[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (47 page)

“Negative. It was an Impala.”

“We’re trying to look at recent rentals, but there are a ton of those things. I’m sending someone over to the roof of C, to try to get a closer look, maybe a plate.”

“We’re going to come back down,” said Karen. “There are no other cars near us, and I’m afraid—”

Karen stopped talking as a pair of gunshots echoed above. Junior jumped out of the car, pistol first. The radio exploded with curses and traffic. Another vehicle raced up from the bottom, as did two of the FBI task force team that had been shadowing Habib.

Junior ran to the stairway to the top level. He took the stairs two at a time, leaping onto the top level and racing across the roof.

A man was leaning over a body about ten feet away. He dropped something, then straightened immediately.

Junior skidded to a knee.

“Drop your gun!” he yelled.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” replied the man. He held his hands out. “Calm down now. Calm down.”

“Get away from the body. What did you drop?”

“I didn’t drop anything.”

“You’re Magoo,” said Junior. “CIA.”

Magoo still had his pistol in his hand. He started to move it in Junior’s direction.

Junior fired. He hit him in the shoulder—he was actually aiming for his head—and Magoo fell backward, dropping the gun.

“CIA, CIA,” gasped Magoo, unleashing a stream of curses as the FBI team swarmed around him and Junior. “I have a terror suspect—I shot a terror suspect. Damn. Damn, why the hell did you guys hit me. There’s a plot—they’re going to blow up a national building. Damn. Your kid shot me. Your guy shot me.”

“He planted that gun,” said Junior, pointing to the pistol Magoo had tossed down.

Habib, meanwhile, lay bleeding from a pair of bullet holes to the head. By the time Karen reached the roof, one of the FBI agents had retrieved a sweatshirt from his car and put it over his mangled head.

“Ambulance is on the way,” said one of the FBI agents, pointing to Magoo. She could already hear the siren in the distance. “I don’t think it’s life-threatening. We gave him first aid.”

“Right.”

“A lot of people are going to have questions about your shooter,” he said.

“I understand.”

“CIA officer says he picked up the gun, then realized he shouldn’t have,” added the agent. “It was a mistake.”

“I don’t think so,” said Karen. She glanced around, then realized that Junior had run off. “Damn it.”

“Something wrong?”

“Just your typical SNAFU,” she told the agent wearily.

(V)

I stood on the bridge of the
Bon Voyage.
The world around me was dark. My ears were filled with the guttural howl of the ocean. My first thought was that I was on my way back to the womb—a poetic way of saying that some bastard had blown up the bridge and I was on my way to my just reward.

But then I realized it was nothing so dramatic as all that: Murphy had just turned off the lights. A bolt of lightning had struck the
Bon Voyage,
wiping out the main power circuits. This is not particularly easy to do, and our friend Murphy had undoubtedly stayed up for days on end figuring on how to deliver the bolts that took it down. Then again, given all the lightning that was flashing around us, maybe the odds were with him all the time.

My bearings back in an instant, I started moving toward the chart room when someone hit me from the side and I went down. It was one of the hijackers. Severely wounded by Larry, the man had staggered with the roll of the ship and fallen against me and then to the deck. By the time I figured that out and got to my feet, Scarface was escaping through the captain’s quarters.

I started after him as the emergency lighting system began flickering on and off. A sharp flash of light and loud boom drove me back—Scarface or one of his guards had thrown a flash-bang to cover his retreat.

Behind me, Larry was rallying the bridge crew to the controls. They got the auxiliary power on and took over, changing course south and radioing an SOS.

In his haste to get off the bridge alive, Scarface had abandoned a backpack with gear. Besides a pistol and some spare ammo, there was a radio remote control and a sheaf of papers. In with the papers were diagrams of the ship with Xs in various compartments, along with numbers.

“Gotta be where they put the bombs,” said Larry. “Look. Even tells you how many there are in each compartment. Four in that bar we were in—two to a post.”

Besides the bridge, they had concentrated on two levels—the one with the bar area that we’d found, and the lowest deck where the engines were. Though the simplistic maps didn’t detail the precise location in each compartment, just knowing which places to look made things easier.

