War Lord (35 page)

A head count told me I’d misjudged the number of people aboard by a significant margin. Including the folks I’d seen already, there had to be close to fifty personnel. Minus one, I reminded myself. I noted four men scattered around the scene, armed and dressed pretty much just like I was, even down to the ski mask. I kept moving and thought about how I might contact the US Navy steaming in the same patch of ocean. And then someone stumbled into me; more accurately, it was me who did the stumbling. Served me right for not watching where I was going – I couldn’t take my eyes off the bomb and the people working on it.

‘Hey!’ the guy snapped. ‘Watch where yo goin’, moth’ fuck.’

My eyes went wide with surprise. Of all people, I’d knocked over Charles White. He picked himself up off the deck. I took a step back and held up a hand in apology.

‘Take yo’ ass someplace else,’ he shouted angrily. ‘No need for yo here, useless fuck.’

I gave him a nod and backed away, but not before I saw his brother Falco behind him, hands on his hips, ignoring his brother and me while he surveyed the goings-on around the nuke with Gamal Abdul-Jabbar and Ali-Bakr al Mohammed. The Somali pirate with the wrecked eye socket turned to have words with a small group of Iranians perched over a pair of laptop computers. I doubted it was internet porn on those screens. This had to be the command center for the floating bomb. Those laptops probably controlled how and when the thing would blow. Four of Charles White’s bodyguards were lingering in the vicinity, paying no particular heed to security other than providing their presence. They were heavily armed with M4s and anti-personnel M26 frag grenades bulging from their webbing. They were also well trained. Taking them out would be a long way from easy.

The White brothers, a couple of Somali pirate kingpins, a nuke and a ship full of gasoline. A picture was forming and it wasn’t pretty. I didn’t want to risk further eye contact with Charles White, or Gamal for that matter, so I crossed to the other side of the ship behind the ragged remains of the bulkhead. I walked slow, attempting to seem like just another guard on patrol. The different route changed the angle on the Iranians working over the W80. From where I was now, there appeared to be a separate device attached to the side of the bomb. It was under three feet in length, a very long shoebox fashioned from aluminum. I wondered what it could be. And why
Iranians
? If Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and the Whites needed outlaw nuke experts, why not North Koreans or Pakistanis? Iranians weren’t nuclear bomb experts as far as I knew, despite their blatant nuclear weapons program. And the bomb itself was next to useless as a nuclear device. Without codes,
all
the experts said that it couldn’t be detonated.

I looked back down toward the stern, over the tops of countless barrels of gas and detcord and relays and blinking red LEDs. The platoon of technicians working on them mostly appeared to have finished the job, only a few remaining on improvised catwalks over the barrels, checking connections and switches. What the hell was the plan? I thought about Sweetwater. Did he know what it was? He was onto the nuke early. He’d tried to warn the authorities without blowing his cover, sending his academy ring to Alabama along with the amputated hand of a known associate of von Weiss. And now a random series of incidents had brought me here, solo. The Lone Ranger with no Tonto.

Sweetwater – I hoped he’d made it. I didn’t even want to think about what might have happened to Petinski . . .

Eye dee, eye dee . . .

I pictured the guy lying on his side in the rain outside the US Embassy compound back in Dar. Had he managed to pull himself up and out of his pain long enough to tell me what was going down here?

Eye dee, eye dee . . . Eye dee, eye dee . . .

And just like that, I had an epiphany. It hit me like a bucket of ice water. I suddenly knew what that odd shoebox attached to the side of the bomb was, why the Iranians were here, what von Weiss had planned, and why Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and his buddy were central to it.

Now I had no choice but to seize the ship.

