Blown Circuit (2 page)

“Hello to you too,” I said.
 

Either he didn’t speak English, or I had just made him madder because he let go with a straight right. Though he was big and broad, I didn’t think he would be particularly fast. He acted more like a heavy hitter, a knockout punch kind of guy. He pulled back and threw a powerful right. I dodged the blow, but just barely, because he turned out to be a whole lot faster than I had initially reckoned. I heard the snap in his fist as it hit the airspace my head had occupied just an instant earlier.
 

Ninety seconds down. Ninety to go. The guy was three feet away and acting as if we had all the time in the world. Either he didn’t know that there was a bomb on the boat, or he didn’t mind being blown sky high. Either way, I had no time for subtlety. So I feinted with a left punch followed by a quick right straight punch to his solar plexus. It didn’t connect, because he sprung to the side, but that was exactly where I wanted him. I transferred my weight to my left leg, lowered my center of gravity, and swung my hips around in an explosive roundhouse kick.
 

With my left foot still firmly anchored on the ground, the ball of my right foot connected with the sailor’s center mass, propelling him into the corner of the cabin. Then, before he could react, I bolted through the cabin door. After that I took the stairs two at a time, sprinting into the night.

Chapter 2

M
Y
NAME
IS
Michael Chase. I’m twenty-six, about six foot three, just under two hundred pounds, and a contract employee of everybody’s favorite intelligence agency, the CIA. Seven months ago, my father went missing, presumed dead. A month after that, the Agency recruited me. It wasn’t your typical recruitment; they wanted me because they had received a message from my missing father. He was their agent and they had an op they needed to run fast. The carrot for me was the fact that the op might just mean a chance to find my missing dad. I signed up and the rest was history. My recruitment was rushed, my training was accelerated, the whole thing was pushed. It could have ended badly for everyone and even worse for me. But I got through the mission, and I got a little closer to finding my lost father.

My father’s next message had come as an NSA intercept. The folks at the National Security Agency passed it on to the CIA and then to me. Like the earlier contact, it was a pair of geographic coordinates. As soon as I’d received the message, I’d hopped on a plane, leaving Vietnam and connecting through Singapore to land at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. That was two days ago. Now I stood on the deck of an aging freighter, praying to anyone who would listen that my legs were fast enough to outrun a bomb.

Sixty seconds and counting. The mosques of old Istanbul were bathed in the orange glow of the city before me. I needed to get to the rope ladder that I had climbed to get aboard. That ladder hung three hundred feet ahead of me on the port side of the ship. The bridge above me lit up and I heard what sounded like an electric winch. That’s when I saw her.
 

She was about fifty feet away from the first of three deck cranes, standing in the shadows just beyond the light. I saw no more than her profile in silhouette. She was on the phone, talking, and that conversation clearly took precedence over me. She was slender and of medium height, and her hair, or what I could see of it, was tied up in a tight pony tail. I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was somebody else there with her, in the darkness, but before I could confirm the impression, the ship’s foghorn blasted through the night. It was followed by the crack of a bullet and a loud, guttural scream.

I turned to see a sailor tumble through the air from the bridge above. I didn’t wait to see him land. I just ran. I knew I had a hundred yards ahead of me and if I played it right, most of it would be in the shadows. I slipped my left arm through the other strap of my daypack and zigzagged across the deck. I didn’t know who had the gun, but I had no intention of leaving myself an easy target.

That’s when I saw an object in the middle of the deck. I had missed it coming aboard in the dark, but the thing looked like a tuning fork. A giant titanium tuning fork, approximately twenty feet high, but with three prongs instead of two. It was mounted to a pedestal, atop what resembled a large rubber mat. I didn’t have time to get a picture of it. I could see my ladder now, hanging off the side of the ship. Another bullet cracked through the night.

I glanced behind me, but the pool of light beneath the crane was empty. The woman was gone. I pumped my legs harder as I did the math. The deck of the ship sat maybe fifty feet above the water. The ladder led down, but it also represented a static target. There was a bomb on the boat. There was no need for any kind of complex equation. I needed to get off the ship, and I needed to get off it immediately.
 

