[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (42 page)

“You took your damn time getting here,” I told him.

He blinked his eyes and smiled, immediately throwing off the persona of fool that had served him so well. But even as a plank holder of SEAL Team Six, Albert “Doc” Tremblay always had an intelligent look about him.

As I’ve often told him, he’s living proof that appearances can be deceiving.

“It’s a big ship,” complained Doc.

“You couldn’t find the bridge?”

“I had trouble getting out of the bar.”

“Story of your life.”

*   *   *

As seasoned readers, friends, and hangers-on well know, Doc has been an employee of Red Cell International pretty much since our inception. Besides being an excellent corpsman and a natural-born leader, he was born with a golden tongue. Everyone has heard of the salesman who could sell ice to an Eskimo. Doc would add a refrigerator and a lifetime maintenance plan. Then he would start working on an air-conditioning unit.

He’d used that talent to wheedle his way through the lighter part of the hijackers’ perimeter, getting past the guard who initially took him and about two dozen people hostage by claiming that he had left his medicine in a friend’s cabin. Allowed to go and get it, he quickly slipped away. When the guard picket became a little thicker, he began play-acting with the Alzheimer’s bit.

“Saved time,” he explained. “I didn’t feel like talking much anymore. My Arabic’s rusty.”

“We’ll send you to Libya next month for a refresher course.”

“Did you get the device in?” Doc whispered as we sized up the men on the bridge through the window.

“It’s there. All we have to do is go below and activate it. We’ll run the ship from there.”

“They won’t be happy.”

“I hope not.”

“Storm blowing in from the south.” Doc gestured at the large fist of black hugging the horizon. Like most cruise ships, the
Bon Voyage
was built to minimize roll in rough waters, but she was starting to feel the heaves. “Looks like a rough night ahead.”

“In more ways than one. Let’s get moving.”

Our first task was to get out of the bridge area. My plan for this followed time-tested Rogue Warrior doctrine: Keep It Simple, Stupid, otherwise known as KISS. I found a bobbie pin on the floor, waited until no one was watching, then jimmied the pathetically primitive lock on the door between the chart room and the captain’s quarters. As Doc slid inside, I looked back at my fellow hostages.

“I can’t explain now,” I told them. “OK?”

One by one, they nodded.

The captain’s quarters were spartan. There were no personal mementos, and except for the clothes neatly hung in the open closet, barely a sign that anyone lived here. You could have bounced a quarter off the bed and caught it in your teeth.

Doc’s knees groaned as he knelt near the door to the corridor. Mine groaned in sympathy.

“I’ll just have a look.
Damn,
” he hissed, closing the door quickly.

There were two guards in the passage, a few feet away.

“We can rush them,” suggested Doc.

“Then they’ll know something’s up,” I told him. “Best to go back to Plan B.”

“We’re already on B, aren’t we?”

“More like D.”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, one of our fellow hostages began pounding on the window, screaming to our captors in Swedish. I’m not exactly sure what he was saying, but the words “heart attack” come to mind.

Doc was on the deck, having clutched his chest as he went down. I thought he was hamming it up a bit much, until one of the others dropped to their knee and started pressing on his chest. I had to step in quickly before she attempted mouth-to-mouth—Doc’s wife Donna would never have forgiven me.

The hijackers ignored the pounding for a short while, but eventually one of the men came over and yelled at them to stop. The hostages yelled back in Swedish.

“I need to take this man to sick bay,” I said, hopping up. “He needs to go to sick bay.”

The others chimed in. The hijacker raised his voice; they did as well. He raised his gun; they backed from the window, but continued to scream. Finally, our captor waved at me and said one word: “Out.”

I got Doc in a fireman’s hold—there was a collective gasp from the others, sure that the old gent would break his back—then staggered out on the bridge. I’m not saying Doc has put on a few pounds since his navy days, but I was certainly wondering if my health insurance would cover hernia repairs. But at least that diverted my attention from the pain and agitation in my mending knees.

The hijacker led us into the passageway and yelled something to the men there. They frowned, but one of them started walking ahead of me, apparently having been designated as my guide to the sick bay, or Shipboard Clinic, as the signs said.

