Trident Force (29 page)

“Roger.”

 

Shivering, his teeth chattering, Cagayan had ducked into a linen locker at the aft end of the third deck while the Trident Force was moving into position to cover MacNeal. He used a sheet to wipe the slush off his face, then took a deep breath and held it when he heard a group of passengers hurry by, headed for the dining room. One of them kept reminding the others, in a strident voice, that without the lifeboats they would all die.

It felt good to shoot those men, he thought, and now was the time to move on. He listened carefully, his ear pressed to the door, and heard nothing. He opened it and stepped out into the passageway. To his right he could hear the growing rumble from the dining room. That would be his final stop. He would walk down to its entrance and detonate the bomb in front of them. Tell them, if necessary, just what he had done. But before, he wanted one more jolt of power. He turned to the left, certain that more passengers would come along.

He heard talking up ahead. Up ahead and off to one side, in a cabin. He checked his rifle and then dashed down the passageway and through the open door of the cabin, swinging the AK-47—which was as big as he was—in front of him.

There was a media team there. The blond reporter along with video and sound guys. With them was that singer. With a shout he jumped through the door, swinging the rifle from side to side as he did.

The video guy immediately swung his camera in Cagayan's direction, while expressions of shock, then horror, crossed Chrissie's and Jessica's faces. Marcello Cagayan smiled into the camera then pulled the trigger, and the room was filled with a thunderous, pulsing roar.

 

“Oh my God!” cried a man, one of the many hundreds jammed into the dining room. “Somebody's shooting in the corridor.”

Unease, uncertainty, flashed into even greater fear. Where could they go? What could they do? They were trapped here, barely able to move, unable to escape. They were sitting targets waiting to be shot down. The fear turned to panic, and hundreds—some sobbing and crying, a few screaming—struggled to get out. Through the doors to the galley. Through the one door leading out onto the weather deck. Anywhere but through the main entrance, where the firing was coming from. Ellison and the three armed deckhands under his control struggled to keep them in, but it was to no avail. Within seconds the passageway and the deck were filled with passengers fleeing in all directions. Most had no destination in mind. All they wanted to do was get out of that trap.

“Get in here!' shouted Tim as he struggled to drag Dana and Katie into a booth along one side of the room, out of the lethal flood of terrified passengers. “Hang on! Pull!”

Dana made it. Katie did not. Caught by the torrent, she was torn from Tim's grasp and carried downstream until she stumbled and fell, overrun by the raging current.

 

Cagayan looked down at the forms crumpled before him. It was nice to be able to look down on people. Especially the singer, who still seemed alive. He looked into her hazel eyes and saw pain and fear, and it gave him another jolt of pleasure. She'd been hot stuff an hour ago but not anymore. He raised his rifle and watched her eyes follow it. He slammed the butt into her face then jumped back, momentarily surprised at the amount of blood that erupted from her mouth. Elated, he turned and sprang out into the passageway, where he turned to face the mob of terrified passengers. So confused were they by now that some were trying to force their way toward him while most were trying to get away, all so desperate to be someplace they weren't that they were knocking one another down and running over the fallen. He opened fire and watched them crumple as he forced the living back toward the dining room.

Suddenly, all seemed to go silent as the crashing booms of the rifle blasts in the enclosed space stopped. It was now possible again to hear the terrified sobs and shouts of the victims.

“Shit,” mumbled Cagayan as he withdrew the empty clip and fumbled in the pocket of his coat for a fresh one.

Ray Fuentes, his leg throbbing, his head spinning and his stomach churning, leaned against one of the bulkheads in the cabin. He knew Cagayan was at most twenty feet down the passageway to his left. By pressing his head against the bulkhead, he could peer out the door and see that all the passengers were some distance to his right, piled up at the door to the dining room. If only he could hold himself together for another minute, he would have a clear field of fire.

