Flat snarls heralded the arrival of several Sea Kings. I hopped out onto the wing. Two of them were a quarter of a mile away on a parallel course to the
Spirit
. I didn’t stay out on the wing too long. There might be SEALs on those choppers, and I might be considered a legitimate target. The nearest chopper was flashing a light at the bridge. I figured it was probably Morse, but as I didn’t know any Morse other than dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot, the code for SOS, I had no idea what was being communicated.
The water was now light green and I could clearly make out a line of white where the surf was breaking onto the sand a mile ahead of the bow. Time to move. It was maybe less than three minutes till this tub blew its dirty secret into the sky. I could already visualize the headlines. Heads would roll. Mine would be toast.
I headed for the back end of the boat a last time. My leg was well and truly seized. The ricochet or bullet fragment or whatever it was that had performed a little impromptu surgery on my calf muscle had cut through a nerve, or was lodged against it, sawing through it with every step. I pushed myself along the wall, using it as a support, trying to keep my weight off that leg. I wasn’t looking forward to negotiating the three ladders down to the open deck, but I took them as fast as I could and tried to ignore the screams ripped from my own throat when I stepped onto each of the metal decks. I opened the hatch out onto a burst of sunlight. Down at sea level, the ship seemed to be going faster, overtaking the swell lines. The water was a pale green now, the sandy bottom clearly visible. The naval vessel was close, turned side-on about half a klick away, its commander probably nervous about running aground. The ship appeared small – it was some kind of destroyer or frigate and not one of ours, but the Seahawk hovering over its stern probably was.
I peeled off the body armor and dropped it onto the deck, along with the .38 rounds in my pocket and the NVGs flipped up on my head. I climbed up onto the gunnel with difficulty. The turbulence coming off the propellers boiled with puffs of sand. I didn’t think too hard about jumping, in case thinking about it changed my mind, and stepped off into midair. Half a second later, I hit the wash.
Coming to the surface no problems at all, I watched the
Spirit
charge full steam toward the beach less than a klick ahead, a surf beach. I could see the backs of the waves crashing onto the sand. Beyond, the yellow sand was a thin line of low khaki-colored scrub. I couldn’t see any vehicles or smoke indicating habitation. Nothing to indicate wind direction either. Small fish nibbled at my calf, drawn by the blood, followed by something a little larger that hit my leg and started tugging at it, its teeth caught in the tourniquet.
I lifted my eyes and saw the ship suddenly pitch sideways and roll a little. It had struck the bottom. And then the sides of it bulged and three geysers of bright orange flame, one from each of the holds, shot several hundred yards into the sky. A split second later the entire vessel was engulfed in a vast expanding ball of gasoline that rushed toward me along with the shock wave. I ducked below the surface as the concussion pulse punched through the water. It punched the air out of my lungs and threw me around like a cork in a bath. Dazed and disoriented I bounced off the sand bottom, the world above the color of flame as the pall of ignited fuel spread over the air and sea. My lungs were raw and hot, close to bursting. Secondary detonations pulsed through the water pummeling me like body blows from a heavyweight. I needed air, but I was trapped below. I had to breathe or die. Nowhere to go. The oxygen-starved world was turning gray. I began to slide toward the bottom. Or the top, I wasn’t sure which. I opened my mouth, lungs and chest convulsing. Water rushed in. I choked. My lungs were bursting, seared, the taste of copper and gasoline in them. ‘This is it,’ a quiet voice said somewhere inside, a moment of peace. ‘You’re gonna die. It’s not so bad. Just accept it. Breathe . . .’
I
felt something clamp against my jaw, tentacles wrapping around my arms. My eyes and mouth opened and bubbles filled my blurred vision as a rubber mouthpiece was jammed almost down my throat, and the second stage cleared. Sucking hard, I breathed in, out, in, out . . . Sweet Jesus, motherfucking air! I breathed again and felt the relief that came with it surge through me. The tentacles turned out to be arms and the clamp a man’s hand. A mask slipped over my face and I cleared it like I’d been trained. I saw that there were six men in the water around me. The trident insignia I saw on someone’s neoprene shoulder told me they were US Navy SEALs.
