Allah's Scorpion (17 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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APURTO DEVLÁN,
ON THE BRIDGE
The gunfire was coming from two decks below.
The big helicopter had come as a total surprise. But from the moment it had appeared from the north, Graham had known it was just a matter of minutes before he’d be cornered up here with nowhere to run. There was no time to be angry, or to try to reason how the authorities had uncovered the plan. There was only time to act.
He’d seriously considered punching the 9 # 11 detonator code on his
cell phone, and ending everything in one brilliant flash of light. There would be absolutely no pain, and the deep ache inside his soul for Jillian would finally come to an end.
But there was more to be done. More blood to be shed, not for the cause the nutcases who surrounded bin Laden believed in, but for the pure sweet joy of the battle. Revenge by any other name became tactics. Outwit your enemy, kill him on the battlefield, and live to fight another day.
The helicopter had American navy markings. It hovered on station just across the road, waiting for someone to try to get off the ship.
The troops that had deployed were dressed all in black and apparently knew what they were doing. By now they would be finding and disabling the explosives, though there was still time to enter the code. If only one of the tanks went up, the rest would explode too.
But how had the Americans found out so soon? No one at the Syrian training camp knew the target, nor had any of his crew been told until they were already en route. Which left only a handful of bin Laden’s inner circle who knew all the details.
The first glimmerings of rage began to fill him with the determination to get out of here alive, so that he could make it back to Karachi and take his revenge on whoever had sold them out.
He wouldn’t be able to shoot his way out, and even if he was successful, and managed to slip over the side, the helicopter was standing by, probably with orders to kill anything that moved.
Nor could he hide aboard for very long. If this were his operation he’d order a thorough search of the ship for just that possibility.
The VHF radio was alive with chatter, most of it in Spanish, from Gatun Control, demanding to know what was going on. Graham caught the pilot’s name, and the solution came to him all at once. The Americans were going to give him a ride to the hospital, and from there, freedom.
Hurrying now lest he get caught, Graham put down his weapon and cell phone, and stripped the shirt and trousers from the pilot’s body.
There was a sudden burst of pistol fire one deck down, and someone cried out in Arabic.
Graham pulled off his shirt and trousers, and hurriedly put them on the dead pilot’s body, getting blood all over himself in the process.
“Now,” someone called softly. In English.
Graham donned the pilot’s trousers, which were slightly too small for him, and the light blue shirt, the front of which was covered in blood.
Someone was coming up the stairs, he could hear their footfalls.
Moving swiftly but silently, he laid his cell phone next to the pilot, then placed his pistol in the dead man’s hand.
Whoever was coming was just outside the door now.
Graham smeared blood all over his neck and face and in his mouth, then staggered back across the bridge where he fell to one knee next to the helm station and al-Tashkiri’s body. He was unarmed, and he no longer had the means to trigger the explosives. But as his operators would say,
Insh’allah.
If God wills it.
A tall, stocky man dressed in civilian clothes appeared in the doorway. He was armed with a pistol, which he swung left to right, centering on Graham.
“No, por favor, señor,”
Graham shouted, holding up a hand as if in supplication.
The civilian moved aside, his pistol never wavering, to allow a much younger man dressed all in black, a black bandana on his head, a Heckler & Koch M8 in his hands, and a pistol strapped to his chest, to enter the bridge.
Graham didn’t know about the civilian, but the other man was definitely a U.S. Navy SEAL, almost certainly part of the Americans’ Rapid Response presence here in the Canal Zone. They were almost as good as the British Special Air Service paratroopers; highly trained to take down any force they encountered with a very high degree of accuracy and lightning speed.
“
Por favor, senõr. ¡Ayúdame!
”
“Do you speak English?” Herring asked.
“Sí,”
Graham said. “I mean, yes.”
McGarvey had moved over to the dead pilot, and keeping one eye on Graham, kicked the pistol away, then bent down to check for a pulse in the man’s neck. He glanced at Herring and shook his head.
“What happened here?” Herring asked.
“The crazy
bastardos
killed each other!” Graham shouted desperately. “They tried to kill me, but this one interfered. They have bombs.”
Herring said something into the small mike at his lapel.
McGarvey checked for a pulse in Ramati’s body and then came to where Graham was kneeling and checked for al-Tashkiri’s pulse.
“What’s your name?” he asked Graham.
