Joint Task Force #2: America

by David E. Meadows

  “I don’t like this,” Tamursheki said.

  The ship took another roll. This time to the left, farther to port than previous rolls. Everyone grabbed something to hold onto. One of the sick men on the medical table fell off, hit the deck with a thud, never saying a word.

  “Look, Amir,” Alrajool said, his voice cajoling. “I have to get to the bridge. The weather is going to play havoc with this ship this close to shore, and the last thing we want is to run aground while we still have the weapon on board.”

  “I will get the men together,” Tamursheki said. He looked around the compartment. The lights faded for a second before returning to brightness. “I will get them back there somehow.”

  “Don’t forget the prisoners,” Alrajool said, knowing that as soon as Tamursheki and his fanatics were off the ship he would send his sailors down to verify the prisoners were gone. “You need to dump the dead overboard and—what are your plans for the three still living?”

  Tamursheki’s eyes narrowed. “Ibrahim gave them shots. I had plans for setting them adrift and having the Americans find them. It was an opportunity to have the infidels participate in our mission, but the weather kept us from doing it and now we are already here.” He reached up and ran his hand along the bumps covering his face.

  “Then you need to throw them overboard. Tie something to their feet first so they don’t float ashore while we are still in port.”

  Tamursheki nodded. “I will think about it.”

  “Don’t waste a lot of time thinking. You don’t have much of it. It’ll take about two hours to make the transit to the mouth of the harbor channel and another four until we are inside Norfolk Harbor. In two hours, you have to depart the ship.” He paused as he watched Tamursheki stare at him. He knew the terrorist was trying to assess if they could do all that Alrajool asked in two hours. Even he had doubts the young man was capable of doing it. He looked at the sick and dying men. Some stood, leaning against the bulkhead, one was on the floor where he had rolled off the table. Three sat in the chairs around the small medical facility, vomit surrounding two of the chairs. He was glad he had demanded and received the vaccinations for himself and his crew. They would have been useless for future missions if they died with the martyrs. How stupid, he thought. Who can believe the rhetoric espoused that when you die you go to some sort of heaven? On the other hand, his off-shore bank accounts were growing, and that was heaven enough for him.

  Alrajool nodded. “Good luck, my friend. We won’t see each other again.”

  Tamursheki stared for several seconds at the Captain. The look of anger returned. “Then return to the bridge, Alrajool!” he spewed, his voice full of venom.

  Alrajool needed little encouragement. He nodded once, reached out, and pulled the hatch shut. He stood for several seconds looking at the closed hatch. This was the critical part of the mission. They had to leave the ship in the next two hours. Once before he had had a martyr group on board. It was a mission near Crete, and they had decided that blowing the ship up in the middle of Chania Harbor was a better mission than the one assigned. Tamursheki was a smarter man than the one who had led that mission, plus the terrorist leader had nearly ten more men with him, even if about half were sick. He touched the set of master keys in his pocket. He reached out and placed his hand on the main part of the hatch, shook his head, and headed toward the bridge. He would lock the hatch to the bridge, even though locking it would only slow them down a couple of minutes. He had to be prepared. Tamursheki would either move aft to execute his mission or the mercurial man would come hunting for him. You never knew with fanatics what they would do to fulfill their beliefs, and it mattered little if those fanatics were Moslem or Christians; Jews or politicians. The ironic thing about fanatics, Alrajool had discovered, was they regarded everyone who believed differently as the enemy and a danger to their way of life. He pulled himself up the ladder to the inside passageway leading to the bridge. Even having no strong beliefs except one for tolerance was unacceptable to a fanatic. You either believed as they did, or you died.

  An able-bodied sailor waited at the top of the ladder for Tamursheki. No, get inside the harbor; do what he was paid to do—and quite well, too—then sortie out to sea before the Americans realized why they were here. He had done this several times in American ports. This one should be no different—if Tamursheki left the ship as planned. With luck, once he was back out to sea, his company might even have a return cargo for him to pick up somewhere in this hemisphere. What he did know was the safest place on this earth for the next few months was going to be out at sea hauling legal cargo.

