Specter sts-2

by Keith Douglass

  "Captain Solomos," Murdock said as the officer trotted up to him. Damn, something was wrong. Solomos looked mad enough to spit nails. "How nice to see you again."

  "Murdock! Where are the two men who were with you?"

  "What men?"

  "Don't give me that! You were seen." He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "From up there. You and two of your SEALs were walking toward the customs house forty minutes ago. Now you are alone."

  "Oh, you must mean Sterling and Roselli. I don't know. Maybe they went on into the city for a drink. Or they could be back at the hotel. Did you check?"

  "Don't give me any of your American arrogance." He pointed at the gym bag in Murdock's left hand. "What's in there?"

  "Nothing."

  Solomos reached for the handle. "Let me-"

  Murdock's right hand flashed across and down, thumb and forefinger grasping Solomos's wrist and breaking it back in a lightning move that made the Greek officer gasp, then nearly go to his knees in a vain attempt to relieve the pressure.

  "You know, I really thought a warrant was required for that sort of thing."

  Solomos gasped again. The three soldiers with him raised their weapons, and Murdock heard the nasty sound of bolts being drawn back. "I… advise… you… to let me… go."

  "Well, so much for the land of democracy." He released Solomos, who barked something in Greek at one of the soldiers. The man stepped forward and took the gym bag, unzipped it, and emptied the contents on the ground.

  "What is this?"

  "Two shirts, two pairs of trousers."

  "I can see that. Whose are they?"

  "Mine. I was looking for an all-night laundry."

  "They are the street clothes your two men were wearing. Solomos, still rubbing his injured wrist, stepped past Murdock and stared for a long moment toward the boats at their harbor moorings. He snapped something unpleasant-sounding half under his breath, then reached under the tail of his jacket and hauled out a walkie-talkie. The soldiers continued to hold Murdock at gunpoint as Solomos spoke rapidly for a few moments, listened to a reply, then spoke again. Had he seen something in the water? Murdock couldn't tell, and he didn't dare turn and look to see if he could see anything himself. If he hadn't seen, though, he'd certainly guessed. The man was delivering a flurry of orders in rapid-fire Greek, and Murdock knew that none of it meant anything good.

  That done, Solomos put the radio away and said something else to the soldiers. One of them prodded Murdock in the kidney with the grease gun. "Come," Solomos said. "We had better round up your accomplices at the White Tower."

  "Accomplices?"

  "Do not play games with me, Murdock. I can be a dangerous man."

  "I'm sure."

  "Your little game has accomplished nothing but to get you and your people expelled from this country. We wanted no part of your military 'advice' or 'observers' in the first place. Now, perhaps, we can do things without your meddling."

  "Uh, Captain, if you don't mind my asking, what's this all about?"

  "The DEA is moving tonight, Lieutenant. I've just radioed to my people to move in and arrest the suspects. But where I might have been inclined to permit you to question these people before, now you will just have to wait until my government communicates through channels with your government. I'm sorry that it must end this way, but I will not tolerate further interference in our internal affairs!"

  Murdock heard a growl and turned to look toward the harbor, toward the right. There was the source… a big patrol boat, probably a military job, its engines booming in the otherwise quiet night, its searchlight glaring across the black water of the harbor like a great, white lighthouse beacon.

  "Really, Captain," he said as one of the soldiers prodded him again. "I'd have thought you could have carried this off with less noise and fuss."

  Before Solomos could answer, a burst of automatic gunfire chattered across the water.

  11

  2224 hours Harbor Salonika, Greece

  Roselli was twenty meters from the Glaros when he heard the thunder of a big boat's engines, heard the sharp, barking rattle of automatic weapons fire. Bobbing in the water, he wiped his eyes with his hand, trying to clear them. The guard aboard the target boat had picked up what looked from here like an AKM assault rifle, run up to the craft's sun deck, and begun firing into the night. Roselli dove, expecting to hear the snapping impacts of bullets in the water around him… but when all he heard was the rapidly swelling throb of a boat's engines, he surfaced again.

  Katris was aiming the AKM at something farther out in the harbor. Turning in the water, Roselli saw the target… a Dilos-class patrol boat bearing down on the anchorage, its bow rising above the white mustache of its bow wave. A searchlight glared from high up on its superstructure, and Roselli looked away to keep from being blinded.

