Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  If Harrabi had a weapon, any weapon, he might have launched himself on al-Awlaki, murderer of his children, then and there. But he didn’t want it to end that way; he wanted it to end with al-Awlaki’s realizing the explosions would never come, that he had failed, that his ultimate fate had been denied him. Harrabi wanted to see the look on his face in that precise moment of understanding and the sense of futility that accompanied it.

  “Twelve minutes,” the cleric said and Harrabi opened his eyes, wondering where the time had gone. Were the minutes speeding up?

  Then, through the sheets of rain pounding the windows, flashes flared in the empty darkness beyond, like torches lighting a way toward hope.

  * * *

  Water splashed a few yards away on the rig’s deck, Cort Wesley sliding forward to the support extension of the mooring leg for cover. A guard, likely alerted by what looked like shifting shapes in the storm, approached with submachine gun leveled before him.

  Cort Wesley lurched upward, wielding a knife. Blade starting forward, finding the man’s chest and heart in the same moment.

  “Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, bubba,” he heard Leroy Epps say in his head. “Let’s get a move on.”

  * * *

  Caitlin was holding on for dear life, every inch of her body so soaked that she had the sense she was drowning even above the surface, on the verge of being swept away by the storm. Her gun had become an afterthought and she hated being stuck here holding the Zodiac in place with the battle likely under way now above her. Just sixty feet in the distance, but she’d never felt farther away from Cort Wesley, even when he was in Cereso prison.

  She was fighting to clear the stinging seawater from her eyes when a dark shape reared up before her, rolling through the last of the waves directly in line with the raft. Caitlin recognized it as some kind of launch, or small cabin cruiser, having braved the storm to ferry al-Awlaki’s team out of here once their deadly mission was complete. She knew it was going to hit the Zodiac, glimpsed the pilot working the wheel frantically behind a single windshield wiper deflecting the rain from his viewing angle as best it could. The launch was slowing, but not fast enough. Caitlin leaped up and grabbed hold of the ladder at the last, feeling the launch crash into the Zodiac with enough force to knock one of her hands from its slippery hold. The launch compressed the raft’s rubber, bleeding the air from it.

  Caitlin dangled, legs kicking the air. The pilot and a second man in the bridge she hadn’t noticed before spotted her, shouting at each other as the shock and clear meaning of her presence along with the raft’s struck them. They each seemed to be reaching for something, one coming up with what looked like a shotgun when Caitlin managed to strip her dark jacket aside enough to tear her pistol free.

  Swaying from the ladder in the storm-drenched night, she emptied the magazine through the boat’s windshield. The men disappeared behind the shattered glass now pierced by the rain as well, and the launch suddenly surged on. It turned sideways, as if one of the now dead men had jammed the wheel, being sucked away by the storm until a huge wave slammed it broadside. The launch slammed into the support leg just beneath her and clung there, the force of the storm seeming to hold it in place.

  Caitlin holstered her pistol and looked at the launch. She could go back down and take refuge on it, but its precarious perch made her think going up was actually safer. Then she added her second hand to the ladder and began to climb.

  103

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley had no idea of the opposition’s number or placement. They seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, scurrying about in panic, recognizable from their lack of proper storm gear in stark contrast to Paz and his similarly dark-clad Zetas who moved as one with the storm.

  He angled for the rig’s elevated bridge while Paz’s team swept inward from the outsides of the deck, herding their victims into an increasingly concentrated killing zone. He’d fought by Paz’s side four times now, continuing to marvel at his warrior-like skills and disciplined sensibility. The man was an odds changer all by himself, a human killing machine like none Cort Wesley had ever encountered before.

  But the bridge was Cort Wesley’s to take, and he took up position behind an exhaust baffle and sighted in toward the command center glass, before which stood a single figure.

  * * *

  The series of flashes had brought al-Awlaki right up to the window, face squeezed against it with hands cupped over his eyes to better see out onto the deck. When he finally pulled back again, a ring of misty condensation had formed in line with his mouth that was now agape in panic.

