[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (44 page)

“I say we go old school,” said Larry. “Charge straight ahead.”

“Since when is getting killed old school?” I answered.

“Those dorks can’t shoot straight.”

“There’s enough of them—one will get lucky.”

“Well, what are we going to do, Skip? Wait for Doc and Chalker? They’re not supposed to move until they see us in the control room.”

“I’m thinking of an aerial attack,” I told him. “Along with artillery.”

*   *   *

Precisely two minutes later, Larry sprayed covering fire while I retreated back down the motor platform. When I reached the last row, I tucked and rolled across the platform, dropped down to the deck, and began making my way forward along the starboard side. Steam was continuing to pour from the hose, but it was too high to camouflage me. I stayed as low as I could manage as I came in sight of the forward railing where the hijackers had clustered.

Three men, two in blue coveralls and a third in khaki, were huddled behind a thicket of pipes running from the deck to the upper reaches of the ship. Their guns were pointed roughly in the direction of Larry, who was trying to keep their attention without running out of ammo.

There was so much water vapor in the compartment that it started to rain. My hands were already sopping wet, and I was worried about losing my grip on the rifle. I wiped them one at a time on my pants, which made them marginally drier, then stepped out and quickly took aim at my target—the water pipes running along the top of the catwalk where my enemies were huddled.

My plan was simple—I’d shoot through the pipes, releasing a spray of steam similar to the one that Larry had used to lay out the other hijacker earlier. As the gunmen scrambled backward, I would hustle to the crane controls and move the chains in on them. There was a long pipe boom that looked like it could be lowered and swung directly into them.

But just as I stepped out, the ship’s bow pushed into a massive dip, then immediately bucked upward. I lost my balance and fell flat on my back.

Luckily, the hijackers were also shaken by the wave and stumbled on the catwalk. And just like in the old days, Larry stepped up and took charge. He took aim at the pipe and did my job for me. A new spray of water and steam engulfed the hijacker goons.

I got to my feet and bolted to the nearby control panel. Pushing the safety cage from the power switch, I yanked hard on the master control for the arm, expecting it to swing down toward the deck. But the mechanism was arranged differently than any overhead cargo controller I’d worked before, and instead of dropping, the boom began riding its tracks toward the stern. I reversed its course quickly, and pushed the other lever, thinking it would lower the pipe. Instead, this made the pipe go marginally faster. Spotting a slider at the far end, I pushed that. The pipe ratcheted toward the top of the compartment, squealing with a loud clank as it hit its stops. I reversed it, then barely ducked in time as the chains that were attached to the boom swung in my direction.

The ship pitched again, and I found myself flying forward on the deck, sliding against the casing of the machine; the chains and their large hooks and pulleys crashed downward, then wrapped themselves against the rails of the catwalk. Two of the hijackers fell off the opposite end as they tried to escape, slipping on the wet metal; the third was caught in the tangle of chains.

Larry reloaded and began dueling with the remaining hijackers. Hoping to get them from the side, I scrambled toward the ladder to the catwalk. I was about halfway up when the ship nosed down hard again, mashing my face into a tread and smashing my hand and gun on the side. Being a modern ship, the
Bon Voyage
was undoubtedly equipped with active and passive stabilizing systems, but the inexperienced crew either wasn’t employing the gear properly or the storm was simply too much for them. The motion continued, sending loose material—and bodies—sliding across the compartment. I finally managed to get up to the top catwalk. Seeing the men firing at Larry through the steam, I dropped the first, winged the second, and then it was my turn to be surprised as the rifle jammed.

Kalashnikovs never, ever jam. Say what you want about the Russians, but they know how to make good, extremely simple weapons. I had the pleasure of meeting Mikhail Kalashnikov while performing a job for the Department of Justice in St. Petersburg a year ago. Two huge rooms in the Artillery Museum there are devoted to his work; you could spend hours there. The general was feisty and colorful; he reminded me of our own Navy Admiral Rickover: smart and cocky.

So:

Kalashnikovs never jam.

