That meant they did not care what they hit, or whether they missed.

  So how many more were there? If the second man was indeed down, that meant two remained. The problem was that the generator was so loud he could not hear footsteps approaching, nor the ragged breathing of a wounded man. He was in effect both blind and deaf.

  As he raced down the catwalk, one hand outstretched before him to protect him from striking unseen objects, the other grasping his weapon, he heard gunfire again. One round whizzed so close to his head he could feel the gust of wind against his scalp.

  Then his searching hand struck something hard—a bulkhead. He had come to a wall at one end of the cavernous room. He swung his weapon first to one side, then to the other, each time striking steel railing.

  He was trapped.

  Then he became aware of the dancing red bead in the darkness, as one of the snipers aimed at the green oval that was, in the night-vision scope, his head.

  He thrust the pistol into the air in front of himself, prepared to aim at nothing again. Then he shouted: “Go ahead! If you miss me, you risk damaging the generator. That’s a lot of delicate electronic equipment there, microchips easily shattered. Kill the generator, and you kill all the power in the ship—and see what Calacanis thinks about that.”

  A split-second of silence. He even thought he saw the red dot waver, though he knew he might be imagining things.

  There was a low chuckle, and the infrared reticule passed across his field of vision again, steadied, and then—

  The spit of a silenced weapon, and then three more spits, and then came a scream and the sound of another body crashing to the steel floor of the catwalk.

  What?

  Who had fired at his enemy? Someone had done it—Bryson knew it hadn’t been him! Someone had fired a round of shots using a silenced pistol.

  Someone had fired at his pursuers—and perhaps even eliminated them!

  “Don’t move!” Bryson shouted into the darkness at the one remaining gunman he calculated had to be out there. His cry made no sense, he knew—why should any of his adversaries, equipped as they were with night-vision goggles or sights, pay any attention?—but such a shout, unexpected and even illogical, could buy him a few seconds of confusion.

  “Don’t shoot!” came another voice, faint against the deafening noise of the generators.

  A woman’s.

  It was the voice of a woman.

  Bryson froze. He thought he had seen only men descend the metal stairs into the room, but the bulky equipment could easily disguise a female silhouette.

  But what did she mean, don’t shoot?

  Bryson shouted, “Put down your weapon!”

  Suddenly he was blinded by a flash of light, and he realized that the lights in this room had suddenly gone on! Brighter than they’d been before.

  What was going on?

  In a second or two his eyes readjusted to the light, and there, standing on a catwalk high above, he could make out the shape of the woman who had been speaking to him. The woman wore a white uniform—the uniform of Calacanis’s steward from the dinner that seemed so much a part of the distant past.

  On her head she wore a helmet and head-harness, the lens of an infrared monocular night-vision unit obscuring half her face. Yet Bryson recognized her as the beautiful blonde he had exchanged a few words with before dinner, and who had spoken a few hasty words to him just before the violence had begun—words he now recognized as indeed a genuine warning.

  And here she was, crouched in a marksman’s stance, gripping the butt of a Ruger with a long silencer attached, moving it from one side to another, steadily back and forth. He realized, too, that there were four bodies sprawled at different points around the generator room—two from the deck close to the generator, one at the beginning of the catwalk on which he was standing, and a fourth lying a mere six feet away, alarmingly close.

  And he saw that the woman was not aiming at him. She was covering him, aiming everywhere else, protecting him against others! The stewardess was standing by a small bank of controls and switches; that was where she had turned the lights on. “Come on!” she shouted over a dull roar. “This way!”

  What the hell was going on?

  Bryson stared in bafflement.

  “Come on, let’s go!” the woman shouted angrily. Her accent was definitely Levantine.

  “What do you want?” Bryson shouted back, more to stall for time than to elicit any response. For what could this be but a trap — a clever one but a trap nonetheless?

  “What the hell do you think?” she shouted, turning her gun toward him, returning to the marksman’s stance. He aimed his gun directly at her, and just as he was about to pull the trigger, he saw her shift the barrel a few inches to her right, heard the cough of another silenced round.

  And at the same instant he both heard a crash and saw a body topple from the catwalk just above him.

  Another sniper with a night-vision-equipped rifle. Dead.

  She had just killed him.

  The sniper had stolen silently up to him, about to kill him, and she had dropped him first.

  “Move it!” the woman shouted to him. “Before any others come here. If you want to save your own life, move your ass!”

  “Who are you?” Bryson shouted back, stunned.

  “What does it matter right now?” She pushed the night-vision monocular up and off her face, so that it rested on the top of her head. “Please, there’s no time! For God’s sake, look at your situation, calculate your odds. What the hell choice do you have?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bryson stared at the woman.

  “Come on!” she called, her voice rising in desperation. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done so already. I’ve got the advantage, I’ve got the infrared—not you.”

  “You don’t have the advantage now,” Bryson called back, his grip steady on his stolen weapon, lowered at his side.

