Allah's Scorpion (8 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion
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He stepped around the end of the turbine where it angled down through the deck. He was a couple of meters behind the AB.
Bang. The AB would fall. He was number four out of nineteen.
Keeping a neutral expression on his face, he walked across to the control room, and went inside.
Weizenegger and the AB looked up, startled. “Captain,” the engineering officer said.
“Is there something wrong with our electrical system?” Graham asked.
Bang, the officer was dead. Number five.
Weizenegger glanced toward the AB on the main deck. “No, sir. Chiang is doing a scheduled P.M. routine.”
“Very well,” Graham said. He looked at the AB.
Bang, the man fell. Number six.
“Carry on.”
“Yes, sir,” Weizenegger said.
Graham headed topside toward the officers’ quarters, but he heard the music again coming from the galley. At midnight the cook might not be in the galley, but it was likely that his assistant and perhaps some of the crew coming off duty might be in the mess.
This morning it was Rassmussen, the cook, mixing pancake batter and frying bacon. He looked up when Graham appeared at the doorway. “Ah, Captain, can’t sleep? Son of a bitch I know how it is. Coffee?”
“No, I’m on my way to bed,” Graham said.
Bang, the cook or whoever was in the galley would be down. Number seven.
“Everything okay down here?”
The cook nodded effusively. “In my son of a bitch kitchen, it’s always okay.”
“Very well,” Graham said. He went back into the mess.
Four steel tables with six stainless steel stools were bolted to the deck. No one was here at this hour, but he had to count on at least some crewmen eating a midnight meal. Say three of them?
Bang, the crewman at the coffee urn fell. Number eight. The two at their table were rising in alarm. Bang, number nine. Bang, number ten of nineteen.
Graham hurried up to the officers’ deck where he stopped at the chief engineer’s door.
Bang, number eleven.
He moved to Vasquez’s cabin where he and his girlfriend would be in each other’s arms.
Twelve and thirteen.
Down one deck, he stopped at the doors of the remaining six crew members.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.
The
Apurto Devlán
had become a ghost ship.
Graham headed topside to his quarters. He took the stopwatch from his pocket and clicked the Stop button. Nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds had elapsed, and the ship was his.
 
 
MARINA JACK, SARASOTA, FLORIDA
Kirk Cullough McGarvey raised the air horn and blew one long and one short, the signal requesting the tender to stop traffic and open the New Pass Bridge. It was a few minutes after noon, the spring Saturday beautiful. Although traffic was heavy the bridge tender immediately sent back the long and short, that the bridge would be opened as requested.
A part of him was reluctant to return to the real world after fourteen days of vacation, while another part of him was resigned. Something was out there. Someone was coming for him.
Four days ago at the Faro Blanco Marina in the Keys, the dockmaster had come out to where the Island Packet 31 sloop, which McGarvey and his wife Katy had chartered, was tied up. He said that he’d forgotten to get the Florida registration number on the bow. But that was a lie.
McGarvey had followed him back to the office, and watched from a window as the man tossed the slip of paper on which he’d jotted down the registration number into a trash can, then made a telephone call. It was a pre-coms; someone was sniffing along his trail.
Yesterday, anchored just outside the Intracoastal Waterway channel near Cabbage Key, they’d been overflown twice around dusk by a civilian helicopter. He was certain that the passenger had looked them over through a pair of binoculars.
He’d said nothing to Katy about his suspicions, but that evening while she was having a drink in the cockpit, he’d gone below for his 9mm Walther PPK that had been safely tucked away since the start of the cruise. He checked the action, and loaded a magazine of ammunition into the handle, racking a round into the firing chamber.
When he turned around, Katy had been looking at him from the cockpit hatch. “Gremlins?” she’d asked.
“I’m not sure,” McGarvey said. “But somebody seems to be interested in us.”
Katy shook her head, disappointment on her pretty face. “I thought it was over.”
“Me too.”
McGarvey was a tall man, fiftyish, with a sturdy build and a good wind because of a daily regimen of exercise that he had not abandoned last year after he’d resigned his position as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although there was no longer anyone to oversee his workouts, he went out to the Company’s training facility near Williamsburg as often as he could to run the confidence course and spend an hour or two on the firing range. Just to keep his hand in, and to see how his daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd, were doing. They were instructors.
He had quit the CIA after twenty-five years of service—first as a field officer, and then for a number of years as a freelancer, working black operations, before he came back to Langley to run the Directorate of Operations, and finally the entire Agency—because he was tired of the stress.
