by Tony Bulmer
The fact he had gotten the drop on her back in Mumbai still niggled. Karyn didn’t let it show. Instead she gave him a honeyed smile. “You got yourself a real aptitude for leadership decision-making. You keep rolling with those kind of smarts and you are liable to land yourself a gig that pays actual cash–money for your services.”
His beard parted to reveal a glistening smile. “OK, you got my attention little miss wise ass.” He held out his hand. “Flint Jackson. You got yourself a call sign you go by?”
“The name is Kane, Karyn Kane.”
He looked more serious then. The Karyn Kane? I heard stories on the bush telegraph, but I never figured I would see the day. What are you Kane, some kind of hot shit legend? Because histrionics don’t cut it in my platoon.”
“Non sibi sed patriae.”
“Really? I heard you were some kind of hard charging bullet magnet who didn’t give a damn about rules of engagement. Is that the case Kane?”
“You get to know just what you need to know Detroit. I got chips in this game—high-stake chips. And I am going to play them come what may. So why don’t you just ease back on the gas and go about your day—the only reason we are talking at all is I need a cab ride to the main event. You understand me? You are a cab ride nothing more.
46
Operation Ocean Justice
Karyn knew the type. She had lost count of the wide shouldered all-American ball players she’d run into down the years. Every one of them figured they could make a difference, stand up for something that was strong and proud and right with the world. Guys like Flint Jackson had the sense of self to know they could make it through and the sense of duty to know that it wouldn’t matter even if they didn’t.
In the quartermasters stores, the SOG team buckled on body armor and an array of close quarters weaponry, including high capacity M4s and HK MP7s. Everyone donned night vision equipment, some of the guys accessorizing with gasmasks, for the android-from-hell look. Karyn had no plans to get caught up in a firefight. She had a game plan that was far more crucial to the mission objective than taking out a bunch of sorry-assed sailor boys, who had been dumb enough to have gotten themselves wrapped up in a conspiracy that extended beyond their understanding. Moving along the line with the other team members, Karyn was offered her pick of any weapon. She chose a pair of tinted goggles and a petite-size ballistic vest with a chest mounted pistol holder. If things kicked off aboard the Maharashtra it made sense to have her SIG front and centre, rather than tucked away, obstructed by her flack-vest.
As she headed up to the flight deck, with the SOG unit, the guys were busy breaking each others balls with in-joke wisecracks, getting the funnies in now, because later was so far distant it might never arrive. Karyn melded into the background and let them go at it. Very soon they would be crash-boarding a sovereign vessel belonging to a nuclear powered nation. If this play went wrong, things would get out of control real fast. Worse, if Pakistan, or elements within that rambling dysfunctional country, had been involved in a secret conspiracy to destroy Mumbai, they would almost certainly be planning further attacks, to build on the euphoria of victory they had just achieved.
The countdown was on. India would surely respond in kind—perhaps with a nuclear weapon, and then what—a further escalation? Leading to war spreading over the entire region? The thought gave Karyn a gooseflesh shudder.
Standing in the giant cargo lift, Karyn could feel the ocean breeze flooding in from above. The thick, humid air offered no comfort. She wrapped her silk scarf about her face and pulled her ball cap down across her goggles. Nothing and no one was going to stop her. She was going to take this all the way—somewhere out there in the fearful ocean darkness a weapon as terrifying as anything invented was lurking silently, preparing to wake it from it’s malevolent slumber.
As Karyn stepped on to the flight deck, the SH-60 Seahawks were outlined black against the eerie, almost satanic glow night of the deck lights The rotor wash from the waiting helicopters hammered towards her. She felt the fear, flooding in from the blackness of the ocean night. Very soon, they would be heading fast and low across the dark Arabian waters, in search of an unknown destiny.