 
A third shot rang out, even closer than the last. I had done the high jump in school. I knew how to arch my back and the rope ladder was coming up fast. A fourth shot rang out. It missed, but I knew I couldn’t stay lucky forever. So I headed directly for the railing of the ship and jumped. I placed my left hand on the rail and pushed off with my toes, using my momentum to carry me up and over the side of the vessel. As the air billowed my T-shirt, I briefly worried that I had miscalculated, that I would hit more than rough seas. But I didn’t. At least not then.

Chapter 3

T
WENTY
-
THREE
SECONDS
left. I hit the water off the side of the freighter more or less where I calculated I would, about five feet off the bow of the boat I had used to get there. I probably went underwater ten or eleven feet. As I kicked my way to the dark surface, I knew that my next challenge was to get the boat untied and out of there, before the guy with the gun could find me. My ride was an eighteen-foot inflatable Zodiac with a rigid hull and dual Yamaha two-fifties on the stern. Lots of power, but not a lot of protection. I reached the Zodiac’s inflatable sponson and pulled myself up and over. The bowline connected to a knotted rope on the ladder by way of a stainless-steel carabiner, so I crawled forward and snapped it open.
 

Eighteen seconds. Now that the inflatable was free, I already felt it drifting away from the side of the freighter. Moment of truth. I took two steps back to the center console and choked the engines before turning the key. The twin outboards started with a purr and I hit the throttle, turning in a tight, frothy turn away from the ship.
 

That was when the spotlight lit me up. It didn’t come from the ship, but from a smaller boat, several hundred feet behind me. Clearly, they had been lying in wait. A megaphone called out something in garbled Turkish and I knew they wanted me to stop. Not likely. The Bosphorus was calm and I had a full five-hundred horsepower propelling me forward. If I could make it across the channel to the old city, I could disappear. Easier said than done, of course. The night sky lit up with muzzle flashes behind me and I knew my task had just grown incrementally harder.

They were either lucky, or they knew how to aim a gun. The first shot hit the engine cowling. It shattered the plastic cover, but bounced off the block as far as I could tell. I ducked down low to the console—no need to present a bigger target than necessary. A second shot rang out, but it must have gone wide because there was no discernible impact. I was planing now, traveling quickly over relatively flat seas, but the boat with the spotlights was following and a second boat appeared out of the blackness following as well.

I heard the crack of a large-calibre weapon and I knew that they had brought out the heavy artillery, probably some kind of Gatling gun mounted to the bow of their boat. My throttle was already matted down, so there wasn’t much more I could do to increase my speed, but I could make it harder for them to hit me. I twisted the wheel thirty degrees, putting the Zodiac up on its chines in a good solid turn. Then I twisted it back again. The Bosphorus was flat enough that I didn’t have to worry about hitting any substantial waves, though I couldn’t discount the possibility of debris in the polluted water.
 

I put my pursuers out of mind and concentrated on reaching the far shore. At that moment, I considered just how far I was from America. Sure there were airbases here and there, but the nearest American ships were probably off Italy where the United States Sixth Fleet was based in Naples. It was then that I saw that the shot that I hadn’t felt had actually hit my starboard sponson. I couldn’t slow, so I ran with it, watching as the inflation tube gradually deflated. I was planing and the Zodiac had a rigid hull, so I knew I was going to stay afloat, but only if I kept her in a straight line. Any more crazy turns and I’d swamp her.
 

I could see the Atatürk Bridge spanning the Bosphorus and the smaller Galata Bridge crossing the isthmus where I needed to go, but what was really bothering me was the fact that I hadn’t heard a peep out of the freighter. I checked my watch. The countdown was long over. The ship should have blown forty seconds ago. But it hadn’t and it made no sense. Was there a second timer? I didn’t complete the thought, because the crack of my pursuers’ Gatling gun wailed out again. I ducked low and saw that my port sponson had been hit. The Zodiac had three air chambers, but with two of them gone, I knew it was the beginning of the end. I estimated that I had another two minutes before I reached the Galata Bridge. The immediate shore was nearer, but not by a lot. I’d just have to hope I could make it.

