Allah's Scorpion (16 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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APURTO DEVLÁN,
GATUN LOCKS
The
Apurto Devlán
eased slowly into the middle lock leading to Lake Gatun fifteen minutes before one in the morning, slightly ahead of schedule. A second Panamax vessel, this one a cruise ship, was in the lock ahead of them and more than twenty-five feet higher and rising.
She was a Carnival ship, out of Miami, which gave Graham a particular pleasure. When he pressed the detonator code, not only would the
Apurto Devlán
go up in a ball of flame, completely destroying the Gatun locks, but the cruise ship would also be wiped out, killing Americans. Probably even more than died in the World Trade Center attacks.
“Engines Back All Slow,” Sanchez told al-Tashkiri.
“Back All Slow.” Al-Tashkiri acknowledged the order, just as he had been taught to do.
Ramati was starting to become agitated. Graham glanced over and slowly shook his head. His first officer acknowledged the warning with a nod. The ship would never leave this lock, and everyone aboard except for the Panamanian pilot knew it.
The ship’s engines responded to the order, and her forward momentum bled off as her bows approached the forward gate, and the stern mules took up the slack, keeping her centered.
“Stop All Engines,” Sanchez ordered softly.
“All Engines Stop,” al-Tahskiri responded. He was sweating, his face dripping, his khaki shirt soaked at the armpits and across the back.
The pilot looked at him, then went to the port wing to check their clearance aft.
“Get a hold of yourself,” Graham whispered urgently to al-Tashkiri.
When the pilot came back, he keyed his walkie-talkie. “Gatun Control,
Apurto Devlán
ready for number-two closure.” He held the walkie-talkie to his ear momentarily to hear the response then keyed the Talk button. “Roger,” he said. He looked pointedly at al-Tashkiri, and then Ramati. It was obvious he sensed that something was wrong.
From the moment they’d raised anchor and slowly made their way north up the seven-mile channel past docks, shipyards, and fueling stations, the pilot had been edgy. He’d not engaged in any conversation, other than to issue orders, and from time to time he gave them odd, searching looks.
“Are we in position, Mr. Sanchez?” Graham asked to distract the man. They only needed a few more minutes in case Gatun Control had something else to speak to Sanchez about.
“Yes,” the pilot said. “Mr. Sozansky, are you feeling well?”
It took a moment for al-Tashkiri to realize that the pilot was addressing him. He turned and nodded. “Yes, sir. Just fine.”
“Is this your first transit?”
Graham reached for his pistol.
“No, sir,” al-Tashkiri said. “I’ve been here before.”
Graham motioned for Ramati to move out of the line of fire.
The pilot pointed to the sweat stains on al-Tashkiri’s shirt. “You seem a little nervous to me.”
Graham’s hand tightened on the pistol in his pocket.
Al-Tashkiri choked out a strangled laugh. “Yes, sir. I’m always nervous. I’ve been this way since I was a little boy in … Poland.”
Sanchez shot a look at Graham as if to say it was the captain’s fault if a crewman was so nervous he was drenched in sweat at the helm. But then the massive steel gates began to close astern, and the pilot went again to the port wing to check clearances.
Graham snatched the ship’s phone from its cradle and called the engine room. “We’re done with the engines. It will happen very soon.”
“Insh’allah,”
Hijazi said softly, and with great respect.
“Yes, God willing,” Graham told him. He hung up just as Sanchez came back.
The pilot laid his walkie-talkie on the shelf beneath the center windshield, took a thermos of coffee from his pack beside the helmsman, and poured a cup. He did not offer some to Graham or the others.
As soon as the gates behind them were closed, sealing off this lock, massive valves would be opened and water from Gatun Lake would rush into the chamber, rising the ship to the center level, more than fifty feet above the Caribbean, in about fifteen minutes.
At that point the lead gates would open, the cruise ship, which would
be twenty-five feet higher, would be disconnected from the mules and would sail out into Gatun Lake, leaving the chamber to be filled for the
Apurto Devlán.
Before that happened Graham wanted to be off the ship and well enough away to trigger the explosives.
The timing was tight, but manageable. He would make it so. He smiled.
“Mr. Slavin, I’ve been thinking,” the pilot said.
Not for long, Graham thought. “Yes, Mr. Sanchez.”
“I don’t remember your cousin. But I’m sure that I remember the name: Grigoriy Slavin.”
“I’m flattered,” Graham said. “There must be thousands of vessels through here each year.”
“More than fourteen thousand,” Sanchez said. He was looking at Graham over the rim of his coffee mug. “A figure that as a Panamax master you should know.”
Graham glanced behind him through the port windows. They were slowly rising. The valves had been opened. He smiled. “I’ve never been one for someone else’s exact numbers,” he said.