  “DID YOU HEAR THAT?” KELLY ASKED IN A WHISPER. HIS eyes widened. He looked both ways.

  The three crouched slightly at the base of a ladder leading up to the next deck. Early doubted there were many more ladders they could go up before they hit the open deck. She recalled that this merchant ship—a freighter—had the superstructure amidships with a raised bow and stern. They had to be somewhere in this superstructure, and if they were, then the bridge should be forward on the top deck.

  “Sounded like glass breaking,” Senior Chief added.

  The ship heaved upward as a heavy wave rode under its hull, moving the entire vessel up for a moment before dropping it back into the valley of the wave. They grabbed the rails of the ladder as the storm shoved the bow of the ship to starboard, its stern traveling right.

  “Felt like a yaw to me.”

  “A what?” Senior Chief Leary asked

  “A yaw,” Kelly said, his head moving, searching the passageway in the event that someone appeared. Lifting his arm, he wiggled it back and forth a couple of times. “You know, where the bow moves in one direction and the stern in another.”

  “Lieutenant, you’ve been spending too much time with the Surface Navy,” Senior Chief said. “I would call it a turn.”

  “Yes, but it’s a turn without the Captain wanting it to turn.”

  “I find it entertaining that we’re standing here discussing nautical shit when we need to keep moving,” Early said. “Can we continue this conversation on the bridge?”

  Senior Chief Leary turned and raced up the ladder with one hand holding the railing while the other pointed the AK-47 toward the top of the ladder. A few steps farther from the top of the ladder a closed door waited for them. The ship tilted to starboard. Kelly lost his balance for a moment, stepping back one rung before he regained it.

  “Be careful. Don’t need you to break something now,” Early said, reaching out and touching Kelly on the buttocks to steady him.

  “Got it,” he said softly, taking two steps at once to catch back up with Leary.

  This was going too smoothly, Early thought. So far, only one encounter, not counting the two men at their compartment. Where was everyone? Somewhere ahead—or behind—somewhere around them, there were more terrorists. She bumped into Kelly’s butt at the top of the ladder. The Senior Chief had stopped. The big man leaned around the edge of the ladder, checking the passageway running cross-purposes to the one they traveled. Early waited, turning sideways and leaning against the railing, facing down in the event someone appeared behind them. Somewhere on the deck they were leaving had been the sound of glass breaking, but the punishment the ship was taking from the storm could have caused loose gear to fall. Be just their luck to make the bridge about the time the storm capsized the ship. Then they’d be on the bottom again, having to work their way up.

  “Come on,” the Senior Chief said softly.

  Kelly reached back without looking and touched her on the shoulder. Early turned and swiftly followed the two men, wondering how many terrorist were they facing. There had been quite a few, it seemed to her, on the ship’s deck, pointing guns at them. It’s hard to count when you’re scared and wallowing in a life raft, looking at gun barrels pointing down at you. She recalled of the capture how the lee side of the freighter had sheltered the life raft from the wind as terrorists ordered them up the rope ladder one at
a time onto the freighter. After that, everything had been a blur as they were roughed and shoved belowdecks, divided into two groups, and locked in compartments. Her breathing increased at the thought of the dead crewmembers. Someone was going to pay for that. She tightened her grip on the AK-47. She had never fired a gun except for a shotgun at the Rota Naval Base skeet range, and here she was toting an automatic weapon. Was the safety on when pushed forward, or off?

  If she was going to die on this ship far from everyone she had ever known or loved, she was going to take as many of these assholes with her as she could. Two down, but how many to go?

  “Maybe they’re sea sick,” Kelly said.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “The fine managers of our accommodations. I seem to remember—”

  “Eighteen, I counted when we came on board,” Senior Chief offered, opening the door and stepping into a short passageway. Flakes of brown paint decorated the deck where the force of the storm had knocked them loose from the bulkheads and overhead. Ahead, a watertight hatch blocked their way. “Eighteen, and they all had pieces like this one.” He held up the AK-47 for a moment.

  “And we only know where four of them are,” Early said.