I reached into my shirt, but my hand was pulled short. One of the SEALs showed me the pneumatic spear gun in his hand. I held my hands up in surrender and one of the SEALs reached into my shirt and pulled out what I was about to show them – my dog tags. He took a closer look, gave the other divers the ‘okay’ sign and patted me on the shoulder. He then pointed in a direction away from the burning
African Spirit
and made a bunch of signals that asked me if I could swim on my own, or needed assistance. I pointed at my calf, informing him that swimming was unlikely, then untied the laces and kicked the boots off my feet.
*
The ship was an Indian guided-missile destroyer – a new, sleek one. A party in NBC suits armed with M16s met me coming aboard and accompanied me back to where a temporary enclosed shower had been set up to one side of the helipad. A Geiger counter was passed over me, and then I was directed to get in the shower. Once inside I was doused in some kind of foaming solution for a few minutes, which tore into the burns on my arms, neck and face, and then the Geiger counter came out for another pass. I saw a few nods between the guys in the suits, which said either, ‘Yeah, he’s clean,’ or ‘Yeah, he’s fried.’
I figured it was the former when I was handed a towel and a pair of khaki coveralls and folks started zipping themselves out of the NBC suits.
I noticed that the M16s had also disappeared. While I was moved into another tent, I caught a glimpse of the
Leyte Gulf
steaming down from the north. I also took in the scene over on the beach. The air was full of Seahawks, a pair of the aircraft landing equipment and US Marines on the beach. Above, I could see a flight of four Super Hornets in a two-plus-two formation flying combat air patrol at around five thousand feet. Meanwhile, the object of all this attention, the
African
Spirit
, was on its side, surf pounding into its cracked hull. The tub was well and truly alight, burning ferociously, a thick pall of black smoke drifting
toward the beach
!
‘Yes!’ I said to myself under my breath.
‘Please . . .’ said an Indian medical officer, gesturing at a gurney. ‘If you would be so kind. Do you need assistance?’
I shook my head, climbed on, and was then ferried inside the ship to a nearby medical examination room where he and an orderly gave me a quick once-over. Without saying a word, they applied some cream on those burns of mine, put me on a table and x-rayed my leg. A local anesthetic in my calf came next before a twisted bullet fragment was pulled from the wound.
‘Good as new, sir,’ the doctor said when he was done stitching and bandaging me up.
The orderly began to push me along on the gurney, but I stopped him and asked to walk. He shrugged and helped me off and I followed him at a hobble back outside onto the helicopter landing deck, where another party was waiting impatiently. This one included a US Navy master chief and a unit of Marines. They came toward me, led by an Indian officer wearing a turban.
‘Good morning,’ the Indian said with an accent more British than any Brit I’d ever heard.
‘Good morning, sir,’ I replied, resisting the temptation to add, ‘Splendid weather we’re having.’
‘Welcome aboard the
Mysore
,’ he continued. ‘I am Captain Raf Sanghera, commander of this ship. You gave us quite a chase.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I am not sure how long you will be with us, but you are welcome for the duration.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
I wondered if he was going to mention the burning, smoking hulk rolling languidly on the foreshore, but no. Instead he shook my hand and then stood aside for the US Navy master chief petty officer, whose nametag said Beale.
‘Special Agent Cooper, United States Air Force OSI,’ he said, identifying me formally.
‘Master Chief.’
‘Made quite a mess for us to clean up, haven’t you?’
I glanced over again at the
Spirit.
The sea around the vessel was also alight. No doubt there’d also be an oil spill.
‘The whole world is going to want you debriefed pronto, Mr Cooper.’
I figured that.
He walked a little away from the Indians and motioned for me to follow. ‘So the package. It
is
in that wreck, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, something’s not right.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like we’re not picking up much in the way of bee-queues. Almost nothing beyond the usual background radiation. Not even downwind. Doesn’t make sense.’
‘Bee-queues, Chief?’
‘Becquerels – a unit of radiation measurement.’