I didn’t mind that he made me carry Doc by myself, but it was inconvenient for him to stay with us the entire way. When we arrived, we found the clinic guarded by two other hijackers. The medical staff had been confined to the clinic area, which consisted of a largish compartment and two smaller offices, along with an isolation area at the far end filled with a dozen beds. A doctor met us as we came in, and immediately walked me to a gurney near the far bulkhead.

“What is wrong?” asked the doctor. His English had a Spanish accent, or maybe it was the other way around.

“Heart attack,” I told him.

The physician practically crossed his eyes, then began examining Doc.

“Hmmmm,” he muttered, frowning at the blood pressure cuff as he held his stethoscope to Doc’s pulse.

“It’s a ruse,” I whispered, knowing that Doc’s got the vitals of a thirty-year-old and worried that the physician would give us away.

The doctor gave me a worried glance. “To lie—”

“We lie or we die,” I said.

He winced. But then he called one of the nurses over, and asked for a needle.

“Saline,” he whispered, adding in Spanish that he just needed to reassure the patient, who would be fine. He was playing along.

I glanced over at the two lugs near the entrance. They were paying a lot of attention to the two nurses who were looking after a pair of patients lying on cots nearby.

“Do you have morphine?” I asked the doctor. “I want to knock the two guards out.”

“I have something much better than that. Come.”

He told the nurse who’d gone for the syringe of saltwater to watch Doc carefully, then walked me to one of the offices. He took a key from a chain around his neck and opened one of the cabinets.

“We use this in case we are dealing with one of the animals in the hold,” he said, pulling a box off a bottom shelf. It was filled with vials. “It works very quickly.”

“Great,” I said, taking the vials.

“You have to be very careful. It’s very potent.”

“Needles?”

He went over to his desk and opened the bottom drawer. It looked like a heroin junkie’s wet dream, stacked with hypo setups. He helped me fix up two doses, and once again repeated his cautions.

“I can use as many of these as you have,” I told him. “Do you have something I can carry them in?”

“Only a medical bag.”

“That’ll do.”

I went over to the door and grabbed his spare white lab coat. I was just contemplating how to take down the two lugs at the same time when they provided the solution for me: one of the men came over to see what the doctor was doing in his office.

The guard didn’t speak English very well, and between his limited vocabulary and the doctor’s lush accent, they didn’t communicate very well. The doctor explained that he was worried about an outbreak of a disease among passengers—something very contagious and similar to scarlet fever. He had looked it up in the thick book on his desk, right here. The guard said he could not stay in the room and must return to the others.

I sidestepped closer to the door, trying to get behind the guard. He glanced at me, but went back to haranguing the doctor, who was jabbing at the open page.

“Come outside
now.
” The guard raised his weapon, insisting.

“Look at these lab results,” said the doctor, pointing. “An epidemic. We may all die.”

“I do not care about this. Come. Come.”

That sounded like an invitation to me. I took the syringe and jabbed it into his gluteus maximus, which was rather more maximus than gluteus. Unfortunately, my technique was somewhat lacking—I didn’t get the plunger in on the first jab, and the lug turned to me with murderous eyes.

“’Scuse me, sweetie,” I lisped—then took him out the old-fashioned way, with a left cross to the chin. He fell back, landing on the deck—pushing the plunger in the rest of the way.

He rolled to his right, then fell back, completely unconscious. I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him behind the desk while the physician closed the door.

“You don’t need to get them in the butt,” advised the doctor. “It works fastest if you get them in the neck. Just make sure to push the whole dose in.”

“I’ll do better next time. Do you have keys to the rest of the ship?”

“No.”

“A master key? Anything like that?”

He didn’t.

“We’re going to leave as soon as I take out the other guard,” I told him. “You stay here. Pretend nothing has happened. If you can, hide the bodies somehow and keep them sedated.”

“I would throw them in the sea if I could.”

That seemed a slight contradiction of the Hippocratic Oath, but who was I to point that out?