  A Dilos. He'd studied the different ship classes on the Greek Navy lists during the flight from the Nassau to the Jefferson. The Dilos class was a motor patrol craft twenty-nine meters long and displacing seventy-five tons. Armament would be a couple of 20mm machine guns, her top speed about twenty-seven knots. If the Glaros was able to get under way, the pleasure craft would outrun the larger boat easily, especially within this crowded anchorage where maneuverability was as definite a plus as speed.

  Jaybird bobbed in the water a few meters to Roselli's left. Which direction… forward or back? The occupants of the Glaros were thoroughly alerted now, and getting onto her deck was not going to be easy. Roselli could see movement on her flying bridge now. Somebody must have emerged from the cabin and be working to get the boat moving.

  The Greek patrol boat's engine throttled back, and the piercing ululation of a siren blanketed the harbor. Katris stooped swiftly, tugged at the mooring line which was looped over a cleat on the deck, and tossed it over the side. Glaros was drifting free now.

  The guard stood upright again, raising the assault rifle to his shoulder for another burst. The patrol boat was not firing… a good decision, Roselli thought, since the city of Salonika lay directly behind the target. God, what shit-for-brains space cadet had engineered the tactics of this search and seizure?

  Then, Katris's head literally exploded in a bloody spray of tissue, blood, and bone. The body went up on its toes, then toppled backward onto Glaros's sun deck, blood fountaining across the forward cabin windows. One of the Delta guys on the White Tower had just reached out and touched someone with that big Haskins rifle. In the same moment, the Glaros's engines coughed, then gunned to life.

  Raising his hand from the water, Roselli caught Jaybird's attention with a wave, then vigorously pumped his fist up and down. Jaybird nodded, and the two SEALs plunged beneath the surface, swimming hard toward the thirty-foot boat. In the underwater blackness, the Glaros's engines sounded deafeningly close. Kicking with powerful, scissoring strokes, Roselli swam until he sensed more than saw the hull of the boat just above his head. Moving by touch, he freed the tightly wrapped hank of nylon line that he wore on his belt, tugging the knot loose that held it together, then letting the line unfold.

  The thunder of the Glaros's engines pounded through the hull. With a heavy thump-chunk, the boat's pilot put the craft into gear, and the twin screws, motionless until that moment, churned to life. The boat began to move, and the pressure of its passing pummeled Roselli's body.

  Turbulence from the spinning screws clawed at him, but he twisted to face them, moving his arm in an arc to spread the tangle of nylon line in front of him like a net. The deadly slice of the screws bore down on him fast; jackknifing, he brought his feet up and kicked, hard, shoving off from the keel of the moving boat. Its bow wave gave him added thrust, pushing him deeper into the water. The prop wash caught him and twisted him violently, but he kept kicking, swimming as hard as he could to get under and behind the churning of Glaros's propellers. With the violent exertion, his body was demanding air, his chest aching, his heart hammering.

  Then the thunder of the engines, the pounding of
the screws, suddenly took on a new sound, a sharply rising whine of protest ending in a loud clunk. One of the screws was still turning, but the other had stopped, its shaft fouled by Roselli's line. Rising through the blackness, Roselli broke the surface five meters astern of the boat, mouth open, gulping down a full draught of cold, wonderful air.

  Glaros was still moving but circling hard to the left, the Zodiac raft tied to her stern wallowing along in her wake. Beyond, the Greek patrol boat was looming closer, perhaps a hundred meters off, the dazzle of its searchlight bathing the motor yacht in a brilliant, blue-white glare. By the light, Roselli could see a man wearing white boxer shorts leaning over Glaros's transom, a boat hook in his hands as he tried to poke and probe at the fouled starboard screw. Behind him was a dark-haired woman, bare-breasted, screaming in shrill terror. Smoke from the boat's exhaust boiled off the surface of the water. Suddenly, Glaros's second engine whined, shrieked, then ground to a thump and silence, and the yacht went dead in the water. Jaybird surfaced a few meters away, close alongside the Zodiac, gasping for air.

