Radiant Angel (14 page)

“Monsieur, may I help you?”

“His Highness has permitted me to see your kitchen.”

“Yes? What do you wish to see?”

“A photo, s’il vous plaît.” Petrov held up his cell phone. “It will go quickly,” he promised.

The chef hesitated, then, realizing it would be better to accommodate the prince’s guest than to protest, he motioned his three male
staff and the woman to stand with him in the aisle between the cutting table and the food locker.

They all assembled, closely packed in the narrow aisle, and Petrov raised his cell phone. If anyone noticed or wondered what it was that he had slung in a towel over his shoulder, they didn’t ask. “Smile!”

He would have actually snapped the photo, but he’d removed the battery from his phone so that the Americans could not track his signal.

“One more, please.”

Everyone smiled again, though the chef, André, looked impatient.

Petrov dropped the phone into his pocket, then swung the submachine gun to his front, pulled off the bar towel, and fired a low sweeping burst of rounds into the posed group, who for a half second didn’t understand what it was in his hands that was spitting flames. In fact, the woman was still smiling when she was hit. The ricochets pinged off the tile floor and kitchen equipment. Then everything was silent.

Petrov put the weapon on single shot and stood at the feet of the five white-smocked people who were spurting blood from their legs and abdomens. They were all alive, and Petrov began with the woman, who was starting to cry out in pain, and fired a bullet into her head. Then in quick succession he gave the other four what André would call the coup de grâce.

He found a bigger towel to wrap his submachine gun and slung it across his back, then went to the stove and shut off the gas under the pots and saucepans. He smelled something unpleasant and looked through the glass door of the raised oven and saw mutton chops roasting in a pan. Who could eat this? He shut off the oven and left the galley.

Now on to the crew quarters.

Viktor Gorsky waited for the steward and the deckhand.

He carried his submachine gun, still gift-wrapped, under his left arm, leaving his right hand free to draw his pistol, which was in his trouser pocket. So far, this had all been handgun work; not the type
of work where one needed a submachine gun. That, however, would change in the salon with the ladies.

Gorsky heard the hydraulic whine of the elevator and stood off to the side of the door.

The door slid open and a food cart appeared, followed by a white-coated steward who pushed the cart across the vestibule toward the captain’s door, not seeing Gorsky, who was behind him.

The steward glanced at the closed security door to the bridge, then knocked on the captain’s door and waited. He then moved, without the cart, to the bridge door and pressed the intercom button. “It is Abdi. Dinner.” He waited a few seconds, and Gorsky could tell that Abdi was perplexed and didn’t know what to do. Ring again? Or push the entry pad to open the bridge door, which Gorsky guessed was rarely, if ever, closed.

The steward pulled his handheld radio from his pocket and was about to make a call, but Gorsky said, “Excuse me.”

The steward turned with a start, then, recognizing a guest, he relaxed, though he didn’t know where the man had come from. The staircase perhaps.

“Yes, sir?”

“I am waiting for the deckhand who will stand watch.”

“He should be on the bridge.”

“He is not.”

The steward looked at his watch and said, “Perhaps a few minutes. Why—?”

“I will wait.”

Gorsky knew he could shoot the steward there and then, without concern that the round would pierce the bulletproof door or bulkhead and strike something vital on the bridge. But he didn’t want a dead man in the vestibule when the deckhand arrived, so he said, “The captain awaits you.”

“I have knocked—”

“Please.” He motioned toward the captain’s door and the food cart.

The steward hesitated and looked at the Russian standing on the far side of the staircase railing with a wrapped object under his arm,
then returned to the captain’s door and knocked again. He glanced at the guest, shrugged, and said, “Perhaps he is in the ship’s office.”

“He is not.”

Clearly the steward was finding this situation unusual, and he reached again for his radio. Gorsky reached for his gun.

The sound of footsteps came up the spiral staircase, and the steward said, “That will be Malkin.” He seemed relieved, Gorsky thought, that someone else would take charge of this situation. The steward had many guests to attend to. Or thought he did.

