Seal Team Seven #20: Attack Mode (6 page)

He parked on the San Diego side of the Coronado Bay Bridge and tried to figure it out. First, he’d dump the rear seats somewhere they wouldn’t be found for a while. A canyon out in East County. He could drag them off the road and throw them down a canyon. Both of them, the seat and the backrest. Then he’d use his flashlight and
check for blood. Depended how much seeped between the seats. Hell no, that wouldn’t work. Must be blood on the rear carpet and on the door frame. The cops had equipment now that could reveal blood you thought had been scrubbed off. That wouldn’t work.

Then he had it. Burn up the evidence. Get out in the country, siphon out most of the gas, and spread it all over the car, then light it off and run like hell. Should burn up and get rid of all the blood. He’d report the car stolen and then they’d find it and check the motor number and tie it to him and he could collect his insurance. No more blood. Maybe. Best idea he’d had. He had to disguise himself and hitchhike back to town. What time was it? Only 2005. Good. He stopped at a gas station and filled the tank, then bought a two-gallon can and filled that. The clerk didn’t really notice.

He drove out Highway 94 and headed out past Casa De Oro and on to Campo Road. He found an ideal spot on a side road just past Rancho San Diego. It was a lane that led off the highway and into a little canyon. He drove in until he couldn’t see the lights of cars on the road, then stopped and opened the gas tank and sloshed the two gallons of gas on the backseat and the front seat. He lifted the hood and opened all four doors. Then he lit a match-book and threw it into the car from twenty feet. The whoosh of the gasoline fumes almost reached out and touched him, but not quite. The seats and the inside of the car burned like a torch, and he turned and walked away, not using the road. He was a half mile down the highway, heading back toward town, when he heard the gas tank explode.

The fifteenth car going past stopped. Two teenage boys.

“Hey, man, we used to hitch all the time. What happened?”

“Ran out of gas back a ways. Long damn walk.”

“Say that again. Hey. You want to drive? Both of us had a few beers, you know. Okay, we had two six packs.” The kid giggled and edged over the center line into the wrong lane, then came back.

“Yeah, I better drive,” Ching said. The kid stopped at the side of the road and Ching slid into the driver’s seat. He didn’t ask them where they wanted to go. Within ten minutes both young men were sleeping.

He drove to within three blocks of his house in Coronado, parked on a side street, and put the car keys in the kid’s pocket, then slid out of the seat and left the two of them sleeping. Tomorrow they wouldn’t have the slightest idea how they got to Coronado, and for damn sure they wouldn’t remember picking him up.

Ching walked the three blocks to his condo. His body was working on half throttle. His kidneys still ached from the blows. He just hoped there wouldn’t be a run on the O course tomorrow. A half a block from his place he stopped in some shadows and watched his corner condo. No lights on inside. No unusual activity in the parking lot. He knew most of the cars that parked there. None seemed out of place. He moved up and did another recon. It looked clean. He came out of the bushes and walked the last stretch to his condo and up the stairs. Nobody in the hall. He unlocked the door and pushed it open, standing against the wall. No shots came. Ching reached inside and turned on the lights. Nobody home. Good.

He called Jaybird and asked him to pick him up in the morning.

“That Mazda give out on you?”

“Hell no, went downtown and somebody stole it. I been walking and taxi hopping ever since. Just got home. Now I’ve got to put in a police report for a stolen car. Hear you can do it by phone.”

“True. See you tomorrow.”

Ching hung up and then dialed information for the right cop phone number to report a stolen car. He wasn’t used to lying, but this time he had to. Just thinking about Tung Kwan was enough to make him lie like a pro. After the police report, he had to figure out how to do a huge payback to that old Chinese man who ran the local tong. Now, there would be an exercise in caution, with a lot of planning and a payback that would shake up the whole damn San Diego tong.

