Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  “Since when?”

  “It was instituted last week,” Ercilla said. “My government asked for help. In the present, shall we say, mood of certain international organizations, combined with the sensitivity of canal operations—”

  Graham let surprise and relief show on his face. “They’re looking for explosives,” he said. “Well, very good. I’ll sleep better when they’re done.”

  Ercilla smiled and nodded. “So will we, Captain. Believe me.”

  “If a ship like mine were to suddenly explode in the middle of one of the locks it could conceivably close the canal for months,” Graham said.

  “No, Captain Slavin,” the transit official said. “It would close the canal for years.”

  “The effect on the world economy would be devastating,” Almagro added.

  “I expect it would,” Graham agreed wholeheartedly. “Now, may I offer you gentlemen coffee or tea while we wait for the FBI to complete its inspection?”

  THIRTEEN

  CABIMAS

  “I’m sorry, señor, but we have reached a dead end, as I warned you we would,” Juan Gallegos said. He poured another glass of wine and sat back.

  It was just nightfall, and he and McGarvey were having an early supper at a small but fashionable cafetería on the waterfront, but well away from the commercial district. Traffic had not yet picked up for the evening, and from somewhere they could hear someone playing a guitar, the melody coming to them over a gentle breeze.

  They were missing something, just out of reach at the back of McGarvey’s head. It had been a frustrating day of running down the shipping agents for each of the twenty-seven tankers that had left port in the past forty-eight hours, plus the eleven scheduled to depart in the next twenty-four hours, showing them Graham’s photograph, and trying to get them to look beyond the simple black-and-white image, and imagine that man in a disguise.

  Next they had talked to all the hiring agencies to find out if someone might have been trying to recruit a crew. But no one had seen a man who even closely resembled Graham.

  All this late afternoon they’d talked to the clerks in several hotels where Graham might have stayed: taxi drivers, on the remote chance that they might run into someone who’d had Graham as a fare; restaurant waiters who might have served him a meal; and with ferry operators who might have taken a man matching Graham’s description out to one of the ships. All without luck.

  “Will you be returning to the States in the morning?” Gallegos asked. He was polite now that he had done what he could for the gringo and had been proven correct. “I can make sure that you get a first-class seat on the Miami flight. They’re usually full.”

  A waiter came to clear away their plates. McGarvey had scarcely touched his churrasco steak that had been cut into thin criollo strips, marinated, and then grilled. “Is there something wrong with your food, señor?” the young pock-faced man asked. His attitude was arrogant. He didn’t like North Americans.

  McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts. “It was fine. I’m just not hungry.”

  When the waiter was gone, Gallegos asked again if McGarvey would be leaving in the morning.

  “We’re missing something,” McGarvey said. “Graham was in Maracaibo two days ago, and according to the whore he was coming here to meet his ship.”

  “If you can believe her.”

  “Graham might have lied to her, but she was telling the truth. Still it doesn’t matter. If he came to Venezuela to board a ship he could have done it just as easily from Maracaibo as here.”

  “Easier,” Gallegos said. “There’re more water taxis out of Maracaibo than here.”

  “Why did he come here?”

  Gallegos shook his head, frustrated. “It’s a moot point. If he wasn’t here to raise a crew, and if he didn’t bring men with him, how could he expect to hijack one of our ships? One man alone could not do it.You can see that, can’t you?”

  McGarvey nodded. “Maybe he wasn’t planning on hijacking a ship.”

  Gallegos threw up his hands. “What are you talking about now?”

  All at once it came to McGarvey. He motioned their waiter for the check. “Graham came here because he was after a specific ship. One that was being assigned a new officer, probably the captain.”

  “If he stayed at a hotel his passport would have been checked.”

  “He probably killed the captain, got rid of the body, and either switched photos in the passport or altered his appearance.” The waiter brought the bill and McGarvey laid down a twenty, which more than covered it and a good tip. “If a new captain was here to meet his ship, where would he stay?”

