by David Poyer
“The morning is good,” she said shortly, then reverted to English for Peter and Bob. “What have you got?”
“I have ‘got’ three teams going through those dhows which have not yet cast off. And the Harbor Police pursuing those which have already left.” Gough waved at the basin. It was filled with a restless throng of small craft, like a bowl of cereal stirred and only slowly coming to rest. Some were still moored, in rafts two and three deep out from the stone and concrete wharf front; others drifted or circled as motor-boats with the Arabic lettering ش ط ة and below it the word POLICE moved among them, constabulary officers with bullhorns shepherding them back to their moorings. Others were already under way, standing toward the distant horizon of the sea. Beyond the mole she glimpsed the gray upper works of the destroyer.
Diehl shouldered forward. “General. Anything can we do?”
“Have you radio communication with your ship?”
“Not directly, but we can get word out to her.”
“I should very much like to be able to speak directly with her. If you can—” He was interrupted by an officer who came up with a handheld radio. “—Just a moment, we may have that problem solved. Yes? And her name, or call sign, or whatever they use?”
“They’ll answer to USS Horn,” Diehl told him. Gough nodded and lifted the radio.
At that moment a series of cracks came flatly over the water. Then, rising to a fusillade, the rattle of small arms firing at full automatic.
MARTY saw the dude first. He was standing where the bow rose to the upswept prow. The first thing he noticed was that he wasn’t dressed like the others. He wasn’t in rolled-up pants and bare chest, or tatty torn undershirt, or stained robes. He wore regular clothes, a sport shirt and slacks. The second thing he noticed was that he was shouting back toward the enclosed cockpit they steered these things from.
Things happened fast after that. The dhow was still on its way out; Faith was still on its way in. Police boats with black hulls were trying to hold back the other fishermen. Arabic came from loud hailers. But these boys weren’t making any move to stop. They were cranking it up, still headed for the gap in the seawall that led out.
The only trouble was, Team Gold was between them and it. And the dhow was about eighty times the displacement of the inflatable, and didn’t look like it intended to lose this game of chicken.
“That them?” the coxswain yelled. “Want me to head for ’em?”
He was opening his mouth to give him the order when the fellow in the sport shirt bent down and picked up what looked like an AK, but with a longer barrel. And before Marty could reorient his brain to say something else, he started firing.
The bursts blew water into the air between the two boats, then, as the firer corrected, all around them. Then Marty was yelling. Cassidy was screaming, the coxswain was twisting the wheel into a tight turn away.
Lizard got the first burst off. Then the others, Crack Man, Snack Cake, Deuce jumped in with deafening cracks that blended into a roar as somebody else opened up from the dhow. The M-14s weren’t so great in the confined spaces of a boarded trawler, but over the fifty yards that separated them from the dhow their heavy, high-velocity bullets hit hard. The windows of the dhow opened up with flashes, and two more guys popped up at the stern and began firing, too.
Then Sasquatch opened up with the M-60 and brass really started flying. He got on the pilothouse and shot out all the windows, took one of the stern guys out as he straightened, started to aim, instead caught a burst in the chest and tumbled backward. Then the big seaman started stitching fire into the engine area, below the empty windows where now they couldn’t see any flashes, any activity at all.
Which was good, except the dhow was still coming on. Still headed for the channel and the ship. He couldn’t see anybody at the helm, but the inside of the pilothouse was a black hole.
The helicopter had come back, skating around above them like the sky was blue ice. It kept moving, which he guessed was a survival tactic. He wouldn’t want to come in at a hover above guys with whatever it was the man in the blue shirt had been firing.
Meanwhile the coxswain had come back around and they were headed right back toward the oncoming prow. So that all Marty had to do was lean over and say, pointing, “Put her right there.”
“Right there?”
“The bow. Right there.” He told Cassidy what he was going to do. The ensign nodded. He was gripping the roll bar on the center console with one hand, his pistol with the other. He hadn’t fired yet, though everyone else had.
Marchetti switched his attention back to the swiftly closing hull. It was rippling along through the green water, still on its steady course. He couldn’t scrub from his mind the thought that any moment now he’d see a flash and the next number would be the singing angels. He unslung the twelve-gauge, jacked a round, and put the bead on the gunwale. Which grew quickly, loomed over them. He squatted suddenly and braced just as the coxswain ran the blunt air-padded bow full into the side of the dhow at about ten knots.
It staggered everyone in the boat. The motors roared as they rebounded, like throwing a basketball against a concrete wall, but the coxswain kept her aimed where Marchetti had pointed and drove right back in again. She snarled ahead, pressing with all the power of his steadily advanced throttles against the dhow’s bow. Like a little rubber tugboat, crowded up against the paint and rust and caked salt in a meat-grinder snarl of hard rubber and plastic against steel. He leaned back, trying to keep the bead where anybody leaning over the side to shoot down would first appear. But they didn’t, and the Johnsons howled, and Crack Man reared back and the grapnel went sailing up, line uncoiling behind it.
