Soldier of God (10 page)

Read Soldier of God Online

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
11.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Up on the bridge McGarvey heard the sounds of gunfire transmitted over the terrorist’s walkie-talkie, and then the transmission stopped.
There wasn’t another word from Katy, which could have meant that the terrorist had simply cut her off in midsentence when he realized she was shouting a warning. But the gunfire could also mean that the terrorist had murdered her in cold blood as he warned he would.
McGarvey stood flat-footed for two seconds, the walkie-talkie in one hand, the RAK machine pistol in the other, a feeling of utter despair threatening to consume him. The thought of his wife lying dead in a pool of her own blood was more than he could bear.
The terrorist had
allowed
him to hear the gunshots. The bastard was sending a sick message. We have your wife down here, and we may—or may not—have murdered her in cold blood. Why don’t you come down and see with your own eyes?
They were stalling for time.
Because they’re not ready to get off this ship yet,
McGarvey thought. The watch from the wrist of the terrorist in the radio room was in countdown mode, with less than seventeen minutes to go. Seventeen minutes for what?
He raised the walkie-talkie and started to depress the Push-to-Talk switch but then held up. Somehow the terrorists knew who he was. They had to know what he was capable of doing. That being the case, they would need Katy as a hostage.
Katy was alive.
Nothing else mattered except freeing her. But in order to do that, he would have to kill or disable a significant number of the hijackers. Now, before they got off the ship. There wasn’t enough time to find a radio, call for help, then wait for the cavalry to arrive.
He looked up out of his daze and surveyed the blood and gore in the confines of the relatively small bridge. Blood was pooled in several spots on the deck, splashed up on the bulkheads and overhead, on the windows, and on the faces of the dials and electronic equipment. This place had become a killing field.
The entire ship was a killing field.
A flashing red light directly ahead of the ship caught his eye. It was one of the buoys that marked the channel. With no one at the helm, the ship was slowly drifting off course to the left. If they went aground on the rocks at this speed, there was a very good chance they would punch a hole in the bottom and sink. The water was very near freezing. If somebody went overboard, they wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes.
He laid the walkie-talkie and machine pistol aside, and turned the wheel to starboard. It took several seconds for the ship to respond before the bows slowly came right, bringing them back into the navigation channel, the red buoy on their port side where it belonged.
All the communications and navigation equipment had been smashed beyond repair, but McGarvey was able to tighten the wheel lock, so at least for the moment the Spirit would continue on its present heading. That would be good only as long as the channel was straight, and didn’t take a jog to the left or right, but for now he didn’t have any other choice.
The engine telegraph lever was mounted on a console to the right of the wheel. It was in the All Ahead Full position. McGarvey disengaged the lock, and shoved it up to the All Ahead Stop position.
He waited for a few moments, but so far as he could tell nothing happened. The ship was not slowing down. The terrorists had also taken over the engine room and its functions which didn’t come as a surprise. Except for steering, the controls on the bridge were useless.
He couldn’t stop the ship’s engines, nor could he lock the wheel hard over to port or starboard, for fear that the channel was too narrow and he would end up ripping the bottom out of the ship after all.
Time was running out for him. He couldn’t leave the bridge for fear
of sinking the ship, nor could he leave Katy or the other passengers under the guns of the terrorists. They’d already shown their utter lack of regard for human life. They’d already murdered in cold blood more than just crew members and his and Shaw’s bodyguards. He had spotted at least one of the passengers, a woman, lying in a pool of blood in the Grand Salon.
His eyes lit on another control panel. Two sets of buttons marked Up and Down—one for starboard, the other for port—controlled the ship’s anchors. If he couldn’t stop the engines, perhaps he could stop the ship.
He hit both Down buttons, then braced himself against the helm’s binnacle rail. Immediately a tremendous, deep-throated metallic clatter came from low in the bows as the two massive anchors dropped into the icy waters, dragging with them the heavy chains.
The din seemed to go on forever, until the Spirit gave a tentative lurch to starboard, and a high-pitched squeal of metal-on-metal rose from somewhere below.
The ship straightened her head, hesitated for a second or two, and then both anchors caught at the same time. The bows came sharply around to starboard, the ship listed about fifteen degrees, and then the stern followed.
At first McGarvey thought that the engines driving the ship forward would sail the boat around her anchors and break free, but it didn’t happen. Instead the Spirit came to a new heading, nearly back the way they had come, and then shuddered as she balanced between the anchors dug into port and starboard somewhere aft.
