Thomas Prescott Superpack (93 page)

Nodding that she understood, she took Bheka by the hand, and both hobbled forward.

I should have gone with them. But first I had two people I needed to kill.

I climbed back onto the nose of the ship, both men still on their backs. The Warlord,
Keli
, had thrown his gun, and it was twenty feet to my right. I calmly walked over and bent down. I noticed movement in my peripheral and turned. The Warlord had somehow made it to his knees. He had one hand clamped down on his left ear. With his right hand he reached down and pulled the machete off his back. Then without hesitation, he placed the blade behind his ear. His bloody right ear fell to the ground. Then his left.

I was too stunned to move.

Did this crazy fuck just cut his ears off?

The Warlord stood, blood dripping down the sides of his face, running together on the bottom of his chin. He charged towards me. I reached out for the gun, but somehow ended up knocking it three feet further. I dove for the gun, wrapped my hand around it, but out of the corner of my eye, I could feel the Warlord reach me. I could almost see the glimmer of the machete as it came down on the back of my neck.

I closed my eyes.

The blow never came.

Just silence.

I opened my eyes. The machete was lying two inches from my face. Its proud owner next to it, lying at an awkward angle, an enormous hole where his left eye once was.

Someone was standing over me. I looked up. It was Ganju.

The gun that was in his hand, silently fell to the ground. I watched as he staggered to where the Professor lay writhing on the ground. Ganju knelt next to him and I watched as he dug his hand down the man’s shirt and tugged. I was waiting for Ganju to shoot him, but he didn’t. He hobbled back to me and fell to the ground. He held his stomach with his hands. I knew that beneath that bloody shirt was something awful. Something beyond imagination. And something beyond medical help.

I sat up and knelt next to him.

His eyes were closed.

He thrust his hand out. In it were a silver necklace with a small electronic capsule and a small piece of paper. He said, “The account information.”

I took both items and shoved them down into my pocket.

I held the small man in my arms as he struggled to breathe. He began to cough. Blood spilled down his chin. His small body convulsed. He was dying. He whispered, “Tell them I love them.”

Then he went still.

I let out a long exhale. And I would have maybe said a prayer and given the little brown man the proper thanks for saving my life, had the Professor not been struggling to his feet. In all the commotion, I hadn’t noticed the LRAD had been shut off. Either Frank thought he’d turned it on long enough, or someone had made him turn it off. The Professor held Ganju’s gun.

I dove over Ganju and rolled off the nose of the ship, falling five feet to the walkway. A bullet whizzed by my head as I ran past the wall that separated the Bridge from the nose.

I ripped the earplugs from my ears and threw them. Two more gunshots erupted. There was a loud clump as the Professor jumped down. I probably had a twenty-foot lead on him. I rounded past Salon Musa and into the expansive deck splitting the pool and the hot tubs. Across the way, Rikki and Bheka stood against the opposite railing, both staring at me at wide-eyed. Rikki was holding something gray. Baxter.

“Jump!”

Neither moved. Both probably still had their earplugs in and they wouldn’t be able to read my lips from thirty yards.

“Jump!”

I could hear the loud steps of the Professor start on the deck. The sight of the man holding the large gun prompted Rikki and Bheka to start clamoring up the railing. Another bullet whizzed by my head. I saw the sparks as it clipped the railing just a couple feet from where Rikki was climbing up.

When I was ten yards away, Rikki jumped.

But Bheka didn’t.

He looked back at me. Tears ran down his cheeks.

“JUMMMMMMMMMMMP!”

Another gunshot. Wayward. The Professor was having trouble aiming and running.

I was two strides from the railing and Bheka was as still as a gargoyle on the edge of a Paris hotel. I leaped into the air, wrapped my arms around his small body, and the two of us plummeted to the ocean seventy feet below.

COMPUTER CENTER

2219 HOURS

Royal and Pollock had walked into the restaurant and found nearly 200 hostages, primary crew members, huddled beneath the many round tables. A small brown man, the man Royal’s pinpointed bullet had saved, rose to his feet. He was holding his stomach. Royal knew the man before him was in the process of dying.

Without preamble, or even a simple thank you, the small man shouted, “There is a duffel bag filled with plastic explosives and rigged to go off at noon tomorrow.”

“How much plastic?” Pollock asked,

The small man said sedately, “Enough to blow up a ship three times this size.”

Pollock whistled.

“Where?” asked Royal.

Ganju took a deep breath, then said in a shallow whisper, “I have to show you.”

He started out the door. Royal told Pollock to get the hostages to Deck 6 where they could be
lowered into lifeboats, then followed the hobbling brown man.

They entered into the elevator shaft, which Royal noticed was dark. Almost as if it weren’t working. The tiny man inserted a key and the elevator light flickered on. The man pressed Deck 5 and the elevator doors closed. Neither man said a word. The doors opened and the small man spoke, the words hardly audible, “Go through that lobby and you will find the computer center. The bomb is in the closet.”

Royal asked, “Aren’t you coming with?”

The man shook his head and hit the button for Deck 7. He said, “No. There’s still something I need to do.” He held out his hand and said, “Give me your gun.”

Royal looked down at the gun in his hand. It was the way the man said it. There was no way Royal could have refused. He handed over Jenny, stepped from the elevator, and watched as the doors closed.

That had been three minutes ago.

Royal watched as the numbers on the iPhone resting on the duffel bag ticked down from 13:38:42 all the way to 13:37:07.

He still couldn’t believe his eyes.

LIFEBOAT B3

10:24 p.m.

“Stop squirming.”

