by Ward Larsen
In that instant a line was crossed, yet Slaton gave no sign of it. Quite the opposite, his expression softened in an accommodating way and his body seemed to relax. Only the mineral-gray eyes might have suggested something else as they began to log new variables, updating the changes of the last thirty seconds. One sailor was standing behind him with a plastic razor in his right hand, another in front, the larger of the two. Both were casually dressed with little chance of a concealed weapon, yet the officer’s right shoulder was flush to the cabin door, his arm out of sight and held in a distinctly unnatural set. If there was a weapon, that’s where it would be.
With that Slaton’s appraisal was complete, confirming an advantage that contradicted what might be assumed. In spite of the fact that these men had lived on Ionian Star for months, if not years, Slaton had home field advantage. If they had walked this passageway a thousand times, neither had ever weighed it in the manner he had over the course of the last twenty-four hours. They did not grasp that the corridor’s narrow confines and thick-gauge steel walls could serve as weapons in themselves. They had never registered the delicate electrical junction overhead which, with one good pull, would create an electrical short to send the entire hall into pitch darkness. Neither man grasped the potential of the wall-mounted fire ax three meters away, the latch of which Slaton had discreetly loosened earlier, nor the thick fireman’s hose and valve that with one turn would discharge a hundred gallons of seawater per minute under high pressure. In a frantic moment, they would not recall that the nearest watertight door, perfect to seal an escape, was ten paces away after a 90-degree right turn at the first connecting hallway.
No, Slaton thought without a trace of hubris, these men see none of it because they don’t live as I do. Belying his confidence, Slaton stood with a passive air. He would not force the issue.
Inadvisably, the Greeks did.
Slaton saw a brief meeting of their eyes, and noticed the second officer’s arm shift slightly behind the door. The sailor named Marco edged closer from behind. Almost imperceptibly, Slaton altered his stance, grounding the outside of his right foot firmly against the floor joint. He choreographed his first three movements, hoping these sailors were as thuggish and sleepy and simplistic as they appeared.
They were.
The door flew open.
Slaton focused absolutely on the big man’s right hand, and the expected knife did not appear. Instead a thick iron bar came flying toward his head. He dropped low, and the bar clanked into the steel wall. From a crouch, and with one shoulder grounded against the wall, Slaton lashed a full-weighted kick to the bigger man’s left knee. It ruined the knee, and consequently his balance. In the same plane of motion, Slaton pivoted and guided the falling officer’s head into a wall of half-inch-thick steel. There was an audible crunch, and the iron bar clattered to the floor.
Slaton lunged backward just in time as the predicted right-handed haymaker whistled past his ear. He found the iron bar with one hand as he lunged toward the engineer, driving with his legs, and put a shoulder into the man’s midsection that lifted him off his feet. The engineer hit the wall and spun a half turn before Slaton hammered the iron bar into the base of his skull. The man collapsed in a heap, the only sounds a lungful of expelling air and the rub of cotton over steel.
Twenty-four hours of planning. Six seconds of execution. The math of preparation.
Slaton stood stock-still. He watched and listened, every sense on alert. There were no shafts of light under nearby doors, no shout of alarm or call to general quarters.
He moved quickly, and in thirty seconds had both men piled onto the mattress in his closet-berth. The engineer was groggy, and would recover to appreciate his pain. The second officer seemed to be breathing, but was otherwise motionless. Slaton had no time for, nor interest in, either man’s prognosis. Outside the room he jammed the iron bar into the door handle, retrieved his jacket, and walked briskly down the corridor.
In the peaceful predawn hours that morning, with a dim glow footing the eastern sky, Ionian Star reached her nearest passage to the Sardinian coastline. Things were quiet on the ship’s bridge as two sleep-deprived men, the watch officer and an ordinary seaman, swilled coffee to stay alert. Another pair of crewmen roamed the decks, an apprentice engineer who was there for a smoke, and a junior man ending his four hours of night-watch duty. None of them noticed the seven-foot surfboard that fluttered thirty feet down from the aft quarterdeck into a flat obsidian sea.