“Don’t take any unnecessary risks,” I said. “It may take us a while before we regain control of the ship.”

“It’s just you two? Against a ship full of hijackers? There must be two dozen at least. All fully armed.”

“I know the odds are unfair,” I said. “But they should have thought about that before they decided to play.”

The other guard had begun talking to one of the nurses, a pretty Scandinavian woman with a forest of blond hair and hips that would dizzy a deer. She glanced at the physician and me as we came out. The doctor nodded ever so slightly, and the next thing I knew, the nurse had her arms around the guard and her lips at his face. I strode forward swiftly, hypo ready to strike, when the lug suddenly dropped to the deck. The nurse administered a swift, very therapeutic kick to the neck. He didn’t move after that.

“He’s a pig,” said the woman, revealing her own syringe from behind her back. “I need mouthwash—the strongest we have.”

Doc sprang up from the gurney, a medical miracle in the making.

“Keep them sedated,” I told the others. “We may be back. Don’t worry if we’re not.”

*   *   *

I grabbed a stethoscope and hustled out into the passage, with Doc trailing behind me. We headed aft, looking for the ladders that would take us down to the engine room. Once there, we would commandeer one of the computers and use it to link to the device I had planted below the console on the bridge. Once activated, it would give us complete control of the ship’s mechanical systems.

I had explored the ship thoroughly since boarding, and had located not one but two different ways to get from this deck to the compartment in question. The first was guarded by one of the hijackers; we spotted him as we turned the corner and managed to scurry back just in time. Worried that he would be missed if we incapacitated him, Doc and I backed away quickly.

“We have to go back to the gym,” I told Doc. “We can get down from there.”

“Which way is that?”

I’d forgotten. I walked down the passage to the directional sign at the corridor intersection. The gym wasn’t listed, but the video amusement center was, and it was close to the gym.

“Left,” I told Doc, just as a whirring sound began filling the passage ahead.

“What do you think the noise is?” asked Doc.

“A motor or something. Let’s not worry about it. Come on.”

“Halt!” yelled a voice behind us.

I glanced back and saw that the hijacker who’d shouted was at the far end of the hall.

“Go,” I told Doc, pushing him down the passage at the left.

We started to run, then stopped abruptly as another hijacker turned the corner ahead. He was holding an AK47.

“Shit,” muttered Doc.

Behind us, the second hijacker had just turned the corner. He was holding a pistol.

“I think they want us to stop,” said Doc.

“Where are your cabins?” demanded the man with the AK47. He appeared Arab, but his English was clear and precise, with a discernible American accent. “How did you get out?”

“I’m the doctor. I am supposed to be in sick bay. I need this man and am taking him to the medical ward,” I said. “We have a patient who is having a seizure. I have permission from your commander. Doc is a specialist in seizures.”

It wasn’t too much of a lie, actually. Doc was great at seizing things.

“You will go back to your rooms.” The hijacker glanced down the corridor at his companion. The man stopped, as if warned to keep his distance.

“You don’t understand,” I told the thug. “The man will die.”

He raised his weapon. “And you will die now if you don’t do as I say.”

(V)

We started down the passage toward the man with the assault rifle. He backed up to the intersection, making sure to leave plenty of space between us—there was no way either Doc or I could get close enough to grab his gun, let alone jab him with the hypodermic. He looked like he would put up a good fight—he was taller than me and a bit broader at the shoulders. The guy behind us wouldn’t be much easier, and he stayed even farther away.

I stopped at the crossway of the two corridors. A man was waxing the deck with a large machine about three-quarters of the way down on the right.

“Cabin’s that way,” I said.

“Go,” said our jailer, who was now behind us. In our younger days we might have tried sprinting for it at that point—not because we were more energetic, but because we were more foolish. There was no way we could get a lead big enough to outrun bullets, but when you’re young and full of vim and vigor, sometimes you think you can do anything.

“Watch your feet. It’s slippery,” I told Doc. “Fresh wax.”

“I can smell it.”

You have to admire dedication to duty. Here the ship had just been taken over, and yet a crew member was still hard at work, shining the deck.