Unlucky 13 (24 page)

Lazaroff was in his midsixties and had arthritis all through his joints, but the two of them would make a good team.

And then there was Lyle.

Lyle was a nice kid, but that was all he had in his kit. He’d told Brady that he had held a variety of odd jobs over the past three years: washing cars and mowing lawns before moving to Alaska and getting a dishwashing
job in a one-star hotel. He gave that up when he heard of an opening as a cabin steward on the
FinStar
.

Lyle’s no-forethought series of pickup dead-end jobs had accidentally positioned him to be a part of a life-and-death operation he could never have imagined.

After Brady and Lazaroff blocked it all out, Brady filled Lyle in.

“Lyle, you have to take us to the crew quarters. Lazaroff and I
are going to keep you out of the way when the shooting starts.”

“My mom’s name is Leora Findlay. Hoboken, New Jersey. If I don’t make it, Mr. Brady.”

Lazaroff said in a husky whisper, “Lyle? It’s okay to be afraid. In fact, we’re counting on it. You won’t have to
act
scared and that’s good.”

Brady knew that there were three gunmen on the Sun Deck above them, a half dozen patrolling the Pool
Deck, and others inside the body of the ship.

Their “pattern of life” was to make radio contact every half hour. Each gunman identified himself by position,
not by name: Pool deck 4 to base. Veranda 2 to base. Roving patrol 1 to Sun Deck.

Brady watched for the pale-green light of the radio on the track to go out. Then he glanced at his watch. It had been five minutes since the start of the pirates’
last check-in. A pale gray line on the horizon in the east signaled morning getting ready to bust through some cloud cover.

It was now or never.

Over a period of ten minutes, Brady pulled the dead pirate’s lightweight, waterproof camouflage pants over his jeans, buttoned the shirt over his sweater, switched out his deck shoes for lace-up combat boots, and cinched the ammo belt around his waist.

Last, he put the dead guy’s walkie-talkie radio back in his shirt pocket and hung the rifle strap across his shoulder.

He covered Yuki’s cheek with his hand and kissed her. She held his hand against her face and trembled.

“I love you so much,” he said.

“Come back to me,” she said. “We have to make a life.”

Doubts saturated Brady’s mind. He was out of shape. He didn’t know the ship very well.
There were hundreds of moving parts that could go so far out of control that people would die. And that would be on him.

“There’s no way I’m not coming back,” he said to Yuki. “Have you got that?”

He pulled on the black knitted mask that smelled of cigarette smoke, then signaled to Lazaroff and Lyle to stand.

When they were all on their feet, he said loudly, “Let’s go, assholes.”

He waved
the rifle and Lazaroff and Lyle raised their hands. With Brady bringing up the rear, the three men stepped around the weeping, cringing clumps of humanity on the deck and made their way toward the Luna Grill doors and the interior of the ship.

BRADY LED HIS
group from behind, the three of them leaving the open Pool Deck and entering the Luna Grill, which was like a furniture warehouse now, piled with café tables and chairs from the deck outside. A gas lamp that had been placed on top of the piano threw a dim light over the formerly elegant room, which now looked debased, like a used-up exotic dancer turning tricks on the
street.

Brady’s three-man resistance force walked around overturned furniture and garbage heaped on the plush carpets past curved windows reflecting the sputtering gas light.

At the far side of the lounge, an open doorway led into the public corridor. Lyle, in the lead, took them to one of the hand-painted murals lining the corridor walls.

He said, “This is how you get to the crew’s stairs.”

He pushed on a panel and a door opened into a wide
metal stairwell that ran the entire height of the ship, from the Sun Deck down to the hold. Caged emergency lights on the walls lit the stairs with a flickering low-wattage light.

The three were on the stairs, the hidden door closed behind them, when a voice called out, “Yo. Wassup?”

Brady snapped around, flashed his light up, and saw a man
in fatigues sitting on the landing one flight above them. The gunman was fully armed, but he’d taken off his mask, revealing him to be a young white guy in his early twenties with short blond hair.

Brady said, “Chief wants me to take these two to the hold. Cabin steward. And the old dude is an engineer.”