W
hat Randy had been saying was eye-
ee
-dee. He’d tried to tell me that the W80 was to be used as an IED – an improvised explosive device. The
African Spirit
would be detonated in close proximity to von Weiss and Ali-Bakr al Mohammed’s mutual enemy, the forces of the United States. But it wasn’t just any IED; this one would be a hugely destructive dirty bomb scattering the W80’s deadly plutonium core into the wind. That’s what the box on the side of the bomb was all about, and why the Iranians were doing the rigging.
It was a shaped charge
, no doubt a variation of the type perfected by Iran for use against coalition forces in Iraq. Its job was to smash the W80’s physics package a split second before the fuel load detonated and lifted the shattered plutonium core into the sky downwind of the target. Von Weiss and his Somali war lord would be hoping to nail one of the ultimate symbols of American power – the USS
Enterprise
. An attack like that would take the Big E offline for a very long time.

Making my way back to the hatch I came in by, I noted that a lot of folks were standing around, waiting. A clanging alarm bell sounded and the waiting turned into hurried evacuation. A line immediately formed at the exit hatch I was intending to use, so I cracked the one on the opposite side of the bulkhead closer to my position. The hatch opened out onto a small space with a ladder, which I raced up as technicians and Somalis came through the bulkhead behind me.

I was among the first to arrive on the open deck, so I moved quickly toward the tender and felt around under the tarp where I’d left the Atchisson and the spare drum. I got my hands on one of them just as a group of Iranians filed through the hatch. I racked a shell into the chamber, safety on. Then I jumped down from the raised hatch and headed for the bow.

Blinding white light flooded the decks. Several Somalis raced to the tarp covering the tender and began folding it back. Charles and Falco White arrived on deck with Abdul-Jabbar, Ali-Bakr al Mohammed, the bodyguards and a bunch of Iranians, all of whom were wearing lifejackets. The crane arms swung into place over the tender. The deck swarmed with armed men, the Somali guards shouting instructions at everyone else.

Hooks from the crane were attached to eyelets on the tender’s gunnels. The White brothers climbed in with the Somali war lord and his number two, and all the Iranians. With everyone seated, the crane hoisted the tender off the deck and swung it over the side of the ship. The Africans swarmed to the side, yelling at the crane operator and flapping their arms to lower the load or to raise it. A sudden upbeat mood among them suggested that the operation was a success, and shortly after the tender appeared on a divergent course to the mothership, powering away into the night.

The Somalis waved their boss goodbye. I gave him the bird. Time to move while everyone was distracted. I made a beeline for the superstructure. The floodlights over the deck were doused and people bumped into each other, their night vision shot to shit. Flipping down the NVG lenses I ran to the hatch in the superstructure and lifted them up again before going through into the light. I ran up several ladders till I could get no higher, then sprinted toward the back of the superstructure. A final ladder brought me onto a small area open to the elements off to one side of the bridge. Jesus – there was an MSTAR set up in the space, a man-portable target surveillance and acquisition radar. Von Weiss had helped these people get the job done with some pretty neat toys. I had wondered about the alarm sounded over the deck thirty seconds or more before those two Super Hornets cruised past overhead. The MSTAR would’ve picked up the aircraft when they cleared the horizon. Cables ran from the hardware onto the bridge, through a hole roughly cut at the bottom of the access door. Those cables would be connected to a display module providing the folks on the bridge with their hands on the steering wheel all kinds of information on potential threats in the air and on the sea. A canvas tarpaulin lay in folds at the equipment stand’s feet. No doubt it was simply thrown over the gear to prevent the ensemble being spotted by overflying aircraft.
Innocent
cargo ships didn’t sport this kind of military-grade intelligence-gathering gear. I glanced at the horizon. Nothing but an empty expanse of ocean. Above the bridge, the standard radar tower with a rotating transmitter providing the bridge with weather and ship-to-sea information about nearby vessels and hazards.

So, in regard to the bomb, I believed I knew the where and the what, but
how
were these assholes going to pull it off exactly? There was a lot of ocean out there. I took a peek through the window onto the bridge. It was dark in there, the only illumination provided by dim red lights and small red or green LEDs on various panels. Three Somalis occupied the space: one with his hands on his hips, standing beside a small metal steering wheel with wooden spokes that I figured was probably the helm; one leaning over a map on a bench; a third just staring out the window at the sea beyond the bow. The guy at the bench gave me a half-hearted glance and then returned to what he was doing, checking over a map. From his point of view, through the small glass panel in the door, he’d caught sight of a heavily armed guy wearing a ski mask – nothing to worry about, plenty of those around.