McGarvey pocketed the walkie-talkie, grabbed the machine pistol, and then started for the door. But he stopped. The bridge communications and navigation equipment had been destroyed, but a telephone-type handset hanging from a clip above the helm seemed to be intact. The panel beside it contained a small digital display with a selection switch beside it. The display showed Grand Salon. The phone was the ship’s intercom.
He went back and dialed through the selections to Public Address, pulled the phone down from the hook, and pressed the Push-to-Talk switch. He wanted everybody aboard the ship to hear him.
“I’m coming,” he said. He could hear his amplified voice somewhere
aft. “I’m coming right now, and no one will help you. Not bin Laden, not even Allah.”
McGarvey put the phone back, then raised his gun to the anchor control panel and fired two short bursts, totally destroying the mechanism. The anchors were down, and they would stay down long enough for him to do his job.
People throughout the Grand Salon were still picking themselves up after the ship suddenly lurched and heeled to starboard when McGarvey’s warning came over the public address system.
The instant he’d heard the anchors dropping, Khalil braced himself in anticipation that people and things would get tossed around when the ship came to an abrupt stop, her engines still producing full power. He glanced over at where Kathleen McGarvey had also braced herself, helping Shaw and his wife to hold on as well. Khalil’s eyes met Katy’s, and she offered him another grim smile, as if to say she had warned them.
Khalil’s rage threatened to rise up and blot out all sanity, but he returned her smile instead, the almost inhuman effort causing sweat to pop out on his forehead. He had been raised to accept the Muslim fundamentalist philosophy that although women were not second-class citizens as they were portrayed to be by the West, they occupied a different place in Allah’s scheme for the world. Women organized and ran the home, while men organized and ran the world. It was a simple division of labor set down more than ten centuries ago by Allah’s prophet Muhammad.
Men were strong, and women were silent. Sons were of inestimable value, while daughters were a burden upon a family. Especially if they grew up not knowing or understanding their place.
Like Western women. Especially American women. Especially this woman.
Khalil raised his pistol and pointed it directly at Katy’s face. She didn’t flinch, nor did she avert her eyes. It was as if she was almost daring him to fire.
Taunting him with failure in front of his men.
Khalil lowered his pistol, turned, threw his head back, and laughed out loud as if he had heard the most amusing thing in his life. “One man,” he said in English for the benefit of the passengers. “Apparently he has delusions of grandeur.” He shook his head. “Well, I for one can scarcely wait until he shows up here. If he has the courage. Although we’ve already seen what his real mettle is. After he killed young Ismal, he did not stay to fight. Instead, he turned and ran away like a mouse.”
Some of Khalil’s operators laughed uncertainly, but their eyes kept darting to the door as if they expected McGarvey to burst into the Grand Salon spraying the room with gunfire.
Khalil looked at his watch. There were less than thirteen minutes remaining. He used his walkie-talkie to call the engine room. “The anchors have been released. Can you raise them from there?”
“I don’t think so,” Pahlawan came back. “The motors are forward behind the chain lockers. What happened?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Khalil said. “Never mind the anchors; we are leaving on schedule. Is everything in readiness down there?”
“We’ll shut down the engines and set the switches.”
“Be quick about it,” Khalil said. “When you’re finished, we’ll meet on the aft deck But keep alert. Our uninvited troublemaker is armed.”
Pahlawan laughed. “He is just one man. If you do not want to shoot him, I will.”
Khalil’s rage rose up again like a tidal wave. One of his operators, a worried look on his young, narrow face, came across the salon, passing the Shaws’ table.
“Get back to your position,” Khalil told him.
“We need to leave now, Khalil,” the young man said. He was frightened. Kathleen McGarvey heard the exchange; though she tried to hide it, Khalil could see her sudden understanding. She knew his name.
He raised his pistol and shot the operator in the forehead at point-blank
range. The young man’s head snapped back, and he crumpled dead to the floor.
“Coward,” Khalil said in Arabic, loudly enough for his operators to hear, but he looked at Kathleen. Still she didn’t avert her eyes.
He keyed his walkie-talkie and called the purser’s office. “McGarvey is on the bridge. Go up there and kill him. You have twelve minutes to do that and get back of the aft deck.”
“Insha’allah,”
the operator said.
“McGarvey can listen to my orders because he has one of our walkie-talkies,” Khalil told his people genially, as if nothing had happened. He made a hand motion to a pair of his men. “But he cannot hear what is being said in this room as I speak now. He knows that someone is coming up from the purser’s office to kill him, and he will set a trap. What he cannot know is that Said and Achmed will be waiting for him in the starboard and port stairwells just below the sundeck. When he shows himself, he will die.”