Another shot rang out. But it didn’t hit an inflation tube this time. It hit my starboard outboard. Whoever the shooters were, they were equipped. They had to be reading my heat signature. It was the only way to see the engine in the darkness from that far out. Smoke rose from the outboard almost immediately. Then it whined loudly before dying. No doubt they had gotten lucky and hit the oil pan. Putting out the pump would be enough to seize up the pistons really quickly.

With one outboard down, I rapidly lost speed. Either I was going to sink, or they were going to catch me, but I didn’t know which would happen first. I glanced at my watch. It had been five minutes since I’d discovered the bomb and the freighter was still happily anchored. I focused on the far shore. I knew that I could still make it. I just needed a little luck. Scratch that, I needed a lot of luck. And that was when I heard a muffled bang.
 

It wasn’t a gunshot. It was thunderous, lower in tenor. It sounded as though maybe the bomb had finally blown. I glanced back from my leaky boat, except there wasn’t much to look at. A column of smoke ascended from the deck of the old freighter, but not much else. A low wave passed over the bow of my own boat and I knew I was taking in too much water. I had to throttle back. I did a bit. Not enough to take me off plane, but enough to lessen the impact of the next bit of rough water. As I glanced back again, my pursuers gaining, I realized that though surrender might not be much of an option, it might be all that I had.
 

Then the bomb really blew.

The sky lit up behind me as a tremendous ball of fire ascended into the air. It was followed by a blinding white light and an incredible percussive blast, deafening, like an angry hammer of God. The lights behind me slowed. They were no longer gaining; in fact, I could actually see them turning to check out the explosion. And I knew that was a mistake. Because a blast like that does something when it happens below the water. It displaces it. And I was sure that a hell of a wave was coming. If the shooters took it bow first, they’d be swamped.

I was two hundred feet from shore. Close enough to swim if I had to. If there was a wave, it would take a few more seconds to make it across the strait. It wasn’t going to topple buildings or anything. But it would do a pretty good job of slamming my little boat around. I braced myself. The shore was a hundred and fifty feet away. A hundred feet. Then I lost sight of the boats behind me as the sea rose in a wall of black water.

 
Not good. I didn’t want to get slammed into the concrete seawall. It would probably break every bone in my body. At the very least it would knock me out. But there wasn’t much I could do either. I looked up at the skyline of the old city rising above me, minarets reaching skyward. It was up to a higher power now. Or dumb luck. I felt the sea drop away below the Zodiac’s stern, the giant following sea filling the low-riding hull with salty water. There was no point in staying with the boat now. It had been picked up beneath me. My job was to not be crushed by the monster swell.

The cold sea hit me like a freight train, ripping me from the boat and propelling me forward with its fierce power. I caught a glimpse of the near shore. There were shops and cars and carts and lights, and an instant later, they disappeared from view as the foaming black sea pulled me under. I had no idea which way was up in the cold black water as it tossed me like a rag doll under the wave. Finally, lungs bursting, I felt my head pierce the oily surface of the sea.

Gasping for air, I looked up to see a lamppost before me. I reached forward, grappling it with both hands. There was debris in the water all around me, but I held on for all I was worth, muscles straining as the wave wrenched me back, the surge of water receding from the boardwalk. A second wave crashed in, but it was milder than the first. By the time the third wave had hit and left, the floodwaters had begun to recede. It was not yet dawn and the waterfront was deserted. I wasted no time picking myself off the cobblestones and heading out into the last of the night.

Chapter 4

I
HAD
BEEN
in Istanbul for less than twenty-four hours at that point. Straight from the frying pan into the fire. Happily, the flight from Vietnam had given me a brief opportunity to recuperate from my mission in China. The flight had been mercifully empty after the Singapore leg, meaning I could bed down in the full middle row of the wide-body airbus. Airline blanket pulled firmly over my head, seat-back display off, I tuned out completely as we crossed Asia and the Middle East.