  “The Internacional,” Gallegos said. “But we were there this afternoon.”

  “We only talked to the desk clerk,” McGarvey said. “This time we’re going to talk to the rest of the staff, starting with the bell captain. Someone may have carried the real captain’s bags into the hotel, and Graham’s bags back out. Room service may have brought him a meal. The chambermaid cleaning his room may have seen him. Someone might have noticed something.”

  The hotel was less than a block away. They drove over and parked under the canopy in front of the main entrance. “Leave it here, we’ll be just a minute,” Gallegos told the valet.

  Inside, they approached the bell station where a young, good-looking man in the blue uniform of a bell captain was reading a newspaper. He looked up with interest, folded the newspaper, and put it away. “Good evening,” he said. “Are you gentlemen checking in?”

  “Buenas noches,” McGarvey said. He handed the bell captain Graham’s photograph with a twenty-dollar bill. “Have you seen this man?”

  Sudden understanding dawned on the bell captain’s face. “You were here this afternoon, speaking with Mr. Angarita,” he said. He pocketed the money. He looked at the photo and shook his head. “I’m sorry, this man is unfamiliar to me. But if you would care to leave the photo I can ask my staff.”

  “That would be helpful,” Gallegos said.

  “Do many ship’s officers stay here at the hotel?” McGarvey asked.

  “Of course,” the bell captain said. “Often.”

  “Any in the past two days?”

  The bell captain nodded. “Sí.”

  “A captain or a senior officer, maybe?” McGarvey asked. “Someone who stayed the night, and then left for his ship in the morning?”

  The bell captain thought for a moment, and then nodded. “There was one.”

  “But not this man,” McGarvey said. “Not even a man who might have looked like him, even faintly. Perhaps his shoulders. Maybe his eyes, or the way he walked. Or his manner: pleasant, indifferent, arrogant.”

  The bell captain studied the photo again.

  “Perhaps there was something different about him,” McGarvey pressed. “Maybe when he checked in he was relaxed, but when he left he was in a hurry, maybe anxious.”

  “The Russian captain,” the bell captain said hesitantly. “Something was odd about him, I think.”

  McGarvey kept a poker face. He shrugged. “Odd?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

  “He was a GAC guest of the hotel two days ago. Stayed only the night. In the morning the Vensport ferry service took him out to his ship by helicopter.”

  “Continue,” McGarvey prompted.

  “I personally handle most of our VIP guests, so I took his bags up to his suite when he arrived. He tried to tip me, but Mr. Angarita who’d come up with him explained that GAC would take care of everything.”

  “Is that common practice?”

  “Yes, sir,” the bell captain said. “But Captain Slavin seemed a little embarrassed.”

  “So?”

  The bell captain looked at the photo again. “In the morning, Manuel took his bags to the helipad on the roof. He said that the captain tipped him and insisted he take it. It was odd, after his embarrassment the evening before.”

  “Do you know the name of the ship?” McGarvey asked.

  “No,
but I can find out,” the bell captain said. He turned to his computer behind the desk and brought up the hotel folio for Slavin’s stay, which included the destination and charge for the helicopter ferry service. “It’s the Apurto Devlán,” he said, looking up. “But Captain Slavin, or whoever he is, will be back.”

  “How do you know that?” Gallegos asked, in English for McGarvey’s benefit.

  “He checked a large aluminum trunk with us,” the bell captain said.

  “Where is it?” McGarvey demanded.

  “Right here, in guest storage,” the bell captain said. He opened a door to a small room behind his bell station. Various boxes and pieces of tagged luggage were stacked on metal shelves. An aluminum trunk about the size of a footlocker sat in a corner.

  “Evacuate the hotel,” McGarvey ordered.

  “What—?” the bell captain sputtered.

  “I wouldn’t put it past Graham to leave a little surprise for us,” McGarvey told Gallegos. “If he thought someone might be on his trail it would cover his tracks.”

  Gallegos showed the bell captain his CID credentials, and said something to him in rapid-fire Spanish, but the young man backed up and shook his head.

