“Such a devout and wonderful man,” the woman said.
“Yes. And, of course, we had to leave no trace, no way for Interpol or Greek officials or the Americans to track down the gold. So, we killed the entire salvage crew, including Ibrahim. Praise Allah, peace be upon him.”
“Well done. May it please Allah.” There was silence, then the woman said, “Masood, there is a problem.”
“What?”
“Your boat stinks of sex, of orgy. You and your men are wallowing in sin.”
“Careful, woman. Watch yourself.”
“Habibi, darling, it’s me, Roxanna.”
“The girls were infidels. Kafirs. Of no importance.”
“If I was in charge, no problem,” Roxanna said, “But Cyclops will have your heads.”
“Come to think of it, you should be in charge.”
“Sssshh. Cyclops has ears everywhere.”
In a lowered, earnest voice, Masood said, “You got the Iran money. You cut the deal. You sailed the bombs down through the Bosporus. Praise the Prophet, may peace be upon him.”
Also in a lowered voice, Roxanna said, “I do like the way you think, brother.”
There was a long silence.
“You open the case like this.” Roxanna spoke slowly to the sound of metal latches opening. “Activate the device like so, and set the timer like this. Once activated, only the code will shut it down. Beautiful, no?”
“Glory to Allah. So beautiful,” Masood said.
“May it please Allah. Inshallah.”
Chapter 7
Saadet
A dam reached the rocky point, climbed from the water, sat on a rock and, still breathing hard, studied the boats through his night-vision scope. Saadet’s anchor was pulling its bows down into the oncoming waves. Deniz, a handsome yawl about ten feet longer than Saadet, was beginning to move away, headed out into the windswept Aegean.
Tripnee, via their linkup, wondered, “Shall I let loose and blast these assholes to kingdom come?”
“Sounds good to me,” Sophia said.
“For once we agree.”
“Not so fast,” Adam said. “Think of the information these people have. If we take ’em alive, we’ll have a way better chance of retrieving all the nukes and rolling up the whole Cyclops jamaat.”
“There’re too many terrorists on that boat,” Tripnee said.
“Way too dangerous,” Sophia said.
“I think it’s doable. The thing is, we’ve got to wrap up Saadet fast, so we don’t lose track of Deniz,” Adam said. “I’m going in.”
“No,” both women pleaded, but Adam activated his rebreather, and slid into the water.
He surfaced about two hundred feet from the Saadet. “What’s happening on the boat?”
Apparently resigned to his plan, Sophia said, “They’re bedding down for the night.” Then with more animation, “I’ve done some sleuthing and figured out their names.”
“Excellent,” Adam said. “Where’s each crew member?”
“Two, Abu and Uday, are in the portside forward cabin. Here’s a recording of those two a few minutes ago.” She turned it on:
“I’m telling you, Abu. Think of all that gold. Let’s enjoy it.”
“You’re not thinking. We pledged ourselves to jihad.”
“That was before we found the gold. We promised to fight our jihad so our families would be taken care of. Now we can make our families unbelievably rich.”
“Uday! The others will never agree to it.”
“Who needs them? All the more gold for us.”
The recording ended.
Adam said, “Interesting. And the others?”
“Captain Masood Wahab and his first mate, Jamal Samad, are in the starboard rear cabin. Let’s listen in.”
At first there was a lot of static, but it cleared.
Masood was saying, “But Cyclops could have us killed at any time. In Cyclops’ eyes, we’re sinners.”
“What about Roxanna?” This second voice had to be the mate, Jamal. “She’s a leader. And you two are old friends.”
“True,” Masood said, “we grew up together like brother and sister, but she’s too ambitious. Smart, a go-getter, resourceful, but too much out for herself.”
“Ahh, I know what you mean. Too ambitious for a woman.”
“Allah has chosen us, brother. Me, you, and our men. Men. For the historic, holy destruction of the Great Satan.”
“And for untold wealth, enough wealth to finance jihad for as long as it takes.”
“We will go down in history,” Masood said. “Saadet is well-able to cross the Atlantic. Inshallah, we will let nothing stop us. We are destined, brother, to spread Allah’s law to the farthest corners of the world.”
