Crescent Dawn - Dirk Pitt Book 21

by Clive Cussler; Dirk Cussler

  The makeshift red missile missed the Janissary’s head by inches, instead striking him on the back of the shoulder. The gunman gasped at the surprise blow, more from the shock than pain, and instinctively turned and craned his head upward to eye the source of the attack.

  Twenty yards away, Lazlo locked in on the man through the sights of his carbine and squeezed the trigger. The quick burst produced no violent scream or splattering blood. The Janissary simply slumped forward in death, leaving a sudden, uncomfortable silence about the ship.

  75

  THE TANKER’S BRIDGE APPEARED TO BE EMPTY WHEN Farzad entered slowly from the rear stairwell. Noticing the shoreline of Sultanahmet sliding horizontally across the bow, he stepped to the helm to halt the sweeping turn. He lowered his pistol as he located, then reached for, the rudder controls.

  “Let’s not fiddle with that just now,” Pitt said.

  Pitt emerged from a crouched position behind a console by the port bulkhead. In his hand, he held a brass flare gun pinched from the emergency kit.

  Farzad looked at Pitt with surprised recognition that quickly evolved to anger. But his ire turned to mirth when he gazed at Pitt’s weapon.

  “I have been anxious to meet again,” Farzad said in a deep accented voice.

  As he subtly tried to raise his pistol, Pitt pulled the trigger on the flare gun. The ignited flare burst across the bridge, striking Farzad in the chest with a cloud of sparks. His clothing promptly caught fire as the charge fell to the floor, then spun off into the corner like a rodent on fire. A second later, the starburst ignited, sending a shower of flame and smoke across the wheelhouse.

  Pitt had already dived to the floor, covering his head, as the sparks blew quickly by. Farzad had been less reactive, patting down his incinerated clothes when the starburst sent a second wave of flames his way. He was enveloped in a cloud of smoke and sparks before stepping away from the eruption, coughing for air. Pitt immediately jumped to his feet and bounded forward, hoping to tackle the man before he could see to shoot. But the hired gunman was still aware of Pitt and turned the Glock in his direction.

  A loud gunshot thundered through the bridge, but Pitt knew that Farzad hadn’t pulled the trigger. The gunman’s body was instantly thrown back toward the helm, then slid to the floor, leaving a bloody trail along the console.

  Lazlo stepped quickly onto the bridge, his smoking rifle aimed at the prone and smoldering body of Farzad.

  “You okay?” Lazlo asked, eyeing Pitt off to his side.

  “Yes, just enjoying a small light show,” Pitt replied, coughing because of the heavy smoke that lingered in the air. “Thanks for the timely entrance.”

  Lazlo passed over the now-dented fire extinguisher, which he had held tucked under one arm.

  “Here, thought you might like this back. I appreciate the earlier aerial support.”

  “You just returned the favor,” Pitt said, then applied the extinguisher to a scattering of small fires that the flare had ignited.

  “I didn’t notice this one slip aboard,” Lazlo said, ensuring that Farzad was indeed dead.

  “He quickly jumped on behind the first two.”

  “I imagine that they’ll try again.”

  “Time’s running short,” Pitt replied. “But you might raise that ramp all the same.”

  “Good idea. What about us?”

  “We might be cutting it close. I trust you can swim?”

  Lazlo rolled his eyes, then nodded. “See you below,” he said, then disappeared down the stairwell.

  The smoke from the flare cleared quickly out of the shattered bridge windows as Pitt stepped to the helm and gauged their position. The Dayan was more than halfway through its wide U-turn, its bow inching slowly toward the southern span of the Galata Bridge. Pitt tweaked the rudder to guide the big tanker dangerously close to the shoreline as it completed its turn, then he nudged up the engine revolutions. The stuttering and hesitation from belowdecks was worse than before, and Pitt fought to squeeze as much speed out of the faltering engine as he could.

  He quickly scanned the shoreline waters for signs of the Bullet, but it was nowhere in sight. After Pitt’s earlier radio call, Giordino had raced at top speed toward the dredge ship and had already passed under the Galata Bridge. As if he knew Pitt was searching for him, Giordino suddenly hailed the tanker on the marine radio.

