Jon Merz - Raider X

Thatcher grinned. “You do have a way with words, Captain.”

“Well, it’s your choice, Thatcher: swim with the sharks or get eaten by them once you’re carted back to Berlin. That is, if you even survive the journey. God knows what that woman will be like when they try to take her prisoner.”

Thatcher frowned. “I wouldn’t want to be around for that.”

“It’s fortunate that you didn’t start to have feelings for her.”

Thatcher shrugged. “I do my best not to. It tends to complicate things to the point that they fall apart rather quickly.”

“Indeed,” said Schwarzwalder. “I would hazard to guess that you do not allow feelings to ever complicate your life.”

“Yes and no,” said Thatcher. “But only when I can afford it. This was not one of those times. As delightful a companion as she may have been for the first twenty-four hours or so.”

“Then let us hope that the transfer is both speedy and efficient. I will let you know when you can slip over the side and make good your escape. You must be ready at a moment’s notice because no doubt they will be on the lookout for our arrival.”

“Noted,” said Thatcher. “Do you intend to tell Cyra what is going to take place?”

Schwarzwalder lifted his drink and sipped it before putting it back down on the table once more. He fixed Thatcher with a steady gaze and smiled. “Would you tell her?”

“No,” said Thatcher.

Schwarzwalder nodded. “Exactly.”

Back in his cabin, Thatcher considered the choices before him. He’d lied to Schwarzwalder but it was more out of shame than any sort of tactical decision. The truth was, he had developed feelings for Cyra, albeit they were more powerful when they’d been aboard the Archimedes than ever since they’d been taken aboard Raider X.

He was embarrassed because he’d let himself fall for her before checking himself. Thatcher didn’t usually allow that to happen, especially a woman he didn’t even know. And yet somehow Cyra had beguiled him to the extent that even now he was considering whether to tell her of Schwarzwalder’s plan. He sat at the small table and thought about it. But as he did so, Hewitt’s face floated through his mind chastising him for letting a woman potentially derail the entire operation.

Because Thatcher still had a job to do. And that was sink Raider X.

How in the world he was going to manage that when they reached Tenerife was a serious problem. It meant that he would have to find some way of accomplishing the task before they reached the cluster of islands. Less then twenty-four hours.

Thatcher needed to get out of the cabin, down to the engine room where the scene of the slaughter was, embed some type of explosive and plant it near the keel so that the resulting explosion tore the ship in half and sent it to the bottom. He needed to do this without the benefit of a timer that would give him an exact amount of time to be near the lifeboats when it detonated.

No pressure, he thought with a frown. How come Hewitt couldn’t have spared any sort of time for training on how to be a saboteur?

He shook his head. Regardless of that fact, he still had the job to do and complaining about Hewitt’s lack of prepatory training wasn’t going to change the situation he was in currently. He needed to figure it out and carry on. That was it.

Thatcher had been on boats most of his life, although they were usually smaller and more exclusive yachts. But in principle, all of them had the same vulnerabilities. In this case, an explosion near the keel was what Thatcher needed. In and among his travels around the ship, he had noted the gun emplacements. There were always shells stacked nearby. But grabbing one of them wasn’t as simple as pick-pocketing a wallet. The shells were all about eighteen inches long and looked to weigh around fifty pounds. Taking one would mean Thatcher would need to somehow be alone and able to grab it and stow it somewhere until he could place it properly near the keel and work out how to make it explode at the right time.

The task was seemingly impossible while he was a prisoner in the cabin. There was no way Steinkopf or any other guard going to permit Thatcher to pop out and grab one. He smirked. “Lovely night for a stroll, isn’t it? Mind if I take that high explosive round?”

Accomplishing this mission was going to take every bit of guile he possessed and Thatcher frankly wasn’t sure he had enough of it to pull it off. That said, the ticking clock was driving him to consider any number of extraordinary options he might not have considered previously, including overpowering his guard, grabbing the shell, lobbing it into the engine room, and then quickly diving overboard before anyone knew what was happening.

He had already clocked the amount of time it would take to run from the engine room up to a side deck where he could dive off the ship as being somewhere around forty seconds. It wasn’t a lot of time in any other situation, but when you were on board a potentially sinking ship, it was a lifetime. And he would need to get past the guards and sailors who would be rushing to the engine room to put out any fires and contain the damage. Obviously, they would try to stop him.

If that was the fastest he could manage to get off the ship, then he would need to move faster. In his mind, Thatcher ran through the plan. There was nothing complex about it but one thing would hinge on all the others. If he couldn’t successfully take out his guard, then nothing else would fall into place. The time of night was also important and Thatcher figured that somewhere around three in the morning would work best. From his previous criminal activities, he knew that most people slept deepest around that time. The ship would only be slightly different. His guard would presumably be tired. If Thatcher made convincing noises like he was sick and the guard entered to check on him, he could use that to club him on the head, tie him up and gag him, and then get to work.

He leaned back from the table. It might work. It had to work, he quickly reminded himself. He was here at the behest of the Crown and he was alive for no other reason than to get this bit of work done. Forget Steinkopf, forget Schwarzwalder, forget Cyra — they were irrelevant to the matter at hand and Thatcher started preparing himself to do the job as soon as they got closer to the islands.

The other option to diving overboard would be to try to get one of the lifeboats down into the water. Or the motor launches that they used to board the ships they targeted. Thatcher wondered how quickly it took to free one of them. Probably far too long. And worse, if he was in any sort of boat, he was going to subject himself to fire from Raider X if the sailors spotted him and opened fire with any of the deck guns.

Still, it was better than swimming through shark-infested water.

Thatcher sighed. Schwarzwalder had told him they would be in Tenerife in twenty-four hours. That left tonight and part of the night tomorrow before they docked in port. If Thatcher did it tonight then he was still too far away from land to swim safely to shore and the sharks would easily take him before he reached land. That left tomorrow night. The activity level on the ship would be heightened due to the impending docking in port. It would have to alter his timeline. Three o’clock in the morning wasn’t going to be an option.

Unless Raider X stood just offshore until the following dawn and waited to pull into harbor during the daylight. Thatcher smirked. He was willing to bet that Schwarzwalder would do that. He was a proud German naval academy graduate and even though Raider X wasn’t a war vessel as much as a battleship, it was nonetheless a vessel in the German navy and he would want the locals to see the ship sailing in. Schwarzwalder was a proud man and proud of his crew. He would give them the opportunity to look the part that the vessel played when it wasn’t busy disguising itself as a merchant ship. And docking in the middle of the night, while tactically smarter, wouldn’t be what Schwarzwalder or his men would want.