“And have some infidel fun along the way, alhamdulillah.”
Sophia clicked off the audio feed saying, “Yuck.” After a pause, she said, “The fifth guy, Nadir Khan, is in the portside rear cabin. Get a load of this.” The audio feed from the drone in Khan’s cabin filled Adam’s earbuds with the loud rumble of deep snoring.
Adam said, “Okay. I’m going in. I’ll start with Nadir Khan.”
Saadet’s twin hulls, like those of most modern catamarans, had steps going down to water level at their sterns. Adam carefully pulled himself onto the broad bottom step on the port side. After stowing his rebreather and swim gear in the dinghy that was suspended within arm’s reach between the hulls, he pulled out his night-vision goggles and Sig Sauer pistol with silencer from his waterproof bag.
He turned off his ear piece, wondering as he did so if he might later regret it. Adam was glad for the intel from Sophia’s drones, but at heart he was old school. He needed to focus on his immediate surroundings, and not be distracted by extraneous info or the ongoing catfight raging between his two teammates. His life and the mission depended on it.
He moved up the steps, confident his soft footfalls would be drowned out by the rhythmic crash of breakers sweeping under the boat. When his head came level with the deck, he studied the stern patio area, the ship’s bridge high above it, the main salon visible through sliding glass doors, and a swath of the forward deck. All seemed quiet. How do you take down five muscular men one-by-one, without any of them alerting the others?
A few feet away, the skylight hatch above Nadir Khan’s stateroom stood wide open. Adam crept to the opening, heard cacophonous snoring, and peered down on the man lying on his back under a thin sheet. Adam squeezed down through the two-foot-square opening. As his feet came down on the bed, the sleeping figure jerked awake and started to sit up. Adam karate-chopped the side of Khan’s neck at its base. The violent carotid knockout punch worked like a charm, and the guy was out cold. Adam silenced and immobilized Khan by hog-tying his arms and legs tight behind his back with duct tape from his bag, and secured a sock in his mouth.
Adam froze. Two sets of bare feet on the deck above him moved toward the stern. Odd. They were quiet, furtive—but also frisky, even playful. Then two muted splashes. Peering out through a porthole, Adam saw two men in the water caressing and kissing. Had to be Abu and Uday.
Adam covered the unconscious Khan with a sheet, and closed the hatch he had just entered. He then silently left Khan’s cabin, closing the door behind him, and moved along the passageway to the door of the next, the middle, portside cabin. Testing the knob, he found it locked. Getting out his lock picking tools, all the while listening for the sounds of anyone approaching, he set to work on the mechanism, and had the door open in under a minute. The cabin was loaded to the gills, packed from wall-to-wall and from floor-to-ceiling with weapons, munitions, and explosives—enough to mount a small war even without the nuke. Enough to cause no end of chaos in the name of Allah.
He made his way to the door of the portside bow cabin. Locked. Again, he got out his picking tools and set to work. Wait. What was that sound? He lifted his Sig Sauer and froze, listening, waiting. No one appeared. So, he refocused on the mechanism, and had t
he door open in under thirty seconds. Letting himself in, he re-locked the door behind him.
A standard feature of big catamarans is an abundance of heads, what landlubbers call bathrooms. Saadet was no exception. This stateroom had its own luxury bathroom suite with a spacious standup shower stall, separate toilet compartment, ample sink and counter area and even a clothes closet. The closet was a tight fit, but Adam wedged himself inside and pulled the door shut, with the latch taped so he would not get locked in.
Then, he waited, crammed into the airless cabinet with his head jammed sideways onto one shoulder. And waited. Finally, he detected the barely noticeable sound of bare feet returning along the deck above, and he sensed rather than heard the two men slide down through the overhead hatch.
Someone entered the bathroom, closed the door, and padded over to the toilet compartment. Opening the closet a crack, Adam saw a man in shorts facing the toilet, bracing himself against the wall, peeing. Adam came up silent and fast, clamped one hand over the guy’s mouth and with the other delivered a blackout squeeze to the carotid.