“Sanchez. I am the
piloto,
the pilot.” He looked up into McGarvey’s gray-green eyes and he could see wariness and skepticism. But the SEAL had lowered his weapon.
“The ship is secure,” Herring told McGarvey. “I’ve called the chopper back, they’ll take Mr. Sanchez to the hospital.”
“
Por favor,
we have to leave now,” Graham pleaded. “The dynamite will kill us all.”
“It’s all right, sir,” Herring said. “They didn’t use dynamite, and my people have disarmed the charges.”
“Can you walk?” McGarvey asked.
“I think so,” Graham said weakly. He held up a hand, but McGarvey stepped back, his pistol still pointed more or less in Graham’s direction.
Herring slung his carbine, came over, and helped Graham to his feet. “Where are you shot?”
“I don’t know. They hit me on the head, and then there was a lot of shooting.”
Herring keyed his radio. “This is Baker leader, we’re coming out.”
“Have your people found any of the real crew?” McGarvey asked.
“Fifteen of them so far,” Herring said, grim-lipped. “All shot to death.”
“We’ll need a new crew then,” McGarvey said. He went back to the body, dressed in the captain’s clothing. Something was wrong.
“Not until we make damned sure that none of the bastards is holed up somewhere,” Herring said.
McGarvey picked up the cell phone and removed its battery. “I’m taking this with me. It’s probably the detonator, and there might be some numbers in its memory.”
The helicopter came into view in the bridge’s windows with a tremendous roar and settled on the deck just forward of the superstructure.
“Whatever you want,” Herring said. “I’m going to take the pilot down to the chopper. Are you staying here?”
“I’ll be right behind you,” McGarvey said.
It was obvious to Graham that something was bothering the civilian; the man knew that everything wasn’t as it seemed to be.
McGarvey used the cell phone’s battery cover to scoop up some of the dead man’s blood, and then replaced the cover on back of the phone.
Herring stopped and looked at him.
McGarvey glanced up. “I want his DNA.”
“Good idea,” Herring said. He held on to Graham. “We’ll take it nice and easy,” he said.
Graham thought that the young man’s death would be eminently satisfying. But the civilian’s death would be more important.
 
 
APURTO DEVLÁN,
ON THE BRIDGE
McGarvey pocketed the cell phone and battery, and holstered his pistol as he followed Herring and the Panamanian pilot from the bridge. He stopped for a moment one deck down and looked back the way he’d come, his gray-green eyes narrowed in thought.
Maybe he was getting old, but he knew damn well that something hadn’t been right up there. Some little thing had been out of place. But for the life of him he couldn’t put his finger on what was bothering him.
Besides the two terrorists he’d taken down on deck four, and the two just inside the companionway on deck one, there would be bodies scattered throughout the ship. The ones he’d seen so far were dressed either in deck crew coveralls, or in civilian clothes that most merchant marine officers wore.
Nothing unusual. The terrorists had either come aboard dressed as crew or officers, or, after they’d killed the real crew and officers, had switched clothes.
Herring pulled up short at the hatch to the open deck, and keyed his lapel mike. “Baker leader at the hatch.” He waited a moment, then helped the wounded pilot out of the superstructure.
McGarvey stopped again for a moment to listen to the sounds of the ship, although it was difficult to hear much of anything over the roar of the helicopter’s engines and rotors. But he could feel in the soles of his shoes that the
Apurto Devlán
’s engines were not running. There was no vibration in the deck plating that was always present when a large vessel’s power plant was up and running.
The terrorists had meant for the ship never to leave this lock. The
explosion of the twelve oil tanks would have taken out not only all the locks, but probably would have destroyed the cruise ship in the front lock, with a major loss of life.
It would have been another 9/11; a spectacular blow not only against the United States, but this time against the entire world.
Again he looked up the stairs he’d just come down. Graham’s plan was to destroy this ship and the Gatun locks. But he’d not been the kind of man to commit suicide for the cause. According to Otto’s research, the ex–British Royal Navy officer had had plenty of opportunities to do so over the past years. This time was to have unfolded in the same way for Graham as had so many of his other operations; he would walk away moments before the killing and destruction so that he could live to fight another day.
What had happened in the last moments up on the bridge? Why had the terrorists apparently gone berserk and shot one another to death?
He could think of any number of possible reasons—maybe Graham had a last-minute change of heart, maybe one of his people somehow found out that Graham had no intention of staying aboard—but none of them struck the right note for McGarvey. His intuition was telling him that there was another explanation.