  “We gonna run into them soon. Ain’t no way we can keep moving on this ship without running into them eventually.”

  “Scott may have something. If they aren’t used to the sea, then maybe this weather is playing havoc with their stomachs.”

  “It isn’t too good with mine,” Kelly said.

  “And pigs fly,” the Senior Chief muttered, motioning them to stop. They had reached the hatch. The sound of the sea came from the other side. The lever on the hatch was shoved all the way down, locking it from the elements on the other side.

  “I think we have reached the end of the yellow brick road,” Kelly said.

  “I think we have reached the end of the superstructure,” Senior Chief said. “We may have come too far up.”

  Early pushed her way to the front. “If we have, we aren’t going to come out on the main deck. We’ve gone up two or three decks since we left the compartment. We only went down one set of ladders when they captured us.” She pointed to the hatch and then wishfully said, “Either this is going to lead us to the bridge or we’re going to find ourselves staring at the stern of the ship.”

  “Either way, I think we’re going to find ourselves outside the skin of the ship,” Kelly offered.

  Senior Chief Leary reached forward and pulled the lever up, unlocking the watertight door. “Then we best be doing what we needs be doing, as my father used to say.”

  The wind grabbed the hatch, ripping it open, nearly jerking the Senior Chief out. He let go. It slammed against the bulkhead, the noise lost in the screams of the storm. Rain and spray blew into the passageway, quickly soaking them. The Senior Chief brought his left arm up across his eyes. Kelly ducked slightly, using Leary as a shield. Early caught the full force of the spray as it whipped around the two men, taking her breath away for moment. Somewhere behind her, the sound of voices rode across the noise of the outside. Leary stepped through the hatch onto a narrow walkway that led forward. The small walkway ran along the edge of the superstructure just below a signal deck opened to the elements. A bulkhead to a compartment provided the starboard side of the walkway. The port side had a couple of chain safety lines running between several stanchions to give the mariner something to hold onto while walking along the narrow walkway. The lines, which dropped in the center between stanchions, weren’t meant for a storm such as this. If you fell through these lines, you were either going into the ocean or smashed on the main deck like a bug hitting a windshield.

  “Look!” Senior Chief Leary shouted over the sound of the storm. “The bridge.” He pointed toward the hatch at the far end of the walkway. Rain ran off his face.

  Water soaked their flight suits, turning them a dark green while draining from the fire retardant material onto their flight boots and into their socks.

  Their destination jutted out slightly left from the walkway. A bank of windows wormed around the edge of the bridge, giving unfettered views of those inside. The closed hatch at the end of the walkway hid them from those inside the bridge.

  “It’s daylight,” Kelly said in a loud voice, and then pointed left. “And, that looks like Virginia Beach to me.”

  Early put her opened hand palm-down across the top of her eyes, providing a slight shield from the intense rain pelting them. Through the rising and falling curtains of rain, she made out the coastline. “It’s land,” she said. “You sure it’s Virginia Beach?”

  “I don’t know. It looked like it for a moment.”

  “Come on. We’ll find out where we’re at later.” The Senior Chief eased forward, crouched at the waist and holding onto the top safety line while maintaining his grip with his right hand on the AK-47. The AK-47 is not a heavy weapon, weighing slightly less than ten pounds, but any weapon is a burden when you’re trying not to be tossed overboard.

  The ship rolled right, causing the three of them to fall left into the safety lines. A huge wave bore over the top of the superstructure. Early looked up as it reached its crest. A sheet of seawater sailed over them for a few seconds before breaking apart and slamming down on them.

  Early slipped, but her flight boot found the raised edge of the walkway. She twisted her boot sideways and braced against the raised edge.

  “Help!” Kelly shouted.

  Early looked to the right, where a moment ago the copilot had stood. The curtain of water parted. Kelly was flat on his back. His feet swung into space through the bottom of the safety lines. Both hands gripped the bottom line as he struggled to keep himself from falling overboard. He pulled against the steel chains of the safety lines, trying to pull himself back onto the steel mesh walkway.