And yet, this one did. It was my
second
AK47 jamming in a little more than a week. What are the odds? And how does Murphy play them so dramatically?

The hijacker stared at me. I looked at him. I prayed for another sharp dive of the bow or a hard rock to port and swing to starboard, but we were in a momentary lull.

The raghead calmly lifted his rifle and pointed in my direction. I tried to take a step back, but my way was blocked by the rail. The bastard grinned and squinted his eye to focus his aim through the iron sights.

His head exploded before he could press the trigger. Doc had come down through the control room.

“You owe me a beer,” snapped Doc. “And dry-cleaning money. I got gore on the cuff of my pants.”

“That’s why you should never wear cuffs,” said Larry, trotting up.

“Did you power up the remote?” I asked Doc.

“No.”

“Well, turn it on and let’s take over the ship.”

“There’s something you have to see first.”

*   *   *

Hearing what they suspected were gunshots above the hum of the engines, Chalker and Doc had entered the control room and quickly dispatched the hijackers to their private paradise. There was surprisingly little blood on the control consoles, which made sorting out the high-tech screens and control widgets that much easier.

But even if it had been drenched in blood, one unit would have stood out immediately—a suitcase-sized box of radio transmitters that were set up as detonators. The hijackers had apparently placed plastique explosive charges around the ship.

“That’s easy to deal with,” I said, inspecting it. It was homemade from several remote radio controllers, clever but not overly innovative. An ambitious thirteen-year-old with a screwdriver and soldering iron could have done the same. “We’ll just power it down and decommission it.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Doc. “Then I found this.”

He led me across the compartment to another console used to monitor the turbine. The panel at its base was loose. Doc pulled it away—gingerly.

“Two packets of Czech C4,” he said, pointing down at a small but extremely powerful bomb. “Vintage stuff. Looks like it’s wired right.”

The most interesting—or alarming—part of the bomb wasn’t the radio connection that would allow it to be detonated from a distance, but the extra circuitry to a watch face.

“Timer backup,” said Doc. “I’m just guessing, but I think those numbers mean we have about twenty hours to the failsafe boom time. That gets us to the coast and a little beyond. But check this out.” Doc bent down. “There’s a second timer wired into the master circuitry. It’s set for twenty seconds. And it has its own battery. It’s another failsafe—a tamper safety. Boom if somebody tries to disable it and does the wrong thing. To get rid of it you’ll have to know what you’re doing.”

“That leaves you dumb ol’ bastards out,” said Larry, strutting over. “Let me take a look.”

He bent down and examined it. The frowns grew deeper the longer he stared.

“I need a penknife. A beer wouldn’t hurt either.”

Doc supplied the penknife. No beer was available. Just as well, though—Larry has been “dry” for well over ten years. Truly a miracle when you consider how long he’s been working with me: he survived SEAL Two, SEAL Six, Red Cell, and Red Cell International. (Rest assured, he does more than just hang around getting into trouble with yours truly; he’s a partner in his own company, Training Resources International, or TRI, where he works on anything that goes
boom.
)

Larry gently pried two small and tightly twisted wires apart at the edge of the circuit board. I felt my heart jump into my throat as the knife slipped and Larry winced, and picked up the knife.

“No boom, no foul,” he said. “I’ll try again. Hold your breath and pray. Not you, Dick,” he added. “God hears you praying he may have a heart attack.”

Larry flicked his wrist. The knife point jerked against the wire. There was a spark.

Then nothing.

Not the
big
nothing. Just … nothing.

“Whew,” said Doc. He laughed. “See? Nothing to it.”

“Yeah—nothing,” said Larry sarcastically. He showed us the second clock face—it had counted down to thirteen.

“The problem isn’t dealing with the bombs,” Larry explained, rising with the device in his hand. “The problem is finding them all. From the looks of that panel, there could be as many as a hundred of the damn things. Miss the wrong one, and one of those turd brains who took over the ship can put a pretty good-sized hole in it. These can be detonated by any radio device that knows the frequency, and I’m sure they have more than one.”