Three dozen spots, including the bridge.

“Bring them to a central location, and I’ll disable them together,” Larry told the mate. “You don’t have to be too gentle with them, as long as you don’t break the wires.”

Larry decided that the safest place to dismantle them would be on the top deck at the center of the ship, where presumably the blast would do the least structural damage. There would still be an awful lot of explosive in one place, but he was the expert and I wasn’t about to argue with him. The mate detailed two of his crew to search for them, then sent another crewman to look for more help. Larry and I left guns and ammo, and went to follow Scarface.

We could tell from the radios that Scarface was moving toward the stern of the ship, but it wasn’t clear who was with him.

Doc and Chalker were listening to the same transmissions. Doc set up an ambush in the Front Office, a space used on the port side of the ship to welcome passengers and deal with administrative matters. We were close enough to hear the gunfire as we ran aft, though it was a deck above us. Larry and I waited until it had died down to go up to the corridor adjacent to the Front Office.

“Doc!” I yelled as we neared the space. “It’s me.”

“Who the hell else would you be?” he growled from inside.

There were eight bodies on the deck and the nearby furniture. Seven were hijackers, the eighth one of the crewmen who had joined Doc. The poor slob had been shot by the bastards as they came down a narrow spiral staircase at the corner of the Front Office. His death was not in vain: once the hijackers had shot him, they thought they were clear, and ran across toward the corridor where we’d come in and where Doc had an easy shot from behind the administrator’s long desk.

“We have more crewmen above,” Doc told me. “Chalker’s organizing them into search parties. We have the extra arms.”

“How many more hijackers?”

“Not too many, if at all,” said Doc. “There hasn’t been any traffic on the radio since this bunch came through.”

I told Doc to go down to the engine room to make sure that the hijackers didn’t try retaking it. Once he was sure it was secured, he could bring the bombs up to the rendezvous point. Larry gave him the papers that showed which compartments they’d been planted in.

“Hell, I’ll just disarm the damn things in place,” said Doc. “You’re not the only one who knows how to blow shit up.”

“The idea is that they
don’t
blow up,” I snapped.

“Ha-ha.”

Actually, I had full confidence in Doc, who if anything is more careful than I. Larry and I resumed our search. Within a few minutes we came across another group of crew members and passengers, all unarmed.

“I don’t have weapons for you,” I told them. “Your safest bet would be to go back to your cabins.”

“The hell with that,” said one of the passengers, a gray-haired senior who was their unofficial spokesman. “We’ll tear these bastards apart with our bare hands.”

That was a sentiment I could appreciate. Still, I didn’t want them to get hurt—or get in the way. I decided to have them search out the rest of the bombs in the public areas of the ship. Larry would go and start disarming the bombs.

“You’re going to track Scarface by yourself?” asked Larry.

“I think we better neutralize the bombs quickly,” I told him. “Scarface isn’t going anywhere—he can’t get off the ship. But maybe he’s got another detonator somewhere.”

“He’d have blown us up already.”

“Maybe not. We have the main one. He’s going for the backup.”

“I don’t know.”

“Go. Come back and join me once the rest of the bombs are disabled. There are only eight up here.”

“Not counting the four in the GalleyPlex.” Larry tapped the papers that showed where they were.

“Save that for last. I’ll radio you with the word ‘casino’ when I’m about to go in. Give me an ETA when you hear it.”

“OK.”

“If you don’t get back to me, I’ll assume I’m on my own.”

“If I don’t get back to you, you will be.”

*   *   *

The next forty minutes passed slowly, as I checked through the public areas amidships, gradually working my way toward the stern and the large GalleyPlex.

I met Chalker and his motley band of rescued crewmen and passengers on the pool deck, in the enclosed space overlooking
une piscine.
The ship wasn’t jerking around nearly as wildly as it had earlier, but it was still moving enough to get miniature whitecaps on the pool surface. I told him to get below and help Doc secure the engine room and finish locating the explosives. He gave me a thumbs-up and herded his people to one of the service passageways.

