Soldier of God (11 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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McGarvey waited around the corner from the starboard stairwell on the bridge deck just aft of the Shaws’ stateroom.
One man was coming up from the purser’s office to take him out. But the terrorist leader had given the order via walkie-talkie, which he knew McGarvey was monitoring. It was crude, but obviously they were trying to set a trap for him.
If he took out the lone terrorist, at least two others would be waiting somewhere between here and the Grand Salon for him to show up. They meant to catch him in a crossfire.
But he kept thinking about the elapsing time on the terrorist’s watch. The countdown to whatever was about to happen was under twelve minutes now.
And he kept thinking about Katy.
Time was on nobody’s side. Especially not his.
On top of that the terrorists had several other advantages: their superior numbers and weaponry, and the passengers as shields and hostages.
But they had targeted Katy, and that was a very large mistake.
He crossed the corridor to the stairwell where he held up. Someone was coming up the steps in a big hurry, his footfalls heavy. The man from the purser’s office. The one who was supposed to die so that the trap could be sprung.
McGarvey flattened against the bulkhead behind the door and waited until the terrorist reached the landing and stopped. He could imagine the man peering through the window in the door to make sure the corridor was empty. The terrorist might not want to go up against an armed man; unarmed passengers were much easier to deal with. But he had his orders.
The door slowly came open, and the terrorist stepped out into the corridor, sweeping his machine pistol to the left, when McGarvey took one step forward and popped the young man at the base of his skull with the butt of the RAK. The terrorist dropped to the floor like a felled ox.
For just a second McGarvey could feel hatred rise up from his gut, like bitter bile at the back of his throat. It would be so easy to fire one round into the back of the young man’s head and end his miserable life here and now. If the terrorist wanted to reach Paradise as a martyr, why not help him along?
Who would know what really happened up here? And who would care?
McGarvey hurriedly dragged the unconscious man around the corner, out of sight from anyone emerging from the stairwell. Then he took the terrorist’s weapons and walkie-talkie, and turned and sprinted back down the corridor, where he let himself out onto the open deck, closing and latching the door behind him with as little noise as possible.
It would take the hijackers only a minute or two to figure out that the terrorist from the purser’s office was taking too long to report back. But by the time someone realized that McGarvey had made an end run, it would be too late.
He slung his RAK muzzle down by its strap over his shoulder so that it was centered on his back, then went to the starboard rail and tossed the terrorist’s weapons and walkie-talkie overboard. Although it had mercifully stopped raining, the wind was on their starboard quarter, blowing at least twenty-five knots and bitterly cold. The sky was cloud-covered, and there was almost nothing to see except for the flashing red buoy bouncing around about a hundred yards ahead.
The Spirit, whose motion was lively as it balanced under full power between the two anchors, suddenly steadied out, as if it had broken free. Almost immediately McGarvey realized that the engines had been shut down. He could no longer feel the deep, low-frequency vibration on the soles of his feet.
The terrorists were getting set to abandon ship. Some of them might have already been aboard when the Spirit left Juneau but some of them must have come aboard earlier this evening. Probably from a chase boat that had been waiting in some cove along the Inside Passage; an approaching floatplane or helicopter would have made too much noise. Somebody would have heard it. Boarding a moving ship in this kind of weather would have been dicey. Getting off would be no worse, even though the ship was bucking and heaving against her anchors.
He leaned well out over the rail, but he couldn’t see anything aft. If there was a chase boat, it was either standing off in the darkness, or it was hidden by the bulk of the hull at the stern.
But they were taking Shaw with them and he was precious cargo, so they had shut down the engines to steady out the motion. They didn’t want to lose him.
The problem was, who else were they taking off the ship?
And the other problem was his nearly uncontrollable anger. He could see the expression in bin Laden’s eyes, hear the tone of his voice saying that every non-Muslim—men, women, children—were fair game for murder
.
McGarvey climbed over the rail, dangled there for just a moment, then swung himself inward and dropped down to the upper deck, landing off-balance with more noise than he’d wanted to make.
He pulled out the Steyr pistol he’d taken from the terrorist in the radio room and scrambled into the deeper shadows to see if someone would come to investigate. He almost wished that someone would come.
Except for the wind there were no noises.
He eased around the corner and made his way to the forward extremity of the upper deck. Directly above was the bridge; below were the Grand Salon and the open-bow viewing area where on good days passengers gathered to watch the passing scenery and wildlife.
Big windows in the Grand Salon’s forward bulkhead opened onto the viewing area. Anyone jumping from the deck above would be visible for just a moment as they dropped. But the bow area was in darkness, and the terrorists’ attention would be directed toward the passengers.
In any event there was no time to consider any other alternative.
McGarvey climbed over the rail and jumped. This time he landed solidly, but without making a sound. He ducked below the level of the windows, unslung the RAK, switched the safety lever to off, and crabwalked the five feet to the starboard door. He rose up, intending only to take a quick peek through the window and to then duck down. But he stopped.