I went over to the control console. Besides the array of instruments and devices for checking every system on the ship, there were also displays that duplicated the navigational units up in the wheelhouse. We could see not only our present position, but where we had been, and, more importantly, where we were going. I rechecked the course. We were still on the same line we’d been on earlier.

“Norfolk,” said Doc, looking over my shoulder. “Blow the ship and block the channel.”

“Mmmm. Failsafe won’t go off for a few hours beyond that.”

“Gives them a margin for error.”

Sinking the cruise ship near the harbor at Norfolk would certainly cause a serious pain in the rumpus for the navy, but that wasn’t the way these types generally thought. They liked flash and sparkle, along with civilian casualties.

Economic disruptions. Panic that leveraged the damage of the event itself.

Headlines.

Like the sort you would get if you went past Norfolk and kept going all the way to the Liquefied Natural Gas Port at Cove Point.

Blow the ship up at the right spot, and you might get a nice flare that could be captured for any number of prime-time news shows around the world. You’d also generate lasting publicity. Plans to expand the port were already controversial, and you could bet that an “event” would live on in the hearts and minds of many for decades. It would be another Three Mile Island—and not coincidentally, a free advertisement for al Qaeda and its far-flung worshipers.

To say nothing of the innocent lives that would be lost in the process.

“Could be,” said Doc. “Either way, we have to stop it. And that’s one hell of a storm we’re steering into,” he added, pointing at the huge red ball on the screen of the monitor to the right. “These waves we’re getting are only at the leading edge.”

As if to punctuate his weather analysis, the ship tilted abruptly forward. I grabbed the metal handhold nearby and held on as we pitched back the other way.

“Jackasses probably learned to sail in the air farce,” mocked Larry.

I had thought we’d disable the bridge control, radio for help, then take out the hijackers in small groups. But radioing or interfering with the controls would tip them off that we were here. Better to go after them systematically until they realized we were here.

It sounded like a good plan as the words came out of my mouth. But what’s the old saw about battle plans? They become obsolete the moment the first gunshot is fired.

This one didn’t even last that long.

“Two guys coming down the ladder,” said Chalker, ducking into the control room. “They’re only armed with pistols, but one of them has a walkie-talkie.”

3

(I)

Doc joined Chalker at the door, while Larry and I retreated back into the engine compartment, aiming to circle around and attack from the corridor. We moved quickly, but by the time we reached the compartment, Doc had already grabbed one of the hijackers as he came into the control room. The other had been shot through the neck by Chalker.

“Did he use the radio?” I asked Doc.

“I don’t think so. They’ll figure something’s up soon enough, though. It’s squawking with Chinese.”

“Arabic,” said Larry, taking the radio. “They’re asking what’s going on.”

“Can you answer?” I asked him.

“My Arabic’s not going to sound that good,” said Larry. “It’s hard to sound like these guys. That’s the first thing you learn in language school.”

“Make it sound muffled,” suggested Doc. “Better ’n nothin’.”

We went into the engine room and gave it a try. With Doc making static noises in the background, Larry told the others that things were OK.

The other person on the line immediately asked where he was. Even louder static practically drowned out Larry’s answer that he was on the dog deck.

Dog deck?

“I thought it would confuse them,” he explained.

We moved the bodies into the engine room then returned to the control area to figure out what to do next. We could systematically go through the ship, but to do that effectively we’d have to leave the control room. Larry said he thought he could disable it without making it obvious. I told him to get to work on it.

“We need reinforcements,” said Doc, staring at the walkie-talkie. “What about the rest of the crew? Not all of them could have been plants. If we can find them, at least a few would be able to help us, don’t you think?”

“Hell, some of the passengers could help, too,” said Larry.

“Most of them are over the hill,” said Doc.

“No farther than you.”

Doc blinked. I’m sure in his head he’s still twenty years old.

It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best option we had.

“It’s not a bad idea,” I told the others. “As long as we do it the right way.”

“I agree,” said Larry. “It has to be planned out and executed just right.”