The Espionage Effect(94)
“Good luck, you two,” Regina replied.
With a slight wobble, the skids touched down, then with the flicking of several switches, Alec powered down the bird and the instrument panel.
We pulled off our headsets, hung them on the instrument panel hooks, then unfastened our harnesses. Alec stood, then paused, placing a hand on my shoulder.
I glanced up at him. Volatile emotion swirled in his eyes. A storm of activity was happening around us, yet for the briefest moment, we connected. Wordlessly conveyed, I got the sense that whatever had happened before, however complicit he’d been in the undefinable betrayal, we were together now, in every way.
“Ready, Pink?”
Choked up with emotion, I nodded. At the moment, I didn’t trust my voice not to give me away.
I followed him to the back of the helicopter, and we began unloading the weapons cases. He handed me the SIG SAUER I’d used, then handed me a long, narrow case.
“Sniper rifle,” he explained when I gave him a questioning look.
Then he opened additional cases and armed himself with a semiautomatic pistol, a snub-nosed assault rifle slung across his body, and grabbed his own long, narrow case.
“What about that?” I nodded to the handheld missile launcher case.
“Looking to blow up the ship?”
On a heavy sigh, I shook my head. All the anger in me wanted to blow up something into tiny little pieces, but a ship with innocent passengers wasn’t it.
“Surgical precision would be better,” I agreed.
On a curt nod, we left the cases with the heavier weapons where they sat, then he led the way off the helicopter. I squatted, planted the heel of my hand on the edge, and hopped down. An odd question pinged into my brain: If I’d wanted to blow something up, would he have let me?
After getting our bearings, we walked from the center point of the structure we’d landed on, but as we approached the elevated parapet edge, we crouched down until we belly crawled the remaining few feet, sliding the sniper rifle cases in front of us as we went.
Sunrise splashed growing light onto the bustling docks below. Alec sidled up beside me as we made ourselves comfortable. Regina had positioned us at the perfect vantage point. Obscured by other buildings at our flanks, we had a clear line of sight to where the Phoenician Sun would dock.
After we spent the next several minutes disassembling, checking, and reassembling our weapons, I sat down, knees bent in front of me, and leaned a shoulder against Alec who sat beside me. I yawned, then let out a long sigh.
“Sleep,” he said.
I let out a soft snort. “I lost almost seven hours on the ship.”
“You need it. You’ve been through a lot. I’ve got us covered.”
I closed my eyes, unable to argue. The emotions of the last ten hours had drained me. And I still had a ways to go.
A slight jostling startled me awake.
The sun had risen higher in the sky. I scrubbed a hand over my face, blinking heavy sleep from my mind.
Alec still sat beside me. He pulled out those high-tech glasses from his pocket and put them on, then stared over the hundred-yard distance between our location and the side of the ship, whose gangplank had already been lowered and was filled with activity by crew members.
As Alec surveyed our target with stony seriousness, I stared at Alec’s lenses.
“Got any more of those—”
Without a glance or a word, he pulled a folded second pair from his front shirt pocket and handed them to me.
“How…?”
“Each of the long-range weapons has a pair in their case. Thought you’d want one.”
“They sync with the sniper rifle too?”
“Yes.”
All business. Which, under the circumstances, I was more than all right with.
From the ship, bins were wheeled out, so enormous, it took two deck hands leaning forward and pushing with dug-in heels to maneuver them. With each twosome of personnel, I engaged the binocular feature of the glasses, zooming in. But none them were of the kidnapped college students or anyone else recognizable.
Additional crew members disembarked in larger and larger groups. Most in gray uniforms. Others in blue. Customs officials in black uniforms at the end of a roped-off line checked documentation in rapid succession as the crowd of people funneled together. In the last group, the workers wore civilian clothing, duffel bags slung over their shoulders. One held a dual-handle sport bag at his side, the contents stuffed so full the seams looked ready to burst.
“There!” I called out in fierce whisper. I pointed the muzzle of my sniper rifle toward a tight-knit group among two hundred plainclothes crew members.
In the middle of and around our college students and Anna, workers appeared hungover. Some seemed to be singing a song. Others leaned toward each other, arms slung over shoulders, eyelids drooped over their eyes, as if they were still drunk from an all-night bender.
But those workers held themselves a little too well in their “drunken” stupor. And several had a hand stuffed into a jacket pocket that had been conveniently pressed up to their captives’ sides.
The captives themselves could barely stand upright. They stumbled along, propped up by a corresponding “fellow crewmember.”
As if this were an everyday disembarking occurrence after a voyage at sea, the customs checkpoint didn’t even slow when our crewmembers and college students passed, either used to half-baked ship employees or bribed in on the situation.