Chapter 11
ELEVEN
“Let them go,” Declan said quietly, watching as the life raft deployed and then drifted out into the darkness. “Let them go, and we will finish this.”
Sergei looked at him and then barked into his radio. “Leave them.”
Declan released a breath. At least Steinbeck and Austen would be safe. His contact would follow their EPIRB and pick them up, even if they only found a smoking hole where the Invictus once had been.
He had two hundred miles to figure out how to get to the bow, open up the fender garage, access the lithium batteries, destroy them, and start a fire, exactly the plan he’d outlined for Steinbeck.
He hadn’t wanted Stein to think he might really be a traitor.
He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but. ..
Okay, it was Austen that he was trying to prove himself to, although he didn’t know why. Maybe he should harbor no hope that he might fix anything between them. Maybe his best hope would be that she’d remember him with some warmth, after the truth came out.
Fact was, he probably wouldn’t live through this, so any hope beyond this felt futile.
Now the captain plugged in the coordinates Declan had given him and told Declan to sit down on the sofa. Another guard held a handgun on him. He lifted his hands in surrender. “Where am I going to go? There’s nothing but ocean around us for fifty miles.”
He said it in Russian, and Sergei looked over at him and then at his henchman, a new guy whom Declan decided to call Ivan, and nodded.
“You think we don’t remember you?” Sergei said and glanced at Declan.
“What?”
“Alosha. You’re on a dozen wanted posters.” The chair creaked as Sergei laughed. “I didn’t know you were so famous till I got to Cuba.”
Oh, that accounted for why the US official had turned on him. It wasn’t about the obsidite or even his AI program.
It was about Operation Cybernet.
Declan looked over at Sergei. “That was a long time ago.”
“We have a long memory.”
Yes, well, Declan did too. The kind that kept his Russian fluent.
Maybe because he’d feared exactly this day, his past coming back to haunt him.
“So after we find the obsidite and the refining facility, I think you will have to return to the motherland for another conversation.”
Another conversation. After which, if he wasn’t executed, he’d end up in a Siberian gulag, if they still had such things.
Alosha. A play on the name Dark Horse, loshad.
He just could not seem to outrun his mistakes or even the consequences of his decisions. His stupid words to Austen played back to him, “Whatever business problem I have, I have two choices. I can either ignore it or I can face it. Facing it helps me figure out how to fix it.”
Clearly not. It only dug him deeper.
Well, at least she was alive, and Steinbeck too.
He stared out into the night and uttered a prayer, wanting to believe that God might listen to him. Please get her safely to shore. Maybe for her sake, God would.
Although her words still dug into him, ached.
“I want the guy who stopped at nothing to find me in the middle of the ocean just because he cared about doing the right thing.”
He was still doing the right thing. But helping her had also made him feel like he could step out of the choices he’d made into a new place, a new version of himself.
“Watch him,” Sergei said to Ivan, then looked over at Declan. “If he tries to touch the console, shoot him.”
Declan held up his hands and rolled his eyes. “I’m just an observer here, man.”
Sergei stepped out of the pilothouse, heading down the stairs, probably to the galley.
Ivan, maybe in his early twenties, glanced over at Declan. “What did he mean by all that?”
Declan frowned.
“When he called you Alosha.”
“It’s an old name,” Declan said. “From the Afghan war. I had some Russian friends. We got into a bit of a disagreement.” He stared out the window, remembering the early days after Hunter had moved the FOB to a different location.
He probably didn’t even know about Declan’s stint working for counterintelligence.
The door opened.
It happened so fast Declan almost didn’t move. Two shots, dimmed by a silencer. It took a full second after Ivan hit the floor for him to realize Steinbeck hadn’t joined Austen on the raft.
The man burst into the room. “Let’s go.”
Where? He didn’t stop to ask as he followed Stein onto the sky lounge and down the stairs toward the bow deck.
“I hope you’re not too attached to your boat.” Stein paused in the dim lights of the deck.
“It’s sort of named after my mother, so maybe a little.”
“You’ll have to upgrade.” Steinbeck pointed toward the bow. “Let’s get to those lithium batteries.”
Declan nodded. “To be clear, once you start, you can’t stop the chain reaction.”
“I think that’s the point.” He motioned toward the front and Declan jumped onto the bow deck.
“Where’s Sergei?” Declan asked as the door lifted.
“Time-out in the head,” Steinbeck said. “But there are more roaming around the boat, so let’s move it.”