  “Someone’s out there,” Harrabi heard him mutter.

  Motion flashed amid a burst of lightning in the storm beyond, at least one shape angling for the elevated bridge from below. The big man with the limp barreled into al-Awlaki and took him to the floor an instant before the glass exploded behind a barrage of automatic fire, shards showering in all direction ahead of the storm following them. The cleric’s other two guards offered return fire until a fresh barrage blew them backward, past Harrabi who found himself hugging the floor in the next instant.

  “How? How?” al-Awlaki screamed over the howling winds that had invaded the bridge. Then his bulging, furious eyes fixed on Harrabi. “Do it! Do it now!”

  Harrabi remained prone, motionless, strangely calm. “No.”

  “Trigger the blasts!”

  “No.”

  “Coward!”

  Harrabi moved his gaze to the big man, then back to al-Awlaki. “Cowards kill innocent boys with baseball bats.”

  Al-Awlaki’s mouth dropped.

  “Their coffins were closed because of what you did to their faces!” Harrabi raged on, thinking of his wife, who’d given up her world for his, only to pay a terrible price for her love.

  “That was God’s work!”

  “No, it was yours and now you pay!” Harrabi screamed, as wind gusts pushed more of the storm in upon them. “Because God does not murder children … or women.”

  “You speak of your wife, an American? I did you a favor by ridding her from your life and turning you toward the light!”

  “The light … Is that what you call my cursed life now? It was you who cursed me! Not God, not fate—you to serve your own ends.”

  “I gave you the chance to rejoin your people, to make amends for indiscretions that are sins in the eyes of Allah! You can still have your redemption, my brother,” al-Awlaki continued, a sense of calm returning to his voice. “Send the signal. Trigger the blasts. Make the Americans pay for all they have done to our people.”

  But Harrabi held his ground stridently. “I’d rather make you pay, for what you’ve done to me.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley thought he’d hit at least one person in the command center, maybe two, but couldn’t be sure. He sliced forward, darting into the open long enough to better his angle. Waiting for a firm target or at least motion before opening fire into the command center again.

  * * *

  Caitlin continued to climb, the wind and torrents of rain lashing her like strikes from a bullwhip. The force of the storm had jarred some of the ladder’s support truss loose, which made her ascent that much more perilous. She’d never had a particular fear of heights and glancing down now revealed only blackness that gave up nothing discernible after ten feet. But her stomach felt fluttery and a sudden wave of dizziness left her holding hard to the ladder with both hands, eyes squeezed closed.

  She peeled them open enough to see the next rung, stretching a hand up to it. The deck of the Mariah was close now, not more than fifteen feet away, but that fifteen feet in her dazed vision might as well have been forever, and a dread fear that she wasn’t going to make it filled her. But she pushed herself on regardless, trying to visualize each motion as one in itself. Her legs grew heavy, almost impossible to budge, leaving the arduous task almost exclusively to her arms, which strained under the pressure. Her hands were
wet with nervous sweat as well as seawater and the rungs grew more slippery with each grasp.

  Caitlin felt her breath settle when the deck came within reach, just as the truss broke from its bracket. She reached out, groping at the air, realizing the rig was starting to slip away. Her feet slid off the ladder and she kicked with them, as if dog paddling like a child, hoping to swim through the air and force the ladder back against the deck mount.

  The swirling wind buffeted Caitlin before a sudden gust helped drive her back close enough to the Mariah to latch a hand onto the raised deck sill an instant before the ladder broke off altogether, plummeting toward the sea. Caitlin managed to jerk her second hand over the sill as well, her feet flailing to find purchase on something, anything, to help in the effort.

  With no other choice, she resolved to dig her palms into the sill edge, feeling steel slice into her flesh. The pain sent starbursts before her eyes but provided the grasp she needed to lift herself up in agonizingly slow fashion. She heard herself scream over the howling of the wind that sounded like crazed laughter. The rain hammered her, the wind fighting her final hoist with renewed effort, as Caitlin felt herself tumble to the cold wet deck.

