’ve seen enough.”
Juan had opened a few other crates and found more explosives and impellers, but he also discovered several sophisticated radar imaging units like those installed on self-driving cars. They were small enough that Juan took one and put it in his pack, protecting it with a dry bag in case they had to swim out to the Gator.
Someone had used a marker to scrawl one word on the outside of the box. Kuyog. Juan’s translator app told him it was a Tagalog word meanin
g swarm.
Juan closed up that last crate and climbed down. He patted his pack and said, “This might tell us something about what they’re building. We’ll have Stoney and Murph take a look at it when we get back.”
“Think Locsin will miss it?” Linc asked.
“Probably. Let’s hope they blame it on the Chinese shorting them. Ready to go?”
Linc nodded. His hand was on the door handle.
“Gomez,” Juan said. “How’s it looking?”
“Hali here, Chairman. Gomez is busy with Eddie’s team, so he asked me to look out for you. You need to get out of there right now. Guards are coming your way, and it looks like they’re searching inside every truck.”
“Got it, Hali.” Juan looked at Linc and said, “Let’s move.”
Linc silently nudged the door up just enough for them to slip out. They each rolled onto the ground, and Linc pulled the door shut behind him.
He was about to crawl under the truck again when Juan grabbed his shoulder. He pointed at the approaching flashlights on either side of the third truck behind them.
