Ghost Ship

THIRTY-NINE

Pressing himself up against the wall beside an open door, Kurt heard another volley of gunfire, a shout of pain, and then a second explosion from a stun grenade.

Glancing inside the room, he saw Calista lying on her side, blood streaming from her ear. Her friend was firing into a smoke-filled room when a bullet knocked him backward and a second shell hit him dead in the center of the chest.

On the ground beside them lay Sienna Westgate.

A spike of adrenaline surged through Kurt. He could hardly believe his eyes. She was alive. Or at least she had been. But now…

A trio of North Korean soldiers rushed through the smoke, and Kurt instinctively opened fire, dropping the first two quickly and winging the third, who dove back through the smoke to a position of relative safety.

“Cover me,” Kurt shouted to Joe.

Joe swung into position and unleashed a hail of bullets as Kurt crawled into the room, grabbed Sienna, and dragged her out. She groaned as he pulled her into the hallway. At least she was alive.

As he pulled her around the corner, a new volley of return fire came from the depths of the room, peppering the doorframe and the wall.

Joe snapped off a few more shots, and the last soldier dashed through the smoke toward the rear of the room and out into a stairwell.

“Something tells me he’ll be back with the posse,” Joe yelled.

“Let’s not wait around to meet them,” Kurt said. “Get the elevator.”

As Joe ran off, Kurt began to pick Sienna up.

“Kurt?” Her voice was husky like someone whose throat was dry.

“Are you okay?” Kurt asked.

“How? What? What are you doing here?”

She was clearly disoriented. “Long story,” he said. “Can you walk?”

She tried to stand but fell. “My legs,” she said. “I can’t feel them.”

“Put your arm around me,” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

Sienna did as Kurt asked, and he helped her down the hall to the waiting elevator. There, he leaned her against the wall and pointed to Joe. “Stay with him.”

“Why?” she asked. “Where are you going?”

“To return a favor.”

Joe shot him a look. “Kurt, this place is going to be crawling with North Korean troops very shortly.”

“All the more reason,” he said.

Kurt let Sienna go and stepped out of the elevator.

Joe flipped the hold switch back to operate and pressed the button. “I’ll send the car back up once we’re out.”

Kurt nodded and took off back down the hall. Sienna didn’t take her eyes off him until the doors closed between them.

The smoke from the firefight and the stun grenades had filled most of the hallway by now. The flashing lights of the fire and smoke alarm systems pulsed through the haze.

Kurt found the room where the fight had taken place and discovered Calista beginning to wake up from what he guessed was a stun grenade that landed too close.

He dropped down beside her and shook her. “Remember me?”

Like Sienna, it took Calista a second to recognize him. When she did, she reached for her gun, which Kurt knocked out of her hand and across the floor.

“You wouldn’t kill your rescuer, would you?”

She looked around. “Egan…”

“If you mean your date,” Kurt said, “he’s dead.”

The news brought little reaction from her. Kurt began to help her up.

“Wait,” she said. She pulled out a small silver canister. “Throw it in the stairwell, it’ll give us a few minutes.” He dragged her over to the door and cracked it open. The sound of feet pounding down the metal stairs told him the North Koreans were on the way.

“Twist the top,” she said, now standing on her own. “And don’t breathe.”

He did as she directed and tossed the canister onto the landing. It skittered to the wall and began hissing as two high- pressure jets of gas burst forth. Kurt slammed the door and heard the sound of men falling in their tracks and tumbling down the stairs.

“Don’t worry, they’re not dead,” she said.

“I’m more worried about us,” he said. “Go.”

She began to move, lurching forward unsteadily, but Kurt wasn’t about to get too close.

“Down the hall,” he ordered.

With a wall to lean against, she made better progress, slamming her hand onto the elevator call button as soon as she reached it.

The doors opened and she fell inside. Kurt followed and stood on the opposite side of the car, the pistol in his hand. He punched the bottom button and the elevator began a slow creaky descent.

She laughed. “You really are a white knight,” she said. “Can’t resist a damsel in distress. Even one like me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said. “You have answers, that’s all I want from you. Who are you? Who are you working for? What do you want with Sienna and the others?”

An exaggerated pout appeared on her lips. “I was hoping for something more than boring conversation.”

The elevator reached the bottom floor and the doors opened.