Equally unnoticed was a black-clad figure that dropped in a free fall seconds later.
FOURTEEN
Hakim Ghazi stood on the bank of the Shatt Al Arab waterway with his head craned upward. His hands moved deftly to keep the reel of kite string taut. At his side stood two children, a boy and a girl, wonder in their eyes as they watched his every move.
Two hundred meters over their heads—perhaps a bit less as the upper wind was keeping the string at an angle—a bundle of forty helium-filled Mylar balloons stood clear in the cobalt morning sky over southern Iraq. Kites were more typical here, and it was perhaps the novelty of the balloons that held the children so enraptured. Ghazi had bought an entire case of the things a month ago from a shop in Al-Basrah, five kilometers north, explaining to the proprietor that he was planning a big birthday party for his three-year-old son. Ghazi, in fact, did not have a son. Not yet anyway. But perhaps someday.
“Can I do it yet, Mr. Ghazi?” asked the boy. He was holding a second reel of string that ran to the same bunch of balloons. Ghazi had given firm instructions to keep this line slack as the arrangement gained altitude.
“No, not yet. But it is almost time.” Ghazi pushed his round-framed glasses higher on the bridge of his nose, and addressed the other child, the boy’s older sister. She was twelve years old, and had been given the more demanding task. “Are you ready?”
The girl smiled and pointed Ghazi’s smartphone toward the sky. She tapped the screen once and said, “Yes, we are recording.”
“All right. Take in the slack.”
The boy complied, winding up the professional-grade kite spool until the line was nearly taut.
Here Ghazi paused, taking a moment to check all around. They were two miles from the nearest house and it was still quite early. All the same, the local farmers occasionally wandered from their wintering fig and olive groves. Across the waterway, a mile distant, were the disquieting shores of Iran. Ghazi had never seen anyone there—useless wetlands predominated that side of the delta—but everyone in this part of Iraq kept a wary eye toward the east. The most regular problem was ship traffic, oil tankers and freighters riding the slow brown waters, merged from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, to the Persian Gulf and seas beyond. He saw nothing today in either direction along the waterway.
Ghazi double-checked the wind, an estimate taken from a small but accurate windsock he’d planted near the center of the berm they were standing on. The little cone hung nearly limp, indicating surface winds below 5 knots. Finally, he double-checked the reference mark on his string, ensuring it was at the two-hundred-meter point. Satisfied, he began a countdown that was quickly echoed by two high-pitched voices.
Ten … nine … eight …
He always tried to make it fun for the children.
When their count hit zero, the boy yanked hard on the second string, and they all watched the plastic container beneath the balloons. It was fashioned from a five-gallon olive oil decanter, and when inverted by the pull of the string it dispensed its contents—a cloud of red liquid blossomed into the soft morning breeze.
“Follow it!” he said to the girl as the atomized liquid drifted toward the ground.
She tracked the red mist with the phone for a time, but then said, “I don’t see it anymore.”
It was all over in twenty seconds.
“That’s all right,” Ghazi said. He too had lost sight, just as in the other trials. He’d experimented with a number of different dyes before succumbing to the fact th
at a visible-light experiment was beyond the scope of his resources. It would have been useful in determining a precise measurement of fall rate. As it was … one did what one could.
The girl stopped filming and handed over the camera. Ghazi gave the primary reel to the boy.
The two children looked at him expectantly. “Can we do it now?” they asked in near unison.
Ghazi smiled. It was always their favorite part. “Yes, let’s.”
He pulled a switchblade from his pocket, flicked the release, and the razor-sharp blade snapped into place. Ghazi turned the knife in his hand and presented it to the girl, handle first. She took it and severed the string from the main spool. They watched the big raft of balloons, free of the liquid mass in the container and untethered, soar upward into a flawless sky.
“I wonder where it will end,” said the boy.
“That is the joy, is it not?” Ghazi replied. “The wonder of what might be.”