‘The weapon’s in there. I saw it – touched it.’
‘Well, we’re gonna have to wait a little for things to cool off before we try to recover whatever it was you saw and touched,’ he said dubiously.
I was distracted by the sound of an approaching Seahawk. It was intending to land.
‘That’s for you,’ Beale shouted over the growing engine noise. Indian sailors went to work, packing away the temporary shower and other gear and herding everyone off the landing deck into an observation bay.
*
From an altitude of a couple of thousand feet, the
Enterprise
could have been a solid ingot of gray steel, except that it happened to be floating. As we drew closer, I watched two Super Hornets catapulted off one end of the ship as an early-warning aircraft was trapped aboard the other end.
We came in over the side of the ship, a pair of yellow shirts wanding us down onto the main angled deck close to the safety nets off the lip of the runway. Once the wheels had settled, a white shirt ran across from the opposite side of the deck and approached the Seahawk’s open side.
His eyes searched around inside the cabin area. ‘Agent Cooper?’ I raised my hand. He handed me a canvas helmet with built-in ear protectors to put on. ‘Come with me, please, sir.’
Hopping down onto my good leg, I limped after him to the ship’s island where two armed Marines met me, their blond hair cut like matching shoe brushes. They tag-teamed with the white shirt. ‘This way, sir,’ the one with the stripes of a gunnery sergeant said over the noise of a taxiing jet.
I followed them along a narrow steel passageway, down a narrow ladder and along another narrow passageway, eventually stopping at a room guarded by two more armed Marines. This appeared to be a no-smiling zone. The Marines showed me into the room, a big steel box dominated by a large U-shaped table covered in laptop computers and cabling, attended by at least a dozen people I didn’t know, and one that I did. There was a lot of talking that stopped sharply when I ducked through the bulkhead, the way it does when the people you walk in on are talking about you. Maybe it was my imagination.
‘Vin!’ said Arlen. He stood and came over. ‘We were just talking about you.’
Right. ‘Hey,’ I said, happy to see the guy, happy to be seeing
anything
given my last twenty-four hours.
His eyes swept my face, neck and arms. ‘Jesus, I was told you’d picked up a few burns . . .’
‘Looks worse than it feels.’
‘I sure hope so, buddy, ’cause you look like crap.’
A small cheer followed by a sudden burst of relief swept through the room. Two Air Force majors high-fived.
‘What’s up?’ I asked Arlen as a short, balding Navy commander came over.
‘Mr Cooper,’ he said, grabbing my hand and almost shaking it loose. ‘You’ve done a great job . . . a
great
job. We’ve just heard from the recovery team. They have the weapon, and it’s intact.’
‘It didn’t go off?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Nope.’
‘That’s wonderful news, sir,’ said Arlen.
The Commander was grinning like someone who’d won first prize in a beauty pageant, and motioned us into an adjoining cabin. ‘This is going to give Washington complete deniability over the incident,’ he continued. ‘It never happened. There was no nuclear clean-up team, no compensation, no damage for the diplomats to repair.’
Maybe the bomb was a dud. In which case the last three weeks, including the murder of Emma Shilling, the kidnap and possible murder of Kim Petinski, and the abduction and torture of Randy Sweetwater – all of it had been for nothing.
‘Do you know why it didn’t detonate, Sir?’ I asked.
‘Possibly just bad sequencing,’ the Commander replied. ‘When you ran the ship aground, Mr Cooper, perhaps the fuel load on the ship ignited before it was supposed to. We’re still waiting on all the specific details, but it appears the heat of the gasoline fire burned off the explosives in the shaped charge attached to the weapon. Our people at the recovery site have said that the bomb’s plutonium core is a little scorched, but that’s it. Let me say it again – good job, Mr Cooper.’
I thought he said I’d done a ‘great’ job. By tomorrow it would be an okay job, and in a week’s time no doubt I’d be getting hauled over the coals for not doing a good enough job.
He smiled, shook my hand all over again and left, as did the other folks assembled in the room beyond.
‘Was that your plan?’ Arlen asked once we were on our own. ‘To get that floating bomb to fire out of sequence?’