  * * *

  “You’re a fake, a fraud!” Harrabi continued, his rage bubbling over.

  “I was serving God! Everything I did was to serve Him. I made the world believe I was dead to serve Him!” The cleric’s eyes bled fury and hate, his coarse short hair drenched in rainwater that ran down his face. “The death of your sons, what happened to your wife, was His bidding, not mine. I am only his vessel, as are you. Know that as you bring hope to our world.”

  “No, your world,” Harrabi shot back at al-Awlaki. “A world of blood, pain, and needless suffering wrought by you to justify your own existence. How many lives did you take, did you destroy, to set your plan in place? All for naught now because you are the traitor. Traitor to everything Islam should stand for.”

  “This coming from a man who turned away from it, who shunned his own people and his own world.”

  “It was never my world.”

  “Trigger the blasts! It is your duty!”

  Harrabi didn’t move, didn’t speak. Al-Awlaki popped up into the spray of rain, greeted instantly by a hail of fire rendered silent by the storm’s banshee-like roar whipping around the deck. He swept across the bridge in a crouch, seeming to dodge the bullets, and captured Harrabi by the throat in a surprisingly strong grasp.

  “Perform your duty to God or die here and now! And when you die, you will go to hell.”

  “I’m already there,” Harrabi said, as al-Awlaki started to choke him.

  * * *

  “Did you get him, bubba?” Leroy Epps asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cort Wesley told him, jamming a fresh magazine into his submachine gun. “Angle’s all wrong. I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

  “Bad sight angle means bad shooting.”

  Around Cort Wesley, Paz’s Zeta commandos closed on the final terrorists their sweep had pinned down in a tight cluster of storage containers. Cort Wesley thought he heard words screamed in Arabic struggling to be heard over the storm’s wail, perhaps asking for mercy or trying to surrender. But the Zetas didn’t play by such rules. They knew only one way and taking prisoners wasn’t part of it. Soft, quick pops split the night, confirming his assumption.

  “We’re running out of time, bubba!” Leroy Epps shouted at him.

  “Tell me something I don’t know!” Cort Wesley tried to find his ghostly specter through the storm. “Don’t suppose you can cover me, champ.”

  “Sorry, not in my job description.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Cort Wesley said, and took a deep breath before spinning out for the bridge.

  104

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  Harrabi was ready to die, until he thought of the man squeezing the life out of him, the same man who had ordered the deaths of his sons.

  He would die soon enough. But not now.

  And with that thought he pulled himself free of al-Awlaki’s grasp and unleashed a flurry of blows, the rage and sadness spilling out of him. In that moment he realized how he had nothing to live for and found renewed purpose in killing the man who had destroyed everything he loved. His life had ended that night in a sodden field in Wolfsboro, Tennessee, all that followed nothing but a charade, a fake existence he had fallen into. The purpose al-Awlaki’s mission had provided had been a fraud too, but killing the cleric was anything but. Killing him was about reclaiming his life, and he could feel the blood flowing through his veins for the first time since that terrible night, as he continued to find the cleric’s flesh with his fists.

  Then Harrabi felt a sudden rush of warmth running out of him, turning his insides as cold as his flesh. There was pain, dim and vague, near his spine and he felt himself sliding down the air for the floor, hitting it to the sight of the big man with the limp steadying his pistol on him again. But a fresh barrage of gunfire poured through the storm and turned the big man who’d murdered his oldest son into a marionette, twisting him about the floor before cutting the strings and letting him crumple.

  Harrabi felt only tired, nothing else. He wanted to grab al-Awlaki as the cleric crawled past him, but his arms wouldn’t obey. He was still trying when al-Awlaki stripped a hand grenade from the big man’s ammo vest.

  Harrabi watched him crawl toward the shattered window and then fixed his eyes on the big man’s pistol that had skittered to a halt just a few feet from him. He knew he was dying. He felt it without regret or fear, comfortable in the certainty he’d soon be with his sons. That thought helped him find the strength to pull himself toward the pistol, as al-Awlaki hurled the grenade into the night.