Mid Pacific Ocean

On board the
Willowwind

That first day of the hijacking, there had been a struggle by Keanae to get a gun away from the hijacker Benton. The revolver had gone off and Benton took a round in his heart. Keanae knew he couldn’t cover it up, so he changed his plans again. This time he would hide out on the ship. The hijackers didn’t know this vessel; they’d never find him. His big job now was to get to the radio and try to notify someone of which direction the freighter was heading. First he had to be sure of the course.

Keanae didn’t expect that it would take him four days to get the course settled and the plan worked out. Now he had it. It was a southwest course and that meant the Marshalls. If his calculations were right, they would hit the farthest north islet and atoll first. That was Sibylla. He had memorized half the names and locations of islands in the South Pacific.

Fifteen hundred miles southwest of the tiny atoll she had sailed from, the
Willowwind
anchored in shallow water off Sibylla Island, the northernmost of the Marshalls and more than five hundred and twenty miles northwest of Majuro Atoll, the capital and commercial center of the widely scattered thirty-four atolls that make up the Marshall Island nation. It was a little after three
A
.
M
., and the ship’s navigator and his radar had brought them into the island perfectly.

Jomo Shigahara sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge
and stared through the moonlight at the small native village on the tiny island. It was two hours to dawn. The takeover of the big ship had not gone well over the past six days. This was the start of day seven. First there had been the problem of Keanae, the double-crossing Hawaiian who had volunteered to join then, then shot dead one of his conspirators and vanished into the bowels of the freighter.

Shigahara and his hijackers didn’t know this ship well enough to find him. He had bedeviled the five of them, raided the kitchen for food, and even broke open the arms locker and took two pistols and a rifle. He was a constant threat.

A select few of the crew members Shigahara needed to help him run the big ship had caused him all sorts of problems. At night when Matsuma wasn’t watching, the helmsman twice had angled the ship well off the given course and had caused a two-day delay in arriving at this given point of land. It was far enough away from everything that he felt comparatively safe here. He was sure that the U.S. government had sent out screaming notices to every port in the Pacific warning them about the
Willowwind
and her cargo. They were covered as far as her name went. One of his men had a knack for painting, and he had been let down over the bow to repaint the name. The old name had been painted out on both sides of the hull, using the same color as on the hull. The new name, the
Challenge
, was in the correct size and style of the previous.

Shigahara left the chair and went to the front windows and stared at the small island and its neighboring atoll. He’d known things would be primitive, but he had no idea they would be this basic out here in the South Pacific. This island was not his primary destination. That would come by radio, but so far he had heard nothing on the satellite reading set.

Chief Mate Stillman had given him the most trouble. At least twice he had turned off the engines and let the ship coast to a complete stop. It took them a half day to
get underway again. He at last had to lock the chief mate in his cabin and cut his food to one meal a day. The outside hatch to the cabin was secured with a special hasp and padlock, for which only Shigahara had a key.

Matsuma was on the helm now, and the ship was safe at anchor on the lee of this small island. No boats had come out to investigate them. Shigahara wasn’t even sure there were many people on the small bit of land that could not be more than two hundred feet wide and a thousand feet long, with a heavy growth of trees, vines, and bushes. A dozen small buildings nestled around a tiny harbor with a rickety looking pier. Smoke came from one of the shacks, but he saw no people. But then, why would they be up at this time of night?

Shigahara paced the bridge for two hours, unable to sleep, even to catch a nap. He was pumped up about his operation. When this went through, he’d be a rich man. Filthy rich. He’d be able to go anywhere he wanted to, do anything … The Japanese man looked at his watch again. It was five o’clock. He went to the radio room for the second time that early morning. There were two hijackers on guard and one asleep. He asked the operator if there had been any messages.

“Not a one, Shig. Want me to try to contact them again?”

“Yes. It’s almost five o’clock. Maybe somebody is awake out there by now.”

The call went out. “Conquest, this is Wanderer, seeking your call. Have arrived at Point Alpha, looking for more instructions.” They waited. After five minutes the call went out again. It was in voice and in the clear, with no way to encrypt it.