Damn. Instead of blacking out, the guy, with the sinewy strength of a wild animal, tried to kick the two of them over rearward. Adam threw a leg back for stability and instead of going over backward, slammed the man’s head forward into the wall. Stunned, the guy went slack enough for Adam to fold him down and bang his head again, this time hard against the toilet. Finally out cold, the guy got the same treatment as Khan, and Adam left him trussed and comatose on the bathroom deck.
Had the crashing waves concealed the sound of the struggle? Opening the bathroom door a crack, Adam let out a slow breath when he saw the other man snoring on the bed. This time Adam took no chances and clobbered the guy’s noggin hard with the butt of his Sig Sauer. Adam repeated the hog-tying, gagging procedure. Three down, two to go.
He opened the cabin door. Light and the sound of voices filtered down from the main salon. Easing the door closed behind him, he crept along the passageway and up the stairs. Two men sat across a table from one other, Captain Masood Wahhab and the man who had to be his first mate, Jamal Samad.
Seeing no weapons, Adam pulled out his Sig Sauer automatic, climbed the steps, and said in Arabic, then English, “Hands up. Don’t move. Move and you die.”
The two men slowly raised their hands.
He motioned for them to lie face down on the salon deck with hands behind their heads. The men slowly complied, watching for any opportunity to thwart him. But Adam gave them no opening. After trussing Masood’s arms and legs behind the man’s back, he did the same to Jamal.
All right. Adam took a deep breath.
“Drop the gun,” spat a male voice in a thick accent.
Turning around, Adam saw men bunched together where stairs came up to the salon from the portside hull. Four men—the three he had just hog-tied in their cabins, plus an extremely small, skinny new guy—all aiming AK-47 machine guns at his chest and head.
The new, fourth guy must have freed the others. Where’d he come from? Adam lowered his pistol to the deck, and instantly the men charged forward to pound and slash his head and body with the barrels and butts of their weapons. Soon, gashes on his face and head spurted blood. His vision blurred and the world spun.
“Stop, before you kill him.” It was Jamal, the mate, yelling from the floor.
The pummeling slowed but did not stop. Abu and Uday, in particular, kept clubbing Adam with their AK-47s, turning his whole body raw and bloody.
“Stop! We need information!”
Finally, the battering ceased. The new, fourth guy—who the others called Malik—handcuffed Adam’s arms behind his back. Next, Abu and Uday seemed to take extra delight in using long knives to slice off Adam’s clothes, gouging and cutting him in the process, leaving him buck naked. Then Malik pushed him into a chair.
Damn, where the hell did Malik come from? The guy must have been holed up somewhere where the drones missed him. Might be Adam’s last blunder.
Slow to realize Adam understood Arabic, the men spoke freely as they untied Masood and Jamal. The new guy’s name was Malik Draco and he was clearly a devout Muslim. Malik had had no stomach for orgy or murder, and had not wanted any part of the gold horde. So, he’d been sort of on strike and sulking in a small forward cabin. Until, that is, he heard Adam clobbering and tying up his boatmates.
Masood, now freed from his bonds, picked up Adam’s pistol and jammed it into Adam’s right eye, bulging the eyeball. As he did this, a tiny object no bigger than a bee flew straight into Masood’s face, almost reaching his eyes, but Masood swatted it away, sending it skittering into a corner, dead.
In thickly accented English, Saadet’s captain demanded, “Who are you? How you find us?”
Adam did not reply. He did, however, with his uncovered eye, see a strange-looking suitcase filling a deep cubby on the far side of the salon. AH HA!
Masood whipped the pistol back and forth across Adam’s face, raising new welts, opening more lacerations and sending blood gushing down his neck and chest.
“How you know about us? Who you working with?”
No reply.
“What you know about us? Where you come on board?”
Silence.
This went on. And on.
Finally, Jamal said, “This is getting nowhere. I have a better idea. Better than waterboarding.”