A siren started wailing over the deck. The alarm sent everyone down there scurrying for the walkways beside the gunnels. Then the hatches over the cargo holds began to slide back, opening up the holds to the night air with a sound that was part rumble and part squeaking grind. Also, I could see renewed activity around the ship’s lifeboats. They were being readied for departure and a rabble of Somalis had formed around each one.

The door onto the bridge opened. I was suddenly face to face with a Somali. He asked me something, damned if I knew what. He repeated the question a second time at twice the volume. The third time was almost a shout. The guy was getting agitated. I wasn’t giving him the right responses, or indeed any response. His buddy came out from behind him, an FN in his hands, and they stood shoulder to shoulder at the doorway to the bridge. Both of them jabbered loudly at me; things were getting out of hand, and then the guy with the FN began turning the barrel of the weapon toward me, so I shot him. The impact of the double-aught in his chest sent him sailing backward through the half-open door. I kept the pressure on the trigger finger. The din of two more shots crashed off the hard steel around me and the second guy slumped to the deck, the Atchisson having blown his heart clean through his back and flattened it like road kill against the steel wall behind him.

This wasn’t how I wanted things to go, at least not in a timing sense. I went through the door onto the bridge, stepped over the deceased just inside and slid on the pool of blood spreading from his vented chest.
Bang.
A gunshot. Close range. The sound caused me to jump. The slug went through a glass pane behind me. The third guy – I’d forgotten about him. He’d come out of the charthouse, a small room off the wheelhouse, and his rifle was shaking in his hands. He was pulling the trigger repeatedly and nothing was happening. Maybe he had a jam. Maybe he only had one round in the mag. Maybe this was my lucky day. It sure wasn’t his: I shot from the hip and a big red hole surrounded by ragged cotton and strips of flesh appeared in his thigh, just below his nuts. A gush of warm blood from his shredded femoral artery hosed me down before I got off another round, better aimed than the first, that removed his jaw on its way through his spinal column.

Blood had soaked through the ski mask so I tore it off and threw it on the floor. All the men down on the deck were staring up at the bridge, in the direction of the gunshots, with ‘what the fuck?’ looks on their faces. Great. I double-checked the drum, and then put a reassured hand on the mag packing twenty rounds still tucked into my webbing.

There wasn’t much time till the bridge was stormed, maybe a minute to scout around and hopefully find an escape hatch. A quick hunt told me there wasn’t one. But I did find a small cabin with a cot, a fire extinguisher, a basin and a handy stainless-steel head – just what I needed for the nervous dump coming on. I heard shouting outside, getting closer. My date with the shitter would have to wait. Aside from the small cabin and charthouse off the bridge, there was also a radar room. The display monitor hooked up to the MSTAR out on the wing showed nothing airborne in the vicinity and, according to the ship’s own radar, the sea surface was also clear. On the wall were pictures of the USS
Enterprise
, the USS
Leyte Gulf
and half a dozen other ships of the French, British, Australian and Indian navies. It was an identification wall showing targets. I considered putting a shell or two into the electronics in the room but then immediately thought better of it. Maybe there was a trigger for this floating dirty IED somewhere among all the flashing LEDs. Just as easily, there could be a way to defuse it, perhaps the
only
way to defuse it.

I took the stainless-steel chairs from the chartroom and repurposed them to jam shut the access doors onto each of the open-air wings. Next I removed the .38 and the Desert Eagle from the webbing and laid them on the floor in the cabin. Checking the dead guys for weapons and ammo I found three FNs with two full mags between them. I readied one of the rifles with a spare mag and placed it on the floor beneath the helm, then put myself flat on the floor in the cabin beside the handguns and took a bead on the nearest wing door.

