The drydock was only making three knots, so they had little trouble passing behind the vessel and easing their way along her starboard side. The hull was a featureless wall of gray steel that stretched from stem to stern. The lights mounted high atop her rail washed down the plating, but amidships there was a patch of darkness where one of the bulbs was burned out. The pilot eased the Zodiac over, running right outside the wake zone next to the darkened section of hull. He had to constantly adjust the motor to keep the vessel stable in the choppy wash.
“Grapple,” Linda called over her throat mike.
One of the SEALs raised an odd weapon to his shoulder. It looked like an oversized rifle, but a hose ran from the pistol grip to a cylinder strapped to the floor of the Zodiac. He activated a laser range finder slung under the ungainly rifle and pointed it skyward, centering his sights at a spot just above the Maus’s rail.
“Sixty-seven feet,” he whispered.
By the light of a small red-lensed flashlight, his partner dialed the number into a valve at the top of the cylinder. He tapped the shooter on the shoulder.
The man centered his breathing, feeling the gentle rise and fall of the Zodiac, and waited for the exact moment the craft reached the zenith of a wave. He eased the trigger.
A precise amount of compressed nitrogen exploded from the tank, launching a stubby rubber-coated arrow from the grappling gun. Behind the arrow trailed a millimeters-wide nanofiber line. At the apogee of flight, the arrow peeled apart to become a grappling hook. The hook cleared the rail by scant inches and fell silently to the deck.
Back in the Zodiac, the shooter pulled back on his weapon, dragging the hook high above so it locked around a rail stanchion. “Secure.”
His partner unhooked the reel from the grappling gun and used a snap link to splice a nylon climbing rope to the nanofiber line. In smooth hand-over-hand motions, he hauled the line through a small pulley at the back of the grapple so the climbing rope rose into the night sky. It took barely thirty seconds for him to loop the rope around the pulley and recover the end. He secured one end of the rope to cargo straps at the bow of the Zodiac while the pilot did the same at the stern. Using sheer muscle power, the men pulled on the ropes, and the Zodiac lifted free of the water. They heaved again, and the little inflatable rose another foot. They did this three more times until there was no danger a wave would come along and capsize the craft. Had they left it bobbing in the wash while they were reconnoitering the Maus, the boat’s rubber skin would have shredded against the drydock’s steel hide.
All the lines were locked down, and one by one the team climbed the thick nylon rope, first making sure they had chambered rounds in their pistols. Linda climbed third in the stick, trusting the first team member would clear the rail under the cover of the number-two man. She heard the shooter call “Clear” through her miniature earpiece and looked up to see him slither between the metal railing.
She glanced down as she neared the top. The Zodiac pilot was right below her, and far down in the shadows she could see the inflatable snuggled up against the drydock like a seal pup nursing from its mother. The sea was a surging presence a littler farther down.
She accepted the hand from above and was dragged over the rail, thankful that the heavy flak vest protected her breasts. She doubted Doc Huxley with her 38-Ds could have done it.
The three of them formed a defensive perimeter around the rail until the last man clambered over. The shooter took a second to remove the grappling hook and secure the rope holding the Zodiac with a coupling device that could be disengaged once they were safely back on their boat.
The top deck of the Maus appeared deserted, though technically it wasn’t a deck but a ten-foot-wide catwalk that circled the entire ship. Had huge sheets of stiff material not been drawn over the hold, the deck would have been like the parapet of an iron castle. Linda approached the protective covering. The material felt like woven plastic fibers. It had been pulled taut across the hold so it was stiff, like the canvas of a large tent. She pressed against it and felt no give.
One of the men had pulled a blued Gerber knife from a boot sheath and was about to cut the fabric. Linda held up a hand. Wordlessly, she pointed to the shooter and his partner and indicated they were to search the perimeter headed aft while she and the pilot would head forward. She pointed across the 240-foot hold to where she wanted to meet up.
Linda eased her Glock from its holster. There was too much light around the deck to use night vision gear but too little to see clearly. Fortunately, there didn’t appear to be many places a sentry could hide on the catwalk. There were few ventilators or machinery housings to provide cover. Backed by the pilot, she stalked silently along the starboard rail, her pistol held steady near her waist while her eyes darted from shadow to shadow. Her breathing came easy and light, but she could feel her pulse in her throat and wondered briefly if her team could hear it through the tactical radio.
There was a structure near the bow, a blockhouse that probably housed the ballast and door controls. At first it appeared dark and deserted, but as they approached, Linda could see seams of light outlining several blacked-out windows. She pressed her back against the structure’s cool metal, then cocked her head to place her ear to the steel. She couldn’t make out words, or even the language, but she definitely heard voices inside. She heard four distinct voices, all male, and held up four fingers for the pilot. He nodded.
The pair of them eased past the blockhouse, keeping a wary eye on the single door. Just as they reached cover behind a massive ventilation hood, the door was thrown open, and a single man emerged into the night. Linda checked her watch. Two thirty. Time for a bihourly patrol. A second guard joined the first. Both wore black uniforms similar to the ones the Corporation team sported, but these men carried compact submachine guns on slings around their necks. Linda didn’t recognize the model, though it didn’t make any difference. She and her entire team were outgunned. The guards had the air of the military. Mercenaries, she guessed, hired by whoever headed the pirate ring. She also suspected that these men, or others like them, had been responsible for killing the crew of the Avalon and scuttling the research ship.
The first to emerge said something to his partner. To Linda it sounded like Russian or some other Slavic language. She wished Juan were here. He had an ear for languages. He spoke four fluently and understood enough of several others to at least get by.
Linda and her teammate ducked deeper into the shadow cast by the ventilator and let the guards pass. They moved at a brisk pace, their eyes following the beams of flashlights each carried in their left hand, leaving the right free for the wicked little machine pistols. They craned their necks over the rail every few feet to check the drydock’s hull, then cast the beam out across the black expanse of material covering the hold. They seemed to miss nothing, so it was only a matter of time until they spotted the Zodiac dangling alongside the giant vessel.
Linda whispered into her throat mike once the guards had moved out of earshot, “Team two, we have a pair of guards headed right for you.”
“Acknowledged.”
Linda’s orders were to leave no evidence that she and her men had boarded the Maus. That wasn’t going to happen. She ran through some scenarios in her mind and decided there was only one way. She’d detected a whiff of cigarette smoke when the blockhouse door had opened. She could only hope that one of the guards on patrol was a smoker.