Good times, some of them. Good people. Friends. But more bad times than he cared to remember, although he could not forget the people he’d killed in the line of duty. All of them necessary, or at least he had to tell himself that. But all of them human beings, whatever their crimes. Their deaths were on his conscience, especially in the middle of the night when he often awoke in a cold sweat.
Because of his profession his family had been put in harm’s way more than once. It was another reason he’d quit.
Kathleen came up on deck, shading her blue eyes against the bright sun. “Are we there yet?” she asked, a slight Virginia softness to her voice. She was a slender woman, a few inches shorter than her husband, with short blond hair and a pretty oval face with a small nose and full lips.
“We will be if they open the bridge for us,” McGarvey told her. There were several other sloops, their sails also furled, and a couple of powerboats whose antennae or outriggers were too tall to pass beneath the bridge when it was closed.
“Then what?” Kathleen asked.
“I’ll give Otto a call and see if he’s heard anything.”
Traffic up on the bridge was coming to a halt as the road barriers were lowered.
“I meant afterwards,” Kathleen pressed. She was serious. “You’re taking
the teaching job at New College. We’re selling the house in Chevy Chase and moving down here. Permanently. Right?”
The roadway parted in the middle and the two leaves began to rise.
McGarvey pointed the bow of the Island Packet to the middle of the channel and gave the diesel a little throttle. The tide was running with them through the narrow pass into Sarasota Bay, giving them an extra three or four knots.
“Right?” Kathleen repeated.
McGarvey glanced at her and smiled. “That’s the plan, sweetheart.”
She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “God, you’re handsome when you lie,” she said. She came aft to the wheel, gave her husband a kiss on the cheek, then started pulling the dock lines and fenders from a locker.
She was wearing a bikini with a deep blue and yellow sarong tied around her middle; her feet were bare. McGarvey was dressed only in swim trunks, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. Except for the couple of nights they’d dressed for dinner ashore, they’d worn nothing else for most of the fourteen days since they’d slipped their lines at Marina Jack and headed out to the Gulf of Mexico.
They’d gunk-holed down Florida’s west coast, slowly heading for Key West; anchoring early in small coves, drinks in the cockpit at dusk, power up the barbecue grill for dinner. Awake with the dawn, the water flat calm for a swim before breakfast, then pull up the anchor, and sail farther south. Sometimes they’d stop especially early so they could snorkel along the reefs just offshore, or walk the beaches, or fish, or just lie in the cockpit in the shade of the bimini to read a book.
For two weeks they never turned on the radio, saw a television set, or read a newspaper or newsmagazine. And the trip had done wonders for both of them, after the hell they’d gone through because of McGarvey’s last assignment in which he’d resigned from the CIA in order to track down an al-Quaida killer. Kathleen, who’d been pregnant as a surrogate mother for their daughter Elizabeth, had very nearly lost her life in the ordeal. But Mac had saved her and the baby, who’d been born six months ago.
This trip had been exactly what the doctor had ordered. Or at least it had been until the incidents at Faro Blanco and yesterday in the Intracoastal Waterway with the helicopter. Like so many times before in his connection with the U.S. intelligence establishment he had to tell himself
that the business was not finished for him. Perhaps it would never be over until he was dead, because there were a lot of people still very interested in what he knew, and any number of others who wanted to pay him back for what he’d done.
They made the broad turn south around Quick Point and the one-design sailing squadron toward the new John Ringling High Bridge. Sarasota’s downtown with its glass-faced office buildings, sixteen-story condos, and the Ritz-Carlton intermingling with palms, bougainvillea, and flowering trees, looked subtropical, laid-back, even peaceful.
Kathleen was rigging the dock lines on the bow cleats. McGarvey locked the wheel, and went below for a moment to get his pistol. He stuffed it in the waistband of his trunks, then pulled on a T-shirt, and went back up to the cockpit.
Kathleen turned around as he got back behind the wheel and gave him the resigned look of hers that she knew he was carrying. She didn’t like it, but she never complained now like she had in the early days, when their marriage had gone on the rocks. His abilities combined with his instincts had saved their lives more than once. She’d come to understand that when he armed himself it was almost always for a good reason.
They passed under the John Ringling High Bridge, and less than one hundred yards south, picked up the channel markers into Marina Jack where they’d chartered the boat. More than two hundred sail- and powerboats were docked on either side of the modern glass and steel restaurant that was located in its own quiet cove right on Tamiami Trail, which was much like the Quai d’Anglais along Nice’s chic waterfront.