The balloons kept rising, and soon the happy bunch of silver dots became a less magical dark blob as it rode the upper level winds toward Iran. Ghazi had never calculated how high they might go, but he remembered the pilot, Tuncay, remarking that he had once spilled coffee in his lap when a large, brightly dressed bundle of silver had appeared unexpectedly in his windscreen at thirty-five-thousand feet. Mylar was a wondrous invention, with incredible tensile strength and excellent chemical stability. The kind of thing Ghazi himself might have invented had he ever been given the chance. Unfortunately, chemical engineers in Iraq found little opportunity to pursue inspiration with research.
“All right, off you go,” he said. “And remember—if the wind is calm tomorrow, come at the same time.”
The children trotted away, their sharp eyes still locked on the sky, mesmerized by what was now no more than a tiny dot. Wondering.
“Malika!” Ghazi called.
The girl forced her eyes downward, and Ghazi held out an empty hand. She smiled broadly and ran over with the still open switchblade. Ghazi took it and held it like a teacher directing a pointer at a student. “And remember, tell no one of our games. It is only for us.”
“Of course, Mr. Ghazi!” She scurried away and took her brother by the elbow, and soon the two were running a winding path over the brown-grass berm in that carefree manner reserved for children.
Ghazi grinned with satisfaction. It would have been terribly difficult to conduct the trials on his own—yet he had found a way forward. Indeed, he doubted there were two more reliable assistants anywhere in Iraq.
He closed the knife and slid it into the backpack at his feet. Unzipping a second compartment, he withdrew a small box the size of a shoe, attached to which was a sensor on a coiled cord. He turned the machine on, performed a calibration sequence, then walked south along the levee. He angled toward the southern field where, given today’s gentle winds, the liquid mist would have come back to earth. Two days earlier a westerly gust had arrived unexpectedly, ruining his measurements and sending an entire batch of his low-level source material across the Shatt Al Arab and into Iran. It ruined the morning’s work, but there was a certain irony in it. Back from whence it came.
Just before reaching the hot zone, Ghazi made sure the children were gone, and he took a last look for any other wandering souls. The time of year helped. In summer, when the groves were busy and the harvest near, he would never have been able to use this place. The only options then for uninterrupted testing would be the surrounding marshes or the western desert. And the marshes, of course, were wholly incompatible with the design of his experiment.
Convinced he was alone, Ghazi took his one precaution. He pulled a disposable respirator from his pocket and placed it over his nose and mouth. Holding the sensor in front of him with both hands, he looked rather like a man divining for water. Which, in a wholly unapplied sense, was very near the truth.
For thirty minutes he walked back and forth over the levee. He stopped now and again to record readings that could later be plotted and compared to his previous data points. He was nearly finished when a truck appeared in the distance. Ghazi set aside his work and dropped quickly behind the levee. The vehicle was not military, but a large western-built pickup truck—most likely a contractor from one of the oil facilities in Rumaila. He never found out because the truck kept going.
Relieved, Ghazi went back to work. Ten minutes later he was walking back to the farmhouse. With the backpack on his shoulder he kept an easy pace, determined to enjoy the lovely morning. Ghazi was startled when a clutch of plovers scattered from the brush, and he paused to watch them wing skyward. Asiaticus or alexandrinus? he wondered. Whatever the case, he hoped they would fly far from here. The isotope he was using for his tests was not particularly high-level, but it was persistent enough. Ghazi pushed the idea from his head, lest his mood darken. If felt good to be working again, to have purpose to his day, and he resolved that when he reached the farmhouse he would brew a pot of the good English tea and pray.
Or perhaps just the tea.
Since leaving home, and the watchful eye of his devout mother, he had found himself increasingly distanced from Allah. If he was a Muslim now it was because he felt a need to be something. His transformation had begun at university, as was so often the case. There he’d discovered that he liked beer and dancing, and that he very much liked women. Ghazi still prayed on occasion, but blasphemed more often, and like most Iraqis he thought the country’s clerics were cracked. Of course, the clerics themselves could afford the luxury of being pious—they had jobs and wives and no end of food on their blessed tables.