Detroit Jackson was standing by the doors of one of the helicopters, making hand signal communications with the crew-chief manning the door mounted minigun. Karyn felt the adrenaline rush hit. If she was going to find the last EMP weapon, it was with men such as this that she would complete her mission. The unit operators were crouching low now, filing aboard the aircraft with their weapons held close. Karyn followed them inside the helicopter, keeping her head down as the giant rotor blades spun ever-faster overhead, blurring into a dark halo, as a single howling engine note picked up into a banshee wail. There was no preflight check, no fasten-seatbelt niceties. The fat, black helicopter simply rose up powerfully from the carrier flight deck and peeled away into the ocean night. The soft glow of the carrier and its gang of ocean going escorts quickly faded into the darkness.
The throb of the night closed in. Speeding below, too fast to draw focus on, the glistening blackness of the ocean, lay frozen like hammered glass. The moon was breeching the tumbling cloud base now, its eerie gilded light creating a growing sense of unease. If the moon was against them, the enemy would see them coming, from the far edge of the horizon. They would be sitting ducks for small arms and surface to air missile attack. The glowing danger danced across the stony faces of the warriors inside the aircraft, as they made their final preparations for battle in total silence.
Karyn drew a slow breath. She told herself that somewhere high above, a crack team of electronic countermeasure experts were circling ever higher, moving on station in their EA-18 Growler, an aircraft designed to create a giant net of electronic interference, that would render radar aboard the Maharashtra temporarily inoperable. Trust in the unseen science of higher minds, there was no other choice. The fragile body of the helicopter was stoutly resilient, but offered little protection against heavy caliber weapons. There was no margin for error now, just cold and unending darkness rising up from the fathomless depths beneath.
47
Islamabad Pakistan
How far had it been? Lauren felt a flaming heat tearing at her hands and knees, her back hurt too, and they were just the parts that were crying out for attention. She knew that given chance, other parts of her body would join the chorus of protest. Far behind her now, she could hear the shouts and curses of the men who were hunting her, occasional bursts of gunfire accompanied these calls of frustration. She had to keep her head down, just a little bit longer, just a little bit farther.
She didn’t hear the guy, didn’t see him either. Perhaps it was her labored breathing that had distracted her? The exertion of scrabbling across almost the entire orchard on her hands and knees was worse than any gym class she could imagine. She pictured her personal trainer barking orders, telling her there would be another ten reps before she could hit the showers. There would be no showers tonight thought Lauren ruefully, not tonight or the next night, or even the night after. She scrabbled further forwards and suppressed a whimper of self-pity.
It was then that she heard him; or rather she heard what he was doing. He was standing in the long grass, just as still as can be—relieving himself—taking a pee for goodness sake and he was almost close enough to reach out and touch. Lauren held her breath. How incredibly gross—crawling through pee, the thought was so horrible it was almost impossible to bear. How much worse could this night of horror get? Much worse. The man suddenly jerked his head towards her. Listening. So quiet now, you could almost hear his breath, sounding out in the freeze-frame night.
Lauren lay paralyzed. She had come this far, gotten covered in mud and cuts, torn her hands and knees to pieces, she was damned if some lone-wolf sentry with a dodgy bladder was going to catch her now. She had almost made it, crawled to the very edge of freedom for Christ’s sake. She didn’t deserve to be caught, didn’t deserve it at all.
The sentry moved then, first one foot, then the other, moving forwards as if uncertain which way he should go.
She didn’t move, didn’t breath didn’t even blink. Just stared at the sandaled feet, as the thin, bearded figure craned his scrawny neck and peered into the darkness that surrounded her. He had heard something, but he couldn’t quite believe what his senses were telling him. He took a hesitant step forward, then another, drawn by the power of his curiosity. Another few steps and he would be upon her.
Lauren took a slow, deep breath, summoning every last ounce of strength and courage she had left.
Still buckling his breeches, he moved ever closer, wading through the long grass towards her.