The two men Khalil named went to the salon doors, held up for just a moment to make sure that the corridor was clear, and then slipped out.
“Do not fail,” Khalil called after them.
He turned again to face Kathleen and the others. An ominous silence had fallen over the Grand Salon. There wasn’t a person in the room who believed that the terrorist was sane, but everyone had a great deal of fear of him. He could see it in their eyes, and in the way they held themselves in postures of respect and deference.
Except for McGarvey’s wife, who continued to defy him. But once she was safely aboard the cargo vessel steaming away from the West Coast, she would begin to learn a very bitter lesson: Even the high and mighty were vulnerable.
Khalil’s plan, which had been worked out in detail over the past nine months, was perfect. It even took into account a whole host of unpredictable factors, such as the weather, mechanical breakdowns, accidents, even the heroics of a crew-member or passenger as they were faced with now. McGarvey was a dangerous man, but he was
only
one man after all.
“You’re getting a little low on troops, aren’t you?” Kathleen said.
Khalil couldn’t figure her out. Was she actually trying to goad him into shooting her? Or did his promise that he was taking her with Shaw make
her feel so safe that she thought she was invulnerable? Was she trying to make him angry so that he would start making stupid, spur-of-the-moment decisions?
There had been many women in his life: mother, sisters, aunts, cousins, lovers. But none like this singular female. In truth he might be doing McGarvey a favor by killing her.
He glanced around the salon. He had five men left up here. Thin, but not dangerously so.
“Be thankful that I do not agree with you. If I did, I would order my men to kill some of the passengers to even the odds.”
Kathleen’s lips started to form a word, but then she shook her head, finally turning away.
Khalil turned on his heel, strode across to the table where the older couple and their daughter with the infant were seated. He dragged the younger woman, who was still clutching her child, to her feet.
“All passengers will be taken belowdecks, where you will be locked up. If you cooperate, no one else will get hurt. Within an hour or so the Coast Guard will come around to see why this ship has stopped in midchannel, and you will be rescued.”
“What about our daughter and granddaughter?” the old man asked with none of his earlier arrogance.
“She and the child will be killed if you and the others do not cooperate,” Khalil replied with cold indifference, and he led the unresisting woman back to the Shaws’ table. “On your feet,” he told them. Kathleen took the young mother and child in hand, as Karen Shaw helped her husband get up.
Khalil motioned for Zahir Majiid and Abdul Adani, who came to him. “Zahir and I will take these four and the infant to the aft deck. As soon as we’re out of here, Abdul will take the passengers below. If anyone resists, kill them. But be quick about it.”
Adani nodded. This was part of the carefully rehearsed plan.
Zahir went first to the doors and checked the corridor. He turned back and gave the all-clear sign, and Khalil herded the former SecDef, Kathleen, and the others across the Grand Salon and out into the corridor; it was frigidly cold because the port and starboard doors out to the deck had been left open.
“Unless you mean to freeze us to death, we’ll need coats or at least blankets,” Kathleen said.
Khalil ignored her.
Zahir checked the starboard door, and again gave the all-clear sign. Khalil prodded Kathleen in her back with the muzzle of his machine pistol. “Move.”
Kathleen turned on her heel and glared up at him. “Do not poke me with that thing again,” she warned through clenched teeth.
“I would like to use you as a hostage, but believe me, you are not necessary to my plans,” Khalil told her. “Move, or I will shoot you.”
She was stalling, of course, to give her husband time to come to her rescue. But it wouldn’t work.
Behind them in the Grand Salon, Adani or one of the other terrorists fired a short burst. Several people screamed or shouted in fear, and there was a great deal of commotion as one of the terrorists stepped out into the corridor and the seventy-plus passengers began jostling out after him.
Kathleen wanted to go back to help comfort them, especially some of the elderly passengers for whom this was a horrible nightmare that they simply could not comprehend. But the baby in the young mother’s arms began to cry, and Khalil shoved the woman toward the open door to the starboard passageway where the wind was howling fiercely.
Suddenly Kathleen was no longer sure how this was going to turn out. Her husband was very good, but he was only one man.
She slowly turned away from the unfolding drama behind her, and allowed herself to be herded out on deck into the gale, and then aft toward the back of the ship and whatever awaited them there.
Like animals to the slaughter
.

Other books

Weeping Angel by Stef Ann Holm
Milk Money by Cecelia Dowdy
English Rider by Bonnie Bryant
The Baron by Sally Goldenbaum