Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) (51 page)

“Ohhhggaaggh,” Duar said as sweat ran down his face. “Main deck,” he gasped. “Both sides.”

“Let’s go,” Rat said. “On your feet!”

“I can’t walk!”

“Banger, drag this asshole topside. If he gives you any shit just smash him in the face.”

“Pleasure,” Banger said as he pulled Duar to his feet and began dragging him down the passageway.

Rat put the steel cable and the pliers back into his vest, grabbed his weapon, and ran to the ladder leading to the deck. Rat spoke into his microphone, “Groomer, what you got?”

Rat heard the reply immediately in his headphones. “We’re in after steering. Nobody here. The engine controls and the helm are frozen. I think they got underneath the deck plates and locked the cables. We were going to get under the deck, but the whole place is rigged with C4. If we touch anything, we’re all going to go up. We’re willing . . .”

“You think that would stop the ship?”

“Can’t tell—it’s possible . . .” Groomer said, understanding the implications.

“Forget it. The radioactive cores are up on the deck. If this ship goes up we can’t let it send radioactivity with it. You start aft, we’ll start forward. Find them and chuck them over the side. Divers can get them later, but we can’t let them go up with the ship.”

“We’re on our way.”

Rat dashed up one ladder after another, breathing heavily. The other SEALs were right behind him. Banger dragged Duar, who was crying out from pain. He begged Banger to stop. Banger threw him over his shoulder like a sack of grain and carried him up the ladders, not caring that his bleeding leg was smacking against the railings and bulkheads.

As Rat broke into the daylight he switched his transmitter to UHF. “Kujo, you up?” he asked, speaking directly to the Pave Low pilot.

“Kujo’s up. That you, Rat?”

Rat looked at the
Eisenhower
. It was less than a thousand yards away. “We need to get out of here. Prepare for SPIE Rig extraction.”

“Same place we dropped you off?”

“Affirmative.”

Rat dashed forward to the bow of the ship. On his way he looked for anything out of place. He quickly spotted the sinister metal containers, the radioactive cores. They were taped to the deck with ordinary duct tape. He ran past several of them as he went forward, pointing them out to the SEALs behind him. They broke up and kneeled near each one individually. Rat ran to the bow, pulled out his switchblade, pressed the blade into service, and cut the tape on the core closest to the bow. He quickly tossed it over the side and watched it splash into the sea as the
Galli Maru
raced toward the nuclear-powered
Eisenhower
at twenty knots. The carrier looked huge in front of them, its flight deck much higher than the deck on which Rat stood.

Rat turned to run back to the next container on the port side. He stopped. The ship was turning—no, he quickly realized—the
Eisenhower
was backing away from pier twelve. A huge rooster tail kicked up behind the carrier as the four enormous propellers dug into the dark water and pulled the massive ship away. He could hear the taut mooring lines snap as the
Eisenhower
broke free. He could see faces of sailors peering over the side of the flight deck as they watched the
Galli Maru
in morbid fascination. Rat looked back and saw the other SEALs throwing their radioactive cylinders over the side. “How many? How many cylinders?”

Each SEAL who had thrown a cylinder over raised his hand. He looked back at the pier, then back at the second cylinder he had been heading for. He ran to it, cut it free, and tossed it as far as he could. He looked up at the carrier. They were going to hit the
Eisenhower
. “Emergency extraction! Everybody to the insertion point!”

The SEALs cut at the cylinders and threw them. They looked madly for more but didn’t see any.

“Go!” Rat yelled.

They ran down the deck and up the ladders to the superstructure. The Pave Low hovered over the superstructure as the crew chief kicked the SPIE Rig (Special Purpose Insertion/Extraction) onto the deck. The SEALs rushed to the two large ropes with attachment points and hooked their harnesses up. Using two ropes simultaneously from the same helicopter was only done in an emergency. But everyone involved realized they had to get off on the first extraction—there wouldn’t be a second. Banger was on his knees next to a visibly suffering and weakened Duar. Rat crossed to them and looked at Duar with fury. “You’re going up with this ship,” Rat said to Duar in Arabic as he quickly pulled the cable back out of his vest. He glanced up to make sure the rest of his men were hooked up to the SPIE Rig, ready to go. He looked ahead at the
Eisenhower
as they approached the pier. He ran his cable under Duar’s arms. His hands were still bound behind him. As Rat reached down for an anchor point, he suddenly thought better of it. He ran the cable through his harness, grabbed Duar, and picked him up.