There were only seconds left now before he was upon her. She didn’t want to act, but she had no other choice. If she didn’t make a move now, she would lose the advantage of surprise. He would grab her, hold her down and sound the alarm, calling out for his gang of foul accomplices. After what had happened back at the summerhouse, they would show no mercy. They would rape her, and murder her, just as surely as they had killed ambassador Campanella. The thought panicked and enraged her. She rose up from the long grass and charged her attacker with the manic ferocity of a cornered wildcat.
The man let out a strangled cry of surprise, but already she was upon him. Lauren had no idea what she was doing, or even how she would do it. She acted on the ancient and uncontrollable feral instinct rising up within her.
She hit the guy hard in the face. Not a punch, not a slap, but something somewhere between.
The man drew his hands to his face reflexively.
Lauren’s body steam-rollered into his. Her meager weight alone would never have been enough to take him down. Combined with the force of her charge however, the sentry was thrown completely off balance. In his surprise, his unbuckled pants sank quickly to his ankles. He stumbled, he teetered, he clutched for the rifle that hung over his shoulder—and then he went down, sprawling backwards in the slimy mud. He let out a throaty exclamation and attempted to twist away, but Lauren rode him into the floor, pummeling his face with hammer blows. She didn’t pause, not even for a moment. She made certain she had got him down, snatching at the heavy rifle, as it slid from his shoulder.
Reeling from the ferocious attack, the sentry sprawled in the dirt for a long moment, but as Lauren rose to her feet, he gathered his composure quickly, slithering away from her, like a vengeful cobra. Rolling over in the long grass, he grasped for his weapon. But Lauren was already holding it.
She could see his face now, glistening, malevolent eyes, a crooked grin twisting across his lips. He crouched on his haunches and whispered something guttural and unpleasant. He was rising up now, reaching out for the gun with filthy claw-like fingers.
Lauren took a step back then another. He laughed at her now—a low, mocking cackle.
She pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. The sentry rose up to his full height and surged towards her. Lauren’s panicked fingers fumbled with the gun, she felt something give—a lever sliding downwards. A blinding arc of fire tore through the darkness. The rifle danced upwards in her hands. Lauren grasped the rifle tighter. But the harder she gripped it, the more manic it became. Tracer rounds arced away, lighting up the night, as the savage recoil of the weapon spun her ever faster. It was just a few short seconds, but those fleeting moments stretched like an eternity, before the bucking, flaming muzzle of the rifle finally fell silent.
She stood there in the long grass, hyperventilating. The sound of gunfire reverberating in her ears. It was as though the entire world had fallen silent save the ghastly echoes of death.
The man was nowhere to be seen.
She couldn’t understand it. Where had he gone?
Looking around now, a rapid 360.
A realization then—the panic hit instantaneously.
She swung the rifle about her with a furious cry of anguish, and launched it over the long grass with every ounce of strength she had. It sailed away, disappearing silently into the inky blackness. She didn’t wait to hear it land. She set off running, just as fast as she could. Where she was headed she had no idea, not even the vaguest inkling. All she knew was that she had to get away from the terror that was reverberating through every part of her.
48
The Arabian Sea, 230 nautical miles West of India
The Navy Seahawks rolled in fast out of the night sky, descending from four directions at once. The helicopters hovered above the Maharashtra so fleetingly they barely seemed to pause at all, before they were climbing away into the dark sky. But those few short minutes were all that was needed for the CIA Special Operations Group to make their fast-rappelling arrival on the decks of the giant container ship.
The freighter was even bigger than it had appeared in the pictures at the ONI briefing. End to end the vessel was longer than three football pitches and wide with it. At its highest point, the ship towered above the black ocean over 15 stories high.
Across the vast deck, dingy tungsten lights cast an eerie green-tinged glow, illuminating a vast cargo of shipping containers stacked five high, over every inch of deck. This was quite some vessel. There had to be a thousand containers on the deck at least and maybe twice that below.
