[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (46 page)

“We’ll get to them later,” I told Larry as he began inspecting one of the bundles. “Let’s take the bridge first.”

Glass crunched under our feet as we ran to the sliding doors that led out to what was called The Porch, an exposed deck at the far end of the bar area. We passed the magic pool table as we went; the balls sat perfectly on the green-felt top.

As I opened the door, I saw a shadow bent in the light ahead. It was one of the hijackers, seasick, emptying the contents of his stomach over the nearby rail. I took pity on him, and raced to relieve him of his discomfort.

Granted, he did have a few other worries as he went over the rail, but being seasick was no longer one of them.

No good deed goes unpunished, and mine was swiftly rewarded when the man’s companion, holding on to a stanchion nearby, spotted me and started firing. I retreated back into the bar area through the doors. He made the mistake of following, giving Larry an easy shot as he came through the door.

“I
really
forgot how much fun this was,” said Larry, hopping down and leading the way toward the bridge.

*   *   *

Meanwhile. Doc and Chalker reached the passenger area and began liberating passengers and crew. Among the first people they found was a sailor who had been working in the lower hold when the hijackers took over the ship. He had seen where about a dozen of the bombs were placed. Doc decided that they should split up; he sent Chalker ahead to continue freeing people, while he went below with the crewman to find and defuse as many bombs as possible.

We had no code for this, and Doc didn’t think it was smart to break radio silence to tell me about it.

*   *   *

I remembered the goons in the main passage behind the bridge, and guessed that there would be more guarding the doors that came in directly from the lower deck. From what I could recall, though, there had been no one watching the flying bridge, and with this storm intensifying, it was unlikely that someone would be out on it. So that was the logical place for us to attack.

The problem would be getting through the doors quickly. They were secured from the inside by a deadbolt handle. We could always break the glass if they were locked, but that would take time and we’d lose the element of surprise.

So Larry suggested we blow the doors down.

We went back to the bar and dismantled the bombs. Taking them apart took about ten minutes. Larry had them reconfigured in two.

I didn’t get the nickname “Demo Dick” by going light on explosives, but even I recognize the fact that you can have too much of a good thing when it comes to C4 and its cousins Semtex, PE4, and plastique in general. So I didn’t object to Larry’s cutting down the bricks. Still, there was a bit of guesswork involved, and the truth is neither Larry nor I wanted to err on the side of too little. Nothing would be more ego-flattening than Failure to Eradicate.

We split up, each with our own little bomb, and went to separate sides of the ship. Under other circumstances, getting into position would have been easy—there were ladders on either side of the upper deck that led to the extensions of the gridwork on the outside of the bridge. But the raging and unpredictable waves made it hard work, and a little nerve-wracking. Plastic explosives are very stable—throw some in a fire and there won’t be an explosion. In fact, you might even have used it to heat your C-rations, if you were of a certain age. But the stuff
does
ignite when subjected to heavy shock. Would falling a few stories to a lower deck qualify? I didn’t want to find out.

By the time I got to the bridge level, my shins were battered and bashed from the edges of the ladder. I was wetter than squid at a hundred fathoms. I checked my watch—one minute to detonation.

I crawled out on the deck, and placed the bomb against the bottom of the steel-and-glass hatchway. Then I got out the knife I’d grabbed from the dining area, checked my watch, felt my short hairs get shorter, and flicked my wrist to break the wire that was preventing the backup clock from counting down.

Seconds started draining. For some reason I got a little fussy and positioned the timer piece on the block and its igniting cap, then retreated down the ladder. About halfway down the sky lit with lightning, the clouds putting out a pyrotechnical show to rival many a Fourth of July celebration.

As I hit the landing, I glanced at my watch, then looked up at the bridge—just in time to see the block of C4 slide off the deck and down the steps.

Instinct kicked in: the wrong instinct. Running would have been the
smart
thing to do. Instead, I threw myself forward, spread out like a wide receiver at the goal line.

