Go, Junior told himself, and go he did, pushing through and walking quickly to the door.
“Night,” he called over his shoulder to the guard, raising his hand as he went.
If the guard even noticed him, Junior couldn’t say.
Outside, he was surprised to find himself on the side of the Supreme Court Building.
What the hell was going on?
* * *
That was the same question Karen Fairchild asked when he showed up at her door an hour later.
“What happened with you and Dick? And with Danny?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
Karen has a certain way about her—a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point stare. And yet her voice isn’t harsh, and her tone somehow seems to suggest that whatever the problem, she’ll help work it out. After a swat to the head, of course.
She didn’t swat Junior. He mumbled something to the effect that he was confused himself.
She took a better look at him. Disheveled wouldn’t quite cover it. “Have you eaten dinner?”
He shook his head.
“Come in, then. I’ll put on some pasta. Go take a shower—I’ll find you some spare clothes. You’ll eat, and then we’ll talk.”
(III)
Out in the Atlantic, Larry and I were making our way to the bridge; Chalker and Doc were en route to the main passenger cabins, aiming to search for the crew and any able-bodied passengers who wanted to help. We had a limited number of arms—just the captured rifles and pistols. We now had four ship’s radios. Using them would tip off the hijackers, and though we worked out a primitive code, we were reluctant to use them. We could hear the hijackers’ chatter on them, but it was of limited value, since they rarely used English and the talk was fairly garbled.
By now it was morning. The storm’s intensity had increased, and besides the wind and waves, the portholes we passed were as dark as if it had been midnight. Every so often we saw a faint blip of lightning through the glass. At points I felt a bit like a cross-country skier working his way through the foothills of the Alps.
We reached the main deck without seeing anyone, and were just about to cut through the dark-paneled Amusement Salon to the main staircase when we heard voices in the corridor. Larry and I ducked into the salon, crouching between the vintage Pac-Man game and Terror Arcade as four hijackers stalked past.
“Four against two,” said Larry, getting up. “Hardly seems fair.”
“Since when did we start fighting fair?”
“Guns or not?”
“Fire hose,” I said. “Guns are backup.”
I ran over to the bulkhead near the passage, where a fire hose hung. I pulled the hose down and grabbed the trigger, intending to knock them down with the spray and take them by hand.
During a drill on the first day we sailed, I watched the crew have some fun pushing each other around with a jet of water that could take paint off a wall. But that was then, and this was now: I’ve seen more powerful streams on Baby Wet Me dolls.
You can make the rest of the metaphor yourself. Fortunately, Larry was right behind. He took down the four goons before they got a chance to make fun of the piddle of my hose.
“So much for saving ammo, and being quiet, huh?” said Larry, checking the bodies.
They had two rifles between them, and each had a spare magazine. It was better than nothing. We pulled the bodies back into the amusement center, hiding them behind a bank of games that included Sgt. Slaughter and Winged Fury. Then we continued down the corridor. We had no sooner reached the grand staircase on Amuse Deck when a trio of hijackers appeared. Clearly alerted by our earlier gunfire, they had their guns up and were ready for us, firing a hail of bullets as we backtracked for cover.
We ducked into the Louis XIV Dining Room. The bow dipped as we entered, and the tables and chairs, which had gathered themselves aft, rushed forward like the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. We ducked as best we could, sliding to the floor near the bandstand as the tangos fired from the passage and bullets began sailing into the room. Chandeliers began breaking, and bits of the mirrored ceiling exploded downward in a hail of glass.
Suddenly the bow of the big liner stopped descending, hesitating at the bottom of the mammoth wave she’d entered. The ship heeled backward, bucking her bow upward and sending the room’s furniture back across the room. We threw ourselves to the side, then began firing at the men at the doorway as they struggled to keep from following the furniture.
As the last one fell, I realized we were being fired on from behind. Two more hijackers had come in from the doorway on the aft side of the room. Taking cover behind a settee, they began peppering us with gunfire from pistols. Larry and I dropped to the deck, then crawled uphill toward the door as the ship shifted again. Apparently this made the tangos think we’d been hit; they stopped firing and began working up the side of the room, looking for us as the ship heeled backward. I grabbed a chair as it slid by, rose, then ran with the tilt of the ship toward the nearest hijacker, less than ten feet away. Off-balance and surprised, he got off a few ill-aimed shots before I threw the chair at him, puncturing his larynx.
Messy business.
Larry took out the other man the old-fashioned way, firing at him as the tango slid back between two tables.
“I forgot how much fun this was,” said Larry, getting to his feet.
We made it to the main staircase without finding any more exchanges of lead, but going through the Arc de Triomphe Bar just about broke Larry’s heart. The tables here were secured to the floor—always a wise idea for a bar, even on land—but the ship’s bucking had sent bottles scattering against each other, with lamentable results. The place reeked of alcohol—a not unpleasant smell to be sure, unless you considered where it rose from.
Looking over the place, we found charges on the bulkhead pillars that sat on either end of the bar proper. If blown, the charges would take down not only the bar but the deck above. Hit enough spots like this, and the ship would implode from the top, falling in on itself.
“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 t
he 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 anyth
ing 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 TSA49 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.”
[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel Page 36