“And remember, you don’t want to see him when he’s angry,” Eddie said.
When they reached the container, Juan opened it again only to find nothing inside.
“I swear I didn’t know!” Tao whined when he saw Juan turn on him. Then something caught his eye. “Wait a minute, something’s not right.” He was peering at the number on the container.
Juan stepped closer to him. “What?”
Tao pointed at it. “I remember this number from the manifest because it ends with five nines. It’s an empty we were bringing back to India. This container should be in the last row.”
“They were switched?” Eddie asked.
“They must have been. The crane operators at the ports are easy to bribe.”
“Show it to us,” Juan said.
They walked to the last row of containers. Tao nodded at the reefer container on the starboard end. Juan pushed him to the side, and Eddie kept his P90 at the ready while Juan wrenched the door open.
They relaxed when they saw the interior was full to the top with crates marked Laranjas/Oranges.
“The Novichok could be stowed somewhere in here,” Eddie said.
“Maybe,” Juan said before keying his comm unit. “Max, send as many people over in NBC suits as you can. We need to rip this container apart.”
He was about to ask Tao about the owner of the reefer unit when he saw the Triton Star’s captain staring at something along the side of the container. Tao started to say something when his chest bloomed with three gunshot wounds from a suppressed automatic weapon whose staccato report nevertheless echoed off the metal around them. Tao collapsed in a heap without a sound.
Juan dove to the deck past the open door of the container, ready to fire at the unknown assailant. He got a glimpse of a man in a desert camouflage NBC suit ducking behind the end of the container. Juan fired off a volley of rounds, hitting nothing. The gunman was gone.
Eddie leaned over to check Tao but shook his head when he saw the mortal wounds.
Juan spotted an opening in the side of the container and cautiously approached. When he reached it, he glanced inside and saw what had to be a custom-made decontamination chamber, based on the nozzles built into the ceiling.
Eddie appeared at his side and pointed to the floor. Resting on it was a case with an empty slot in the foam, plus a duffel for the NBC suit.
Juan nodded and radioed Max as the two of them inched to the external corner of the container. “We found the person sending the messages, Max. Tao told us that Rasul was a passenger, so it’s got to be him. He has a decontamination unit, and he’s wearing an NBC suit.” Juan stuck his head out for a moment and saw an open hatch leading down into the interior accessway. “I think he’s planning to disperse the Novichok.”
“On the Triton Star?” Max said.
“Yes. Eddie and I are the only ones over here in suits, so evacuate everyone else to the Oregon right now.” Juan heard him give the order to Hali. “If Rasul tries to get aboard, shoot him.”
“Roger that.” A second later, the .30 caliber machine guns rose out of their barrels and swiveled to point at the Triton Star.
“Is the portable decontamination station ready near the gangway?” Juan asked Max.
“It’s up and running.”
“Good. We might need to use it. Eddie and I are going after him.”
They sprinted to the hatch and descended into the bowels of the ship.
* * *
—
Rasul checked behind him as he ran down the corridor. He had lost his pursuers for the moment. He’d just finished putting on his NBC suit when he heard the container doors open. Then he heard a man calling for reinforcements, and Rasul knew he needed to get out of the chamber before he was trapped there.
Luckily, he’d already attached the Novichok device to his waistband. The only thing left to do before activating it was to put on his gloves.
His stomach went cold when he reached for his pocket and realized the gloves weren’t there.
The attack had happened so quickly that he’d left the specially designed gloves back in the decontamination chamber inside the duffel. He would need to either get them back or find replacements before he could carry out his plan for the nerve agent.
The other item he needed was something that all cargo ships were required to carry: a SOLAS rocket line thrower. The Safety of Life at Sea regulations stated that a ship of the Triton Star’s size was supposed to be equipped with four of them, which could be used to fire ropes to men overboard even if they were hundreds of yards from the ship.
During one of his midnight excursions onto the deck, Rasul had seen one of the rockets in its yellow plastic bucket hanging from the bulkhead directly under the lifeboat. He’d have to go outside to get it, but only for a moment.
When he reached the stairs nearest to the lifeboat station, he heard the crew being herded out of the mess.
“Come on,” one of the guards said. “Back to the other ship.”
That meant they’d be going in the other direction. Perfect.
Rasul climbed the stairs, his G36 assault rifle at the ready. The hallway was empty.
He went out the door, and there was the line thrower. The bucket had a plastic lid and a handle with a trigger secured by a pin like a grenade.
Rasul took it down and lifted the lid. Inside, the rocket was centered in the bucket with the thousand-foot nylon line coiled around it. The rope was tied to a steel wire clipped to the rocket, which would make it easy for him to attach the Novichok cylinder in its place. The bucket even had helpful instructions on the outside for its operation and how to install a replacement rocket. All he needed to do was dump out the rope, set the Novichok to a two-minute countdown, and tie it to the rocket.
Now he just had to get back to the decontamination chamber. As long as he could get there unseen, he’d have plenty of time to jury-rig his weapon. They’d be scouring the rest of the ship for him. No one would suspect he’d go back to the same place.
