Читаем Code of Honor полностью

“Maybe here to that banana tree, me think,” Konner said, pointing to a tree some thirty meters downhill as he moved. “Big hibiscus trees, then beach, then water.” He looked up at the thick canopy above, the way someone might check their watch. “It low tide now. Beach maybe little more wide.”

Another bullet whirred by, high overhead. Chavez chanced a look over his shoulder. His vision was too blurry to see much of anything anyway, but he knew Habib and his goons had made it over the mountain.

More rounds snapped in the air, followed by the distinctive report of an AK-47 behind them. One of the rounds neatly clipped a fat banana leaf above Adara’s head, sending it falling to the jungle floor.

“Voices!” Adara hissed, picking up her stride.

Chavez could hear little but the muffled whoosh of his own pulse in his ears. Adrenaline was a marvelous thing, but he’d been living off a steady diet of the stuff for the last couple of hours. He could handle fatigue, but the throbbing pain and nausea from his injuries pushed their way to the fore as the adrenaline ebbed. He was reduced to carrying his broken wrist as he ran to keep the bones from grinding.

The shots came more quickly now, peppering the foliage just a few meters to the right.

“How much farther?” Chavez asked through clenched teeth, panting heavily. It took so much concentration to speak he nearly lost his footing.

The Papuan’s hand shot out to steady him. “We goin’ downhill very quick,” he said. “Maybe five minutes.”

Chavez glanced at Adara, who met his eye.

“We’re trapped between these bastards and ocean,” she said. “They’re going to get to us before the ship does.”

“Me knows good hiding spot.”

More shots. Closer now.

Adara shook her head. “You think they could have people ahead of us?”

“I do,” Chavez said.

The Papuan grew wide-eyed as he reached the same conclusion.

He hefted the homemade shotgun and looked back and forth along the side hill, obviously trying to come up with an alternate plan. “They driving us to a trap.”

* * *

Littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth was fifty-six miles away when the comms officer received a call via satellite telephone. The female operative they were supposed to pick up informed them she and her partner were ten minutes from the beach and taking fire from an unknown number of pursuers.

The seas had become choppier and the powerful Rolls-Royce engines, based on the same engine that powered Boeing’s 777 jets, pushed the ship along just below thirty-five knots.

Commander Akana stood in the bridge, looking out over the foredeck boat that stretched out in front of him like a clean parking lot. In addition to the officer of the watch and the two enlisted personnel who were driving the boat, the executive officer and the command master chief were also present. All wore Navy work blues and uniform ball caps.

The XO, Lieutenant Commander Nicole Carter, was an Annapolis grad, but she didn’t appear to be a ring-knocker. She let her daily output of stellar work speak far louder than her CV ever could. Command Master Chief Alfredo Perez was tall, with the lined face of a man with a long history. He had an intense Danny Trejo look going that at once terrified and endeared him to officers and enlisted alike. Equivalent to the chief of the boat, or COB, on a submarine, a command master chief or command senior chief was the senior enlisted person on a surface vessel. The Navy didn’t strike sailors anymore or restrict them to bread and water — but one cross look from CMC Perez had the same effect on most young sailors. He was fiercely protective of his crew, advocating for them to leadership at every turn, but unafraid to dispense the frequent ass-chewings needed to keep recalcitrant youngsters in line. Like the rest of the crew, the XO and command master chief were finishing up their assigned four-month rotation. Akana had taken over for the previous skipper, making him the new guy. Fortunately, his reputation as a pirate hunter aboard the USS Rogue had preceded him — bringing enough sea-cred that he had time to prove himself as a servant leader. It seemed to Akana that every sailor just assumed that a new skipper was going to be an incarnation of Captain Queeg. That sort of leader certainly existed, but in Akana’s experience, there were more Horatio Hornblowers in the Navy — more deckplate leaders — than there were Captain Blighs.

Good leaders thought about leadership, not management, and that meant getting out in front of things. This mission was tricky, and if it failed, he would be the one to take the heat, not the XO, not the CMC.

“Have Engineering wring out flank speed for as long as practical,” Akana said.

Where full speed was a high percentage of power that, while not fuel-efficient, was not the maximum, flank speed meant as fast as the boat could go. Period. Such speed was reserved for emergency situations, and came at a cost if carried out for too long. Maintainers didn’t much care for flank speed, because it had a tendency to break things.