Gritting his teeth, Fuentes edged around the door frame into the passageway and jammed his left side up against the bulkhead as he pushed his Glock before him with both hands.

So intent was Cagayan on reloading that he never noticed the figure dressed in blue coveralls who oozed out of the cabin, steadied himself and discharged five heavy .45-caliber rounds at almost point-blank range, tearing the scrawny monster's chest to pieces and blasting the mangled remains back several feet.

 

The passageway was still thick with smoke when Alex reached it, Mike and Jerry not far behind. With her eyes focused intently on the pile of rags and blood and her trigger finger tense, she approached Cagayan. One close look assured her he was absolutely dead. She then walked over to Ray and crouched beside him. “You okay?”

“No worse than I was an hour ago.”

“I'll get Dr. Savage.”

“Just get me into the bed in that cabin. Dr. Savage doesn't have time right now for me.”

After getting Ray onto the bed, the three Tridents returned to the body and looked down at it. “Tiny mother,” remarked Jerry. He then knelt down and reached with two fingers into a blood-soaked pants pocket. “Here it is,” he remarked as he pulled the phone out.

The three looked at one another then nodded, in unspoken agreement. Jerry slowly opened the phone. “Four, four, four, four has been punched in,” he remarked. “I bet my pension that if I push call we'll all be blown to hell.”

“Please don't,” said Mike as Jerry carefully closed the phone and handed it to his boss.

There was the sound of a door opening at the far end of the corridor.

“Oh Christ!” There was a pause, then, “These three are gone. Get pressure on this girl's wounds. Stop the blood. Then we'll figure out what to do next.”

“Ellison, this is Savage,” squawked their walkie-talkies immediately thereafter. “You have any casualties in the dining room?”

“You'd better believe it!”

“How many?”

“Maybe twenty. Maybe more.”

“Get everybody out of there except the wounded . . . and any doctors or nurses we have aboard. I'm going to need a lot of help.”

“Ellison, this is Chambers,” cut in Mike. “Use the armed men from the ship's company to escort the passengers back to their cabins.”

“Roger.”

“God damn it!”

Mike turned and looked down the corridor to see Captain Covington standing in the passageway, looking in at Chrissie Clark. The captain's face, initially red from the weather, had turned white. “I don't know what to say,” he mumbled as he walked up to Mike. “It's good you were here. What, exactly, happened?”

Mike explained.

“It might be prudent to pass the word that nobody, under any circumstances, should touch their cell phones.”

“An excellent idea.”

“You think this is the end of it?” asked Covington after directing the mate of the watch to pass the word about cell phones.

“We've still got at least one explosive device to find.”

“Do you think Cagayan was alone?”

“I get that impression.”

 

When Mike returned to his suite several hours later, he found his team all there. Ted and Alex were doing stretching exercises, hoping they would help them unwind. Jerry was dozing, and Ray was established in one of the beds, totally out of it.

“Ray okay?” asked Mike.

“Dr. Savage says he'll be fine, someday,” explained Alex. “After they do a little work on his ankle. So what's the score, Boss?”

“The score,” said Mike, anger now flashing in his blue eyes, “is one maniac, one drug dealer and one deckhand dead and one wounded; eleven passengers and three media persons dead and thirty passengers wounded; one dead congressman and a ship that might very well self-destruct at any time.”

“Ship's still afloat, sir,” offered Ted, trying to be positive.

“What about the singer?” asked Alex.

“Alive. Dr. Savage says she'll probably make it, but she'll need a tremendous amount of reconstructive surgery.”

“And the little girl who got trampled?”

“A broken arm and a few bruises. Captain Covington's hoping to medevac the worst cases out this afternoon, assuming the weather doesn't get much worse. And another tour ship, the
Polar Duchess
is headed south from Ushuaia. We'll probably rendezvous tonight.”

“We going to be able to transfer the passengers under these conditions?” asked Jerry with a skeptical tone.

“Probably not unless we have no choice, but at least she has boats and she'll be with us.”