“Why bother locking them up? Why not just—
pyewww?
”

He put a finger gun to his head and
pretended to fire.

“You want to ask Jackhammer?” Brady said. “Go ahead.”

Brady wanted to stop talking and start moving. He didn’t know how tight this unit was, whether they were a band of brothers or mercenaries recruited individually for this mission.

If the kid on the stairs challenged him further, Brady would have to shoot him. That would bring other gunmen rushing into the stairwell and
that would be bad.

The young gunman scoffed at the idea of calling Jackhammer, saying, “Yeah, right. Go ahead. God, I was really hoping you were my relief.”

“Sorry, man,” said Brady. “Hey. Put on your mask.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Brady waited while the gunman masked up, then said to Lyle and Lazaroff, “Okay, you two. Down we go.”

Brady prodded Lazaroff and Lyle with the barrel of his AK, and they
started down the stairs, one ringing metal flight after another times three sets of footsteps. They passed signs to various decks and public rooms: the Casino, the Spa, and so on, until they saw the arrow marked O
FFICERS
Q
UARTERS
.

The arrow indicated a forty-five-degree turn to the right.

Brady knew that the crew slept in narrow, windowless cabins no wider than four feet across, with single
bunks hung on the walls. He wondered how many crewmen were still alive in those slim, airless cells.

He and his team turned the corner and saw a brighter light at the end of this spur off the main corridor. The light came from a gas lantern on the floor next to a man in fatigues who was sitting in a folding chair, guarding the hatch door to the crew quarters.

The guard got to his feet. He was
holding his radio phone, and Brady thought the guy upstairs had probably given this one a heads-up.

The guard said to Brady, “What’s up, brother? Who’ve you got there?”

He pocketed his radio and held his AK-47 with both hands.

BRADY KNEW WITH
dead certainty that the guard positioned in front of the crew quarters would shoot without provocation. Shooting would be very, very bad. Gunfire inside this metal staircase would be like setting off a fire alarm.

Jackhammer’s entire crew would be on them in about a second and he would be dead.

Along with the AK-47 and the combat clothes, Brady had taken the dead gunman’s
knife and belt, which he was wearing.

As he and his two wingmen closed in on the guard at the door, Brady still had hope that he could talk the guy into opening the crew door. If not, he would be bringing a knife to a gun fight. And he’d have one chance to pull it off.

Using Lazaroff and Lyle to shield him from the gunman’s view, Brady reached across his body, and gripped the knife handle in
his fist so that the blade faced up.

Ten feet from the guy, Brady said, “Jackhammer told you I was coming plus two, right? I was there when he called you.”

This guard had a huskier voice and build and was older than the kid on the stairs. Brady thought he might be an actual soldier.

He said, “Jackhammer called
me?
Because I don’t know nothing about
this
.”

“Let’s not talk in front of these
mutts,” said Brady as he closed in on the guard. “Do you mind? After I stow them, we can talk about it all you want.”

The gunman hesitated.

Then he said, “No fucking way. I’m calling the chief.”

Brady said to the guard, “I’ll save you the call. Jackhammer is on the line with me right now.”

The guard said, “Yeah?”

Coming toward Brady to take the radio, he stretched out his hand. Brady grabbed
his wrist with his left hand, jerked him forward, and slashed his throat, slicing through his carotid artery, larynx, and jugular.

The gunman reached up but never got his hand to his neck before he dropped, blood pumping out of him, adrenaline speeding up the flow. He breathed in blood, coughed up more blood, and gurgled his last words as he tried to speak.

Lazaroff got behind the dying man
as the blood gushed and held him down until he no longer moved. Then he
took the AK away from the dead man while Brady told Lyle to sit on the chair and put his head between his knees.

Lazaroff got up, checked the corridor, and reported back, “All clear. Great job, Brady. They teach you how to do that in the police department?”

“I picked up a few moves along the way.”

He and Lazaroff each took
one of the gunman’s arms and dragged him through the blood pool to the side of the corridor. Then Brady took off his mask and turned the wheel on the hatch door.

The hinges squealed as the door to the officers’ quarters swung wide open.