The rain was coming down even harder now. The ship was on auxiliary power, and here and there some of the backup lights weren’t working. Even in the areas that were, the lighting was dim until I came to the passage outside the casino. The casino and GalleyPlex had its own dedicated backup generator, and it was going full bore. The place looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

I made the radio call. “Casino.”

“Five,” responded Larry.

“Engines,” said Doc, checking in from the control compartment next to the engine room. He and his band had encountered two more hijackers along the way; both were now dead. Doc and company were now working to try and get the power back on line.

It was pretty clear that Scarface and whoever was with him were the only miscreants left. But even if he didn’t have another detonator, the ship was large enough that he could hide for days, and maybe even run an effective guerilla war against us until help came. So I decided that the best way to forestall that was to flush him out, and the best way to do
that
was to let him think he was outsmarting me.

“Doc, this is Dick Marcinko,” I said over the radio. “I’m going into the GalleyPlex through the starboard side entrance. I’ll cross over to port, then come down and meet you.”

Doc must have realized what I was up to, because he didn’t radio back. That or he concluded I’d completely lost my mind.

I got down on my knees and eased through the open portal into the casino—on the port side, of course. Crawling down a row of one-armed bandits, I made my way to the roulette table at the end. I was just peeking out to get a view of the door when Scarface’s amplified voice filled the hall.

“So who is this Richard Marcinko, I ask myself. An egotist from America.” Scarface’s French accent added just the right touch of sarcasm to his English. “Why is it that I do not know him? Because he is an ant to be crushed, and nothing more.”

Ow.

Checking my six to make sure I wasn’t being flanked, I crossed behind the roulette table and moved up to the archway separating the casino deck from the steps that led down to the GalleyPlex. The furniture normally arranged around the deck had tumbled into a massive jam on the starboard side of the space, leaving most of the deck open. At first glance, I thought Scarface was hiding in the tumble, but when his voice boomed again, I realized he was on the highest balcony at the stern. He had a microphone, a gun, and two female passengers, whom he’d flex-cuffed to the railing.

“A gray-haired egotist warrior,” he yelled, practically laughing.

“It’s a dye job,” I shouted back.

There was a whistle behind me. Larry and four liberated crewmen had arrived to back me up. I retreated to explain what was going on.

“We have all of the bombs that were on the upper decks neutralized,” he told me. “Except for the ones in here. That’s six bombs. Enough to put an iceberg-sized hole in the stern.”

“They should all be above the waterline,” I said. “Doc’s working on the ones below.”

“Even if Doc finishes, we can’t take a risk, Dick. Some of the bomb clusters we found were doubled and tripled up. That much explosive—if it does any sort of structural damage to the boat, we’re going down. Hell, look at the way the rain is pounding those windows. The waves are reaching the second tier. We might go down on our own.”

“Where do you think the bombs are?”

“Against the bulkheads to blow open the ship so it can’t be fixed or patched quickly. The idea was to cave it in. Here they might just be trying blow a big hole. At least they’re easy to spot. They’re too big to hide, mostly.”

“I didn’t see any in the casino,” I told Larry.

“Let me have a look.”

Larry scanned the most obvious places without finding anything. Then we went to the archway and looked into the GalleyPlex. After a few moments of thought, Larry decided that most of the bombs must be tied to the base of the large ribs at the side of the space—four on the port side, and two to starboard. Sure enough, I spotted what looked like a big black box at the base of the nearest rib. When I say big, I mean large—it was suitcase-sized.

“Could be over a hundred pounds of plastic in there, easy,” said Larry. “Maybe two hundred or three. Big, big hole.”

“Yeah, I agree with that.”

“I can get them if you can distract him,” Larry promised. “There are doors next to each one. All I need to do is sneak in from the door, undo the tape that attaches them to the wall, then take them back out into the passage.”

“You’re sure they’re going to be taped? What if they’re chained?” I couldn’t see all the way to the base.

“The ones below were taped.”

The plan made sense—especially since I didn’t have a better one.