  Early wanted to reach down to help him, but she would have to let go. If she did, she’d lose her grip and the motion of the ship would do the rest to toss her overboard. They needed the weapons they had if they had any opportunity to survive. For a fraction of a second she debated dropping the AK-47 to help Kelly.

  Senior Chief Leary squatted, placed his weapon on the deck, and put his foot on top of it. The ship began to roll right. Leary reached out past the safety lines, grabbed the waist of Kelly’s flight suit, and with one heave shoved the thin copilot back onto the walkway. With both hands working furiously, Kelly scrambled backward until his back hit the bulkhead only a couple of feet away.

  “Are you okay?” Early asked, shouting over the noise of the storm.

  Kelly looked up at her, his eyes wide, his breath coming in quick, short gasps. His face was white. Then his eyes looked past her. “Look out!” he shouted, one hand reaching toward her.

  Early rolled forward, coming up against Kelly. The hatch from which they had emerged swung by, crossing the very space where she had been. It slammed against the hatchway. If he hadn’t shouted, she would have been crushed between the hatch and the hatchway. She crawled over, reached up, and pulled the lever down, locking the hatch in place, sealing them onto the walkway.

  She looked at Kelly and mouthed, “Thanks.”

  He nodded. “I lost my piece,” Kelly said, referring to the AK-47. Rain ran down his face, dripping into his open mouth.

  She read his lips more than heard him. “Come on. We’ve got to keep moving.” She looked forward. Senior Chief Leary was at the far hatch that opened into the bridge. Using the starboard roll of the ship to keep his balance, the huge flight engineer leaned out past the safety lines of the walkway to look through the nearest window into the bridge. He jumped back, looked at her and Kelly, and then motioned them forward.

  “I counted five with at least three of them with arms.” He said when they reached him. “Lieutenant, you lose your gun?”

  “It fell overboard when the wave caught him, Senior Chief,” Early said. The rain seemed to be slackening. The shoreline was visible again, and she could make out where beach turned to tr
ees. Senior Chief Leary and Lieutenant Kelly must have been looking in the same direction.

  “Looks like the old Cape Henry lighthouse,” Kelly said. “Been there. It’s on Fort Story.”

  “If that’s Fort Story,” Early said, “then we’re off Virginia Beach like you said, which means whatever is on this ship is probably headed toward the Norfolk Navy base.”

  The three looked at each other for a moment, the two men deferring to her for a decision. After all, she was the mission commander and the senior Navy officer both on board their aircraft and now on board this ship.

  “We’re going to take the bridge,” she said, feeling her stomach tighten. She was a pilot on a four-engine propeller-driven maritime reconnaissance bird; she wasn’t even a fighter pilot, and here she was telling the two of them they were going to attack and take over from armed men the bridge of a terrorist vessel. Armed men probably trained to fight until they were killed. For a brief moment, the idea of jumping overboard and swimming for shore seemed acceptable, but in that same brief moment she realized they’d drown in these seas, sucked beneath by the notorious riptides augmented by the storm surges.

  The ship tilted left. Salt water rolled off the top of the open deck above them like a cold shower, again drenching water-saturated flight suits. She wondered for a moment if she looked as bad as they did.

  The ship righted itself.

  Senior Chief Leary looked at the sky. Clouds passed overhead, heading east with the circular winds. “Looks as if the storm may be headed out to sea, Lieutenant. If it is, then we only have so long before these assholes try to take this ship into the harbor.”

  Early nodded at the two men, pointed at the Senior Chief, and then nodded toward the door. They weren’t going to take the bridge sitting out here.

  CAPTAIN ALRAJOOL BURST THROUGH THE DOOR ON THE starboard side, glancing at the helmsman as he entered the bridge. Across from him, with binoculars dangling from his deck, was his Chief Mate, standing beside the leading seaman of the vessel. An able-bodied seaman entered the bridge with him. Tamursheki was evil—evil to the core—and when the man realized that his hollow cries for martyrdom were going to be answered, it wouldn’t surprise Alrajool for this fanatical youth to try to kill him, his crew, and blow the ship up inside the harbor. It was something he himself would do, if he was younger, as stupid, and if roles were reversed.