A command was yelled into the bridge. Being in Somali, or whatever language they speak in Somalia, I couldn’t understand it but I figured it was probably something like, ‘Whoever the fuck you are, come out with your hands up.’

I answered with silence.

Their response to my response was a volley of shots that removed the glass panel I was aiming at. And then the flash diffuser on the end of an FN barrel appeared cautiously over the bottom edge of the opening and half a magazine was emptied into the bridge. The rounds smacked, pinged and whirred off the steel walls, floor and ceiling, some smashing out the forward-facing windshields. I kept my head buried under my arms till the noise stopped, then glanced up and saw several misshapen, full-metal-jacketed rounds spinning on the steel floor just in front of my face, bleeding off the last of their energy.

The barrel came through the hole in the door again, a face behind it this time. A round from the Atchisson made it disappear in a puff of red mist. I turned to the side, pulled one of the frag grenades off my webbing, gripped the spoon handle tight against the body of the weapon and removed the pin. This was risky. If I missed the hole in the door and it rebounded back into the bridge, it could get messy. For me. I decided against the lob, scrambled to the door instead, released the spoon, counted off three seconds then popped it through the hole. I heard screams and yells and a mad scramble and then a loud metallic crash as I dived for the floor in the radar room.

Moments later, I got up, ran to the door now pockmarked with dents, ripped the chair away and ran out onto the wing. Four bloody, smoking men lay slumped in a pile on the floor. Maybe half a dozen others were running down the alleyway toward the stern. I fired the Atchisson in their direction on full auto for a second and a half, dropping three of them. I ran back inside the steel walls of my stationary tank just as an axe smashed out the window of the door onto the wing opposite and a frag grenade sailed in. It hit the floor, bounced once and rolled into the corner. I dived into the cabin again and made it with barely a moment to spare. There was an unbelievably loud explosion just around the steel corner. It rang in my head and jangled as the pressure wave blew through the nasal and sinus cavities in my face. I yelled at the top of my voice with my mouth wide open to try to clear my ears.

The door the grenade came through was being battered by something. The top hinge bent and then broke. The center hinge was going the same way. And then the door burst inward and half a dozen men stormed in behind it shouting and screaming some kind of war cry. I opened up the Atchisson and five rounds per second of twelve-gauge double-aught hacked into them at point-blank range, silencing them, but not before they managed to get off three or four wild shots of their own in my direction.

The drum mag emptied, I considered dropping the weapon and picking up the FN, but the shrapnel from the grenade had rendered it useless. Instead I replaced the drum on the Atchisson as two men made another attempt at storming the bridge, but they slipped on the blood on the floor like I had and both went down, smacking their heads on the steel. For dessert, they each chewed a couple of mouthfuls of double-aught.

My foot was wet. I looked down and saw that my leg was leaking blood, a pool of it forming on the floor around my boot. One of the FN rounds that had ricocheted had caught me in the calf muscle. Movement at the door. Through the empty panel I saw a man running toward me, bottle in hand, poised for the throw, a flaming rag hanging from its neck. A burst from the Atchisson cut that idea short and he crumpled to the deck. The bottle shattered and he was instantly engulfed in flames. Suddenly, the world around me was also in flames, my clothes catching fire. A Molotov cocktail had been tossed in through the door behind me. They’d attacked from both sides simultaneously.

My hands were alight, and so was the Atchisson. I put it on the floor and kicked it into a corner of the bridge. Shit, shit, shit. Flame ran up my arms. Back in the cabin, on the wall, wasn’t there a fire extinguisher? I took a step and fell. My leg wasn’t working. I got up, took a few half steps and dived for the red bottle on the wall. Ripping it off the bracket, I turned it on myself, releasing a torrent of foam that gushed from the nozzle, covering me and everything else in the vicinity. The trigger jammed open, quickly filling the small cabin with expanding foam. The flames were snuffed out, but the skin on my arms and neck throbbed like it was still on fire. And my lower leg was starting to feel as if someone was twisting my torn flesh with pliers.