  * * *

  The blast rattled the deck beyond Cort Wesley, sending a curtain of flame and shrapnel to mix with the pounding rain. The percussion alone was enough to tear his feet out from under him, while he was spared the deadly spread.

  He found his muscles spongy and unresponsive to his commands. He realized he’d lost his submachine gun, then remembered it was slung from his shoulder and thus pinned beneath him. But the night was too cold and he was too tired to reach for it, nonetheless finding the will to push up to his knees, ready to move for the bridge when a shape stepped out over him.

  * * *

  Al-Awlaki spun back toward the control board, the time he needed to trigger the blast that would change the world his now. He had watched Harrabi rig the device, thought he knew the way to trigger it. Then he heard a grunt and turned to see a pistol trembling in Harrabi’s hand.

  “Shoot me and you shoot God,” the cleric said, standing there reverently as if in prayer.

  “I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not a killer. You taught me that much,” Harrabi told him and emptied the rest of the magazine into the transmitter that would’ve sent the acoustic signal across the Gulf to blow the barrels had al-Awlaki managed to trigger it. Sparks leaped everywhere, trailed by smoke and the noxious stench of burned wires.

  “Nooooooooooooo!”

  The cleric’s desperate scream pierced his eardrums through the howling of the storm, the most glorious sound Harrabi had ever heard. He saw a pistol flash in the cleric’s hand, fire blazing toward him from its barrel. Harrabi closed his eyes to sleep, dream, and meet his sons again.

  * * *

  Paz helped Cort Wesley to his feet, smelling like air scorched by flames.

  “The Ranger’s on board,” he said.

  “What? You saw her?”

  “I don’t need to see her, outlaw.”

  Cort Wesley felt Paz drag him on, slowly recovering his own footing.

  “My men are sweeping the deck in search of more terrorists. I saw a few jump off into the sea.”

  “Let’s find Caitlin.”

  * * *

  Caitlin moved about the deck, searching for Paz or Cort Wesley. She thought she’d heard gunfire and then a blast, more piercing and concentrated than
thunder, ignited a bright flash not far from the raised structure she recognized as the bridge from her first visit to the rig. That thought made her remember the emergency life pods and rafts, like the one used by the engineer that had drifted straight to the fishing boat she’d chartered at Baffin Bay.

  How long ago had that been?

  It felt like years but was barely a week. Caitlin had no idea how the evacuation procedures actually worked, only that she better learn them fast before the now hurricane-force storm toppled the Mariah into the sea.

  The temperature was climbing, the warmth recharging her while making her torn palms hurt more. She thought she could hear continued sporadic gunfire above the storm, the flashes looking curiously like D. W. Tepper’s match strokes before lighting a Marlboro. She took a wide route around the rig deck, recalling the location of the life pods and rafts from her initial visit to the rig. No way anyone was getting off on the helicopter she’d spotted perched on the helipad that hung out over the sea.

  Caitlin had just formed that thought when a gust of wind blew the Sikorsky onto its side and then into the sea.

  * * *

  Al-Awlaki watched the helicopter fall into the sea but wasted no time bemoaning its loss. He knew God was behind him and his holy mission, knew God would guide him from this hell even as he wondered to what purpose he had come here. His failure must have been ordained, a test he needed to pass in order to fulfill an even greater plan God had in store for him. Hadn’t the Jewish God laid similar tests at the feet of Moses, Abraham, and Isaac? Al-Awlaki would learn from their lessons and someday, a day very soon, he would be blessed with the true vision of the end of days it was his duty to bring.

  Everything, all his planning and preparation, all his sacrifice, had fallen apart on this rig in the face of an assault from forces sent from hell as a final test to see if he was truly worthy to battle the demons on Earth. He should never have expected a mission this holy, this wondrous, to be a mere act of strategic planning. He had been meant to fail to prepare him for something bigger and better.