Joshuas Hammer km-8

by David Hagberg

  McGarvey shook his head. “You might be beating a dead horse no matter what we do,” he said. “Unless he comes out of his compound, or unless we can lure him out of it, he’s going to stay pretty safe for the duration.”

  “That’s about what I came up with, ya know. And it’s different this time, not like the others.”

  He had McGarvey’s attention. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have my search engines so it’d take you a long time to figure out what’s happening. The last three times that bin Laden was in residence he didn’t stay put. He traveled all over the place. He even flew over to London once. Tehran, Beirut, Tripoli, everywhere.”

  McGarvey turned to stare at his computer screen.

  “He’s hunkered down,” Rencke said. “It means that he doesn’t want to take any risks.”

  “Either that or he’s too sick to travel now.”

  “In that case guys like Turabi and General al-Bashir wouldn’t be showing up on his doorstep on such a regular basis.” Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir was the president of Sudan and the leader of the National Salvation Revolutionary Council. “That’s what I came to tell you. He’s staying put for a reason. And the heavy hitters are coming to see him for the same reason.”

  “He’s waiting for the bomb to go off, and they’re trying to talk him out of it.”

  “Bingo,” Rencke said without his usual enthusiasm. “It’s just like you figured.” “Find the bomb, find Bahmad and keep the President and his family out of harm’s way. We have the best people in the country working on it, but so far we’ve struck out.” McGarvey looked up. “All we can do is keep trying. Starting this weekend in San Francisco.”

  “Don’t forget Liz,” Rencke said with feeling. “They tried to hurt her once, they might try again.”

  rio de Arriba, Mexico

  At ten thousand feet the Baja California coast was little more than a hazy, pale brown slash against the deep, electric blue of the Pacific Ocean, but as they came in for a landing Bahmad could see the Rosario Marina where he would pick up his ride. It was very large and modern, but there were only a few boats tied up at the more than five hundred slips. The parking lot behind the restaurantcondominium complex was nearly empty too. A lot of the boats had to be out of fishing charters now, and the handful left were powerboats, all of them large and expensive.

  “We’ve gotten some of the heavy hitters to sign up, but the flood hasn’t started yet,” the Gulfstream pilot Wayne Hansen observed. “The word’ll get out.” Bahmad sat in the copilot’s seat because he thought it might be possible to catch a glimpse of the Margo on the horizon. But they never flew that far off shore, and he did not direct the pilot to do so. He wanted to keep the need to know at an absolute minimum.

  “Is this place new?” he asked.

  “Opened last year. Sanchez built it. The man’s a genius. He figured the marina would keep the federales busy watching his nighttime activities, and they’d be too distracted to pay attention to what he was doing during the day.” Hansen clenched a small cigar still in its plastic wrapper in the corner of his mouth. “Smart.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Bahmad said.

  They lined up for their landing, the afternoon very bright now, and Hansen lowered the flaps and came in slightly crabbed because of a crosswind. He was a very good pilot. “Should I wait for you?”

  Bahmad shook his head. “You might as well go back to California.”

  “I hope you like fishing and drinking, ‘cause there’s not a hell of a lot more to do here yet.”

  Customs was perfunctory; they didn’t even check his bags. Ten minutes after touching down he rode in an air conditioned shuttle over to the marina, where he was directed to Aphrodite near the end of B dock.

  The boat was a black-hulled Cigarette of about fifty feet on the waterline. Long and low she looked very sleek. Bahmad knew something about this type of boat. He’d attended a meeting aboard one in Monaco about five years ago. Its low profile made it very difficult to detect by radar, its powerful engines could push it to speeds up to eighty knots if the sea conditions were correct, and if the engine compartment was properly insulated and the exhausts baffled and led below the waterline she could be extremely hard to detect even by infrared sensors. She could outrun just about anything that the Mexican or U.S. Coast Guards could put to sea.