Upon reaching the farmhouse, Ghazi filled a pot with water and set it on the stove. As he waited for the boil, he unpacked his gear, taking particular care with the delicate scintillation counter. He glanced at his prayer rug, gave a short sigh, and left it untouched. Instead Ghazi went to the makeshift desk, and with warm sunlight streaming through the window he opened his notebook and began to correlate another morning’s data.
FIFTEEN
South of Porto Pino, on the southern shore of Sardinia, rests an errant horse-shaped peninsula known as Capo Teulada. It is a jagged and bleak place, accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicles or seagoing watercraft, and then only useful in the more pleasant summer months when families gather for seaside lunches and young lovers ensconce themselves in quiet coves. There are no villages or townships and, if one discounts the small herds of bony goats, there is not a single permanent resident, this a consequence of the sandy, infertile soil, and an unfailingly rigorous topography.
Fittingly, Capo Teulada meets the surrounding Mediterranean in all her obstinacy with an imposing shoreline, ranging from vertical cliffs to bramble-encrusted coves. Tenacious birds nest in thorny plants, and the bitter winds of winter alternate with an iron summer sun. Yet for all Capo Teulada’s shortcomings, none are apparent when viewed from the sea—particularly when one’s vantage point rests a mere twelve inches above the surface.
It was some years ago in France, provisionally situated in a windswept safe house on the northern coast of Brittany, that David Slaton had taken up surfing. For the first week of his residence he’d stood on the high hills watching waves that had built for a thousand miles reach in from the Celtic Sea, and he’d seen the clean point break raking the angled peninsula. So it was only natural, when he came across an old fiberglass twin-fin in a woodshed, that Slaton had put himself to the test. He by no means mastered the art in the following weeks, yet relished the physical challenge. He also found the waves a much needed diversion from his appointed mission—plotting the demise, by ballistic means, of a Hezbollah bomb-maker ensconced in a villa some three kilometers south. The man was an oddity—a radical Shi’a demolition expert who actually survived to middle age, and who, suffering either a loss of religious zeal or a conversion to capitalism, had gone private, and earned enough handsome paydays to see him through his days in comfort. Unfortunately, as Slaton knew better than anyone, there were certain lines of work from
which one could never retire, and in time the man’s only earned pension came by way of a 168-grain boat tail round.
Now those swells of Brittany were a distant memory as Slaton paddled toward Sardinia on a dead-calm sea. On the waxed fiberglass surface in front of him was the double-wrapped trash bag containing his jacket and street clothes—which after an hour at sea might or might not be dry—along with his remaining money and identity documents. Effectively, all his worldly possessions encased in 4-mil plastic. The wetsuit he was wearing had come from the same storage closet as the surfboard, and while it was too large and leaked at the seams, the neoprene did enough to keep his core temperature at a safe level on the frigid February sea.
He smelled the briny air, and heard nothing more than the soft lap of waves against the board’s rails. He estimated he’d jumped ship roughly six miles from land, a distance he hoped to negotiate in slightly over an hour. The muscles in his back ached, and twice he stopped to rest, the second time floating still on a silent sea as the sun breached the horizon. The radiant heat recharged him, and he felt warmer as the scalloped shoreline came near.
There were no signs of life along the desolate coast, and Slaton steered for a thin stretch of sandy cove. As the water became shallow, the gentle swells built into modest three-foot waves, but Slaton made no attempt to stand for the ride to shore. Even if there was no obvious peril involved, a life in the dark arts had taught him many lessons. Chief among them—style points were for dead men.
Keeping to his belly, Slaton skimmed ashore on a gentle roll of white water. He carried the board above the tide line, and in a dense stand of thicket exchanged his leaky wetsuit for nearly dry clothes. The wetsuit, surfboard, and plastic bag he buried in a depression, covering everything with sand and driftwood.
He hiked north until he found a road, and dawn had gone to morning when he reached the first town. It was a sleepy place called Sant’Anna Arresi, and by then his hair was dry and his pace quick—with the exception of the wound on his thigh, his injuries had largely mended. A hired cab took him to Iglesias, and there he waited thirty minutes for the train to Cagliari.