Joe and Sienna stood at what appeared to be the control panel for the maglev train. To Kurt’s surprise, the three hackers from the tram were awake and helping.

“Can you work it?”

Joe looked at Kurt and shook his head. “It’s all Greek to us,” he said. “And by that I mean Korean.”

Calista made her way over. “Maybe I can help.”

Kurt didn’t trust her but even she couldn’t possibly want to stay where they were.

She studied the panel and flicked through a couple of screens. “They’ve cut the main power from up above. I can probably override their command.”

As she fiddled with the controls, Kurt looked over a battery of closed-circuit TV feeds. One showed the hallway where the firefight had been. Another camera showed the stairwell. There seemed to be one on each floor. He checked through all of them. Men were piled like cordwood on each of the upper landings, but at the top level a new group of soldiers were rushing in. They wore gas masks.

“Better hurry.”

“I think I’ve got it,” she said. “Get in the tram.”

At her command, the three hackers began to move. Joe helped Sienna while Kurt stood by Calista, waiting for the inevitable trick.

“Relax,” she said. “I’d rather spend time in a Western prison than a North Korean one.”

She flipped a switch and the power pack came to life. The hum of electricity and the whine of high-voltage generators were a welcome sound to everyone.

“Get on board,” Kurt said.

“We need to transfer control to the remote,” she said, reaching into her pocket and grabbing for something.

The act brought about a quick jab from Kurt’s pistol. “It’s just a remote control,” she said, pulling out a small device with a glowing screen. “We’re going to need it, unless you want to stay behind and press go.”

He snatched the device from her and pushed her toward thetram. As soon as they were all in it, he pressed the flashing green button. But instead of the tram accelerating, a lightning bolt flashed in Kurt’s eyes and across the synapses of his brain. A wave of pain shot through his body combined with the sensation of dropping from a great height.

Aided by a push from Calista, he fell backward, tumbled over the side of the car, and was unconscious by the time he hit the ground.

“I told you I’d be ready next time I saw you,” Calista whispered.

Dumbfounded, Joe watched Kurt fall. There was no sound, no indication anything had happened, Kurt just dropping as if someone had turned off a switch in his brain.

Sienna screamed, and Joe instinctively jumped out of the car and began to pull Kurt up. Kurt was deadweight, a twohundred-pound rag doll.

Behind him there was a commotion.

“Sienna,” Calista said. It wasn’t a shout but a scolding, the way one might address an inattentive child.

Joe turned around. Sienna was aiming a weapon at Calista. Good work, he thought.

Calista obviously felt otherwise. “If you ever want to see your children again, you’ll point that somewhere else.”

Slowly, as if in a trance, Sienna turned the weapon on Joe. Not so good, Joe decided.

Confident she was now in control, Calista addressed Joe directly. “Pick up the remote and toss it to me,” she said.

Joe shook his head.

“Please,” Sienna managed, tears pouring down her face. “She has my children. She has all our children. If we don’t go back, they’ll be killed.”

“We can rescue them,” Joe insisted. “She knows where they are. Just give us twenty-four hours.”

Sienna wavered, but Calista pressed her. “If I don’t bring you back home alive,” she began, “none of your relatives will live to see the morning.”

Sienna retargeted Joe, more firmly this time. “I’m sorry,” she said, “tomorrow will be too late. Please, give me the transmitter.”

Joe held still, but one of the hackers intervened, climbing awkwardly out of the tram car and grabbing the remote from the floor of the tunnel. As soon as he had it in his hand, the man climbed back in the car and gave it to Calista, who tapped the screen a few times and offered Joe a satisfied grin.

“A u r e v o i r,” she said as the tram began to accelerate away. “Give your friend my love when he wakes up.”

Joe watched the tram pick up speed and vanish into the gloom of the tunnel. “I knew we should have called the cavalry.”

Hoping to wake Kurt, Joe shook him twice but got nothing. Kurt was catatonic, exactly the way he’d been when Joe pulled him from the water three months earlier. The parallel was eerie. And Joe began to think perhaps it was not entirely coincidental.

“This is bad,” he said.

It may have been the understatement of Joe’s life. He was trapped in a secret base on the wrong side of the DMZ, with an unconscious friend, a 9mm pistol carrying perhaps five shells in the clip, and an angry battalion of North Korean soldiers barreling down on them.

“Bad” did not begin to cover it.