The pilot shook his head. “You’re not Grigoriy Slavin,” he said. “You’re an imposter.”
“Yes, I am,” Graham said. He took out his pistol, and before Sanchez could move or even speak, shot the man in the middle of the forehead, blood splashing across the port radar set.
The pilot’s head was flung backwards. He dropped his cup, which shattered on the steel deck, and his body bounced against the forward bulkhead as he fell on his side, dead.
Al-Tashkiri closed his eyes and began to rapidly mutter something. Graham figured he was praying, preparing his soul for Paradise.
Ramati, on the other hand, was highly animated, flinging his arms outstretched as if he simply could not contain himself. Graham had to briefly wonder if it had been like this for the crazy bastards in the last minutes of the flights that hit the World Trade Center.
Graham switched aim and fired at Ramati, the shot catching his number two in the middle of the chest.
Ramati staggered backwards, but he was still alive. He desperately clawed for his pistol in his pocket, when Graham fired again, hitting him in the right eye, the back of his skull disintegrating.
Graham turned and fired almost at point-blank range into the side of al-Tashkiri’s head as the kid opened his eyes and started to step away.
For several long seconds Graham listened to the sudden silence, as the
Apurto Devlán
continued to rise. But then he got his cell phone and hit a speed-dial button. When the call went through to the operative standing by on the
Nueva Cruz
, it was answered on the first ring.
“Sí.”
“¡Ahora!”
Graham said.
Now! “¡Ahora!”
“Sí,”
the man responded, and the connection was broken. Within minutes a small speedboat would be launched from the mother ship and come ashore.
Graham pocketed his cell phone and pistol, and went to the port wing as the ship continued to rise to the level of the mule tracks. The only people around were the canal operators in the control room, the mule drivers, and the canal workers who handled the lines.
No one would notice a lone man stepping ashore and disappearing into the darkness. And even if they did, by the time they reacted the ship would be gone in a brilliant flash of searing heat, and they would be dead.
 
 
RAPID RESPONSE TEAM BAKER
McGarvey and Herring had donned headsets so they could communicate with the flight crew. They’d flown low and fast straight south along the route of the canal, coming across Gatun Lake no more than twenty-five feet above the water, in excess of 140 knots. They were at hover two hundred meters out from the locks.
The side hatch was wide open, and Herring’s operators were ready to deploy. Two chopper crewmen manned the 7.62mm machine guns. There was no way Graham or anyone else was getting off the ship alive.
A cruise ship, all her lights ablaze, was in the forward lock, the
Apurto Devlán
right behind her in the middle lock.
“Do you see any activity on deck?” McGarvey radioed the pilot. The flight crew was wearing night-vision equipment.
“Two bad guys on deck, at the bow,” the pilot radioed back. “Look like line handlers.”
“What are they doing?”
“One of them is on his knees,” the pilot came back. He hesitated. “Almost looks as if he’s praying.”
“He is,” McGarvey told Herring. “It means they’re ready to pull the trigger. We have to take them down now.”
Herring motioned for his operators to lock and load. He radioed the pilot. “Take out the two bad guys on the bow as we pass over them. Set us down in front of the superstructure. Soon as we’re feet dry, I want you to dust off and stand by off the starboard midships. Anybody tries to jump ship, take them down. But watch out for the canal workmen ashore.”
“Wilco,” the pilot responded crisply.
Kulbacki had produced a ship’s diagram of the
Apurto Devlán
, and on the short flight down from Panama City he’d gone over the deployment orders with the team. The drill was a standard one that they’d practiced countless times on ship mock-ups in San Diego.
It was assumed that the Panamanian pilot would be topside on the bridge, so everyone on deck would be considered hostile and would be taken down.
A three-man team would head to the engine room, taking out anyone they encountered; their objective was to secure the engineering spaces from any kind of sabotage, including disabling the engines and/or the steering controls, before they swept the rest of the ship for terrorists.
Kulbacki would lead his team of three operators on a lightning-fast sweep, first to the twelve oil tanks to find and disable any explosive devices, and then into the bilges to look for kickers that might have been placed to take out the ship’s bottom and sink her in the middle of the lock. Their orders were to take down any and all hostiles they might encounter.
Herring would accompany McGarvey up to the bridge, taking down any bad guys they ran into, securing the Panamanian pilot, and subduing Graham without killing him, if at all possible.
“The knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, or wrists,” McGarvey said. “Anywhere but the head or torso.”
“That’ll be tough if he’s shooting at us,” Herring said. “You sure you don’t want to wear a vest? We brought one for you.”
McGarvey shook his head. “When he shoots it’ll be a headshot.”