I looked up at Lacy with daggers in my eyes. I said, “That’s easy for you to say, you didn’t just pour saltwater into a thousand gashes on your body.”

If the salty Indian Ocean finding its way into sixty different places on my body in the way of sulfuric acid was bad enough, Bheka and I had turned over in the air, and I had done a seventy-foot back flop. I more or less cushioned Bheka’s fall, but it was going to take a team of chiropractors to fix what was left of my spine.

We hadn’t been in the water long, maybe two minutes before Rikki, Bheka, and myself were pulled aboard a lifeboat. At seeing Baxter in Rikki’s arms, Lacy had screamed, then began to cry. And Baxter—he was so excited to see his mom that he’d now gone 12 minutes without falling asleep. A new personal record.

Everyone had made it safely aboard. Amongst forty others, were J.J., Susie, Frank, Trinity, Walter, Marge, Berta, and
Reen. Even Gilroy had made it and was still conscious. How much blood did that guy have in his body? He probably kept half of it in his dick, which accounted for his still breathing.

Lacy, Rikki, and Susie had been doctoring me for the better part of ten minutes. Picking the pieces of glass from my body, then wiping away the saltwater with shirts dipped in bottled water. I no longer felt like I’d been stung by a thousand angry wasps. Now it was more like fire ants.

Susie and Lacy recounted how they’d lowered the lifeboats in the water, how they’d made everyone put in their earplugs, and how the sound had been nearly unbearable. The most intriguing detail was the sudden appearance of four men in black suits after the second lifeboat had been lowered—Navy SEALs. At this Frank looked at me and I even allowed myself a smile.

They had come after all.

Presently, we were about a half-mile away from the
Afrikaans
and we had a commanding view of the last lifeboat being lowered into the rolling surf. I looked around the room and noticed most people were euphoric. They had stared death in the face and survived. Yet, most of them had no idea how close they’d come to dying.

I was happy for these people. For them, it was over. But not for me. Not by a long shot.

There were still a quarter of a million people in a village somewhere who were going to get vaporized sometime tomorrow if I didn’t alert the proper channels. Now, it wasn’t as though I knew any of these people. To me, they were simply sick Africans, but to one person in this lifeboat, they were anything but.

As Bheka and I had surfaced from our plummet, the small boy had clung to my neck as I trod water and waited for the approaching lifeboat. His face was wet. But not from the ocean. Large tears were running down his cheeks.

“It’s okay little man,” I’d said softly. “It’s over.”

He’d shook his head. “What that man said,” he’d said, sniffing. “All those sick people. How they’re going to be killed.”

“Yeah. What about them?”

He’d stared at me. Broken. Unable to say the words. And then it hit me. His mom. That’s why she’d gotten off at the last port of call. She’d heard about the village where help was headed.

“Is your mom sick?” I’d asked

He’d nodded.

Now, as the women tended to me, Bheka sat on my lap. And as the two of us watched the eighth and final lifeboat touch the water, I knew he was thinking about his mom, wishing she were on this boat.

I patted Bheka’s leg and promised him his mom would be okay. A promise I intended to keep.

Then I began thinking about the Professor. I was curious if the SEALs had stumbled across him and filled him with bullets. Or even better, slit his throat. But I would know soon enough. The SEALs, or maybe the Navy, would need to debrief us. Then I could tell them about the village.

But for now, I was going to allow myself a moment of satisfaction. The last lifeboat was five feet from the water. The last of the hostages were seconds away from being free. The second the lifeboat touched the water, it was New Year’s Eve. Everyone started clapping, kissing,
hugging.

The celebration was shattered by the loudest sound I’d ever heard. The fireball that was once the
Afrikaans
lit up the night sky, a white sun on the dark horizon.

Susie and Lacy said it simultaneously.

Oh, dear God.

WASHINGTON D.C.

6:03 p.m.

The door opened and Roger Garret’s daughter-in-law smiled. After they embraced, she said, “He’s holed up in his den.”

Roger laughed and said, “I thought that might be the case.”

After a second’s pause, Betsy Garret, asked, “Is Paul’s career over?”

“In Washington? Probably.”

Betsy nodded.

“But I don’t think Paul was cut out for the White House. All the bullshit. The lies. Pulling the sheets over everyone’s eyes. That’s not him.” He almost added, “The opposite of his old man.”

“No, it’s not.”

Roger pulled Betsy to him once more and said, “Don’t worry. You guys will be fine. I’ve already had five people call me with job offers for Paul. Job offers that pay triple what he’s making right now.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Roger stepped into the foyer and asked, “Where are the kiddos?”

Betsy informed him that his grandkids were out playing and after a quick rundown on how both were doing and promises for the zoo the following weekend, Roger excused himself and made his way to his son’s den. He didn’t knock. He opened the door and strode into the beautiful wooded room.

His son was sitting behind his desk, a large snifter of scotch held in his right hand. Paul appraised his father, then laughed. “I wasn’t expecting you this soon.”

“I have to make sure my baby boy is okay.”

Paul shook his head with a smile. Then he stood, walked over to the wet bar, and poured his dad a gin gimlet. He walked around the desk and handed the glass to his father.

“That was quite a show you put on,” said Roger, fighting back a smirk.

Paul puffed out his cheeks and raised his eyebrows.

“Reminded me of Lou Piniella in his prime.”

Both men laughed.

“It was only a matter of time,” Roger said, with a shake of his head. “I’m surprised it took you this long.”

Paul took a sip of scotch and swished it around. His father had told him countless times that he didn’t have the personality for politics. He cared too much. “Yeah.”