They went up hand over hand, stepping first on the inflatable’s nose as it rode up, then either jumping up to grab the deck edge and haul themselves up and over bodily or else walking up the line from the grapnel. The deck was only about ten feet above the water, but it took muscle to pull yourself straight up burdened with weapon and gear and ammunition and wet clothes and boots and, of course, the damn flotation vests they didn’t dare leave behind. He rolled into the shelter of a cathead, whipped the barrel around, and scanned the afterdeck. Through the missing windows a chromed wheel in the empty pilothouse rotated slowly.
Crack Man jumped out and fired a full clip down into it, from the hip. From the far side Cassidy, recovered, it seemed, was firing into the far window, both angling down, so they wouldn’t shoot each other.
Marchetti rolled over and lurched up, sprinting as hard as he could down the port side. One of the crew lay there, blood running into the scuppers, a smashed Kalashnikov beside him. Marty vaulted over him and fetched up beside the pilothouse. He and Cassidy looked down the glass-littered stairs.
The ensign started to move, but Marty had him by a quarter second and went down first, blasting blind ahead of him as he went, the shells chucking out as he worked the pump.
The wheelhouse smelled of paint and fish and diesel oil. There was nobody there. He was about to take another ladder down when a horn began. The RHIB’s horn. One, two, three stuttering blasts.
He glanced out to see the seawall looming.
They hit with a crashing crunching impact into solid concrete and stone. Every piece of glass still in the frames shattered and fell. Horrible sounds came from below, as if heavy machinery was rotating fast while winding steel cable around itself. Shrieking and complaining, tearing itself into pieces.
Heads came into view over the bow and he jerked the Mossy up, almost blasting them through the empty windows before he realized they wore black assault gear and black helmets and carried submachine guns.
As lines rattled across, he wanted to pull his head into his shoulders and his dick into his groin, waiting for the explosion. They’d run full tilt into the seawall and were probably going down. Any sane man would get off before whatever was down there sent them all to Cloud Nine.
Instead, he grabbed the overhead and swung down the steps, boo
ts crunching glass and slipping on cartridges, most empty but some still bulleted, still live. But he just kept going, and as his eyes adapted he made out an opening leading down and forward. The engine-eating-itself sound was coming from there, and he followed it, but had to reverse himself first and back down a ladder. His hand went for his flashlight and grabbed air, a lanyard keeper dangling with nothing at the end of it. He didn’t know when he’d lost the Maglite, but he wished he hadn’t. The interior was black.
A shot sledgehammered steel by his head. He twisted and fired into the dark. Something hit his chest, hard, like an iron ram with a sharp point swung abruptly into his breastbone. He saw stars and flashes, but kept pumping and firing and someone was firing back and he pumped and fired till the striker clicked empty but the answering flashes stopped and he heard someone scrambling away on hands and knees, crying or praying in a foreign-sounding whine.
Someone came down the ladder with a light, and he reloaded, thumbing shells into the mag, keeping his eyes where the muttering whimper had disappeared. Then grabbed the Maglite out of whoever’s hands and went forward, feeling like it was blood or semen instant after instant of time itself being squeezed out of him.
The beam lit up a cavernous hold, bigger than he’d have thought, seeing the dhow from outside. One side was bagged solid with heavy-looking sacks. The air was thick with the lime smell of wet concrete and old fish and the sharp coppery tang of blood. On the other side, blue polyethylene drums like the ones chemicals came in. He reached out to thump one, then thought better of that. He was used to seeing holds loaded symmetrically, with careful dunnage between cargo.
There was none here, as if this voyage would only be a little distance in calm water.
He slid among them hastily but quietly, following the flash beam with his shotgun. Left hand clamped to the fore end, beam aligned with the bore. The flutter-roar of the helicopter from the far side of metal, the metallic tone of a bullhorn, the scrape and lurch and boom of a rock incisor gnawing along the outer hull.
The spotlight wavered on a square case with green wires coming out of it. He caught his breath. Each step took an age.
He was almost to it when someone stepped out of the dark and slugged him in the back with what felt like a two-by-four. The flash tumbled away. The Mossberg blasted a red tongue of flame. Then he was on his knees, scrabbling to get up again as the board or bat or whatever it was slammed into his ass, then boomed hollowly, missing him and hitting steel.
Five sharp explosions loud as close lightning filled the hold with sound and light and powder smoke. In their intermittent flash he saw a boy in a white shirt jerking his hands up to grab his chest.
Marchetti got his hands on the Maglite again and pointed it to find the guy on the deck, crawling for the box. The pistol cracked again and the kid sank down, hand stretched out. His legs kicked.
Wilson came out of the black, pistol extended, ready to fire again. Her extended arms were locked, shaking. Marchetti spoke softly to her. Took the pistol away and let the hammer down. Held her for a few seconds, feeling her shudder and breathe, shudder and breathe.
To his surprise, she didn’t show the first sign of wanting to cry.
AISHA finally got aboard hours later, after the local bomb squad had removed the detonators and made sure what was left was safe. The dhow lay tied up to the outer seawall, far from other craft, apparently sitting on the shallow bottom there. An assault trooper guarded the gangplank.
Yousif was standing on top of the pilothouse as she and Pete and Bob came aboard. He welcomed them with a nod, gestured them on; she took it they were free to look around, to go below.