The big helicopter suddenly banked hard to the left, the open hatch on the low side, and roared along the length of the cruise ship, the tips of its rotors clearing the ship’s gigs by less than ten meters.
Kulbacki and another man positioned in the hatch would be the first to hit the deck.
There were passengers on the promenade deck of the cruise ship. Some of them waved as the helicopter passed.
“Take out the two on the bow,” Herring radioed to the gun crew.
“Wilco,” someone responded.
A second later the pilot swung the tail around so that the nose gun was pointing at the men on the
Apurto Devlán
’s bow, and started to sideslip along the length of the open deck. Both machine guns opened fire at the same moment, and stopped almost immediately.
“Scratch two,” one of the gunners radioed.
The operator crouching next to Kulbacki in the open door suddenly lurched backwards.
“Incoming fire,” Kulbacki shouted, and he sprayed a deck hatch that was open amidships.
The helicopter set down hard just forward of the superstructure and immediately came under intense small-arms fire from somewhere aft. Small-caliber bullets pinged into the fuselage, and ricocheted off the ship’s deck.
Herring and another of the operators shoved McGarvey aside and hauled the downed man to his feet, as Kulbacki and the other SEALs exploded from the open hatch and laid down a heavy line of fire toward the port and starboard passageways.
The operator who’d taken a round in his chest armor would have a hell of a bruise by morning, but otherwise he was still good to go.
“Clear!” Kulbacki shouted.
McGarvey was next out of the chopper, rolling to the right so that he would be out of the way and in the shadows of the towering seven-story superstructure. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that the mule driver on the starboard bow had jumped out of his locomotive and was heading across the access road in a dead run.
Herring and the last operator jumped down on deck, and as soon as they were clear, the helicopter lifted off with a tremendous roar, banked almost over on its side, its rotors barely clearing the deck, and accelerated over the mule, while turning its nose gun back toward the ship.
Camera flashes were coming in a nearly continuous stream from the stern of the cruise ship twenty-five feet above them.
“Marchetti, go.” Herring pumped his left fist, and the three operators who would take care of the engineering spaces headed aft. They would leapfrog along the portside passageway, and thence into the ship and down the ladder, clearing the way ahead with flash-bang grenades, and then shooting anything that moved.
Kulbacki and his three men had already started forward to the product tank access hatches, to find and disarm the explosive charges. Each of them would take one tank, and with any luck they would run into light or no resistance and the job could be done in a few minutes.
If they did have to fire they would need even more luck that they wouldn’t inadvertently touch off an explosion in one of the tanks, which would set the others off like a string of firecrackers.
But, as Kulbacki had explained with a sardonic grin on the way down here, “That’s the chance we signed on for when we put on the uniform, sir.”
At that moment a light breeze sprang up, blowing the sounds of the chopper’s exhaust and rotor noise away, and the
Apurto Devlán
became as quiet as a ghost ship. The hairs at the nape of McGarvey’s neck stood on end.
It wasn’t this simple. They were forgetting something. He was forgetting something. Something in Graham’s file that the Brits had not yet sent to Otto. Something they were hiding?
“The next part is your show, Mr. McGarvey!” Herring shouted.
“Right,” McGarvey said. “The bridge.” He sprinted to the portside passageway, then aft to the first doorway. The hatch was open.
Two men dressed in dark blue coveralls, APURTO DEVLÁN stenciled on the backs, were down with headshots, blood spreading on the steel deck. Marchetti and the other SEALs heading down to the engine room had taken them down.
McGarvey hesitated only a moment to make sure they were dead. He didn’t want some fanatic filled with religious zeal coming up from behind. A tight-lipped Herring nodded his approval.
A stairway led six decks up to the bridge. McGarvey stopped at the first turn and motioned for Herring to hold up. He cocked an ear to listen for sounds from above. For a moment the ship was silent, but then he thought he heard someone talking.
Herring heard it too.
“Radio,” McGarvey mouthed the word. Probably from the bridge, which meant the door up there was open.
Herring nodded again, and McGarvey continued up, pausing for a moment at each turn, until they reached the third deck where someone from above opened fire, bullets ricocheting off the bulkheads, shrapnel flying everywhere.
McGarvey fell back and fired three shots up the stairs, aiming for the door frame to carom his shots off the steel plating into the corridor.
Someone cried out, and fired another burst from what sounded like an M8.
“Stay here,” McGarvey whispered to Herring. “I’m going to take the passageway one deck down across to the starboard side and see if I can get behind whoever’s shooting at us.”
“We don’t have much time,” Herring whispered.
“Keep them busy,” McGarvey said, and he turned and hurried down to the next deck, while above, Herring opened fire again.

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