  “Get a bomb squad over here on the double,” McGarvey said. He walked back to the main entrance, where he’d spotted a fire alarm. He broke the glass with the little hinged hammer and pulled the lever. Alarms began to blare all through the hotel.

  McGarvey and Gallegos stood outside under the canopy, while the police held the majority of the hotel guests and staff behind barriers half a block away. Police units, fire trucks, and ambulances were parked all over the place, their emergency lights flashing. A military bomb disposal squad had been choppered across the lake from Maracaibo within twenty minutes of Gallego’s call to the Zulia State barracks. They’d been inside for nearly a half hour, before the supervisor emerged from the lobby. His Lexan face shield was in the raised position.

  He came over to where McGarvey and Gallegos were waiting. His complexion under the harsh entry lights was pale, and his face was shiny with sweat. He looked as if he was about to be sick.

  He said something in Spanish to Gallegos, who shot back a rapid-fire response. The bomb disposal supervisor glanced at McGarvey, nodded, and headed across to his truck.

  “I think it was Graham,” Gallegos told McGarvey. “The body of a man, who will probably turn out to be the Russian ship captain, was stuffed into the aluminum trunk.”

  The news was more frustrating than surprising to McGarvey. “Was anything else packed with the body?”

  “We won’t know until the medical examiner gets here,” Gallegos said. “But you were right all along. I’m sure that my government will ask your navy for help. If some maniac has actually gotten control of one of our tankers there’s no telling what will happen.”

  “We’re already on it,” McGarvey told him. “The target’s probably one of our oil refineries in California, which means we have time to do something.”

  “How can I help?” Gallegos asked earnestly. He’d been wrong, but he was sharp enough not to hold any grudges.

  “I’m probably going to need some fast transportation out of here,” McGarvey said.

  “I’ll have Air Force on standby for you. Whatever you need.” McGarvey walked a few feet away and made a sat phone call to Rencke, who was still at Langley. “It’s the Apurto Devlán. Graham probably killed the captain ashore here in Cabimas and took his identity. What can you tell me about the ship?”

  “She’s a Panamax oil carrier, nine hundred feet on the waterline, beam of one hundred and ten feet.Twelve separate tanks, carrying fifty-thousand-plus tons of light sweet crude.”

  “What about the crew?”

  “Normal complement of a master and twenty-three officers and crew, but she’s been running shorthanded. Nineteen and the captain.”

  McGarvey put himself in Graham’s shoes. He’d apparently come up with enough information about the ship and her officers to feel confident that he could get away with posing as the captain. Once aboard, and at sea, he would have to eliminate the entire crew and probably stop at some rendezvous point to pick up their replacements.

  “Where’s the ship right now?”

  “I’m just bringing it up now,” Otto said. He sounded excited.

  McGarvey could see him in his pigsty of an office; empty classified files, NRO satellite photos, top secret Company memos, and empty Twinkie wrappers would be scattered all over the floor, on the desk and chairs, while Otto, probably dressed in ragged jeans and a dirty sweatshirt, would be working a half-dozen computer monitors and keyboards like a concert organist manipulating several registers.

  “Oh wow, Mac, she’s in the Limón holding basin,” Otto said. “Scheduled to start her transit in a few hours. Midnight.”

  “Have the canal authorities already cleared her?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes, but she’ll stay anchored until the pilot comes aboard,” Otto said. “But I just had another thought. What if Graham isn’t targeting the Long Beach refineries? What if he’s after the canal?”

  McGarvey had kicked the same idea around in his head all afternoon as they’d worked their way through the shipping and hiring agencies. The only mistakes that Graham had made were telling the whore he was meeting a ship and then making her mad enough to remember him out of all her johns. He was professional enough to have eluded capture for the past several years even though he was a hunted man worldwide, which meant he had a very definite plan, one which he believed would not fail. He would be professional enough to realize that time was against him. The moment he’d killed the Russian captain, the countdown had begun. Sooner or later the body that he’d stuffed in the footlocker would be discovered; sooner or later someone would come looking for him.