  According to the pilot Aphrodite was used almost exclusively for overnight and long weekend cruises that were arranged by Loves Unlimited, a swingers club from Los Angeles. In reality she was used to head off shore during the day and meet with another ship where she would take on several tons of heroin or cocaine. From there she would race north to the U.S. border, where she would drop the weighted containers about a mile or two off a deserted beach at a precise GPS location for later pickup.

  A slender man wearing a baseball cap, brightly flowered Hawaiian shirt and white shorts stood on the foredeck coiling up a thick power cord. He looked up as Bahmad approached. His eyes were dark, and there was a five-or six-day growth of whiskers on his angular face.

  “Captain Fernandez?” Bahmad asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Gordon Guthrie. I believe that you are expecting me.”

  “Come aboard,” the man said. He stowed the power cord in a locker, and directed Bahmad to the aft sun deck, then below through a smoked Lexan door.

  Everything that Bahmad could see about the boat was first class, very expensively and professionally done. The hatches, the fittings, the ports, all of it was extremely heavy duty. If the entire boat had been custom built and outfitted this way, Bahmad thought, it would withstand a typhoon.

  “He’s here,” the crewman said.

  A huge, shirtless man with long black hair and a thick black beard, seated at the saloon table studying a chart, looked up. Thick black hair covered his chest, and lay in great patches on his shoulders and flanks. Even the backs of his hands were covered. He smiled, his teeth perfectly white.

  “Senor Guthrie, here you are.” He extended a hand, but Bahmad ignored it, cocking his head to listen. He thought he heard someone pounding on something below decks. “Who else is aboard?” “Besides Antonio here, no one else except for Hernando, who takes care of the engines.” Fernandez’s eyes narrowed. “What were you expecting?”

  “A larger crew.”

  “We manage.”

  Bahmad laid his bag down, opened his attache case, took out a Bank of Mexico, s.a. envelope and handed it to the captain. “I would like to hire you, your crew and this boat.”

  “We are already yours,” Fernandez said. He opened the envelope and took out the bank draft. It took a moment for it to register and when it did he looked up surprised and very interested. “This is a lot of money.” “There will be a second draft for a further half million U.S. dollars when we’re finished.” Bahmad gave the captain a significant look. “Of course the exact nature of this transaction is strictly between us. It need never leave this boat.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Hijack a cargo ship.”

  “What about the crew?”

  “There are seventeen officers and men, but two of the officers are mine. Most of the remainder of the crew won’t know what’s happening.”

  “Those that do?”

  “We’ll kill them.”

  Fernandez sat back. “What then?”

  “You’ll get your second check and you can come back here or go wherever you would like to go.”

  Fernandez looked at the bank draft again. “How do I know that this is legitimate?”

  “Telephone the bank.”

  Fernandez nodded. “I think I’ll do just that.” “Good. In the meantime I want to meet your other crew member, I want to see your radio equipment and I want something to eat. We have a busy night ahead of us.”

  M/V Margo West of Isla San Martin

  “This is unit two standing by on schedule. This is unit two standing by on sched
ule, over.” Green was on the radio telephone, obviously waiting for a reply. The crewman normally on the bridge with him had gone below to fetch more coffee. Green had spilled his on the deck. Captain Panagiotopolous had been on deck checking the helicopter. When he came back inside he spotted the crewman and asked why he wasn’t on the bridge. He stood now in the shadows of the chartroom just aft of the bridge, watching and listening.

  “Unit one, this is unit two standing by on schedule, over.”

  Green was not getting the reply he wanted, and he was becoming frustrated. Something made him turn around and he spotted the captain, his face falling almost comically.

  “How long have you been standing there, sir?”

  Panagiotopolous came out into the light. “Long enough to want to know what the hell you’re up to. What’s this unit one and unit two stuff?”

  “It’s a company code. I was trying to contact my father.”

