Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

The Sea King thundered in over the grounds, its blinding searchlight playing across the estate as Eddie Rice searched for a clear place to set her down.

Reaching Jill, Mercer took her into his arms. She clung to him tightly, unaware that Mercer’s ribs grated against each other as she squeezed. “Everything is all right now. You’re safe. Kenji’s dead.” She nuzzled her head into his shoulder as if she were a small creature burrowing into the earth for protection. “Jill, I have to leave you here with one of my men for a while.”

Jill looked up into his face with beautiful but frightened eyes. “Can’t you take me with you?”

“I can’t. There’s still a lot for me to finish,” Mercer said, then kissed her tenderly. “That’s to let you know I would if I could — and that I’m coming back.”

Mercer untangled her arms from around his body and nodded to the SEAL. “Try to contact the Inchon somehow, maybe through Pearl Harbor, and have another team sent here. Don’t trust any local authorities. Also, guard her with your life.”

He jogged to the waiting chopper and vaulted into its hold. Eddie lifted off immediately, sweeping the chopper over the dark jungle.

In the cockpit, Mercer threw on a helmet, keying the mike immediately. “Head north as fast as this bitch can move.”

Eddie banked the chopper, then turned to Mercer, grinning, “I don’t think you’re gay, so that must have been a woman you were kissing just then. Where the hell did you find a woman in the middle of that fight?”

“You just gotta know where to look.” Mercer chuckled in the murky light of the cockpit. He opened the last two beers he’d taken from the kitchen and handed one to Eddie.

“Not when I’m flying,” the pilot demurred.

“I’m not with the FAA or the navy; don’t worry about it.”

“Good point,” Eddie replied, and took a long swallow.

“Did those SEALs have any dive equipment on board?”

“Yeah. Like you asked, I went through their stuff while I was waiting. There’s air tanks, regulators, masks, the works.”

“Good.” Mercer pulled a slip of paper from his pants pocket and handed it to Rice.

“What’s this?”

“The Loran numbers of a Russian submarine about to start a nuclear war.” Mercer had mentally calculated the position of the John Dory from the infrared pictures provided by the National Security Agency. “Punch them in and follow them.”

“Problem,” Eddie said after keying the Loran numbers into the Sea King’s navigational computer. “We have enough fuel to get out there, but not enough for the return flight.”

“There’s a good chance there won’t be a return flight.”

“Why’d I know you’d say that?” Eddie muttered.

An hour later the chopper was thundering over the ocean swells, a driving rain pelting the windscreen of the Sea King like grenade fragments. The wipers were all but useless. Occasionally, a bolt of lightning arced through the sky, casting a brilliant incandescence into the cockpit.

Mercer sat quietly in a borrowed navy wet suit, content to let Eddie Rice do his job. It had been torture getting himself into the constricting neoprene, but now the tightness around his chest eased the pain from his cracked ribs. Unconsciously, his hand polished the barrel of his machine pistol as if he were at home working on a piece of railroad track. Hundreds of questions roiled in his mind, questions about Kenji, the Koreans, Kerikov, and Lurbud, but he could not allow himself to become distracted by them. He had to remain completely focused on the present and let the past sort itself out later.

He and Eddie were racing against an imminent nuclear launch. Failing meant not only their deaths but also the loss of one of man’s greatest discoveries. The benefits of the bikinium were too great to let slip away now, and on a personal level, Mercer wouldn’t allow himself to fail; he’d suffered too much in the past week to not see this completed successfully.

“What’s our ETA?”

“About another ten minutes.”

Mercer glanced at the luminous dial of his Tag Heuer. “According to Lurbud’s threat, the John Dory launches in thirty.”

“I’m already ten knots over the safety limits of this bird in these conditions.”

“Make it twenty knots over and that Mai Tai you wanted will be on me.”

“Christ, I could use it now,” Eddie replied miserably as he torqued more power out of the turbofans.

The chopper rocked and jerked in the storm as Rice fought to keep her below the John Dory ’s radar. Her rounded nose nearly skimmed the white spume atop the waves.

“Bingo,” Eddie nearly shouted a minute later. “Target dead ahead.”

“What’s the range?”

“One mile,” Eddie said, glancing again at the neon blue radar screen.

“That’s got to be her. Take us down. I’ll swim the rest of the way. When I jump out, take off again, but be ready to pick me up when that ship blows. Approach from the stern and make sure no one else gets aboard except me and the man I’ll have with me.”

“I told you, we don’t have enough fuel to get back to Hawaii.”

“That doesn’t matter. Someone will figure out we’re here eventually.” Mercer didn’t want to tell Eddie that if the SEAL failed to get through to Pearl Harbor, the President would launch his own nuclear strike against the volcano in just three hours.

“You’re crazy, you know that?”

“It’s the main reason I can’t get life insurance.”

The Sea King’s engines wound down and the rotors whipped the sea into a salty mist as Rice brought her in for a water landing. Mercer waited at the open doorway of the chopper, sweating in the wet suit, the two large air tanks bowing his back. Around his waist he wore a leaded belt and a waterproof bag containing some other items borrowed from the SEALs. A razor-sharp dive knife was strapped to his right calf. The whole time Mercer had struggled into the gear, he had wracked his brain trying to recall everything that Spook had taught him about diving all those years ago in that flooded New York mine.

As soon as the rounded underhull of the Sea King touched the churned-up water, Mercer bit down on his mouthpiece, sucked in a breath of cool air, and launched himself out of the chopper.

The water was warmer than he expected. At first Mercer sank below the surface, then he adjusted his buoyancy by detaching one of the lead weights. He took a bearing from the compass on his wrist and, still underwater, started swimming toward the John Dory .

Mercer had made two potentially fatal assumptions when he launched himself from the Sea King. One was that the ship they had picked up on radar was, in fact, the John Dory . There was a definite possibility that the craft ahead of him was an entirely different ship, one innocently steaming through the area. The second assumption concerned the hull of the Soviet submarine/ freighter. If there was no gap between the submarine’s hull and the fake sides of the freighter, he would have no way of gaining access to the vessel. If he was wrong about either guess, he would be dead long before the Russian missile detonated.

After a few minutes of swimming, Mercer felt a vibration through the water — the pounding engines of a large ship.

Adding a little air to the compensator, he surfaced on the crest of a swell. Through the rain-lashed night, he made out the running lights of a large freighter about two hundred yards ahead of him. His breath hissed through the regulator, rain and spume splattered against his mask.

He ducked back under the surface and continued to doggedly swim toward the John Dory . The backs of his legs were beginning to ache and his breathing was labored.