The Grand Salon was apparently empty of any living thing. The room had become a killing ground, as he feared it would.
He yanked open the door and rushed in, sweeping his weapon left to right in case any of the hijackers had anticipated his arrival, but stopped
again. There was nothing here except for corpses and blood—blood in pools under the dozen or more bodies, splashed across tables, some of which had been overturned, up against the bulkheads, and along the buffet serving line and service bar.
Katy wasn’t among the bodies, nor were the Shaws, but there was some blood on the tablecloth at the former SecDef’s place.
McGarvey almost turned to go when he spotted a tiny pencil with a gold cap lying beside Katy’s napkin. He went back and picked it up. It was her eyebrow pencil. She had left it on the table for some reason.
She’d been trying to tell him something.
He lifted the napkin. Beneath it, written on the tablecloth was one word: KHALIL.
Like Carlos the Jackal in the sixties and seventies, Khalil was just a work name. He was a man who the Western intelligence agencies considered to be the real brains behind most of the successful Islamic fundamentalist attacks against the West. No photographs of him existed in the West, nor were the CIA, FBI, or British SIS even sure of his nationality.
What everyone did agree upon, however, was that Khalil was as deadly and merciless as he was elusive. No one who had ever come up against him lived to tell about the encounter. The attacks of 9/11 were probably his doing, but they were only the most recent and most infamous of his operations, which stretched back at least twenty years.
Currently the U.S. was offering a twenty-five-million-dollar reward for his capture dead or alive. In the two years since the reward had been posted, there had been no takers; in fact, there hadn’t even been one inquiry.
Except for Katy’s earring this operation would probably have gone off exactly the way Khalil had planned it. No one knew that the director of Central Intelligence would be aboard, nor could anyone have predicted the business with one passenger’s earring. It was nothing but pure, dumb luck.
And McGarvey planned on telling Khalil that his luck had run out. Nothing would give him more pleasure.
Where were the passengers?
McGarvey went to the back of the room and checked Grassinger’s pulse. His bodyguard was dead, as was Shaw’s. They had tried to do their jobs, but they’d simply been outnumbered.
Their deaths he could understand. And Shaw’s kidnapping made sense from the terrorists’ viewpoint. But why kill passengers? Innocent men and women?
Osama bin Laden had tried to explain that reasoning to him in a cave in Afghanistan before 9/11. But what he said about no one being innocent made no more sense now than it did then. In McGarvey’s estimation, Islamic fundamentalists by very definition were little more than rabid animals snapping at anything that moved, trying to tear down anything that didn’t square with their own brand of radicalism, their own horribly misguided take on a fine religion.
He stood up and took a quick look into the corridor. There was no one there, but the starboard door to the outside passageway was open.
He ducked back for a second. Khalil had taken Shaw and possibly Katy as hostages and was holding them in the stern of the ship. There were outside stairs down to the main deck, where a small boat was probably waiting to take them off. In the meantime the passengers had most likely been led below and locked in the galley, or possibly the dry-storage pantries, to keep them out of the way. For the moment then Khalil’s forces were divided.
But it was the countdown that bothered him. There were less than ten minutes remaining.
For what
? He had a lot of ideas, but none of them were very comforting.
McGarvey checked the load on his RAK and stepped out of the Grand Salon, intending to cross the corridor and take the inside stairs down to the main deck, when someone fired from the door to the men’s bathroom ten feet to the right, spraying the deck and bulkheads.
Instinctively, McGarvey fell back while firing a short burst down the corridor in the general direction of the shooter. The terrorists were a lot smarter than he thought they were. They’d expected him to return to the Grand Salon, and they’d simply waited for him to show up.
All that went through his brain in a flash. Dropping to the deck as he spun around, he fired toward the front of the room as one of Khalil’s men came through the portside door from the bow viewing area, where he had apparently been waiting to catch McGarvey in a crossfire.
The man shouted something in Arabic and fired another long burst toward the back of the room, the bullets smacking into the bulkhead.
McGarvey rose up on one knee and fired two single shots, both catching the man squarely in the chest, knocking him backward into the piano.
The RAK was out of ammunition. McGarvey ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare out of his belt, and was about to shove it into the pistol grip when the terrorist who’d fired down the corridor rushed into the Grand Salon.
He didn’t see McGarvey crouched against the bulkhead to his right. His attention was directed toward his dead comrade at the front of the room.
It was all the opening that McGarvey needed. He dove forward, catching the younger man at hip level, bowling the hijacker over, the man’s head bouncing off the carpeted deck. McGarvey had dropped his RAK, and he pulled the Steyr pistol out of his belt, cocked the hammer, and jammed the muzzle into the man’s neck just below his chin.
“What happens in ten minutes?” McGarvey demanded.
The terrorist’s eyes were bulging. He shook his head.
“Ten minutes. There’s a countdown. What’s going to happen—”
The terrorist got one hand free. He grasped for the pistol, and McGarvey fired one shot, the bullet spiraling up from beneath the man’s chin and plowing into his brain.