  Panagiotopolous glanced at the SSB radio attached to the overhead. It wasn’t set to any of the company’s frequencies. “You’re lying, Green. Now I want to know what’s going on here!”

  “It’s your off-watch,” Green snarled. “You should have stayed in your quarters instead of coming here.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol.

  Panagiotopolous, surprisingly light on his feet, was across the bridge in two steps and he batted the gun out of Green’s hand. “You little shit. Pulling a gun on me.”

  Green stepped back and tried to hit Panagiotopolous in the head with the radio telephone handset. But the captain had been in his share of barroom brawls during his long service as a merchant mariner, and he knew all the tricks. He ducked like a boxer, slipped the blow and shoved Green hard enough against the radar console that the breath was knocked out of the first officer. Nevertheless Green tried to fight back, but he was outweighed by at least seventy-five pounds. Panagiotopolous slammed him against the console again, this time knocking the fight out of him.

  The portside door swung open and Schumatz came in. He looked from Green to the captain in surprise. “Do you need some help, Captain?”

  “Green pulled a gun on me.”

  Green tried to say something, but Schumatz was across the bridge in a few strides and he knocked the first officer to the floor. “I told you that I didn’t trust the sonofabitch.” He looked up. “What was the little pissant trying to do, sabotage the helicopter?”

  “No. He was up here trying to call someone on the SSB.”

  “My father,” Green croaked from where he was crouched on the floor still clutching the phone.

  “That’ll be easy enough to check,” the captain said. “I’ll call the company.”

  “It’s the middle of the night over there,” Schumatz pointed out. “Maybe we should wait until morning.”

  Panagiotopolous turned back to Green. “Why did you pull a gun on me?”

  Green looked away defiantly. The captain snatched the telephone from him.

  “Unit one, this is unit two, go ahead.” There was nothing but the soft hiss of a dead frequency. He hung up the phone. “Put him somewhere secure. I don’t want him sneaking up on me tonight and slitting my throat.”

  “I’ll put him in the dry storage locker in the galley,” Schumatz said. “He won’t be bothering anyone. I’ll get his gun.”

  “Just get him out of here, I’ll take care of the gun,” Panagiotopolous said.

  “Do you want me to send Rudi up?” Rudi Gunn was the second officer.

  “He’s scheduled to come on at midnight. I’ll stay until then,” Panagiotopolous said. He looked at Green. “See if you can get anything out of him, Lazlo. Something is going on around here that I can’t quite put my finger on.”

  CIA Headquarters

  “I don’t think so, Liz,” McGarvey said.

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not leaving until you see my point,” his daughter said. It was seven and they were alone in his office. He’d known that she was bringing trouble by the look in her eyes and the set of her shoulders. Girding herself for a battle.

  Yet what she wanted to do went way beyond the pale of her duties as a CIA case officer, even in this instance in which she had so much personally at stake. Elizabeth had almost lost her life on the golf course. It was just luck that McGarvey had gotten there in time to spot the van heading out onto the fairway and recognize it for what it was. Just blind luck that he was there to break up what would have been a good hit. Both shooters had been heavily armed and both were well motivated. Since Elizabeth had been cut off from her weapon, she’d done the only thing left open to her, and that was to run. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The terrorists had herded her and her mother into a killing ground and would have finished the job if Liz hadn’t gotten to her father’s gun.

  Now she wanted to step up to the plate again; deliberately put herself into harm’s way. He was proud of her and angry with her at the same time. And vexed too. Goddamnit, nothing was ever simple. But she had a point and he knew it.

  “I’m going to your mother’s,” he told her. “I need something to eat and a few hours’ sleep. You can ride down with me to my car.”

  “Good, maybe Dick can talk to you—”

  “This has nothing to do with my driver,” McGarvey said. “You’re an intelligence officer, not a Secret Service bodyguard.”

  “But I know her, Dad,” Elizabeth said.

