A cultured British voice was speaking over the loudspeaker. It was saying to abandon ship. It was saying to simply jump off the side.
“Where is KimKim?” Minako asked, forcing herself to open her eyes and look outside the plexiglass bubble. “Where is KimKim?”
Silver shook his head. “They got him. You don’t want to see, honey.”
Minako shrank back. She hadn’t really known KimKim, of course. At first he’d terrified her. Then he had rescued her. But it still seemed impossible that he could actually be dead.
Silver slumped in the front seat. There came the flat crump of another grenade going off. The battle was still going on.
“Can you swim, kid?” Silver asked her.
The question made no sense to her. He might as well have asked whether she could dance. “Yes, I swim.”
“Well, this time of year, here in the harbor the water shouldn’t be too cold. We’re not far from land, should be able to reach the wharf or at least one of these little islands if no boat picks us up right away.”
“What do you mean?”
Silver turned to face her. “That loud bang and all of a sudden the boat starts turning? Well, it hasn’t stopped turning. And the engines are still going full blast—you can feel it. That’s why they’re calling to abandon ship.”
“You think we’re going to crash?”
“I’d say there’s probably no way to stop it,” he said, looking very serious. “And this chopper, well, kid, I don’t think we have time. The skids are still chained.”
“Jump in the water?”
“Or I could throw you, but one way or the other, I didn’t go through all this to let you die. So come on. Now!”
Minako said, “I’ll do it. But we’ll have to count to …to seven. That’s my best number.”
Silver looked nonplussed but said, “Seven it is.”
They climbed from the helicopter. Minako felt something sticky under her shoes. Blood. There was no way not to look at KimKim, he lay like a rag doll, arms and legs twisted in impossible ways.
She followed Silver, moving at a fast trot now, to the railing. She could hear cries and gunshots from the split-open sphere that had been her prison. The battle still raged. The Sea Kings hovered helplessly, staying out of range of RPGs.
They went to the side, climbed over pipes and up a shallow steel ladder that brought them at last to where they could gaze down at swiftly rushing green water.
Suddenly Minako felt a terrible rage inside her. She was no longer afraid, she was no longer overwhelmed, she was feeling her fists clench. “I don’t want to run away, I want to kill them.”
Silver did not smile or laugh. He nodded and said, “Yeah. You and me both, kid. But for now, let’s just get off this floating nightmare.”
Minako counted. “One.” The first prime. “Two.” The second. “Three. Four,” a bad number to be swiftly passed by, to reach, “five.”
“Shove off as hard as you can and swim away from the ship.”
“Six,” a very bad number.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
“Seven,” she said, and jumped.
As she fell she twisted in the air and saw a sharp-prowed gray ship, much smaller than the Doll Ship. A blossom of smoke erupted on the smaller ship’s deck.
Minako hit the water before the sound of the cannon reached her.
She was still plunging down, down into chilly, nearly opaque water when she heard the loud explosion of the shell hitting the Doll Ship just at the waterline. The shock wave was strong but not deadly.
She kicked and crawled her way up toward light. It seemed to take forever for her to find the surface, and when she did at last the Doll Ship was nearly past.
Minako sucked in air and trod water as the Chinese vessel fired a second round followed by a second explosion.
Silver surfaced fifty feet away, looked frantically around, and when she yelled, “I’m here!,” began to swim to her.
A third round, a third explosion, but now the Chinese ship was in danger of being crushed between the Doll Ship and the shore. It reduced speed, and the Doll Ship, damaged but still plowing ahead at full speed, crushed a vintage sailing yacht to splinters.
A wall of skyscrapers was directly ahead
More people were jumping now, falling into the water.
From the too-near shoreline Minako heard alarms going off. There was a cruise ship docked almost dead ahead and looming up over it the row of forty-story buildings, built right to the water’s edge.
“It’s going to run right into those buildings!” Minako cried.
“Yes it is,” Silver said. “That’s Harbor City. A huge mall, office buildings, hotels …God save them.”
The Chinese police vessels had now swung in behind the Doll Ship. The harbor was lit up by frantic machine-gun fire, by the sudden explosions of the cannon and the eruption of flaming steel from the LNG carrier’s stern.
The Doll Ship was riding lower and slower, but it was less than a quarter of a mile from impact, still moving at ten knots, and nothing was going to stop it.
Helen Falkenhym Morales had been to National Cathedral only once before, for the funeral of a supreme court justice. That had been two years ago, and at that time she hadn’t paid much attention to the location and the look of the place. It was north on Wisconsin Avenue, out past the Naval Observatory in a surprisingly green setting for so urban a location.
The cathedral itself might have been transplanted straight from medieval Europe. It was a pointy object seen from the outside, a bit like a hedgehog, if a hedgehog could be Gothic.