The place was littered with glass and cartridge cases and foot-printed all over with bloody boot marks. The bodies were still in place, being photographed and searched. She hesitated over one in a blue shirt. Its arm dangled over the gunwale. Techs were picking up the weapons, bagging them and carrying them ashore. She hesitated, look ing at the body. Then followed Diehl below, stepping cautiously on glass-strewn ladder treads.
Work lights illuminated the hold like a stage. A chalked square showed where the explosive had been. Beside it, hand extended as if pointing, lay the crumpled body of a small dark man of about twenty.
A crunch behind them. She turned to see Yousif bend, straighten. Wait.
“Identify any of them?” Diehl asked him.
“They’re all ours, Bob.”
“Bahraini nationals?”
“Right. But the guns, of course, not from here. Russian manufacture, but they’ve passed through many hands. The grenades are yours. The plastic’s yours. The blocks are still in the original wrapping. We will make some arrangement presently to return it, with the proper paperwork of course.”
“And this stuff?” Diehl thumbed the blue drums.
“The main charge. Fertilizer and diesel oil. We were lucky today.”
Aisha said, “What about this doctor? The one bin Jun’ad mentioned. The foreigner. Where’s he?”
Yousif shrugged, looking as if someone else had asked him that recently, and hadn’t liked his answer. They looked at the body, as if the brightness that spotlighted it meant it was worthy of their attention. But she didn’t see anything else. Men carrying a stretcher worked their way between the drums. They glanced at Yousif, and when he nodded, began rolling the corpse onto the stretcher, to take it away.
25
The King Fahad Causeway
THE peach-colored Mercedes could make two hundred and forty kilometers an hour. But the man with the drooping eyelid lifted the toe of his polished oxford from the accelerator when it reached a hundred. To drive at less, on this long stretch of perfectly straight causeway, would attract attention.
Above all he didn’t want to do that. Though, as always, his paperwork was in order. The passport and visa he’d used to enter Bahrain were now only stirrings of powdery ash in the tide. First shredded, then burned, then scattered into the harbor while the third team, the local boys, finished their preparations for today’s action.
Doctor Fasil Tariq al-Ulam no longer existed.
He watched the sparkling towers dwindle to distant white specks in the rearview mirror. Watched another coastline push up ahead, though its outlines were flat and undetailed through miles of dusty air. A taupe horizon toward which the highway arrowed, propped above the shining sea on concrete pilings that went on and on, rising only once, in a graceful arching stride, to let ships pass beneath.
The King Fahad Causeway linked Bahrain to the mainland of Saudi Arabia. The dun distance was Al-Khubar, in Saudi’s Eastern Province. But before he got there, in not too many minutes at the speed he was making, he’d have to stop.
A basement of riprap, a verdant icing of foliage; then, soaring, what looked like spaceships impaled on bayonets. The artificial island lay midway between the two countries. He’d have to go through immigration. That didn’t worry him. His new papers weren’t forgeries. They were real, with the proper stamps and clearances. He was a reporter with a new Internet news agency.
But before that, before his next identity and the long-awaited and long-prepared mission to the north, one thing remained. A treat, of a sort, that he allowed himself with each outing.
He pulled off into a pleasantly landscaped parking area that overlooked an artificial beach. Families had spread cloths on picnic tables. Children ran shrieking through friendly waves. He pulled the car around until he was looking back in the direction he’d come from.
He glanced at his watch. Then turned on the radio, got out, and climbed up to sit on the hood and light a cigarette.
He sat there for a long time in the sunlight and sea wind, watching the children and listening to the radio. His fingertips stroked the gleaming surface of the hood. Waiting for the distant plume of smoke—yes, he should be able to see it from here—listening for the terrified, shocked words announcing another disaster.
But they didn’t come. A traffic reporter said flow was interrupted on Avenue
40, on the way to Juffair, due to a police barricade. At that he turned the volume up. But the announcer said nothing more, until some time later he said the delays were now lifted and morning traffic was flowing normally.
Something had gone wrong. It hadn’t come off. Even now the local talent might be undergoing interrogation.
He took out his new passport and flicked the lighter beneath it. Held it away from his suit as it writhed, blackened, became a wisp of char that he carried, still burning, to a trash container and rubbed into powder between his palms. He took a third set of documents from a slit cut into the leather of the rear seat, cunningly concealed by the seam. Now he could not be stopped, searched, photographed, or fingerprinted. This was a diplomatic passport. On its cover gold gleamed: a deeply embossed seal of crossed swords beneath a palm tree.
The official seal of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Holding it up, he’d be waved past the businessmen and tourists waiting for access to the Land of the Two Holy Places.
He looked again, hoping still to see smoke. But still the sky hovered clear, pale, innocent of the sign and evidence of destruction. Behind the sunglasses his eyes narrowed. He did not like to fail.
Then his chin lifted again. The road which makes our feet bleed is the path which leads upward. To topple the colossus would take many blows. Much sacrifice and pain.
Or perhaps—his mind moved ahead—one great blow. Greater than any that had ever been struck before.
The heavy car accelerated again, heading west.
IV
THE MED