Yousef saw it too. His face went pale. “They have us trapped, Hassan. We must surrender. We will go to prison.”
Hassan knew about Dubai’s criminal justice system. He and Yousef would never reach the barbed wire of prison. Their crime, by Islamic custom, had earned them a public beheading.
Hassan pulled the launcher back up through the hatch. He picked up one of the unused missiles and quickly affixed the guidance wire.
“No, Hassan! We must surrender.”
Hassan ignored him. He slid the missile into the launcher tube. Bracing the tube on the lowered mast, he pointed the muzzle toward the police boat.
“Hassan! It’s too late. We must—”
Whooom! The missile left the tube, trailing a torch of flame and smoke. With the guidance stick, Hassan steered the missile, trying to keep it superimposed over the police boat.
The boat was turning. The police crew saw the missile coming, and they were trying to elude it.
Hassan struggled to keep the missile directed toward the boat. This was more difficult than shooting the gig, which had been a steady target, moving away from him at a quartering angle. The police boat was dodging.
The missile missed the boat.
Hassan’s heart sank. Yousef dropped to his knees, praying. Hassan struggled to affix the guidance wire to another missile. Glancing up, he saw the boat bearing down on them. A voice boomed over a megaphone, giving them an order Hassan didn’t understand.
He finished affixing the wire, and he fumbled with the missile, getting it into the tube.
Bullets were already splintering the deck before he heard the staccato burp of the machine gun.
He saw something red spraying the deck.
It took Hassan a full second to realize that he had been hit, that his torso was ripped open, that it was his blood gushing over the ancient wood of the dhow’s deck. His vision blurred and he toppled backward into the water.
Claire watched the port of Dubai slip into the distance.
“What’s happening, Sam?” She nodded toward the captain’s bridge high above them in the island superstructure. “Where are we going?”
“Back to sea. Captain Stickney is the acting Battle Group Commander, and he’s getting out of Dodge.”
Forty-five minutes had passed since the admiral’s gig was destroyed. They stood inside a door in the island structure that led to the open flight deck. Claire and her camera crew and four other reporters were the only civilians left aboard.
She looked out to the harbor. “Do they know who blew up the admiral’s boat?”
Maxwell shook his head. “Not yet. There have been other attacks. Someone gunned down four of our sailors in a bar in town. Another guy tossed a bomb into the entrance of the embassy. Must have been a bungler. He wounded a marine sentry, but no one else was hurt. They caught him, and they also captured one of the shooters from the boat that fired the missile.”
“Was it some kind of reprisal action against Americans?”
Maxwell shrugged. “Who knows?”
Claire tried to read his expression. She was sure that he knew more than he was telling her. They both knew the rules — that she could report what he told her, but she was not to read anything between the lines. Just the facts, ma’am.
That was what was odd about their relationship. With her many other sources inside the military establishment, anything she picked up was free game. Journalism was a cutthroat business. Claire Phillips was masterful at piecing together stories from the tiny snippets of information gleaned in innocent conversation.
With Sam Maxwell, it was different. She had never violated their rule, not once, and she concluded that there could be only one reasonable explanation for this behavior — she was in love with the guy.
After a moment, she said, “I’m sorry about Josh.”
Maxwell kept his eyes on the harbor. “Thanks.”
“You’ll miss him, won’t you?”
He nodded.
“Was he a friend of your father?”
“Best buddies. Academy classmates, then squadron mates. Josh was my godfather…” His voice trailed off.
Claire tried to read his expression. His face was a mask, his eyes burning like coals. He seemed to be staring off into the desert. “You’re thinking about who did this, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“Do you think there will be a retaliatory attack from the Reagan?” She knew the question veered outside the lines of their protocol. But she had seen that look on his face.
He didn’t answer for a moment. His eyes were focused somewhere off in the Arabian peninsula. “There’d better be.”
CHAPTER THREE
FACE OF THE ENEMY
“Why did they do it?”
Cmdr. Spook Morse, the flag staff intelligence officer, peered at the questioner, a pilot from one of the Hornet squadrons, as if the guy had just landed from Uranus. Like most air intelligence officers, Morse had a low regard for the cognitive abilities of fighter pilots. Pilots were like single-purpose gladiators. They were dangerous if they knew too much.
“For the same reason they destroyed the World Trade Center. Because they could. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s what terrorists do — kill Americans.”
The pilot wasn’t satisfied. “Are you saying that these assholes get to take a shot at us whenever they feel like it?”
“No.” Morse gave the pilot a glacial smile. “Listen up, and you’ll hear what I’m saying.”
The ready room was filled with the senior officers of the air wing — squadron commanding officers, executive officers, designated strike leaders. A few, like the Tomcat squadron skipper Burner Crump and his beer-hoisting buddy, Rico Flores, who commanded a Hornet squadron, were nursing world-class hangovers. In the recall of personnel ashore, they had managed to jump on the helicopter from the fleet landing before the Reagan hauled anchor and headed to sea.
Maxwell sat in the row behind Boyce and his staff. He could feel the motion of the ship. the Reagan and its battle group were steaming southward in the Persian Gulf. He could only guess where. The Strait of Hormuz? Into the Indian Ocean?
In the front row sat Capt. Red Boyce, the Air Wing Commander. Boyce’s honorific title was CAG — the extinct but still-used label for Commander, Air Group. Boyce was gnawing on an unlit Cohiba as he listened to Spook Morse’s briefing.
Morse turned to the map projected on the screen before him. It was a topographic depiction of the southern half of the Arabian peninsula. He tapped the screen with his pointer. “Here’s what you need to know,” he said, leaving the clear implication — there’s a hell of a lot more that you pilots don’t need to know.
Listening to Morse’s briefing, Maxwell couldn’t help thinking about the strangeness of his situation. His life seemed to be punctuated by the loss of someone close to him. His mother passed away while he was still in high school and his absentee father was commanding a fleet. Debbie, his astronaut wife, had been lost forever in a burst of flame one morning at Cape Canaveral. Her death caused him to leave NASA and come back to the fleet. Then when it seemed that his career as a fighter pilot was washed up, his commanding officer, Killer DeLancey, died in a dogfight over Iraq. Maxwell took his place.
Of course, that could change. He had no illusions about how the Navy worked. To most of the men in this briefing room, he would always be an outsider — an ex-astronaut and test pilot. A carpetbagger who hadn’t paid his dues like they had.
It was not the way he had expected to spend his first day as a squadron commanding officer. The USS Reagan had been scheduled for another week in Dubai. He had already booked a room in a small guest hotel on the outskirts of the city, where he intended to spend most of the week with Claire Phillips.