Silent Assassin(53)

“Let’s move in,” said Bishop. “Spartan, give me crowd control. Cobra, with me.”

“All right, everyone,” Spartan yelled out, her strong voice carrying throughout the ballroom. “We are here to save you. Calm down. Everything is okay and under control. That’s it, nice and easy. Everyone find your family and stay put. Are Alison’s parents around here somewhere?” A woman in a short black dress and dazzling jewels stepped forward, and then a man with carefully coiffed brown hair and striking blue eyes raised their hands. “Oh God, is she all right?” said the mother.

“She’s fine, ma’am. I just wanted to tell you that she’s a hell of a girl.”

As the passengers moved around, slowly at first but more and more agitatedly, Morgan followed Bishop to the injured guard.

“Move and you die!” said Bishop, training his semiautomatic on the man, whose gun was still within reach. He kept one hand on the ground, which kept him propped up, and raised his other in surrender.

“Cobra,” said Bishop. “Get him outside and away from these people. And patch him up. I don’t want him bleeding out before we interrogate him.”

The man looked up defiantly, but Morgan could clearly see the fear that ran beneath. He crouched down and helped the man up, and they hobbled together outside. Morgan used plastic cuffs—they took up little enough space that everyone on the team always carried them on a mission—to tie his hands to a brass railing along the edge of the deck, and sat him on the floor. He ran down to the lower deck to his glider and took out the first aid kit from the storage compartment. Coming back up, he cut open the man’s pants around the wound. It was a nasty one. Bone had clearly been shattered. If he survived, he’d probably lose that leg.

“What are you doing here?” Morgan asked him as he pressed down on the wound to stanch the blood. “What’s your mission?”

The man did not speak, but from the way he stared, Morgan knew that he had understood. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a thin beard and an ugly face, with a tiny, thin nose and a thick forehead.

“Are you with Novokoff?” he insisted.

“He is not here,” said the man.

“That’s not what I asked,” said Morgan, pressing down on the wound harder than he needed to and making him wince in pain. “Did he send you here?”

The man kept quiet. Morgan began applying a tourniquet around the leg. The man cried out as he tightened the strap. This part was painful enough that Morgan didn’t have to do anything else to worsen the pain.

“You’re not leaving this boat,” Morgan said as he worked. “You didn’t kill the passengers, which means you were planning on sinking the boat. And if it sinks, believe me, you’re going down with it. Is that worth it? Are you really that loyal that you’d give your life for him?”

The man looked doubtful. He looked even less sure when he saw Bishop, Diesel, and Spartan approach them. It was clear that he was not, in fact, loyal enough to die for Novokoff.

“It’s going to sink, isn’t it?” Morgan insisted. “How are they going to do this?” The man hesitated. “Tell me or we all die!”

The man bit his lip and looked down, wincing in pain. “They are going to use explosives. Blow up the hull. The ship will sink fast, and everyone will die.”

“Where are the explosives?”

The man bit his lip. “Below deck. There will be two charges. One by the crew’s quarters and another one in the engine room.”

“Got that, Shepard?”

“Working on a route,” he replied.

“How many men?” asked Bishop.

“Just one,” he said. “The rest of us were in charge of securing the passengers.”

“How long until the bombs blow?” Morgan asked.

“Ten minutes,” the man said, looking at his watch.

Bishop immediately sprang into action. “All right, let’s move out,” he said. “Rogue,” he said into his comm, “keep the deck secure and keep an eye on our prisoner. Cobra, you think you can deal with disarming a bomb?”

“With my hands tied behind my back.”

“Good. You and Spartan take the engine room. Diesel and I will take the crew’s quarters.”

Spartan led the way aft, down the stairs to the lower deck.

“A lot of big talk, but I sure as hell hope you can deliver, Cobra.”

She went first into the hatch, and he went in after her, bounding steps at a time and narrowly avoiding banging his head against the bulkhead. His footsteps reverberated far with a resounding metallic noise.

“So much for stealth.”