He stepped outside. The main deck was awash in lights from the ship as well as from stanchions along either side of the lock.
Marchetti and the other SEALs who’d helped secure the engineering spaces and sweep the ship were on deck, but Kulbacki and his team that had disarmed the explosives had apparently shifted their search to the bilges.
Herring was leading the wounded pilot across to the helicopter, which had touched down one-third of the way forward from the superstructure.
McGarvey’s eyes were momentarily drawn to the stern of the cruise ship looming twenty-five feet above the bow of the
Apurto Devlán.
It was moving away. Camera flashes were still coming almost continuously. None of the passengers, however, could realize how close they had come to being incinerated.
Herring had reached the helicopter. A crewman jumped down from the open hatch and helped the canal pilot up into the machine. They didn’t have a medic aboard, though all the Rapid Response Team operators, including the helicopter crew, were trained in battlefield first aid. But it would be only a matter of a few minutes before the pilot reached the hospital in nearby Colón.
The man had been understandably confused on the bridge. He’d nearly lost his life, he knew that much, but it might be until tomorrow before he came out of shock and could talk about what happened.
The pilot had walked awkwardly. Probably because he was hurting.
Climbing up into the helicopter he’d moved stiffly, almost as if his trousers were too tight, restricting his movements.
McGarvey stared at him.
The ship’s engines had been shut down. Graham had been finished with them because the
Apurto Devlán
wasn’t supposed to move out of the center lock. Then why hadn’t he killed the pilot, whose services were no longer needed?
Herring said something to the crewman, then stepped back. A moment later the helicopter roared into the sky, banked to the right, and took off toward the northwest to Colón.
The answer was up on the bridge. Rupert Graham’s body.
McGarvey ducked back through the hatch and sprinted up the stairs, careful to avoid the pools of blood where the terrorists had gone down. The SEALs were mopping up the last of the terrorists as well as searching for and disarming any other explosives. The ship was all but secure. Nevertheless McGarvey had his pistol out, the safety catch off. He did not want to be caught flat-footed by one of the bad guys who might have been hiding.
On the top deck he held up at the door to the bridge and listened for several seconds. Now that the helicopter was gone, the ship was ultra-quiet.
He looked over his shoulder, the way he had come up, then slipped through the door, sweeping his pistol left to right.
Nothing had changed. The three bodies lay where they had fallen.
Once again he was struck by an odd feeling between his shoulder blades, as if someone were aiming a laser sight on his back.
Rupert Graham’s trousers were too long.
McGarvey holstered his pistol and carefully eased the body over on its back. The man’s eyes were dark, as was his hair and his complexion.
But Graham was an Englishman. Not dark.
There was a look of surprise and perhaps fear on his features. He hadn’t been expecting this to happen to him.
When the U.S. Navy helicopter had suddenly roared over the
Apurto
Devlán
’s bows it must have been a shock. But Graham was a professional killer. He’d known the risks. He would have known how to instantly improvise when something went wrong in mid-mission.
It suddenly came together.
The man lying on the deck was the canal pilot, and Rupert Graham was making his escape off the ship courtesy of the SEAL team that had come to arrest or kill him.
McGarvey pulled out his pistol and went to the door, where he held up for a brief moment, then raced to the end of the corridor and took the stairs two at a time down to the main deck, where he held up again at the hatch.
“McGarvey at the main hatch!” he shouted.
“Come,” one of Herring’s men replied from a few feet around the corner.
McGarvey stepped outside.
The SEAL had his M8 at the ready, the butt just above his right shoulder, his shooting finger along the trigger guard. He hesitated for just a split second to make certain that he’d correctly ID’d McGarvey, then lowered the carbine. “We wondered where you went, sir.”
“Where’s Herring? We need to warn the chopper crew.”
“The boss is on his way to the engine room,” the SEAL said. “Warn the crew about what?”
“That wasn’t the canal pilot. It was the terrorist leader.”
“Are you sure, sir?” the SEAL asked.
“Just do it,” McGarvey told the young man, but it was probably too late already.
As the SEAL spoke into his lapel mike, McGarvey turned and looked in the direction the helicopter had gone. They hadn’t even thought to search the imposter.
This attack had been stopped. But there would be others if Graham and bin Laden were allowed to live.
This time, McGarvey vowed, he would finish the job.

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