He retreated behind an external bulkhead for cover and took out his phone, then opened the specially designed launch app. Once he’d typed in his code, the screen allowed him to change the targeting coordinates that came up. He entered the longitude and latitude for Diego Garcia.
Target confirmed, came the app’s reply.
He navigated to the screen titled Launch. He slid aside the icon protecting against inadvertent activation, and the screen revealed a round red button with a caption that said Launch now.
He clicked the button and smiled as he thought to himself, This will keep them distracted.
* * *
—
“We’re not going to help the Chairman?” Raven said as they double-timed it back toward the gangway and away from the gunshots.
“Orders are orders,” Linc said. “Remember that from the Army?”
“There’s a reason I left the Army.”
“The Chairman worries about his crew more than himself.” He threw her a grin. “Besides, as soon as we get to the Oregon, we’ll put on some NBC gear and see if we can convince him to let us come back.”
“I like the way you think.”
They all stopped at the sound of a loud bang. It wasn’t quite an explosion, but it also wasn’t like any gunshot Linc had ever heard.
MacD rapidly waved to them. He pointed above their heads.
Linc looked up in time to see the side of a container above them tumbling toward the deck like a fluttering leaf.
He picked up Raven and heaved her into the space between two container stacks next to them and then dove in after her. The container side-slammed into the deck inches from his boots and then slid over the side of the ship. There was a dent in the steel where they’d been standing.
“I don’t normally like getting thrown around,” Raven said as she
hopped to her feet, “but in this case I’ll make an exception. I owe you one.”
Linc got up, and they ran to MacD, who was still gazing upward.
“You don’t see something like that every day,” he said.
They turned around and saw that the roof and sides of the topmost container on the stack next to where they’d been standing were gone, blown away by explosive hinges.
Now there was nothing there except its cargo: a missile launcher canted at a twenty-degree angle.
They all ducked when a geyser of flame erupted from the tube and a missile blasted out. When it was safely away, the booster rocket dropped into the sea, and stubby wings sprang from the fuselage. White-hot exhaust shot from the tail, and it accelerated away toward the southeast at a fantastic rate.
As they stood up, Linc cocked an eyebrow at Raven and MacD and said with a heavy dose of sarcasm, “I’m guessing that’s the launch they were talking about.”
TEN
For a moment, everyone in the op center froze, including Max, who stared at the sight of the missile disappearing into the distance.
Linda had been glued to the radar looking for any signs of an incoming aircraft or missile. Nobody had been expecting a missile launch from a container on the Triton Star.
“What kind of missile was that?” Max asked Murph, the ship’s foremost weapons expert.
“BrahMos cruise missile,” Murph answered without hesitation. “Supersonic. Indian design.”
Max’s first priority was the safety of the ship. “Activate defensive measures. Lock on with an anti-aircraft missile and fire.”
“Firing Aster,” Murph said. The Oregon’s hull reverberated with the sound of the European anti-aircraft missile rocketing out of its tube toward the cruise missile.
“Gatling guns and Metal Storm coming online,” Murph added.
The Aster anti-aircraft missile was their primary defensive weapon. But if the cruise missile turned around and avoided the Aster, the Oregon also had secondary defenses. Hull plates retracted to reveal three six-barreled Gatling guns that fired 20mm tungsten shells at a rate of three thousand rounds per minute. The Metal Storm gun rose out of the stern, ready to fire a wall of five hundred electronically activated rounds in the span of six milliseconds.
“Is the missile turning back toward us?”
“Negative,” Linda said. “It’s tracking on a straight path away from us southeast.”
“Time to target?”
“If it doesn’t change course,” Murph said, turning to look at Max with a concerned expression, “time to intercept the cruise missile is thirty-two seconds.”
“What’s the matter?”
“The BrahMos got a ten-second head start, and it’s almost as fast as the Aster.” The short-range anti-aircraft missile was designed to intercept airplanes and missiles coming toward the ship, not for chasing them down.
Murph put a map up on the viewscreen showing the red dot of the cruise missile heading away from them at Mach 3 and the Aster missile in pursuit, gradually gaining on it at Mach 3.5.
“If we’re not the target,” Max said, “where’s it heading?”
“Could be a ship in that direction,” Linda said, “though I don’t see any on the scope.”
“The target isn’t a ship,” Eric said. “Look at the map.”
Eric zoomed out and extended a dotted line along the BrahMos’s current heading. It was heading directly for Diego Garcia.
“Hali, get in touch with Diego Garcia any way you can and tell them that a cruise missile loaded with a toxic nerve agent is coming their way.”
Hali shook his head. “I still can’t contact anyone there, but I’ll keeping trying.”
“Ten seconds to impact,” Murph said.
The distance between the two dots was closing at an agonizingly slow pace.
Murph starting counting down.
“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”
Then he stopped. The dot representing the anti-aircraft missile winked out.
“What happened?” Max asked.
Murph slapped the panel in frustration and turned to him. “Ran of out fuel just before it caught up with the target. Now there’s no way for us to shoot it down.”