  The man with the boat hook shouted something in Greek, and Roselli hoped he wasn't calling for a gun. No… apparently the guy hadn't seen the swimmers yet. He was still trying to reach the screws with the hook, assuming, perhaps, that they'd been fouled by weed or by garbage floating in the harbor, and yelling at his partner up on the boat's flying bridge. He shouted again and Glaros's engines whined, but failed to kick over.

  Jackknifing once again, Roselli dove, swimming quickly toward the stern of the boat, passing beneath the Zodiac, then surfacing explosively within touching distance of the transom, looking straight up into the startled face of the man with the boat hook. Rising like a rocket out of the water, Roselli stretched out both arms, grabbed the shaft of the boat hook, and yanked hard. The man, caught off balance and completely by surprise, gave a loud wail as he soared headfirst off the stern of the Glaros and splashed into the sea.

  Roselli's movement carried him up, then back under water. Kicking back to the surface, he launched himself toward Glaros's fantail, grabbing the top of the transom and boosting himself up… then muscling himself up and over the top in an untidy somersault. He landed with a loud, wet thump in the boat's after well deck at the feet of the screaming woman.

  "Easy! Easy!" Roselli yelled, holding up a hand, wondering if she understood English, but the woman kept screaming, her hands holding her head, her breasts dancing and bobbing wildly as she jumped up and down. Roselli was less interested at the moment in her movements, though, than he was in her safety. Snapping out with one foot and rolling to the side, he swept the girl's long, bare legs out from under her, spilling her to the deck with a startled bump. His boarding technique had been less than stealthy, and he didn't want innocent bystanders hit if the guy up on Glaros's bridge decided to start shooting.

  He unknotted the heavy cloth bag still dangling from his makeshift belt. Inside was one of the Smith & Wesson automatics, which he dragged out as he came to his feet. Clicking off the safety, he braced the pistol in both hands, aiming it up the well deck ladder toward the flying bridge, where the boat's pilot was still trying to get the engines started again. "Stamatiste!" he shouted, using his sole word of Greek. Papagos had coached him on it an hour ago. "Stamatiste! Stop!"

  Taking the first three rungs of the ladder, Roselli moved halfway up to the flying bridge level, until he could see the entire deck. A man in trousers and an unbuttoned sports shirt stood at the control console, his hair in wild disarray, a .45-caliber Colt automatic clutched in one hand.

  "Stama-fucking-tiste, you son of a bitch!"

  The man turned and stared into the muzzle of Roselli's Smith & Wesson, and some of the wildness seemed to go out of him. He slumped into the pilot's seat, the Colt spilling from his hand and clattering onto the deck. He raised his hands as Roselli climbed up the rest of the way onto the bridge. Kicking the .45 away, he grabbed the man's collar and forced him facedown onto the deck. Standard takedown. Roselli kicked his legs apart, jammed one foot against his crotch, then kneeled on the guy's buttocks, using his left hand to check for other weapons beneath his shirt.

  Where was Jaybird? Roselli didn't see him, but he did hear a frantic splashing and stole a glance aft. The woman, evidently, had recovered enough to make one rational decision, at least, and was swimming toward the promenade in a thrashing flurry of legs and arms. "Wonder what the indecent exposure laws are like in this town," he wondered half aloud. His prisoner rasped something in Greek, and Roselli roughly shoved the muzzle of his pistol against the base of his head to quiet him. Seconds later, the patrol boat, engines throttling back, rumbled slowly up to the Glaros, starboard side to, the searchlight sweeping the yacht from bow to stern. Squinting past the glare, Roselli could see a dozen armed men standing along her rail. A loud-hailer voice boomed something at him in Greek, and with a sharp chill Roselli realized that, so far as those guys were concerned, he was an armed man aboard a hostile craft.

  "American!" he yelled as loud as he could. "U.S. Navy!"

  "Put down the gun, Mr. Roselli," the loud-hailer voice barked in accented English.

  Sailors on the Greek vessel were reaching down with boat hooks to grab Glaros's rail and pull her up alongside. Roselli felt the deck shudder, heard the creak and scrape of the yacht as it bumped across the long, dirty white fenders hanging down the patrol boat's side.

  "Roselli!" the voice called again. "Put down your gun or we fire!"

  Shit! These guys were supposed to be on his side!