“Right.” Declan took the stairs down to the locker, where they stored the fenders and the lithium batteries. Entered the code to unlock the garage.
“I can’t believe you came back for me,” Declan said to Steinbeck as the door opened.
“It took me a while to pick up what you were laying down,” he said. “You were on the Cybernet op.”
“You know about that?”
“It was talked about as a textbook operation that destroyed a Soviet complex that was aggregating our information, selling it to the world, and reverse engineering our technology. I especially remember how it ended.”
“The lab was on a cargo ship docked in Vladivostok. Made a big boom.”
“They thought you were one of them.”
“That’s what happens when you have a Russian mother and speak without an accent.” Declan moved down into the storage bay, toward the batteries. “Apparently they haven’t forgotten.”
Steinbeck stayed in the bow. “So this whole operation? You’re still running a Dark Horse op?”
Declan nodded.
“I should have figured that out when I saw my cousin Colt in Barcelona. He wasn’t there to watch you. He was there to help you, wasn’t he?”
Declan had unlocked the battery compartment, revealing the ship’s lithium batteries—all twenty of them.
They would make a sizable boom too.
“I don’t know who Colt is, but I did work with a clandestine government agency that helped me make contact with the Russian Bratva. I leased them the Mariposa land and watched them. As soon as I realized they’d gotten their first shipment of obsidite, I came up with the shell game.”
“The three ships.”
“We’re down to one. They’ve been tracking the Santa Maria since we left Cuba.”
“I should have trusted you,” Steinbeck said.
“Give me your gun.”
Steinbeck handed over the Beretta.
“I think your instincts are pretty good, Steinbeck. You suspected I was lying about something, and it wasn’t really a lie, but I didn’t want Austen to get involved.
Maybe that was stupid, but I’m a little tired of living two lives.
” He gave him a solemn look. “I’m falling in love with your sister. I hope that’s okay.”
“I think I can live with that,” Steinbeck said. “But first we need to find her. So let’s get going.”
Declan stepped back and shot.
The batteries sparked.
“Let’s move.” He turned and scrambled out to where Steinbeck stood by the anchor chain.
“Help me get this out.” Stein had hold of a large bag.
Right. The secondary life raft. “How did you know this was here?”
“We did a couple of ops on boats like these back when we trained to repel pirates.”
Declan grabbed the other side of the life-raft case, and then he and Steinbeck unzipped it, walked over to the bow, and dropped the case into the ocean.
The water activated the raft, and it exploded out of the case, inflating.
A four-man life raft, the boat wasn’t big, and it was floating away in the night.
Shouts rang out behind them, and a bullet skimmed off the edge of the prow.
Smoke started to roll out of the garage.
“Go, go!” Steinbeck said even as Declan fired over his head.
“You go!” Declan kept firing.
Steinbeck took a step up to the bow and dove.
Declan tucked the gun into his belt, then followed.
The water shocked him, brisk on his body, and he surfaced as bullets pinged the water around him.
“Stein!”
No answer. He searched for the lifeboat in the darkness. It had floated away, but he spotted it some twenty feet into the swell.
He needed to catch it before the waves took it into the night. He swam hard for the raft, his hand catching the rope.
Behind him, the yacht caught fire. The flames burned across the bow toward the bridge. It lit up like a torch on the water.
Declan turned, searching again for Steinbeck.
Nothing but darkness, the waves cresting over him, burying any sight of Stein.
Then, just like that, the Invictus exploded as the flames hit the engine room. A billowing cloud of fire and black smoke churned into the night, reflecting upon the waves.
Declan treaded in the water, watching the Invictus burn, the decks, then the stern, and finally, the fire climbing to the pilothouse.
“Steinbeck!”
No answer in the orange glow of the sea.
No. No!
He nearly let go of the rope, the urge to swim back to search for Steinbeck rising through him. But if he lost the rope, well, he lost any hope of surviving.
Any hope of finding Austen.
Steinbeck, where are you?
He watched as the boat burned, a carcass of flame on the water, the pilothouse falling in on itself, cutting the vessel in half.
And nowhere in the flames did Steinbeck surface.
The Invictus finally sank, the flames quenched by the ocean, only debris remaining to flicker like stars on the water, until it, too, died.
He finally dragged himself into the lifeboat, lying on the bottom, his hands to his chest, breathing hard.
And then it was just Declan and his lifeboat and a sky full of stars floating over the great, hungry alone.
* * *
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”