  “I know this ship inside and out. Now, if you want to stay here and play games, be my guest. I have no choice now but to get off the ship. Calacanis’s security force is large — there are plenty of others, probably on the way right now.” With her free hand she pointed toward an object mounted high on one of the bulkheads near the ceiling of the generator room. Bryson recognized it as a surveillance camera. “He has much of the ship on camera, but not all. So you can follow me and save your life, or you can stay here and be killed. The choice is yours!” She turned quickly and raced down the catwalk and up a short set of metal stairs to a hatch cover. Unlatching it, she glanced back and jerked her head toward the opening, signaling him to follow.

  Bryson hesitated no more than a few more seconds before he did so. His mind spun; he tried to make sense of the woman. Questions! Who was she? What was she doing, what did she want, why was she here?

  The woman was obviously no mere ship’s steward.

  So who was she?

  She beckoned; he came through the hatchway behind her, all the while gripping his weapon.

  “What are you—?” he began.

  “Quiet!” she hissed. “Sound carries far here.” She shut the hatch door behind him and slid home a large deadbolt. The painfully loud noise of the generator room was gone. “This is an antipirate ship, fortunately for us. Specially constructed so passages can be closed, locked.”

  He caught her eyes, momentarily distracted by her remarkable beauty. “You’re right,” he said quietly yet forcefully, “I don’t have much choice right now, but you’d better tell me what’s going on here.”

  She gave him a stare that was at once forthright and defiant and whispered, “No time for explanations right now. I’m undercover here, too. Following arms transfers to certain parties that want to blast Israel back to the Stone Age.”

  Mossad, he told himself. But her accent told him she was Lebanese, from the Bekaa Valley; something wasn’t quite right. Would a Mossad field operative be Lebanese, not Israeli?

  She cocked her head as if hearing some distant noise he could not perceive.

  “This way,” she said abruptly, vaulting up the steel stairs. He followed her to a landing, then out a hatch that opened into a long, empty, dark corridor. She paused for a moment, looked both ways. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that the tunnel went on and on, as far as he could see. It seemed to run the entire length of the ship, from bow to stern; it appeared to be a little-used service alley. “Come!” she hissed, suddenly breaking into a run.

  Bryson followed, lengthening his strides to adjust to the woman’s lightning-fast pace. He observed that her tread was odd: springy and light, virtually silent. He emulated her, realizing that she was attempting to minimize the reverberation against the steel surface—both to keep from being heard and to be able to listen to any followers, he guessed.

  Within a minute, when they had run a few hundred feet down the dark tunnel, he thought he heard a muffled noise coming from the aft end, behind them. He turned his head, noticed a shift in the pattern of the shadows at the far end. But before he could say anything to her, he saw her swerve to the right and flatten herself against the steel bulkhead, behind a vertical steel girder. He did the same, though not a second too soon.

  There was an explosion, a burst of automatic gunfire. Bullets spat into the bulkhead, ringing, clattering against the deck.

  Whipping his head to his left, he saw a plume of flame shooting from a machine gun at the far end of the tunnel, the shooter shadowy and indistinct. There came another burst of gunfire, and then the killer was running down the corridor toward them.

  The woman was struggling with a hatch cover. “Shit! It’s painted shut!” she whispered. With a quick glance back down the long, dark passage at the approaching assassin, she said, “This way!” Suddenly leaping forward, away from the protective shelter of the bulkhead and its steel girders, she raced ahead. She was right to move; otherwise, they would be trapped here, obvious targets. He peered quickly around the girder, looked back, and saw the shooter slow his pace, raise his Uzi submachine gun, and aim it directly at the woman.

  Bryson did not hesitate. He pointed his pistol toward the killer, squeezed the trigger twice in succession. One round exploded; the second squeeze of the trigger produced nothing more than a small click. The chamber was empty, as was the magazine.

  But the shooter was down. The pursuer’s Uzi crashed to the deck as he tumbled awkwardly to one side. Even from this distance Bryson could see the man was dead.

  The steward turned back with a grim, fearful expression and saw what had happened. She gave Bryson a quick look of what might have been appreciation, but said nothing. He raced to catch up with the woman.

  For the moment they were safe. Now, suddenly, she veered off to the right and stopped abruptly at another section of bulkhead, also divided by vertical girders. She leaned over, grabbed a bar that was mounted over an oval opening in the bulkhead the size of a manhole, and agilely swung her feet into the hole like a child playing on monkey bars. In an instant she had disappeared. He did the same, though somewhat more awkwardly: as physically agile as he was, he lacked her apparent familiarity with the ship.

  They were in a box-shaped, low-ceilinged compartment that was almost totally dark, the only light coming from the dim service alley. When his vision adapted to the dark, he realized they were in a square space that connected to another one, by means of another manhole, and then another, and another. He could see clear across to the other side of the ship. This was a thwartships passage, he realized, the sections separated by heavy steel girders. She was peering into the next compartment, then without warning she grabbed on to the bar and swung her body inward, feet first.

  He followed suit, but the moment he got to his feet, he heard her whisper, “Shh! Listen!”

  He could hear the distant hammering of footsteps on steel. The sound seemed to be emanating from the service alley from which they had come, and also from a level above. It sounded like at least half a dozen men.