“How long until it hits Diego Garcia?”
“Nine minutes,” Eric said.
“Potential casualties?”
“If that missile is loaded with even half the Novichok that was reported stolen, we’re looking at a catastrophe.”
“Hali, get me Juan.”
After a moment, Hali said, “The Chairman’s on speaker.”
“Juan,” Max said, “Rasul just launched a BrahMos supersonic cruise missile from the Triton Star. We fired an Aster but couldn’t shoot the BrahMos down. You’re going to have to track him down and get him to send the missile’s abort code.”
“Easier said than done. We’re still looking for him.”
Max looked at the timer Eric had put up on the screen showing the missile’s time to impact.
“Not to put any pressure on you, but if you don’t find Rasul in the next eight minutes and thirty seconds, every person on Diego Garcia is going to die.”
* * *
—
Juan moved quickly down the accessway to the next corner, with Eddie close behind covering their rear in case Rasul circled back around them. He stopped at the crossing passageway and peered around the corner, but Rasul wasn’t in sight. Finding him in the maze of corridors in the next eight minutes was going to be a crapshoot.
“Max,” Juan said into his earpiece mic, “if we can’t catch Rasul, I might have a backup plan. Have Hali call Langston Overholt and get him to link up with Barbara Goodman at the 50th Space Wing in Colorado Springs. Tell him it’s about Operation Theseus.”
“You and your Plan Cs,” Max said. Juan could practically hear him rolling his eyes at Juan’s tendency to improvise last-minute schemes. “It’s the middle of the night back in the U.S. We’ll just wake them up.”
“How are we going to find Rasul in a five-hundred-foot-long ship in less than eight minutes?” Eddie asked Juan.
“He’s wearing an NBC suit,” Juan replied, “so that means he’s planning to set off his own Novichok release.”
Eddie nodded. “He wants to get rid of witnesses.”
“But we’ve put a crimp in his plans. He wasn’t expecting two ships.”
“He’ll want to get the nerve agent airborne. Maybe he already had a plan to do that.”
“Then why make a run for it and go into the ship? When I saw him . . .” Juan’s voice trailed off as he replayed the shoot-out in his mind.
“What?” Eddie asked.
“I only saw him for a split second, but I don’t think he was wearing gloves.”
“He wouldn’t have forgotten them.”
“I don’t know,” Juan said. “Maybe he had them in his pocket, but if he didn’t, he’ll need some replacements.”
“They can’t be just any old gloves. They’d have to be chemical-resistant.”
“Like rubber gloves. I can think of two possibilities. One is the mess, where they might have rubber gloves for cleaning. The other is that he’s circling back to take the ones from Keith Tao’s suit.”
“Split up?”
“It’s our best shot,” Juan said with a nod. He couldn’t check his watch, which was inside his suit. “We can’t have much more than seven minutes left.”
“I’ll take the mess,” Eddie said.
“I’ll check Tao. And remember, we need him alive.”
Eddie nodded and ran toward the mess.
As Juan sprinted back the way he’d come, he radioed Max the plan. Max told him that Raven, Linc, and MacD were suiting up and would be over to help out with the search as soon as they were ready. He also said they were down
to six and half minutes and still no contact with Diego Garcia to warn them of the approaching danger.
He decided to go around and between the row of containers. If Rasul had done the same, Juan would be coming up behind him.
When he got to the space between the containers, he could see the front door still ajar. Beyond it was Tao’s body.
The suit was bloody, but the gloves were still attached to it.
Juan moved forward with the submachine gun raised until he got to the end of the row and eased around the open door. Still no sign of Rasul.
He was about to consider this plan a bust when he heard a piece of metal clang inside the container. Juan poked his head around the corner and saw Rasul emerge from the decontamination chamber with gloves on that matched his suit.
Juan could have kicked himself for not checking the duffel. If the gloves were still inside, that was the only reason Rasul would have returned.
Rasul was holding a bucket with a rocket-powered line thrower. In a flash, Juan knew what he had in mind.
“Drop it, Rasul!” Juan yelled.
Rasul turned and looked at him in stunned disbelief, visible because he had a full-face mask instead of the goggles that Juan wore.
He didn’t hesitate. Despite Juan’s warning, he aimed the top of the bucket at the sky, and his hand reached for the trigger.
Juan fired a single round at Rasul’s shoulder. He needed him alive.
Rasul spun and collapsed onto his back, but he closed his finger on the trigger as he fell. The rocket launched past his head and into the decontamination chamber, where it ricocheted around until it ran out of fuel.
Juan ran forward. Rasul reached for a pistol in his belt, but the gloves were clumsy enough that Juan got to him first and stepped on his wrist.
“How do I send the self-destruct code to the missile?” Juan demanded with the P90 pointed at Rasul’s face.
“The phone in my front pocket,” Rasul said with a smile.
With his boot still on Rasul’s good hand, Juan reached down and pulled out the phone. He pushed the HOME button, and the screen asked for the passcode. Juan’s gloves were designed to work with touchpads.
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