McGarvey picked up the microphone and called the dockmaster on VHF channel 16. “Marina Jack, this is
Sunday Morning.
”
“
Sunday Morning,
switch and answer seven-one.”
McGarvey switched to the working channel. “Marina Jack,
Sunday Morning.
We’ve just passed marker eight A. Where do you want us?”
“Tie up at the fuel dock,” the dockmaster radioed. “Welcome back. Have a good trip?”
“We’re sorry to be back.”
“I hear you,” the dockmaster said. “You’ve got someone to see you. He’s been here most of the morning.”
A tall figure with frizzy red hair came out onto the dock. “Yeah, I know,”
McGarvey said. Even from one hundred yards out he could recognize Otto Rencke. “
Sunday Morning
out.” He returned to channel 16.
“It’s Otto,” Katy called from the bow. She was relieved for the moment. She waved, and Rencke waved back.
A couple of dock boys came out as McGarvey throttled back and eased the sloop starboard side too at the fuel pumps, their speed bleeding to nothing. Kathleen tossed one of the boys the forward line, and McGarvey tossed the other a stern line.
“Hi, Otto,” Kathleen said.
Rencke, dressed in tattered blue jeans and a raggedy old CIA sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, leaned against the building, in the shade of the second-floor overhang. “Hi, Mrs. M,” he said. He didn’t look happy.
Lavender, McGarvey guessed, or something close to it.
They didn’t have to return the boat until tomorrow morning. They’d planned on spending the afternoon packing and cleaning up. This evening they would have dinner, and tomorrow they would fly back to Washington for the closing on their Chevy Chase house on Tuesday. Later in the week they would drive back here to get their new house on Casey Key up and running.
Shutting down the engine, McGarvey had a feeling that there might be a change of plans. Or at least that Otto had come down here to make an offer.
Katy came aft. “You didn’t know it would be Otto, did you?”
“No.”
“He’s got the look, darling. You’re going to turn him down, right?”
“You need your holding tank pumped out, Mr. McGarvey?” one of the dock boys asked.
“Please, and when you’ve filled the diesel run her over to the slip for us, would you?”
“Sure thing, sir.”
“Right?” Kathleen asked.
“He’s a friend, I’m going to listen to him, Katy,” McGarvey said. He went below, put his pistol away, and slipped into a pair of Topsiders.
Kathleen joined him. “What about me?” she asked.
“Otto and I are going for a walk. Why don’t you get dressed and meet us at the bar? We’ll have some lunch.”
“I meant
us,
goddammit,” Katy said, keeping her voice low.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she pulled away.
“We’ll just be a few minutes,” he promised. “It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t think so.”
McGarvey went topside, opened the lifeline gate, and stepped up onto the dock. Rencke came across to him and they shook hands.
“Oh wow, Mac, Mrs. M didn’t look very happy to see me,” Rencke said. “Is she okay?”
“Depends on why you’re here,” McGarvey said. “Was it you looking over our shoulders the past few days?”
“Yeah.”
“You could have called.”
“Your cell phone was out of service, and I didn’t want to use the radio.”
McGarvey nodded. “Let’s take a walk.”
They headed around the restaurant to the parking lot and the sidewalk that followed Tamiami Trail over to City Park a couple of blocks away. There were a lot of people out and about, walking, roller-blading, biking, working on their boats, having picnics, flying kites, fishing. White noise. He and Otto were anonymous here and now.
“This is about Osama bin Laden again, isn’t it?” McGarvey said.
Rencke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “We’re on the hunt for him, just like you suggested, but we’ve stumbled on something else. Maybe even bigger than 9/11 or the suicide bombers you stopped last year.”
It felt odd to McGarvey to be back on solid land after two weeks, but not odd to be talking to an old friend about the business. Katy understood him better than he did.
“Who sent you, or did you come down here on your own?”
“Adkins. But no one was sure that you’d come back, or even agree to listen to me. He thought it was worth a shot, and so did I.”
They got off the path and walked down to an empty picnic table at the water’s edge.
“It’s nice here,” McGarvey said. He looked at his friend. “I’ve got a job teaching Voltaire at New College, starting this fall. Did you know that?”
Rencke nodded glumly. “Good school,” he said. “But you know that they’d like you to take over at the Farm. You could make a lot of difference for the kids coming in.”

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