“Captain,” said Ted, “a day or so ago I remember Mr. Acosta mentioning something about that fuel tank near the void Cagayan stuffed Hensen into.”

“What?”

“He was explaining about how stubborn Mr. Montalba can be at times, and he mentioned that during the overhaul the chief wanted the yard to inspect the outlet and siphon in that tank but somehow it didn't get on the original work order list. At first the yard didn't want to do it, but Montalba made such a scene they finally went ahead and drained the tank and inspected the siphon. Since it was in good shape and no work had to be done they didn't bother to gas-free it, they just closed it up again. He's not even sure it made it to the final list, since it was really a very minor item and it was still a sore point with a couple of the yard's supervisors.”

“And I'm the one who keeps saying whatever we're looking for was probably placed during the overhaul . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not only are you a credit to the SEALs, you're also a credit to all the shipfitters in the navy.”

“Kind of you, sir.”

“Jerry!”

“Sir?”

“Ready for a swim?”

“Always, Captain.”

“I'll tend,” offered Alex.

“I've got another job for you. I want you to go through the chief engineer's records of who signed off on what during the past few days. I want a complete list of all the spaces Cagayan supposedly searched.”

“I can see how we're going to spend the rest of the trip,” remarked Alex. “Where's the cell phone?”

“In Captain Covington's safe.”

 

Jerry Andrews, dressed in a black dry suit, stood and watched as Mike and Ted finished unbolting the inspection port into fuel tank number two. Once the cover was removed, Kim Ackerman shined a flashlight down into the hole, revealing the ugly brown surface of the diesel about ten feet down. It certainly wasn't Jerry's first dive into a fuel tank, but he hoped it would be his last. The stuff didn't move right, didn't feel right, and if it got to your skin you ended up with a nasty rash.

“The bottom of the tank's about twelve or thirteen feet below the surface,” said Mr. Acosta as he lowered a Jacob's ladder into the hole. “And the baffles are ten feet high and ten apart,” he added, referring to the low walls built into the tank to prevent all the oil from moving at once when the ship rolled, thereby endangering the ship's stability.

Jerry gave him the thumbs-up sign then turned to Kim. “Okay. My helmet, please.”

Kim checked to ensure that air was flowing from the two big, steel bottles they had rolled into position, then fitted the fiberglass helmet over Jerry's head and locked it closed.

“You read me, Jerry?” asked Mike into the communicator.

“Roger,” said Jerry, “going down.”

After picking up the wand for the sonar search system—its cable was bundled into the umbilical with the air hose and communication wire—the master diver started down the ladder with Kim carefully tending his umbilical. The ship rolled, causing the ladder to sway and the oil to shift slowly. Seeming to pay little attention, Andrews continued down into the pitch-black pool then stepped off the ladder and started to sink, only to come to a shuddering halt with his helmet and shoulders still above the surface. “Damn it, my butt landed on one of the baffles,” he said as his helmet tilted forward and he disappeared.

“I've reached the forward end of the tank,” he reported a minute or so later. “I'm proceeding to the starboard side and starting there.”

“Roger.”

“I'm between the starboard side of the tank and the first baffle. I'll start waving the wand. You be sure to tell me the second you spot an irregularity, so I can check it out. The visibility's zero or less.”

While Ted and Acosta kept their eyes focused on the sonar display, Mike hung upside down through the port and, using a brilliant, halogen light, studied every square inch of the tank that was visible.

“Be sure to give me plenty of slack,” said Jerry. Kim complied, making sure the buoyant umbilical was floating out and over the baffles before plunging down to the diver.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm all the way aft. I'm going to start down between the first and second baffles now.”

“Roger.”

“Damn!” grumbled Jerry three passes later. “I think I just tripped over the siphon.”

“Okay,” said Mike. “Mr. Acosta, please pay special attention now and see if you can spot any irregularities when he scans the siphon.”