There was no time
. The single thought crystallized in McGarvey’s head as he got to his feet, crossed the corridor, and started downstairs to the stern observation area on the main deck.
At the stern rail, Khalil cocked an ear to listen to what he thought sounded like gunfire from somewhere forward and above. But he wasn’t sure. Although the ship’s engines were silent, the wind howling around the superstructure was almost as loud as a jet engine.
A full gale was developing, and he was beginning to worry about getting
back to the island airport, and about the ability of their bush pilot to lift off.
He peered over the rail. Mohamed had eased the
Nancy
N. close enough so that the boarding ladder reached the foredeck. She rode fairly easily in the lee of the Spirit.
But time was running out.
Shaw and his wife were huddled together, and Kathleen McGarvey was holding the young woman and infant closely to conserve body heat in the sharp cold.
Pahlawan and his assistant had come up from the engine room without spotting McGarvey. Abdul Adani and his three people came up the aft stairs a minute later.
“The passengers are securely locked below,” Adani reported.
“They were as so many sheep,”
he added in Arabic, which drew a few chuckles from the men.
“What will happen to them?” Katy demanded.
“Why nothing at all, if your husband does not interfere with our orderly departure,” Khalil told her. He thought of the things that he would teach her once they were away from here. She would not be happy, but she would be amazed.
In addition to the one man who’d been standing lookout in Soapy’s Parlor with the dead poker players, Khalil had a force of eight operators back here, plus Mohamed aboard the
Nancy
N., out of the fifteen he’d started with. But every mission had its casualties. It was to be expected. And in the end, McGarvey was just one man, for whom time had just about expired.
Khalil could not remember the name of the boy he’d sent to the purser’s office and then to the bridge deck to intercept McGarvey. But there was a much better than even chance he was already dead.
He had served his purpose, as all of Allah’s soldiers of God must
.
He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Achmed, it is time.”
With the boy from the purser’s office to draw him off, McGarvey would have walked into a trap in the vicinity of the Grand Salon. Khalil almost wished he could have been up there to participate in the killing. But there were other more interesting pleasures to contemplate.
Impatiently he keyed the walkie-talkie again. “Achmed, report. It is time to leave the ship.”
There was no answer.
He and Said should have dealt with McGarvey by now. The first glimmerings of doubt began to enter Khalil’s mind. He worked out in his head what McGarvey could have deduced given the information at hand and the man’s experience.
“Have you misplaced even more of your toy soldiers?” Katy asked, sweetly. “I did warn you.” She turned to the other hijackers. “Release us, and then get out of here while you still can.”
Khalil resisted the nearly overpowering urge to smash a fist into her face, to wipe away the smug
Western
expression he’d seen on so many other faces, especially on those of intelligence officers who thought they were coming in for the arrest when in fact they were coming to their deaths.
McGarvey knew that a trap had been set for him. He knew they would expect him to return to the Grand Salon, where he had last seen his wife.
Khalil suddenly knew. McGarvey was right here, probably within a couple of meters.
He drew his Steyr pistol, grabbed Katy away from the young woman and child, and placed the muzzle of his pistol against Katy’s temple. “Mr. McGarvey, won’t you come out and join us?” he called out over the shriek of the wind.
“Kirk, no!” Katy shouted.
“I can’t miss from here,” McGarvey said from the darkness somewhere above.
Pahlawan spotted him first, on the stern viewing area one deck up. He raised his RAK, but Khalil stopped him with a head gesture.
“Neither can I miss at this distance,” Khalil said, pulling Katy closer.
“Frankly, what do we have to lose?” McGarvey asked. “If I lay down my weapon and surrender, you will kill me and my wife. My way, we have a chance.”
“What if I give you my word that no harm will come to either of you?” Khalil countered. “We only took your wife as hostage to neutralize you. All we want is Shaw.”
“Get on your boat, just you and your men; get away from here, and I will let you live. For now. There has been enough killing tonight. These are innocent people—”
“There are no innocents,” Khalil said. “Toss the woman and child overboard,” he told Pahlawan.
“You bastard, no!” Katy cried. She tried to pull away from him, but he was much stronger than she was, and he held her very close, the muzzle of the pistol jammed into her temple.
“Don’t you do it!” McGarvey admonished.
“Watch me,” Khalil shot back.
Pahlawan pulled the young woman and child to the rail. Shaw tried to break away from his wife to go to their aid, but one of the terrorists butted him in the gut with a RAK, knocking him back.
The young woman had no idea what was going on, but she was very frightened and she tried to pull away from the bull-like hijacker. But it was no use. Pahlawan scooped her and the infant up in his arms, lifted them over the rail, and dropped them the seven or eight feet into the freezing black water.
“No!” Katy screamed.
“Next will be Mrs. Shaw,” Khalil called up to McGarvey. “Then, if need be, your wife will go into the water. After that we will hunt you down.” Khalil shrugged, as if he were merely discussing tomorrow’s weather. “It is your choice. But we
will
prevail.”

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