  “Bullet here. I’m past the bridge and just pulling alongside the green cutter dredge. What do you want me to do?”

  Pitt told him his plan, which evoked a low whistle from Giordino.

  “I hope you had your Wheaties today,” he added. “How much time do you have?”

  Pitt glanced at his watch. “About six minutes. We should be along in about half that time.”

  “Thanks for bringing the powder keg my way. Just don’t be late,” he added, then quickly signed off.

  By now, the Dayan had completed its turn, and the south span of the Galata Bridge loomed ahead less than a quarter of a mile away. Pitt willed the ship to go faster, as he felt the seconds tick by, while the bridge seemed to hold its distance. The timing would be close, he knew, but there was little he could do about it now.

  Then the unwanted sound of silence suddenly drifted from the tanker’s bowels. The rumbling and stumbling beneath his feet vanished as the console in front of him lit up like a Christmas tree. The Dayan’s fuel-starved engine had finally given up its last gasp.

  76

  TAILING THE DAYAN A FEW DOZEN YARDS OFF ITS STARboard flank, Maria gazed at it through a pair of binoculars. To her disappointment, the big tanker had continued to veer away from shore and was quickly approaching a return pass under the Galata Bridge. She realized why when she scanned the tanker’s wheelhouse and caught a brief glimpse of Pitt at the helm.

  “They have failed,” she said, her voice nearly hoarse with anger. “Get my last men aboard quickly.”

  The yacht’s captain looked at her nervously.

  “Shouldn’t we be getting clear?” he urged.

  Maria stepped close so that no one else on the bridge could hear.

  “We can part once the men are aboard,” she whispered coldly.

  Her last three Janissaries assembled on deck as the yacht raced over to the Dayan’s flank. As the yacht approached the tanker’s accommodation ladder to off-load the gunmen, the stairway suddenly rose off the water. At the top of the steps, Lazlo stood at the hydraulic controls hoisting the ramp up.

  “Shoot him!” Maria yelled, spotting the commando.

  The startled Janissaries quickly aimed their weapons at Lazlo and fired. The Israeli commando had been watching the men’s reaction and turned to step from the rail. But he lingered a moment longer at the controls, wishing to keep the ramp out of reach. The hesitation proved costly, as a burst from one of the guns caught him in the shoulder.

  He immediately lost his balance, falling forward onto the controls, before slipping to the deck to avoid further gunfire. His left arm was numb, and he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, but his senses were still intact as he heard a loud crash from below. One-handing his rifle, he shimmied to the rail, then stood and peered quickly over the side.

  To his disappointment, he saw that the lower end of the stairway swung out from the tanker and was positioned just over the yacht. Then he looked closer and realized that it was actually wedged into the yacht itself. Falling on the controls, he had inadvertently released the lower-end retracting cable. The heavy steel platform had shot toward the sea like an arrow. Only instead of striking water, it had crashed into the topside bow of the yacht, penetrating several feet through the deck.

  Despite the damage and heightened angle, two of the Janissaries had already leaped onto the ramp and were attempting a fast climb to the top. Lazlo aligned his gun on the rail and fired a sustained round, sending both men flailing over the side and into the water.

  Suddenly feeling dizzy from a loss of blood, Lazlo curled back onto the deck and rummaged for a medical kit in his comb
at pack. Fighting the urge to lay down and go to sleep, he told himself he only needed to keep the yacht at bay a few more minutes. Then he glanced up toward the bridge and wondered how much more time Pitt really needed.

  TIME WAS ANYTHING but an ally to Pitt now. The last time he checked, there were less than six minutes until detonation, but he tried not to think about it. His focus was simply on driving the tanker a short distance beyond the bridge.

  Since the engine had quit, the tanker was sailing on pure momentum. Multiple shipboard generators provided auxiliary power for Pitt to turn the rudder, but the huge single propeller had spun its last turn. The Golden Horn’s gentle current pushed lightly at his stern, and Pitt hoped it would be enough to keep up speed for a few more minutes. Given enough time, the current was ultimately capable of carrying the tanker safely to the Sea of Marmara. But time was going the way of the ship’s fuel.