The head and shoulders of a man wearing the blue shirt of a deckhand appeared on the spiral staircase. As the man stepped into the vestibule, he glanced at the closed door to the bridge, then noticed the steward at the captain’s door and asked, “Why is the bridge door shut, Abdi?”

The steward shrugged, then nodded toward the guest near the elevator, noticing that he had laid his package on the floor.

The deckhand, Malkin, turned and saw Gorsky. “Yes, sir?”

Gorsky drew his pistol and held it in a two-handed grip, steadied his aim, and fired a round at the center mass of each man, both of whom were thrown back against the wall. The deckhand slid slowly to the floor, but the steward bounced off the wall and fell across the food cart.

Gorsky came quickly around the spiral staircase and threw open the door to the captain’s quarters and pushed the food cart with the steward’s body lying atop it into the captain’s room, then grabbed the deckhand by his collar and dragged him into the room. Both men were still alive and Gorsky fired a bullet into each man’s head, then exited the captain’s room and closed the door.

Gorsky pocketed his pistol, retrieved his package, and moved quickly to the spiral staircase, descending three steps at a time toward the salon level. As he descended, he could hear music and women’s laughter.

Vasily Petrov moved quickly from the main deck galley down to the tank deck, still carrying his MP5 slung across his back. He passed no
one on the way, but in the narrow passageway that led to the crew’s quarters a deckhand suddenly appeared, coming toward him. The man stopped and braced himself against the wall as the guest hurried past him.

Petrov suddenly spun around, pulled his pistol, and fired a bullet into the side of the man’s head.

A serendipitous kill was as good as a planned kill, except in a hallway, which presented problems. Petrov looked around, then opened a door marked
VALVE ACCESS
, revealing a maze of vertical and horizontal pipes. He dragged the man across the floor and squeezed him into the tight space, then shut the door and continued toward the midship of the tank deck.

He could hear voices coming through a large door at the end of the passageway, and he conjured a mental image of the crew area deck plan: an open common space for recreation and dining, flanked by five small rooms on the port side for the chef and his kitchen staff, all of whom were now accounted for.

On the starboard side were two-man cabins that were the sleeping quarters of the seven deckhands and the seven stewards, and farther toward the bow was the crew’s pantry and galley.

Petrov tried to determine how many men would be in the crew area. He had already eliminated four stewards in the bar and dining room, and he knew that one or two stewards would be with the ladies in the salon, where everyone should be dead by now if Gorsky was on schedule. That left one or two stewards unaccounted for—though they should not be down here because of the large number of guests onboard. Therefore, only deckhands should be in the crew area—except the one who was in the valve access room. So, with the ship at anchor, he might find the six remaining deckhands, including the Bulgarian, having dinner, which would make his life and their deaths much easier.

Petrov unslung his MP5 submachine gun and loosely re-wrapped it in the towel with his right hand in the folds, four fingers around the vertical grip and one finger on the trigger. He checked that the shell casings had enough room in the towel to eject, then let his arm fall at his side and opened the door marked
CREW QUARTERS
.

Four young men in white jeans and blue shirts sat around a table toward the rear of the large common room, eating their dinner as they watched a flat-screen television. None of them was the Bulgarian he’d passed earlier on the staircase. That man, therefore, was elsewhere, and so was the seventh deckhand. Perhaps they were in their rooms.

The television was showing a war film, and he heard American voices coming from the soldiers on the screen. They looked like brave young men, and they seemed confident as they fired at ill-dressed and bearded men carrying Kalashnikov rifles. Iraq, perhaps, or Afghanistan. There was a lot of blood. He wondered if the prince would approve of this movie.

One of the deckhands noticed him and said something to the other three men, who took their eyes off the television and stopped eating.

None of them stood, but at least one recognized him, because the man called out, in Russian, “Are you lost?”

Petrov remembered the man from the tender garage and replied, in English, “No. Are you?”

The man laughed tentatively, then asked, in English, “What do you have there, sir?”

“A gift from the chef for the crew.”

No one replied, and Petrov asked, “Where are your mates?”