  Carefully, ostentatiously, he placed his pistol on the bridge control console, then raised his hands and clasped them behind his head. He stayed on top of his prisoner, however, digging in with his knee to convince the man that it would be wiser not to move. "Don't even think about it, pal," he said, wondering if the man understood English at all.

  Greek soldiers in camouflage uniforms began leaping aboard the Glaros, as sailors used boat hooks to draw the two vessels together. In a moment, both Roselli and his prisoner were being herded back down to the well deck at gunpoint.

  The woman who'd dived overboard was gone. Some of the soldiers started searching the Glaros, and in moments he heard a piercing shriek from inside the cabin. Seconds later, the laughing soldiers emerged, pulling along a girl — she couldn't have been more than eighteen — wearing nothing but long blond hair and a terrified expression. There was no sign of Sterling, however, or of the man Roselli had tossed over the side. As soldiers roughly handcuffed his wrists behind his back, Roselli grinned.

  The Zodiac that had been tied up astern of the Glaros was gone, its mooring line snicked clean through by a SEAL diving knife.

  2315 hours Harbor front Salonika, Greece

  Murdock stood on the promenade below the White Tower, watching as the Greek patrol boat edged closer to the promenade waterfront. Solomos stood beside him, scowling, while Brown and Papagos leaned against the tower wall, under guard.

  "Lieutenant," Solomos said quietly, "I am going to take great personal pride in seeing you broken. You have exceeded your authority, abused my hospitality, and threatened the success of my operation here."

  Murdock said nothing. There would be no reasoning with Solomos, not now. The man's pride had been injured, and this was a nation that took pride very seriously indeed.

  Politics. Shit!

  Every so often, the SEALs were forced to operate in a political environment, something quite different from the sea, air, and land elements which they'd been trained to deal with. Getting SEALs to behave diplomatically, or to follow the rules, or to avoid stepping on toes, was difficult to say the least. Sometimes it was even dangerous.

  In October of 1985, members of SEAL Team Six and the Army's Delta Force had been deployed to Sicily in order to carry out an assault on the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which had been commandeered in the eastern Med by four terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Front. A joint plan had been conceived between the assault force and a team of Italian co
mmandos who were also participating. The SEALS would board the cruise ship and take down the terrorists, then allow the Italian team to come in and take the credit, a ploy that had been used several times already by both the SEALs and Delta to keep those units out of the spotlight of media attention.

  Before the operation went down, however, the terrorists had surrendered after being promised safe passage by Egypt. Only after the terrorists had gone ashore at Port Said was it learned that they'd murdered one of the passengers, an elderly American confined to a wheelchair, and thrown his body overboard. Despite American protests, the Egyptians allowed the terrorists — together with several PLO negotiators and Abu Abbas, the terrorists' leader who was posing as a negotiator, and four members of Egypt's Force 777 counterterror unit — to board an airliner for a flight to the PLO's international headquarters in Tunisia.

  In a swift and determined series of maneuvers, planned and coordinated by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North at the White House, four F-14 Tomcats off the American carrier U.S.S. Saratoga intercepted the Egyptian airliner and forced it to land at a NATO military airfield at Sigonelia, Sicily, where the SEALs were waiting for them. Moving fast, the SEALs had surrounded the aircraft on the runway, prepared to fight with the terrorists if necessary.

  Then a political complication had arisen, Italian carabinieri had appeared, surrounding the SEALs and ordering them to stand down. The Italians were outraged that the Americans had taken military action on their territory; for their part, the SEALs thought that the Italians — who'd caved in to terrorist threats in the past and not always carried through with what they'd promised to do — would let the hijackers escape.

  A tense standoff ensued for nearly an hour, with the Italians demanding the release of the airliner's occupants, the SEALs refusing. A radio conversation on a tactical channel overheard by several officials at the scene added a new note of tension. Two SEALs were quietly discussing whether or not to take out the Italians, and how best to go about it. Only when the American Secretary of State received assurances from Rome that the terrorists would be tried for murder did the SEALs — somewhat reluctantly — stand aside and let the carabinieri take charge of the prisoners. Even at that, the SEALs didn't give up the chase entirely. When the terrorists were flown to Rome, two of the SEALs followed close behind in a small plane, claiming engine trouble to enable them to land behind the other plane and maintain surveillance of the carabinieri and their prisoners.