Two minutes passed, then the speaker rumbled.

“Yes, Wanderer, we’ve been waiting for your call.” The voice was soft and slightly accented, and Shigahara didn’t recognize it. “You are to proceed at once to Point B and meet with our representative there for the first delivery.”

“Will you be at Point B?”

“No. You are to deliver one package there and move
on at once to Point C. You’ll get directions to Point C when the first delivery is made and you’re ready to sail. Timing will now be critical. You should sail before noon today.”

“Understood. Business is business. We’ll contact you again right after the delivery at Point B.”

“Fine. Goodbye.”

Jomo Shigahara smiled. It was happening. Yes, his dream was coming true. He would be a rich man before this cruise was over. He had just taken another giant step. He had grown up in Sendai, Japan, the second son of a businessman. He had gone to the university, and his father assumed he would enter the family business, as his older brother had, but he did not. His father refused to speak to him for two years.

He had drifted from one dead-end job to another. For a while he had been a tutor at the university, helping with English. Then he worked for an importer for a while. All the time he had been attending one strange group meeting after another, at last landing with a cell that believed in world domination by the Muslim faith and those who celebrated it He soon became a leader in the group, but yearned for more. He traveled in the Near East and learned to speak Arabic and Farsi to go with his almost perfect English. It was in Lebanon that he had been contacted by his current employers. After six months of intense training, he had led two bombing raids into Israel. Both were successful and he returned with all of his men. He was given a new assignment. Because of his fluent English, he was sent to Hawaii to watch for the progress of the United States’ decommissioning of nuclear weapons.

He didn’t know if his employers were from Iran or Iraq; it didn’t matter to him. The man gave him fifty thousand dollars and he flew to Hawaii and began monitoring the progress of the removal of plutonium from the warheads and bombs. It was not a secret operation. The only secret was the date the first shipload would be sent to the United States to be processed to make it useless for making weapons.
He studied the seaman’s manual, worked on board several local ships, and soon found a counterfeiter where he could obtain his seaman’s card and U.S. Merchant Marine papers so he could work on Merchant Marine vessels.

He learned that any shipping from one U.S. port to another U.S. port had to have a U.S. flagship do the hauling. When time was nearing for the first shipment, he found out which ship would do it, and applied through the union for a job on her. When the sailors found out she would be hauling hazardous cargo, several crewmen quit the ship. He hired on. He had made the first run from the tiny atoll to San Diego more than three months ago, and then back to Hawaii, where the ship sat at anchor, waiting for the next run. That gave him plenty of time to recruit five more men to train and get on board. The word of double pay for the trip spread through the
Willowwind
’s crew quickly, and senior union members had first choice.

That had been a huge problem. Shigahara solved it by convincing five of the men who had already signed on that it would be too hazardous—that they would be hauling ten tons of plutonium. He scared off five men, who quit the ship once it sailed to the atoll. His five men had signed up on a waiting list for the
Willowwind
’s run, in case there were any last-minute openings. All five were hired and rushed on board one day before sailing from the atoll.

He grinned as he walked back to the bridge. He would give the engineering officer notice that they should make preparations to get underway. They would move as soon as the engines and machinery was warmed up and ready to go. He knew that this could take several hours. He was in no rush, not now. Point B was the Rongrik Atoll two hundred and ten miles slightly southwest He’d have Matsuma plot in the headings and put them into the computer for the new route. At twelve knots they could make the trip in a little over seventeen hours. He checked his watch. Slightly after five-thirty
a
.
m
. Seventeen hours would put them near the atoll sometime during the night. Yes. He smiled again as he thought what he would do with the
five million U.S. dollars the Arabs had promised him. He could do almost anything he wanted to.

Shigahara called Inbrook, the engineering officer, in his cabin. The man was sleepy and hard to understand.

“Inbrook, we need to get underway by noon. Will that make any problems for you?”

“Of course not. I’ll report in at oh-six-hundred as usual and check all of the equipment. There should be no cause for delay.”