The
Eisenhower
was now moving at three or four knots, and was backing quickly away from the pier. They had two hundred yards before impact. He yelled at Banger, “Get hooked up!”

Banger ran to the aft most SPIE rope. Rat was right behind him. He dropped Duar onto the deck, hooked his harness up, and gave the helicopter a thumbs-up. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”

The helicopter pulled up gently. The SEALs hung underneath, and Duar hung precariously underneath Rat by the steel cable which ran through Rat’s harness and under Duar’s arms. The pilot pulled up quickly on the collective, increased altitude, and pulled into a hard right climbing turn. The
Eisenhower
had averted immediate disaster by getting out of the way in time to avoid the collision. The
Galli Maru
missed it by fifty feet. The
Eisenhower
continued to back into the bay in full reverse. The news helicopter was torn between filming the
Eisenhower
and the helicopter lifting the SEALs off the deck.

As they spun in the air, Rat watched the liquefied natural gas ship hit the pier in slow motion. The ship stopped dead in its tracks and the enormous pier shuddered under the force. The stern of the
Galli Maru
came out of the water—Rat could see the screws turning in the air, trying to drive the death ship forward. For a moment Rat thought that perhaps Duar had not rigged the ship to explode and they could go back and get the Japanese crew off. But just as the thought formed in his mind, all hell broke loose. The sides split and the top of the ship opened like a soup can with a stick of dynamite inside. Before Rat could hear anything, he saw the shock wave, the concussion spreading out from the ship. The water was driven back from the explosion; the pier was obliterated and threw splinters of wood and pieces of concrete into the sky. The
Eisenhower
, only two hundred feet away now from the explosion, was thrown back, and its bow caved in.

He could see the force spreading over the ground toward the Norfolk Naval Base and the city of Norfolk in a second. The shock wave spread far faster than its sound. It slammed into the helicopter. He felt as if he had been dropped into the top of a hurricane.

They were battered around and banged into each other as the helicopter fought to stay airborne. It pitched over and headed toward the water as the turbulent air ripped the lift out of the helicopter’s blades. The SEALs bounced up against the bottom of the helicopter and down again as the unstable air thrashed them around the sky. Rat looked down and saw the cable cutting into the underarms of Duar. One of his shoulders looked like it had been ripped out of its socket.

The pilot fought to maintain control as the helicopter plummeted. The SEALs were jerked back down as the helicopter regained some lift. The pilot had the collective in the full up position demanding maximum lift from the blades and the jet engines. The engines whined as the blades beat the air down trying to keep the heavy helicopter from crashing into the water. The news helicopter, which had filmed everything including the explosion, was thrown upside down and smashed into the bay.

There was nothing left of the
Galli Maru
. It had vanished, a victim of the BLEVE, the Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion Rat and the others had dreaded. As the force of the explosion reached the city of Norfolk, Rat watched the glass from the distant windows being blown out of taller buildings. Cars were thrown over on their sides. At the Navy base, the ships that had been unable to get under way were being hurled around and smashed into the piers to which they were moored. The water in the Chesapeake looked like it was in the middle of a storm.

The shock wave passed the helicopter. The Pave Low climbed and pulled away to the northeast. As they hung freely in the air, Rat looked at the massive destruction beneath him, the ships and boats fighting the chaotic water, and the Navy ships struggling to free themselves from their piers.

Rat was angry that they had not been able to stop the ship. They simply hadn’t had enough time. How many had died? How many people had had their lives ruined?

He reached inside his vest and pulled out his pliers. He looked down at Duar dangling below him. Duar was either unconscious, or was staring at the water, dreading his future. Rat slipped cable into the wire-cutting teeth of the pliers, and started to squeeze. He found his anger building again, taking over. The last thing the United States needed was a circus trial with the world’s most wanted terrorist. The tribunal had turned into a fiasco, and since Duar had been captured on U.S. territory, they might not get another tribunal. He’d probably end up in federal court, where Rat himself was returning. It would be obscene.

