Jack Du Brul - Pandora's curse

Leading Anika across the bridge, he dashed through a fire door and collided with a pair of Rath’s men coming up the echoing stairwell. Mercer’s momentum knocked one down the half flight of steps, and the other was a fraction too slow recovering from the unexpected collision. Mercer smashed him in the forehead with the side of the Model 12 and spun to target the guard on the landing. Recognition flared. It was Bern Hoffmann, the young German Mercer had saved from carbon-monoxide poisoning in Camp Decade.

In the moment of hesitation before Hoffmann reached for his holstered pistol, Mercer jumped the eight steps to the landing, dropping so his foot broke the young man’s wrist. Hoffmann cried out, but was silenced by a well-executed pistol-whip to the jaw. Mercer removed the pistol from Hoffmann’s limp hand and recovered a matching weapon from the unconscious man at the head of the stairs.

“Anika, let’s go. They’ll be fine.”

Her face was a mask of shock and revulsion. Mercer’s quick savagery had stunned her. “I can’t. I just…”

“Then give me your gun and hide yourself. We don’t have time to argue.”

She snapped out of her panic and came down the steps. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the broken figure of Bern Hoffmann. “I’m sorry,” she said. Mercer didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the unconscious man.

“Come on.” He took her by the hand, and they continued their descent. The sound of the fire alarm was diminished in the stairwell but came back when they emerged a few decks down. They were near one of the spas. Through a glass wall Mercer could see an elaborate gymnasium and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A fire pull station was across the hallway and he yanked the handle. The other team would be doing the same at any pull station they happened across. The alarm panel on the bridge should be lighting up like a Christmas tree.

Through a set of double doors, Mercer and Anika came upon a number of Convocation delegates milling in a hallway, muttering unanswerable questions to each other about the situation. He kept his weapons from view as they walked down the corridor. He stopped when they reached the far end. There were a number of escape routes in view. He fired the remainder of the thirty-round magazine into the floor. The companionway emptied except for the cordite stench and smoking brass.

He fitted another clip and racked the slide. They ran for an outside door and emerged on a wooden-floor promenade deck. The cold tang of the sea caressed their skin. In the distance hulked the dark silhouettes of lifeboats on their davits. A number of ship’s officers were checking them in case this turned out to be a catastrophic fire rather than a false alarm. They hadn’t heard the gunfire.

Running in the opposite direction, Mercer and Anika made their way toward a flight of stairs leading to one of the vessel’s many outdoor cafes. Mercer took the H amp;K from Anika and refitted the silencer. Two quick shots destroyed the lock on the sliding glass doors and they were back in the ship.

The hallway beyond the cafe’s entrance was deserted. Moving carefully because they were exposed, they passed a number of shops and another bar that overlooked an outdoor pool. Across the smooth water they could see a towering funnel lit with floodlights. Neither saw the two figures crossing the pool area en route to an entry door until the door was heaved open.

The figures, dressed in black and carrying MP-5s with probing laser sights, swept the corridor to their right and turned to look behind them. Mercer and Anika stood just ten yards away. He pushed her down and dove across the hallway as the laser cut the air above him. Mercer rolled onto his knee and fired, a tongue of flame shooting from the Model 12. The fusillade caught the security personnel across the chests, tossing one back onto the patio and standing the other against a wall, his body jerking like a puppet.

“You said you weren’t going to kill anyone!” Anika shrieked.

“They were Rath’s men,” Mercer shouted above her screams. “They were carrying German machine pistols, not the Italian ones the Swiss Guards have.”

She edged closer and recognized the corpse in the hall from the Geo-Research station in Greenland. She couldn’t believe the speed of Mercer’s reaction.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Mercer added and led her away.

He pulled another fire alarm as they entered a long corridor lined with cabins. As before, a few passengers were in the hallway but not many because rumors of a terrorist attack were already spreading. Mercer glanced at his watch, assuming that the twenty-minute time line had passed. He was stunned to find less than half that had elapsed. Like all combat, time had telescoped into a weird distortion where seconds took hours and hours could vanish in a blink.

They reached the double doors at the end of the hall just as Swiss Guards poured onto the companionway. Mercer fired a snap burst from his submachine gun, praying he didn’t hit anyone. Pounding the doors against their stops, Mercer pushed Anika ahead of him, taking up a defensive crouch when he found cover behind a large planter overflowing like a jungle. A few seconds later, a pair of Swiss Guards came racing after them. He used the H amp;K pistol he’d taken from Hoffmann and placed rounds in each of the Guards’ thighs, far enough from the femoral artery so they wouldn’t bleed out.

“Let’s go.” He’d bought a few more seconds.

They burst into an empty ballroom. The ornate chamber echoed as they ran toward the glowing EXIT signs on the opposite wall. At the far side, Anika collapsed onto a sofa, her chest heaving to get enough air into her body. Mercer too was winded, but they couldn’t rest here.

“You’re doing great,” he panted. “Just a little while longer.”

They checked the antechamber beyond the ballroom and began walking more normally, their weapons hidden from the two Muslim clerics arguing in Arabic despite the wailing fire alarms.

They moved through several more passages, firing indiscriminately at walls and ceilings, spreading fear wherever they went. At one point Mercer found a stack of the ship’s newspaper awaiting delivery to the cabins. He stuffed handfuls of them into a ventilation grate and set them on fire. Considering the size of the vessel, it would take many minutes for the smoke to be detected, but he hoped by then it would have diffused all over the ship. More confusion. More panic. They dodged in and out of two more firefights with roaming Guards, each time escaping to a lower deck and blending with frightened passengers until they were safe.

By now Mercer was thoroughly lost, but he guessed that all passages on the each half of the catamaran eventually led to one of the atriums. As they walked down a hall, keeping watch for pursuing Guards, Mercer spotted a sign indicating the atrium was just ahead. He broke into a jog, with Anika beside him. She’d emptied all her clips but continued to carry the silenced H amp;K.

They entered the atrium one level below the dining room where Mercer had met the televangelist and his wife. The cavernous space was deserted. Hunched to minimize his size, he led Anika to one of the bridges to get to the center of the ship so they could then lose themselves in the starboard hull, an area they hadn’t been to yet.

A piece of the bridge’s brass railing exploded the same time Mercer heard the whip crack of a pistol shot. He pushed Anika to the carpet and covered her with his body. It felt like the shot had come from across the mall-like atrium and one level up. He chanced a look and saw a dozen Swiss Guards lining the upper railings. Some of them were headed to the escalators. The Guards would reach the ends of Mercer’s bridge long before he and Anika could escape.