  With agonizing slowness, the south span of the Galata Bridge grew larger in the forward bridge window, and Pitt was relieved to note that the Dayan was still gliding along at seven knots. Sporadic gunfire caught his attention again, and he dared a quick glance out the window. The yacht was so close to the tanker’s side that he could see only a fraction of the boat. He spotted Lazlo, lying near the head of the stairway, and felt assured that the tanker was still secure for the moment.

  The underside of the bridge soon loomed up, casting the deck and wheelhouse in a brief shadow. Pitt took to the helm and feathered the rudder controls with nervous fingers. The rest would be up to Giordino, he thought quietly.

  “I just hope you can hold your end of the bargain, partner,” he muttered aloud, then watched the shadow cast by the bridge gradually fall away.

  77

  AT 454 FEET IN LENGTH, THE IBN BATTUTA WAS ONE OF the largest dredge ships Giordino had ever seen. Owned and operated by the Belgian company Jan De Nul, it was one of just a handful of self-propelled cutter suction dredges in existence. Unlike a regular suction dredge, which slurped up mud and goo from the seafloor using a long, trailing vacuum tube, the cutter dredge also had a digging mechanism, or cutter head. In the Ibn Battuta’s case, the head was a six-foot-diameter ball faced with counterrotating tungsten carbide teeth capable of chewing through solid rock. Affixed to a hull-mounted boom that could be lowered to the seafloor, the cutter head resembled the open jaws of a megalodon shark waiting to bite.

  The dredger had been operating fifty feet from shore and was moored by a pair of huge support legs, called spuds, that protruded through the ship’s forward hull. The ship was perpendicular to shore, with its stern facing the channel, which played directly into Pitt’s hands.

  Giordino, approaching the ship from the stern, spotted a heavy length of chain dangling over the dredger’s starboard rail. He eased the Bullet alongside, then cut power. Quickly climbing out, he snared the chain, and attached it to the Bullet before it could drift away. Hoisting himself up the chain, he grabbed the ship’s rail and pulled himself onto the deck.

  As a potential hazard in the channel, the Ibn Battuta, named for a fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer, stood brightly illuminated by dozens of overhead lights. Giordino peered from one end of the ship’s deck to the other and found it completely empty, the crew still asleep in their bunks. Only a lone seaman stood early-morning watch on the bridge, and he had been oblivious to Giordino’s approach and boarding.

  Giordino quickly moved aft, searching for the dredger’s controls, which he prayed weren’t located in the wheelhouse. In the center of the stern deck, forward of a large A-frame and well ahead of the cutter apparatus, he spotted a small, elevated shack with broad windows. Climbing up its steps, he entered it and took a seat in the rear-facing operator’s chair. He was thankful to find that the dredging mechanism could be operated by a single man, but he cringed when he saw that the control panel was labeled in Dutch.

  “Well, at least it isn’t Turkish,” he muttered while quickly scanning the board.

  Finding a switch marked “Dynamo,” he flicked it to the “Macht” position. A deep rumble shook the deck as the dredge’s massive power generator fired to life. Up on the bridge, the seaman standing watch rushed to the rear window at the noise and quickly spotted Giordino’s figure in the controls shack. His excited voice was soon blaring over a two-way radio affixed to the shack’s wall. Giordino calmly reached over and turned the radio off before gazing to his left.

  The high prow of the tanker was just emerging from beneath the Galata Bridge, barely a hundred yards away. Giordino abandoned his efforts at trying to decipher the Dutch console and frantically started pushing buttons. One series initiated a grinding sound ahead of him, and he looked up with satisfaction to see the teeth of the cutter head rotating with a menacing whine. The supporting boom stretched horizontally off the dredger’s stern, holding the head some twenty feet above the water. It was way too high for what Pitt had in mind.

  “Wat doe jij hier?” a deep voice suddenly grumbled at Giordino.

  Giordino turned to see a squat man with tousled hair climbing into the small controls house. The Ibn Battuta’s pump engineer, still wearing his pajamas under a dingy overcoat, stepped over and clamped a hand on Giordino’s shoulder. Giordino calmly raised a finger and pointed out the window.

  “Look!” he said.