He squeezed harder on the pliers, yearning to cut Duar loose, to watch him fall to the bay a thousand feet below. Wait, he thought. He pulled his pliers back. He switched his transmitter to UHF. “Kujo, you up?” he said to the pilot fifty feet away.

“Go ahead, Rat.”

“We lost two men on the ship. All the hostages and terrorists were on board when it went up,” he said transmitting in the clear, so anyone listening would be sure Duar was dead. “At least we think the hostages were. We never saw them.”

Kujo paused. “You didn’t get any of them off?”

“Nope. Just us. Ten of us.”

The other SEALs looked at Rat, confused. Then they got it. They nodded and smiled.

“Why don’t you take us to Langley?”

“Wilco,” Kujo said.

“And maybe you can call my bosses so they can meet us there.”

“Roger that. Understood.” He understood completely. Rat’s bosses were the CIA. He wanted his friends from the Agency to meet him at Langley to quietly take Duar off their hands.

Those in the situation room in the White House sat back, partly out of relief, and partly out of anger. The ship had made it into the Chesapeake and had plowed into the carrier pier at Norfolk Naval Base. Several ships had been damaged, a few badly, but thankfully none had been sunk. The
Eisenhower
, apparently part of the target along with the city of Norfolk, a city of 350,000, not to mention Hampton Roads, Newport News, Virginia Beach, and the Chesapeake Bay, had been damaged but not seriously.

President Kendrick stared at the map and the images on CNN that continued to be repeated up to the moment when the news helicopter pitched over into the bay. “Not good at all,” he finally said. “Any indication of radiation?” he asked of no one in particular.

Stuntz replied, “No, sir. The nuclear officers on the
Eisenhower
have been checking carefully. They have very sensitive instruments in case of their own nuclear problem. They’re not detecting any radiation at all.”

Kendrick nodded. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse. How many people killed?”

St. James looked at a message she had been handed. “Very preliminary, sir, but it looks like twenty-three so far, not counting the Japanese crew. Looks to me like Lieutenant Rathman did a fabulous job, considering.”

Stuntz replied, “He didn’t stop the ship, he didn’t get the Japanese hostages off, he didn’t divert the ship, he allowed it to blow up inside of one of our major cities and the largest Navy base in the world.”

“Considering we gave him about four hours’ notice I think he did admirably. In fact,” she said, looking at the President, “I think we owe it to him to stop the trial. I can’t even imagine what the
Washington Post
would do with the story of a Navy counterterrorism hero convicted for manslaughter of a terrorist, the very one who worked for the man who just blew up Norfolk Naval Base. How do you think that will sound?”

“Who cares how it sounds? We can’t just stop a trial.”

“Why not?” She turned to the Attorney General. “Can’t we just ask the U.S. Attorney to dismiss the charges?”

The Attorney General shook his head. “If we do that without some new evidence it would look like we were just pandering.”

“Mr. President? What do you think?” she asked, watching Kendrick’s expression.

“The trial will take care of itself. Now if you’ll excuse me, like you, I’ve been up all night. I’m going to go prepare a statement to the press, catch about twenty minutes of sleep, and go tell everyone how great we are.”

The courtroom was jammed with reporters and spectators. They had started lining up the night before. The press was in a frenzy with coverage of the explosion near Norfolk, and when they realized the man who had averted the disaster was the same one on trial they were beside themselves. Full-page coverage, photographs, special articles on Special Forces, diagrams of SPIE Rigs, continuing coverage of the Navy divers who were searching the bay for the Russian radioactive cores, and pictures taken from the exhaustive coverage of the media helicopter were everywhere. The print journalists had fought for the passes to the front two rows of the gallery for Monday morning, when the jury was expected to come back with a verdict on Lieutenant Kent Rathman.

The jury didn’t let them down. After one hour of deliberation on Monday morning they announced to the bailiff that they had reached a verdict.