Masood again jammed the Sig Sauer into Adam’s eye. Khan and Malik pressed AK-47s into his neck. Abu and Uday, smiling, held his legs. And Jamal tied Adam’s ankles tightly together with the end of a rope. Then the six men carried Adam out onto the catamaran’s stern, ran the rope through a pulley on the end of the boom, wrapped the end of the line around an electric winch, and winched in the line to pull Adam’s ankles up and up until he was suspended upside down. Then, on the port, island, side of Saadet, they swung Adam out over the water, naked, battered, now with blood flowing from legs to stomach to chest to neck, over the face, into his hair and dripping off his head.
Jamal reversed the winch, lowering Adam into the surging Aegean. When Adam’s head went under, he did a hanging sit-up to bring his nose and mouth above the foamy surface. He sucked in air desperately, only to choke as a wave covered his face. Abu and Uday laughed. Jamal let out more line until Adam was submerged to his knees with no way to get a breath.
A distant low bang. Adam disappeared below the surface, leaving a dangling rope end and a cluster of bubbles. As some of the men blasted away with their AK-47s at the bubbles, Jamal’s head exploded in a fine shower of blood and bits of bone, leaving a jagged open neck gurgling up blood. Moments later, another distant pop—and Malik’s head vanished in a pink mist.
* * *
On the nearby island, in the stone hut at the crest of the ridge, looking down through her M82’s powerful night scope, Tripnee studied the catamaran and anxiously bided her time. Sophia, monitoring the boat through her drones’ cameras and mics, narrated Adam’s progress, capture, and then torture, driving them both out of their minds.
Saadet was about a half mile away, a distance well within the accuracy range of Tripnee’s rifle, and her fifty-caliber rounds could easily penetrate clear through the craft, turning it into a sieve if she really let loose. But as long as Adam was aboard, she couldn’t open up without risking hitting the big dope.
The terrorists all came up carrying Adam out into the open, onto the stern poop deck. Still, if she started shooting right then, before she got all six, one or two would have time to put a bullet in Adam. So, she bided her time. Never had seconds ticked by so slowly. Then they hung the poor guy upside down and lowered him into the water. That was her chance. But this was a must-not-miss shot.
Taking her time, she sighted on the rope suspending Adam. Feeling her FBI sniper training kick in, she let out a breath, felt her heartbeat slow and, with steely calm, ever so slowly squeezed the trigger. Bang. The line parted. Her beautiful weapon was so well designed, eighty-five percent of the recoil force was diss
ipated by the gun itself, saving her shoulder and torso from getting slammed backward.
Then came easier shots: blowing off heads. Quickly, she centered the crosshairs of her scope on the first noggin and squeezed off a round. Bam—the head disappeared. The second head had seen her muzzle flashes in the night and was firing in her direction with an AK47—which, ha, would be hopelessly inaccurate at that range. She calmly centered her scope on the head and caressed her trigger. Pop—the wild-eyed head was no more. Searching for her next noggin, she found none. The Saadet men had all scrambled for cover.
* * *
When the line holding him parted and he dropped into the sea, Adam made undulating dolphin kicks—like waves passing through his body—to swim under the catamaran and come up in the airspace under the salon between the twin hulls. Doing his best to focus despite the screaming pain of head-to-toe wounds filled with saltwater, he tucked into a tight ball, knees to his chest and passed the handcuff chain around his feet to bring his hands to his front. Then he untied the line binding his ankles and swam for the starboard stern steps.
He moved up the steps, staying low. Right in front of him was the diminutive Malik, with head gone and neck stump gurgling blood. Crouched in the dark, screened from the salon by the molded steps to the bridge, Adam dug the handcuff key out of the guy’s pocket and freed his wrists. Then, scooping up Malik’s AK-47 from beside the corpse, Adam inched forward and peered around the molded steps.
Four men in the salon. He fired right through the sliding glass doors into the chest of the nearest guy. Abu. As the guy arched, spasmed and went down, Adam swung the AK47 to strafe Nadir Khan. But Khan stayed on his feet and followed the other two as they dove out of sight down the stairs into the portside hull.
As he fired off several bursts to keep the remaining three guys down, Adam, his wounds screaming, raced into the salon, grabbed the odd-looking suitcase from the deep cubby, and ran back out. Judging by its weight, his instincts had been correct and it was the bomb.
Cyclops Conspiracy: An Adam Weldon Thriller Page 4