the same instant, a rip current appeared on the surface; the Alumaweld was caught in a swirling seam one hundred yards long. Guitar-string-taut downrigger cables sang and hissed as they sliced through the water.
As the Alumaweld rapidly reversed toward the Chugash brothers, waves of water cascaded over the boat’s splash well and onto the deck. The pilot dashed back to the cabin, dropped the engines in gear and pounded down the throttles. The twin Yamahas roared, their props sent up a plume of spray. The bow lifted, but the boat continued to move backward.
“That ain’t bottom he’s snagged on,” Bob said with delight. “Something’s dragging him. He hook himself a gray whale?”
The pilot stuck his head out the cabin window and yelled for help as he rushed past them. He sounded like a cat with its tail caught in a screen door.
“Hang on!” Stan shouted to his brother as he opened up the Evinrude’s throttle, trying to catch up and at the same time steer clear of whatever was going on.
Two hundred feet ahead of the Alumaweld, the rip current suddenly parted. Black columns thicker than a man’s body slid up through the surface, draped with the downrigger flashers, cables and cannonballs. The split in the rip current opened wider, and the huge black sail of a submarine emerged.
“Hoo-hah!” Stan hollered at his brother. “Yuppie snagged a Trident!”
As the submarine surfaced, the angle of the trapped downrigger cables grew steeper and steeper, lifting the Alumaweld’s stern from the water and driving down the bow. The Yamahas’ propellers bit into air, their three-hundred-horsepower roar became a shrill, frantic whine. The motors’ water intakes sucked air, too. Red-lined, overheating, the four-strokes belched white smoke.
From the way they were losing ground on the flat-black painted ship, Bob guessed its speed at close to forty knots, this while dragging the Alumaweld behind. He had seen The Hunt For Red October seven times. And Tridents from the Bangor sub base were always passing through the strait on their way in or out of the Pacific. This sail was low in profile and sloped in the rear.
“Stan, that ain’t a Trident!” he shouted through a cupped hand.
Stan couldn’t hear him over the sustained shriek of the wide-open Evinrude.
“That’s a goddamn Russian sub!” Bob screamed at his brother. “And it’s headed for the Hook!” Then their boat bottomed out, full length, in a wave trough. The sickening impact slammed Bob’s jaws shut, and he nearly bit off the tip of his tongue.
Ahead, the Yamaha four-strokes sounded like lawn-mowers hitting rocks.
Big rocks.
Abruptly, they went silent.
Bob held on to both gunwales as the sub’s foaming wake hit them. When Stan swung wide to avoid being swamped, he stole a look over his shoulder. The sub was already a quarter mile away. It was about the same distance from the Coast Guard air station on the end of the spit.
Stan slowed the motor to idle. He and Bob carefully stood up to get a better look. The low, long ship barreled toward land. It showed no sign of turning or stopping.
“Oh, my God…” Bob muttered.
The impact boomed across the water like a thousand-pound bomb, followed by the shriek of an impossible weight of metal grinding over the Hook’s jagged riprap. As the vessel grounded itself, its bow angled upward. Dark, oily smoke poured from amidships, enveloping the sail and masts, a slender, greasy pillar coiling into the overcast sky.
From a half mile out, the Chugash brothers could see the beached sub’s engines were still running full speed, the screw throwing a towering roostertail. The Alumaweld lay bottom up on the edge of the riprap. It looked like a Cracker Jack toy beside the massive black hull.
The yuppie was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER ONE
Moses Lake, Washington,
6:48 a.m. PDT
Carl “Ironman” Lyons crouched in a water-filled irrigation ditch, soaked to the waist. A black ski mask covered his face, hiding his short-cropped blond hair, any reflection off his skin and, of course, his identity.
The shallow canal was the only cover on the south side of the target. After three hours in the ditch it was finally getting light enough for Lyons to see the killzone without the aid of night-vision goggles. The ramshackle narco compound was surrounded by flat, tilled farm fields. Whatever was planted in them had barely sprouted.
No perimeter fence or gunposts protected the pair of hammered, single-wide trailers on cinder blocks, the converted SeaLand cargo-container-cum-laboratory, the sagging, unpainted shotgun shack, the collection of junked and rusting cars and the jumble of fifty-five-gallon chemical drums and empty ammonia tanks.
No fence was required.
The site was eight miles from the nearest public road, in the middle of seventy thousand acres of private land.
Lyons’s .357 Magnum Colt Python hung in a black ballistic nylon shoulder holster, a foot above the water-line. A pair of suppressor-equipped, 9 mm MP-5 SD-3s sat in quilted Gore-Tex scabbards on the mud bank in front of him. The scabbards’ flaps hung open, exposing the machine pistols’ black plastic grips and retracted folding stocks.
Lyons methodically clenched and unclenched his big fists to keep the blood flowing to his fingertips. Below the water, his legs were numb, hips to toes, and it felt as if his testicles had retracted up into his body cavity. The former L.A. cop didn’t try to block out his discomfort. Just the opposite. In the back of his mind he inventoried it over and over, item by item.
Being royally pissed off was a good thing.
It helped him maintain focus.
Then he caught movement on the horizon to the north. Four sets of headlights cut through the purple gloom. The lights bounced up and down, up and down as the vehicles bounded over the crop rows. Lyons flipped open the cover on his wristwatch and checked the time. The convoy was a little ahead of schedule.
As the vehicles drew nearer, he heard the rumble of the engines and the squeak and rattle of cargo. The minifleet of rental trucks was delivering raw materials and would take away finished product for distribution in Idaho, Washington and Oregon.
The Moses Lake operation produced and transported a couple million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine a week, a joint venture of the Mexican mafia and an enterprising southern-California-based barrio gang.
Lyons knew all about bangers from his days with the LAPD. They were the Cub Scouts of organized crime, earning their merit badges fighting other gangs, staking out turf for drug sales, supplying security for shipments and collections. The Mexican mafia, on the other hand, was into some elaborately bad, big-boy shit. Kidnappings. Political payoffs and assassinations. Torture.
One by one, the four trucks’ headlights swept over an enormous John Deere combine abandoned in the middle of a cultivated field one hundred yards away. As the lead vehicle rapidly closed on the narco compound, the driver started honking his horn. The other drivers followed suit.
Almost at once, weak yellow propane lanterns came on in the trailers;