A GROUP OF
officers stood in the narrow aisle between two rows of cabins. They were unshaven and rumpled and pale. They stood shifting on their feet and angry, what you’d expect of men who’d been imprisoned in their cabins belowdeck while their ship was under siege.

Brady saw knives and lengths of wood or pipe in their hands. He put out his hands to show that he wasn’t armed, then
put his finger to his mouth in the universal signal to be quiet.

He said, “I’m Jackson Brady. I’m a passenger, also a cop. We’re getting you guys out of here.”

Men exhaled, sheathed their knives, and broke into tears. Some rushed forward to shake his hand.

Brady told Lyle to get the lantern and then waved him and Lazaroff through the hatch door. He followed them in and introduced them to the
ship’s officers.

One of the officers, a balding older guy in his sixties, had on glasses and grubby whites with captain’s stripes on the shoulders. He held a pistol loosely in one hand and shook Brady’s hand with the other.

“I’m Captain Berlinghoff,” he said. “George. Thanks very much…,” he said, choking back tears. “Mr. Brady. We haven’t seen light. We haven’t spoken with anyone. What’s happening
to the ship?”

Brady said, “The terrorists are in charge and executing passengers on the hour.”

He briefed the captain on the terrorists’ demand for payment.

“They’ve killed a lot of people,” Brady said. “I don’t see that they’ve got a viable exit plan whether they’re paid or not. At some point, they might realize that. There’s no telling what they’ll do.”

“What are your thoughts?” the captain
asked Brady.

“Got to get control away from them. And that means arming as many people as possible. Are your guys trained on the weapons in your citadel?”

“Who said we had a citadel?” the captain asked.

“I did, sir,” Lyle said.

“And who are you?”

Brady put his arm around Lyle’s shoulders.

“Lyle Davis. Our cabin steward and a very brave young man.”

The captain said, “I don’t know what you’ve
heard, Mr.
Davis, but there’s no citadel. There’s a lockbox on the Sun Deck marked OPEN IN CASE OF FIRE.

“We have a few handguns in there, some flares, and fire extinguishers. That’s it for our weaponry except for
this
thing,” he said, lifting his revolver by the trigger guard with a finger. It looked like a souvenir from the Korean War.

“There’s one bullet in it. I’m saving it for Jackhammer.
I’ve been waiting by this door since he took over my ship.”

Brady nodded his head, then asked, “These stairs go to the Sun Deck?”

He was thinking of the lockbox with some make-do weapons, the blond kid with the assault rifle sitting on the top landing, and then the pirates up on the track.

They’d have to go past all of them.

Berlinghoff said, “Mr. Brady. Tell us your plan.”

BRADY CLIMBED THE
crew’s stairs alone, catching his breath between flights. When he reached the veranda level, he called up to the gunman at the top landing.

“Hey. Buddy. I need you to take a look at something for me.”

Distract. Disarm.

The ploy had worked before. Would it work again?

He heard Kid Commando getting to his feet, the scraping of boots on metal stairs echoing up and
down the dimly lit stairwell.

The kid called down, “What’s the matter? What happened?”

“The dude I relieved told me to pass something on to you,” Brady shouted back. “He didn’t want it going over the radio.”

Brady was almost panting from walking up five flights. Too much desk duty had layered some fat over his frame. He shouldn’t have missed all those workouts.

This was not good. Not good
at all.

Walking up the last flight, he got his breathing under control. He was going to need everything he had to neutralize this kid.

“He wanted to keep something from Jackhammer?” the young man asked.

Brady had the two-way radio in his hand. The time was counting down on the screen, telling him that in about three and a half minutes, Jackhammer was going to be looking for his eighteen guys
to check in.

Brady wasn’t sure of the answer code. The password. Or whatever the fuck these guys always said to let him know that they were at their posts and that all was well.

He stood three steps down from the kid and said, “Can you just read this? Will you fucking just look at it?”

The kid adjusted the eyeholes in his mask and walked down two steps and bent his head to look at the radio.

He said, “I don’t see what the prob—”

Brady stepped up, putting his weight on his left leg, and reached his left hand around the kid’s neck and pulled down hard. The kid yelled, “Hey,” striking out and wind-milling with his arms, but he couldn’t regain his balance.