The Russian-speaking man replied, “You will find Malkin on the bridge, standing watch. As for Diaz, he just left to assist your ladies in the salon—in any way he can.” He smiled.

The other three men laughed, and Petrov, too, smiled, knowing that six deckhands were now accounted for—Diaz dead in the valve closet, Malkin on the bridge and now similarly indisposed, and these four men a few seconds from joining their mates, leaving just the Bulgarian to find. Petrov asked, “And where is your Bulgarian shipmate?”

No one answered, and Petrov realized he had asked one question too many and the men were now staring at him and glancing at his towel-wrapped arm.

One of them asked, “What have you brought us?”

Petrov, still standing outside the door, glanced over his shoulder, raised his arm, and aimed the towel-wrapped submachine gun.
“Smert.”
Death.
He fired a long burst at the men around the table, and the towel smoked and caught fire.

He ripped the towel off and flung it aside as he strode quickly into the crew area to the table where all the men had been knocked off their chairs and now lay on the deck in spreading pools of blood. Petrov flipped the MP5 onto single shot and fired into each man’s head, then turned and looked at the table, which was covered with splattered blood, food, and broken dinnerware. He spotted an unbroken bowl filled with sliced apples, and he helped himself to a piece before checking the pantry and the crew’s galley, which were empty. He then went from door to door and checked each room, but they were also unoccupied. The seventh deckhand, the Bulgarian, was still missing.

Petrov took a handheld radio from the belt of one of the crewmen and listened, but no one was communicating. Well, he thought, if Gorsky was having equally good hunting,
The Hana
was now a ghost ship. He put the radio in his pocket and found a pillowcase in a linen closet and put his submachine gun into it.

He looked again at the flat-screen TV. An American soldier with a sniper rifle was taking aim at a bearded man in a turban who held a Kalashnikov rifle. Yes, this was Afghanistan, but it reminded him of Chechnya. He pulled his Makarov pistol and fired two quick shots—one at the American sniper and one at the Islamist fighter. The screen transformed into a kaleidoscope of colors, then went black. Petrov smiled and walked out of the room.

Viktor Gorsky stepped off the spiral staircase onto the salon deck. A set of glass doors led to the long salon where a buffet dinner was laid out on the sideboard, though the ladies, still in their bikinis and cover-ups, seemed to be ignoring the food and enjoying the champagne that was being poured by two stewards. Soft music came from the wall speakers, and he recognized Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
, which he supposed the prince had requested for his Russian guests.

One of the ladies saw him and called out in Russian, “What do you have there, Viktor? Come in. Why are you standing there?”

He stepped into the silk-draped salon and his eyes scanned the twenty-meter-long room of floor-to-ceiling windows. To the left was the side balcony, which was now occupied by three of the ladies. At the far end of the salon was the al fresco lounge where another three ladies were smoking and drinking.

One of the ladies in the salon said to him, “Where is your lover, Viktor?”

The other ladies laughed, but when Gorsky looked at them they stopped laughing. Gorsky forced a smile and said, “He has left me for the chef.”

The ladies laughed again, and one of them reached for the gift-wrapped submachine gun. “Is that for us?”

Gorsky held the blue package over his head and replied, “Yes. But you must earn it.”

A steward walked over to him and asked, “Can I help you, sir?”

“I am just seeing that my ladies are being taken care of.”

“They are, sir.” He reminded the guest, “Dinner is being served in the dining room.”

“Thank you.”

“May I show you to the dining room?”

“In a minute.”

Gorsky noticed that the other steward was on his handheld radio, apparently trying to call someone. Or someone had called him. But who was alive to call? Or to answer a call? In any case, it was time to act, before either of these stewards sensed that all was not right aboard this ship.

Gorsky called out, in English, “Ladies! I need your attention, please!”

The six ladies in the salon looked at Gorsky and he said, “I need everyone here.” He said to the stewards, “Go get the others.”

One steward went to the balcony, and the other who had been on his radio walked to the outdoor lounge.

One of the ladies asked, “What is it, Viktor?”

“Some good news.”

She replied, in Russian, “We don’t have to sleep with these Arab pigs?”