  She spoke quickly, in a low voice. “I’m sure they’ve found the one you killed. Which tells them you’re armed, probably a professional.” Her English was heavily accented but remarkably fluent. Her intonation seemed to be questioning, though he couldn’t see her facial expression. “Although it’s obvious you are, if you’ve survived this far. They also know you—we—can’t have gotten too far yet.”

  “I don’t know who you are, yet you’re risking your life for me. You don’t owe me anything, but an explanation would be appreciated.”

  “Look, if we get out of here, we’ll have time to talk. Right now we don’t. Now, do you have any other weapon on you?”

  He shook his head. “Just this damn thing, and it’s empty.”

  “Not good. We’re way outnumbered. There are enough of them to fan out, search every passage, every hold. And as we’ve just seen, they’re equipped with some serious weaponry.”

  “There’s no shortage of it on this ship,” Bryson remarked. “How far are we from the containers?”

  “Containers?”

  “The boxes. The cargo.”

  Even in the semidarkness he could see a white flash of smile as she realized what he was saying. “Ah, yes. Not far at all. But I don’t know what’s in them.”

  “Then we’ll just have to look. Do we have to go back out to the service alley?”

  “No. There’s a passageway cut into the floor of one of these box girders. But I don’t know which one, and without lights, we run the risk of just stepping down into it.”

  Bryson reached into a pocket, retrieved a book of matches, lit one. The compartment instantly lit up with a feeble amber light. He walked over to the next opening, the rush of air extinguishing the flame, and he lit another. She ran alongside and looked into the adjoining space. “There it is,” she said. Bryson waved the match out just before it burned down to his finger. She reached out her hand to take the matchbook; he handed it over, understanding that, since she was in the lead, she had the more immediate need.

  As soon as the darkness returned, she grabbed the steel bar, lifted her feet, and thrust them through. As she pulled herself erect by means of another handhold mounted inside the next compartment, she tapped her feet against the deck, searching out solid steel. “Okay. Careful.”

  He swung himself through the manhole, alighting carefully, keeping to the edges of the compartment floor. She was already descending into the vertical passage by means of a steel ladder that was welded in place. As Bryson waited to follow her down, he heard loud footsteps approaching, accompanied by shouts; then he could see a beam of light from a powerful flashlight illuminate the service alley they’d come from. He ducked down to the steel floor just as a flashlight beam shone directly at them. The light moved from side to side slowly.

  He froze, his face pressed against the cold steel. He was aware of the loud ship’s Klaxons, still blaring ceaselessly, but strangely, they had become almost background noise against which he could now hear other, more subtle, sounds.

  He held his breath. The light moved to the center of the passage, then stopped, as if they had located him. He felt his heart hammer so loudly he swore it was audible. Then the beam moved off to one side and was gone.

  The loud footsteps seemed to be passing by. “Nothing here!” a voice called out.

  He waited a full minute before allowing himself to move. It seemed an eternity. Then he gingerly felt around for the smooth round edges of the opening in the floor until his fingers encountered the jutting steel of the ladder.

  In a few seconds he, too, was climbing down the ladder.

  They seemed to be descending for hundreds of feet, though he knew it had to be less than that. Finally the ladder came to an end, and the two of them were crawling through a long, dark horizontal tunnel whose floor was damp and smelled of bilge water. The tunnel was so low that they could not stand erect. The footfalls of the pursuers were now so distant and muffled they were all but inaudible. The woman moved rapidly through the tunnel, bent over, almost crab-walking, and Bryson found himself doing the same. Then the tunnel branched to the right, and she grabbed hold of another vertical metal ladder and began climbing nimbly upward. Bryson followed, but this ascent was a brief one; it led to what looked like another alley. The woman lit a match, whose flame revealed that on either side of the alley were steep, high corrugated-steel walls; in a moment, he realized that the walls were in fact the ends of steel shipping containers packed closely together. The walkway ran between two long rows of containers.

  She stopped, knelt, lighted another match, and inspected a label plastered at the end panel of one container. “Steel Eagle 105, 107, 111 …” she read quietly.

  “Knives. Field-grade, tactical-ops. Keep looking.”

  She moved on to the next container. “Omega Technologies—”

  “Electronic warfare components. Jesus, they’ve got everything here. But that’s not going to do us any good.”

  “Mark-Twelve IFF Crypto —”

  “Crypto systems for transponders or interrogators. Try the next bay. Hurry!”

  Meanwhile, Bryson was squatting in front of a container in the row opposite, trying to make out the label by the dim light emitting from the woman’s match a few feet away. “I think we got something here,” he said. “XM84 stun grenades, nonlethal, nonfragmentation. Flash-and-bang.” He muttered to himself, “I’d prefer something lethal, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Quietly, she continued to read aloud: “AN/PSC-11 SCAMP.”

  “Several-Channel Anti-Jam Man-Portable. Keep going.”

  She waved out one match and lit another. “ANFATDS?”

  “Army Field Artillery Tactical Data System. Not going to help us much either.”

  “AN/PRC-132 SOHFRAD?”

  “Special Operations High Frequency Radio. Nope.”

  “Tadiran—”

  He cut her off. “Israeli telecommunications and electronics maker. From your homeland. Nothing we can use.”