I caught the bomb in my hands.

Somewhere, Murphy was grinning.

Five seconds were on the timer. Four …

I threw the bomb upward, more or less in the direction of the bridge. There was no time to duck.

The shock wave probably pushed me down or back, but the ship was bucking so badly that I honestly never felt it. I leapt up the ladder, helped by the movement of the ship. The gun was in my hands, and I was on full automatic. How exactly I got to the middle of the wheelhouse I have no idea. All I remember is running through a torrent of rain into a thick cloud of vaporized metal and plastic. There was a body on the deck to my right, and a stunned hijacker at the console directly in front of me, blood streaming from the side of his face.

“I got these guys!” yelled Larry, over on the starboard side of the bridge. There were two bodies on the deck near him.

I scanned around, looking for the rest of the hijackers. A single man stood near the door to the conference space, a submachine gun in his hand.

I recognized him immediately—it was Scarface, the man who’d “hired” me to transport the drugs to America.

“You!” he yelled.

There was a crack of lightning—or maybe it was a flash-bang. The next moment, everything went dark.

(IV)

Junior spilled his guts—figuratively—to Karen over dinner. By the time he was done, she had a good picture of everything that had happened.

“You’re going to have to settle things with Dick on your own,” she told him. “He’s not going to treat you any differently than he would treat Trace or Shotgun or one of the newer guys.”

“I don’t want him to,” Junior blurted. “I just want to be—I wanted to be treated fairly.”

“Fairly? By your standards or his?”

If this was a movie, Junior would nod pensively, get up and embrace Karen, then fly out to meet me. The music would rise, and we’d sail into the sunset together.

But this wasn’t a movie, and Junior’s reaction wasn’t anything like what a Hollywood screenwriter would have proposed.

“I’m tired of getting treated like crap because I’m his bastard son,” said Junior.

He pounded his fist on the table. Karen stared at him.

“That table has been in my family for five generations,” she said. “You break it, you’re in trouble with me.”

“Sorry,” he said weakly.

“I can’t help you with Dick,” she told him. “Or Danny. You have to talk to them yourself. But I think I know what’s going on at the Court. Grab your things and come with me.”

*   *   *

Four hours later, Junior and Karen sat in the back of a Homeland Security mobile command center—essentially a dorked-up van—and watched from a remote feed as a clandestine bomb-removal team began inspecting the vending machines.

The bombs were removed in short order, several hours before the Court Building was due to open. What the Justices might term “a vigorous debate” ensued on whether to keep the affair a secret or not. Karen and her department wanted the matter kept quiet so they could capture the perpetrator. The bombs were to be detonated by a radio device, which meant that one of the plotters would soon be in the vicinity and therefore easy to catch. The other side of the argument was equally logical: if someone had missed a bomb, the consequences would be severe. There’s a lot of pretty stone and marble in that building.

There were other considerations. Information was bound to leak out, despite Karen and her bosses’ best attempts at keeping a lid on it. The FBI’s special counterterrorism task force was already involved, and the Capitol Police, while not knowing the exact details, had been told enough that any stray comment would alert the plotters.

The FBI had Habib’s apartment under surveillance, and was digging into his life online. As were we: armed with his connection to the college, Shunt and his magic minions had dug up more information on him. A Facebook page belonging to his girlfriend yielded a number of tidbits, including his probable location: her apartment, two blocks from the Orange Line out in Roslyn. A surveillance team was sent there, and around the time the Chief Justice phoned Karen to insist in nonjudicial terms that the building be shut and the alert made public, the FBI surveillance team sent a message via secure text that they had spotted a young male leaving the building.

The walk of shame had begun, in more ways than one.

Karen passed the Chief Judge up to her boss, then turned to Junior, who was staring at the monitors at the side of the van.

“I’m going to lose this argument,” she told him, getting up. “They’ll shut down the building. But the text I just got says the team spotted someone they think is Habib. Come on with me.”