  McGarvey stopped. He tried to work out where she could possibly have met the President’s daughter. It was impossible, he told himself. They came from two different worlds.

  “What are you talking about, Liz?” he asked her.

  “I’ve been doing my homework on her and Sarah bin Laden,” she replied. She looked away for a moment and shook her head. “We’re all cut out of the same cloth, you know.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does! We’re about the same age, our fathers are, for better or worse, important men and we all have handicaps. Sarah couldn’t have any kind of a normal life because there was a price on her father’s head and they were stuck in the mountains. Deborah has Down syndrome. And I—” Her lower lip quivered.

  “And you what, Liz?”

  She looked up into his face, searching, as if she was looking for an answer. “I want to be just like you, Dad. I want to follow in your footsteps, but I can’t. I can’t.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, sweetheart.”

  “But I wanted it all my life,” she said. “And now I’m falling in love with Todd, and he wants me to get out of the Company. My mother and father want me to quit. Somebody is trying to kill me. And I’m scared.” She was appealing to her father for help that he could not give her. “But Sarah was scared too, and so would the President’s daughter be If she knew what was going on. It’s why I have to be with her until we stop the bastard.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to, Dad. It’s what we do for a living.”

  “The Secret Service is watching her. Twenty-four hours a day. She can’t make a move without them seeing it.”

  “That’s the difference. They’re watching her. I want to go out there and be with her. She deserves at least that much from us, don’t you think?”

  McGarvey nodded after a long time, and he never suspected how much pain such a simple gesture could bring nun. “Take Todd with you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  New York City

  “His name is Gordon Guthrie,” Cheryl Cook said in the main saloon of Papa’s Fancy. She was distraught. “But I don’t know where he came from. England, maybe.”

  Jim Lane, NYPD gold shield detective, looked up from his notebook with interest. “Why do you think that it was this guy and not one of the crew, or maybe a burglar caught in the act?”

  Cheryl had come down to New York to be with Captain Walker for a few days. They had been having an affair over the past six months, and although she knew that it would never come to anything, she did love him in a way. Th
ey were supposed to meet at the Plaza, but when he didn’t show up she came over to see what was going on. She still couldn’t believe what she had walked into. She looked over to where she had found his body. She could still smell the foul odor of his death lingering on the air.

  “The captain got along real well with the crew, but Mr. Guthrie showing up all of a sudden was creepy.”

  “Creepy how?”

  “We were in the middle of our annual haul-out when Mr. Richter, the owner, ordered us to drop everything and get up to Washington to meet him.”

  “What’s so creepy about that?” Lane’s partner, Nicole Nickles, asked.

  Cheryl shivered. “Just the way he came aboard, smiling all the time. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Like he had X-ray vision, or something. Whenever he was around I felt like I wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

  “Where’d he go?” Lane asked. The young woman had made the initial 911 call, and until the ME had taken a look at the body and found the probable cause of death, she’d been a chief suspect.

  “The day after we got back from Bermuda he told us that he was done with the yacht for a couple of weeks. He packed up everything except the aluminum case and left.”

  “You already told us about that. But the case isn’t on the boat now. Could he have come back and got it?”

  “Anything’s possible,” she admitted. “But if you find him, you’ll have the captain’s murderer. I’d bet anything on it.” She lowered her head and began to cry. “Damn.”

  Nicole put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “We’ll find him.

  Guaranteed,” she said. “But we’re going to need your help. Is that okay?”

  Cheryl looked up and nodded.

  “We’re going to need a better description of him. You can work with a police artist to come up with a drawing of his face. And then you can look at some photographs. Are you up for that tonight?”

  “Whatever it takes to catch him.”

  “Okay, just hang in there. We have a few things to take care of here, and then we’ll drive you downtown.”

  The yacht was filled with evidence technicians who were going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. So far they hadn’t come up with much except that the man identified as Guthrie had fine, light brown hair, which they found on the pillows in his cabin.