The ship was moving full speed ahead, a steel leviathan, plowing through the deadly night. Landing on the fast moving ship in the dark was a near lethal maneuver. Karyn moved fast, leaving no time for thought. She roped down from the helicopter at breakneck speed and unleashed her rappelling rig. She paused very briefly on the roof of the bridge and drank in the scene. SOG operators were swarming the decks, their weapons high and ready, as they rounded up the ship’s crew. Resistance was brief and half-hearted, in the face of the special-forces takedown. Below decks, flash-bang explosions resounded, as the SOG took control of the ship level by level. Karyn ground her teeth. Somewhere on this ship there was a fully functioning EMP weapon, the kind of device that could take out an entire city in fractions of a second. That thing could go off at any moment. What kind of effect would it have on a ship like this? The thought was fleeting; there was no time to ponder such things.
Meanwhile, Flint Jackson and his guys had already taken charge of the ships bridge. They were busy snapping flexi-cuffs on their kneeling captives by the time Karyn looked down onto the bridge gantry. The bomb was all she could think about. It had to be here, stacked in deep amongst the thousands of steel shipping containers. But how would she find it? There was no time to check the many thousands of densely packed containers—And even if there was a way of sorting through the vast cargo, there was no guarantee that the search would turn up the bomb—it would be hidden, disguised, its radioactive signature masked inside a vacuum packed casement of some kind; maybe a chest freezer, or a shipment of machine parts, or even inside a cylinder of liquefied gas—the possibilities were literally endless.
There was another way of finding the bomb however. A shipment that important would be sure to have someone watching over it—there had to me an inside man—someone, somewhere on board, who knew where the bomb was located. Karyn tucked her scarf tight about her face and moved over to the edge of the roof. A steel ladder with hooped safety bars clung to the side of the bridge. Karyn grabbed hold of it and slid down firefighter style. The instep of her boots burned against the hard steel; the intense friction ate into her gloves. Karyn hardly noticed. The bomb was her only consideration. As she barreled out of the ladder pipe, she almost collided with a dark figure prowling the deck below. Karyn landed in a crouch, then rose slowly to her feet.
The figure slid away from her, clinging to the bridge rail, like he was getting ready to plunge over the edge into the broiling ocean.
“Do not kill me. I beg of you, do not kill me!”
Karyn drew her self up to her full height. She said nothing, just stared at the cowering figure, as his weasel words kept coming in broken English.
“We are friends of Americans, Why do you attack us? We are friends I tell
you, the peace loving people of Pakistan are friends to all men of the United States. As God in his mighty wisdom is my witness, we are innocent sailors attending to our duties. By what authority do you carry out this murderous attack?
Karyn took a step forward. The guy was strange. Everything about him was wrong, from the way he talked to the way he slithered along the guardrail—like he was almost expecting to get his throat slit or something. She paused, tilted her head—got a real good look at the scared weasel face staring back at her. The creep was wearing a steel safety helmet, but he had something snapped on the front brim, something that almost looked like a flashlight, but it wasn’t. Karyn took another step, then another.
“Do not destroy our ship I beg of you. We are simple sailors, peaceful men of Islam. By what authority does the Navy of America attack us in this way?”
Karyn moved fast then. So fast, it was almost impossible for the naked eye to plot the scything arc of her heel as it cut the air and impacted the bleating figure in the head—he crashed back—landing hard against the safety rail. He doubled up, almost flipping over the edge of the steel balustrade. Far below, the foaming wake of the ship surged by. Karyn moved in close, caught him one handed by the throat and kneed him hard in the groin, that straightened him up, in double quick time. He queezed and groaned and squawked and pleaded, chattering up a storm of curses in his native language. Karyn casually elbowed him in the face and snatched the up the tin hat as it bounced off his head. She angled the hat downwards examining it carefully. Just as she figured—the rail hugging creep had a Go-Pro style camera fixed to the front of his helmet. He had been filming everything for an Internet uplink. Karyn cracked her captive across the head with the steel helmet, then back-handed it into the ocean like a Frisbee, watching as it sailed away into the darkness.