By the time Karen and Junior reached her car, Habib had gone into the subway, heading back toward the city. Karen drove in the direction of Habib’s apartment.

“Maybe he’s going to the building,” said Junior. “That’s this direction.”

“It might be,” admitted Karen. She knew from what Shunt had already supplied that Habib was more a messenger, some sort of conduit between whoever was supplying the material and support and the actual perpetrators. In such a case, it was unlikely that he would be the one pushing the button, though of course she couldn’t rule it out. Still, there’s no intelligence quite up to the level of female intuition, and even I trust her sixth sense much more than I do anything coming out of Langley.

They were nearing Habib’s block when a new text came in—Habib had changed trains and was now on the Blue Line, heading south.

“Airport,” said Junior.

“Yes,” said Karen, her intuition panning out. “Let’s get there.”

It was early, so the usual crush of traffic wasn’t in their way. Still, they were several miles away when Habib got off the train at the Ronald Reagan airport.

Karen called her TSA
49
liaison.

“We’re going to need a no-fly restriction on someone,” she told him. “But we want to wait to pick him up at the very last minute, at the gate.”

Karen gave him more details, including his name and passport number, along with a description and the name of the FBI task force agent who was coordinating the surveillance team.

“Did you just get this information?” asked her liaison.

“Why?”

“Because we got an alert about this guy from the CIA literally five minutes before you called.”

“From who?”

“Special desk.”

“Which?”

“Terror 2.” It was in-house shorthand for an overseas watch group.

“You have a name with that?”

“They don’t come with names.”

Karen knew she could find out, but at the moment had more immediate things to do. She contacted the supervisor of the surveillance team as they neared the airport, asking which terminal Habib was in.

“Not in a terminal,” he told her. “Looks like he’s heading toward the parking garage.”

“Which one?”

“B.”

The surveillance team theorized that he had hidden a car there, which seemed to be confirmed a few minutes later when the TSA reported that his name wasn’t on the passenger list of any plane taking off in the next twenty-four hours.

“I have the young man who spotted him yesterday in the car with me,” Karen told the team leader. “I’m going to drive through the garage and see if he recognizes him.”

“Whoa, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“He’s with Dick Marcinko’s outfit,” said Karen. “He’s been watching him for a while now.”

“Karen, it’s you I’m worried about.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“
Ma’am.
”

That was exactly the wrong tone to take with her. “We’re coming up to the entrance.”

The agent on the other end of the line took a long breath. “As long as you keep your distance,” he said, accepting what was obviously a fait accompli. “We don’t know if he’s dangerous. And he doesn’t know he’s being followed.”

“Understood. We’ll park and move on.” Karen turned to Junior and pointed to the glove compartment. “I have another pistol,” she told him. “Take it just in case.”

They were just pulling into the lane to get into the garage when a dark Impala cut them off.

“Is that a bureau car?” Karen asked her FBI contact.

“Which?”

“The one that just cut in front of me.”

“Negative. What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Just an asshole late for his flight,” muttered Karen. She got her ticket and drove into the garage, passing one of the surveillance teams. She followed around the aisles, driving slowly. The lot had been closed for overnight maintenance, and the full aisles near the entrance quickly gave way to sparsely populated and then completely empty rows.

“We’re going to stick out,” Junior said.

“We’ll stop at the level below the roof.”

“That’s the Impala,” said Junior, pointing as the other car disappeared up the next ramp.

Karen slowed down, giving the other car a good lead. They came up to the level directly below the roof. There were only two other cars there, and neither one was the Impala.

“Gotta be meeting them,” said Junior. “Or it’s the FBI moving in. It looked official.”

“There was only one person in the car. They usually travel in twos.” Karen pulled the car into a spot near the ramp, turning it around so she could get out directly onto the roadway, then radioed the surveillance team.

“Yeah, we agree,” said the supervisor before she could say anything. “Got to be a meeting. Did you get the plate number?”