  The engineer glanced to the side and froze in shock at the sight of the Dayan bearing down on the dredge ship. He started to say something as he turned back toward Giordino only to be met with the balled fist of a right cross. Giordino’s knuckles struck him on the button of his chin, and he wilted like a wet noodle. Giordino quickly caught the man in his arms and laid him gently on the floor.

  “Sorry, my friend. It ain’t the time for pleasantries,” he said to the unconscious engineer before scrambling back to the console. He sensed the shadow of the high tanker blanket the controls shack as he hurriedly surveyed the console. Noticing a small lever to the side, he reached over and pushed it down. With great relief, he watched the end of the boom suddenly drop toward the water. He held the lever down until the cutter head was nearly submerged, its rotating teeth creating a foamy froth on the surface.

  Releasing the lever, he glanced up the channel. The bow of the huge tanker was now less than twenty feet away. With a helpless feeling, he stood and watched it approach, knowing there was nothing else to be done.

  78

  PITT KNEW IT WAS A DESPERATE GAMBLE, BUT HIS OPTIONS were nearly nonexistent. There had simply been no time to get the tanker safely to open sea, and with the engine now dead there was no chance of escaping the crowded shores of Istanbul. Even if the tanker detonated in the center of the Golden Horn, thousands would die. Pitt’s only hope was to try to submerge at least some of the explosives and minimize their destructive force.

  And that’s where the Ibn Battuta came into play. With its rock-eating cutter head, Pitt knew the dredger had the ability to slice through the tanker like a can opener. But he had to put the tanker right on the money for it to work. If he came in too tight, he would rip the boom right off the back of the dredger. Approach too wide, and he would miss the head completely.

  Gliding powerless under the Galata Bridge, he gazed ahead at the dredger off his bow. Though the cutter head was still elevated above the water, he could see its rotating teeth and knew that Giordino was at work. He lightly tapped the rudder control, then stepped to the starboard window and poked his head out. Riding high in the water, he couldn’t quite see down the tanker’s slab sides to the surface, which added to the difficulty of alignment. He tried not to focus on the fact that he had one, and only one, chance to succeed.

  Quickly approaching the Belgian dredger, Pitt was relieved to see its stern boom drop, lowering the cutter head into the water. A few seconds later, he spotted Giordino standing near the stern rail, waving at him to edge the tanker in closer. Pitt sprinted back to the helm and turned a few degrees to starboard, then waited for the bow to respond. When the tanker inched in closer, Giordino raised his arms in
the air, giving Pitt the thumbs-up.

  Pitt left the helm and returned to the side window to watch the impact. Behind him, he suddenly noticed the roar of a high-revving engine, punctuated by the shrill scream of a woman’s voice. He glanced down to see Lazlo still lying prone on the deck at the head of the stairway. This time, he noticed a small pool of blood on the deck near his chest. Beyond Lazlo, he saw the yacht alongside, wildly weaving back and forth, once even banging into the side of the tanker.

  Pitt idly wondered why the yacht was even still hanging around. But it wasn’t worth pondering now, he thought, as he turned and faced the dredger, and the moment of truth.

  “GET US CLEAR!” Maria screamed for at least the third time.

  The normally controlled tyrant was flush with panic as she repeatedly looked at her watch. There were just minutes to go.

  Sweat ran down the yacht captain’s brow as he swung its rudder to and fro, fighting to break free of the embedded ramp. He had waited until they cleared the Galata Bridge before reversing engines, bucking against the momentum of the tanker. Yet the ramp remained lodged in the yacht’s deck like a barbed hook in the mouth of an angry marlin.

  The yacht’s engines howled as the captain applied full reverse power before trying to swing the boat wide. Unknown to the captain, the stairway’s lower wheels and axle had caught around the anchor chain in the yacht’s anchor locker and was now hopelessly entangled by the wrenching motion of the boat.

  The stairway now was a twisted pretzel of steel, yet the platform refused to break apart. With its props churning a maddening boil of water off its stern, the yacht was dragged alongside the tanker like a puppy on a short leash. The captain looked ahead at the dredger, waiting for the Dayan to turn away from the Belgian ship. But as they drew closer, he came to the grim realization that the tanker wasn’t going to move clear.