‘What do you think?’
He shook his head and snorted. ‘I think you’re the luckiest bastard alive.’
Speaking of luck, ‘How’s Randy?’ I asked.
‘He’s going to make it through okay. That was a neat trick you pulled in front of the security cameras at the embassy gates, by the way. They got to him quickly because of it. CIA traced the registration plate on the cab, interviewed the driver, and we pieced together your movements from there.’
‘Did Randy regain consciousness?’
‘Apparently – told us enough about the
African Spirit
and Ali-Bakr’s plans for it.’
That was a better outcome than I’d expected. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that Sweetwater had passed away. ‘What about you? I thought you were in St Barts.’
‘They made me number two assisting the general charged with cleaning up this mess. I was in Qatar interviewing personnel formerly stationed at Area Two when I heard you were in Dar. So I hitched a ride on a C-2 from the
Enterprise
doing a mail run.’
‘What about Kim Petinski? Any news?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing. She’s vanished. And so has von Weiss. He could be anywhere.’
‘He’ll turn up in Brazil,’ I said.
‘Why Brazil?’
‘Because he’s got the place wired – support systems, local knowledge and so forth. There’s no better place to hide than South America. Ask any Nazi. You’ve spoken to Jeb Delaney, right?’
Arlen nodded.
‘What does he know about the W80?’
‘Nothing, I hope.’
‘What does he think about von Weiss’s whereabouts?’
‘Same as you.’
‘Are we gonna kick his Nazi ass?’ I asked.
‘The profilers believe he’s more likely to be in Eastern Europe, closer to the memory of his father.’
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’ Arlen was looking uncomfortable. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘We can’t connect von Weiss to the theft of the W80,’ he said.
‘No one’s talking?’
‘Actually, they’re now singing like birds, but von Weiss was smart. The operation was compartmentalized from beginning to end. We’ve got theories and assertions, but there’s no evidence, other than Randy’s accounts.’
One eyewitness wasn’t enough to build a case on. ‘There are no wire taps, phone records, photographs linking him to the bomb?’
‘Nope, nothing concrete. Charles White might be able to give us something – when and
if
we find him . . .’
‘Charles White is dead. I killed the son of a bitch.’ Arlen didn’t say anything. ‘He didn’t give me a lot of choice,’ I continued.
‘Would it have mattered if he did?’
My turn to add nothing. So instead I said, ‘Charles’s brother, Falco, was also on the
Spirit.
He jumped ship several hours before sunrise. He’s still out there somewhere.’
‘It’d be good to have him, of course, but Charles was point man.’
‘There’s also Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and his exec, the tarantula.’
‘The
what
?’
‘A Somali pirate.’ I thought about filling Arlen in on the reason for the bomb’s detonation in this nowhere land off the coast of Somalia, but I figured Randy had already spilled those beans.
‘Having them under lock and key would be helpful,’ said Arlen. ‘They cracked our tightest security. We want every little piece about how they pulled it off.’
‘Except that it sounds to me like we’re getting ready to let von Weiss walk.’
‘There are other charges.’
‘Let me guess – outstanding parking tickets?’
‘He’ll never come to trial over the W80. You can’t jail someone for something that never happened. They’re kinda mutually exclusive, don’t you think?’
‘I’m going back to Rio,’ I said.
‘You’ve done enough. Let von Weiss go.’
‘This has nothing to do with von Weiss. I’m going back for Petinski.’
‘She disappeared in Dar. What makes you think she’s in South America?’
I pictured the condom on the tray. ‘Von Weiss took a liking to her. If we find him, I’m betting we’ll find her.’
‘So it
is
about von Weiss. Jesus, Vin.’
‘This is about finding Petinski alive,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve lost one partner; I’m not keen on making a habit of it.’
Arlen’s lips were set in a seam. I knew what he was thinking, could see it on his face. He believed it was already too late. Petinski was already gone – used in some sick experiment, her body disposed of in such a way that her final terrifying moments would never be known. If he was right about that, and I happened to find von Weiss,
I
wouldn’t be letting him walk.