  Once the Apurto Devlán cleared the Panama Canal it would take nearly ten days to reach California. Too many bad things could happen in such a long time.

  “I think you’re right,” he told Rencke. “Where would he blow up the ship to do the most damage?”

  “The Gatun locks, on the Caribbean side,” Otto said without hesitation. “I already worked it out. If he could take those out it would be a very long time before the canal could be made operational again. It’s even possible that it’d never get done. The whole thing is way too small for most modern ships. If it were going to be rebuilt, it’d be better to start from scratch. Make it fit the ships out there delivering cargo, not the other way around. But nobody’s got that kind of do-re-me these days.”

  “Okay, hang on a minute, Otto,” McGarvey said, and he walked back to where Gallegos was smoking a cigarette and watching the police activity inside the lobby. They’d dragged the aluminum footlocker out of the storage room, and a photographer was taking pictures. The other officers were keeping their distance because of the smell. “Is your offer still open for a quick ride out of here?”

  “Sí. Where do you want to go?”

  “The Panama Canal,” McGarvey said. “Probably the international airport at Panama City.”

  “How soon?”

  “Right now,” McGarvey said.

  “Give me five minutes,” Gallegos said, and he took out his cell phone.

  McGarvey turned back to Otto. “Do we still have an Emergency Response Team in the Canal Zone?”

  “Yes. They’re based in Panama City.”

  “Alert them to what’s coming their way. But make it damn clear that they wait until I get there, they’ll have to chopper me up to Colón. Graham will have his own crew aboard, and they’ll be willing to go up in flames for the cause if they’re pressed.”

  “They might have their own threat-response orders,” Rencke warned.

  “If need be call Dennis Berndt at the White House, he’s got muscle.” Berndt was the president’s national security adviser.

  “You’re going to have to hustle, Mac,” Rencke said. “We’re running out of time if Gatun is the target.”

  “Juan is working on i
t for me,” McGarvey said, a tight smile on his lips. “I have a couple of things that I’d like to discuss with Mr. Graham tonight. I think he’ll find what I have to say interesting.”

  FOURTEEN

  APURTO DEVLÁN, LIMÓN BAY HOLDING BASIN

  It was approaching eleven o’clock. The transit pilot would be coming aboard in a little more than a half hour, yet the job wasn’t finished. Graham hesitated for just a moment on the open deck just forward of the superstructure to catch his breath in the clean air. The night sky was pitch-black, but they were surrounded by the lights of dozens of ships, large and small, most of them at anchor, although in the past two hours, three ships had headed into the narrow cut that led to the Gatun locks.

  Spread out along the eastern shore of the bay, the city of Colón’s skyscrapers and business district looked like diamonds, rubies, and emeralds against a black velvet backdrop. The place reminded him in some ways of Singapore’s skyline at night. He’d looked at it through a search periscope from well offshore. But that was another time and place that he didn’t want to remember now.

  Hijazi had taken charge of the engine room, along with one of the other operators, and they’d just finished packing enough Semtex around the rudder shaft to permanently disable the ship if something drastic went wrong. In the worst-case scenario they would jam the rudder, set the ship’s engines All Ahead Full, and ram the first lock gate. It wouldn’t do the same damage as exploding the ship inside the middle lock, but it would do enough to close the canal for months, perhaps even years.

  The access hatch to the six starboard stairwells was open and a dim red light shone from below. The narrow stairs descended eighty feet to the bottom of the ship between the hull and the wall of the farthest aft product tank on the starboard side. Access hatches and stairs for each of the twelve oil tanks, plus the two slop tanks and six pairs of ballast tanks for when the ship was running light, ran left and right.

  Graham took a last look around topside. A helicopter low in the sky was heading northwest, the sounds of its rotors against the other harbor and city noises faint on the light evening breeze. No threat there. And what was probably a commercial jetliner was coming in from the north for a landing at Panama City thirty-five miles across the isthmus.