The rendezvous was set for two hours from now but Graham needed most of that time to get the ship slowed down so that everyone could safely get aboard. First he needed to finish the job of eliminating the crew.
He had already fired five times, which left thirteen rounds still in the pistol, plus a full magazine of eighteen. More than sufficient.
Graham shifted his attention to the ship’s multifunction display. They were on the proper course at the proper rate of speed, there were no incoming messages from the company waiting for a response, and the AB at the helm hadn’t had time to push the Automatic Distress Signal button.
Everything was as it should be.
He closed his eyes for a moment, but he could not bring Jillian’s face to his mind’s eye. This time his rage was replaced with a sense of calm; he supposed that he was going crazy finally, but it was of no import. He was willing to take refuge in his insanity, just as bin Laden had done. It was plain by the expression in the man’s eyes, and Graham was sure that he too had the same intense, yet disconnected look.
Graham glanced at his watch. He was running a couple of minutes late, but he wasn’t seriously behind schedule. He took one last look at the multifunction display above the helm then went out into the corridor to the starboard stairway. He would begin with the engine room, just as he’d planned.
He started down, but something out of the corner of his eye made him stop and look back. For a second he didn’t know what had attracted his attention. But then he understood. A light shone from beneath his cabin door behind the bridge. But when he’d left a half hour ago he’d turned out his lights. He was sure of it.
His first thought was that the Russian steward had come to search his room. But she wouldn’t have the courage to do something like that on her own. She’d probably convinced Vasquez and his girlfriend to help her.
It was just as well, Graham thought as he walked back to his cabin door, his sneakers whisper-soft on the steel deck. If all three were there he’d kill them first, no matter what they had found.
Concealing the pistol behind his back as he’d done earlier, he opened his door and took one step inside. The situation was worse than he’d feared.
Vasquez, a 9mm Beretta pistol from the ship’s emergency locker in hand, was positioned at the doorway to the bedroom, obviously standing guard. He looked up, startled. “He’s here,” he said, and he brought his pistol to bear before Graham could do a thing.
Beyond him, Irina and Alicia had found his two leather bags, opened them, and spread everything out on the bed: Slavin’s clothing, as well as the Heckler & Koch M8 compact carbine with four magazines of ammunition, six one-kilo bricks of Semtex with a small metal box of detonators, leather gloves, a wire garrote, a stiletto and sheath, and an encrypted satellite phone/walkie-talkie.
“Good evening, Mr.Vasquez,” Graham said, weighing his options, measuring the angles. Vasquez was a seaman, not a cop or a trained killer. He would be slow to fire at a man he assumed was unarmed.
“What’s all this shit, Captain Slavin, if that’s really your name?” Vasquez demanded. He was nervous. It was obvious that he’d never held a gun on a man before.
“My personal property for starts,” Graham answered mildly. “What made you think that you could break into my quarters and rifle through my things?”
Irina came to the bedroom door, and said something to him in rapid-fire Russian.
“That’s not necessary,” he said pleasantly. He nodded toward the weapons laid out on the bed. “It’s obvious that I’m an imposter. Thing is, what are you going to do about it?”
“Call the company for one, to find out where the real Captain Slavin is,” Vasquez said.
“I killed him,” Graham said conversationally. “In Cabimas.”
Vasquez was visibly shaken. “In that case we’re going to arrest you and hold you for the authorities when we reach Colón in the morning.”
Graham shrugged, and held up his left hand as if he were giving up. “I guess I can’t argue with a man who’s holding a gun on me,” he said.
Vasquez started to say something when Graham stepped backwards into the corridor and slid away from the open door.
“Shit!” Vasquez shouted. A second later he appeared in the doorway, a frightened look on his face. Too late he saw Graham standing right there and he tried to rear back.
Graham fired one shot into the first officer’s left temple. The man’s eyes suddenly turned blood-red, his head bounced against the door frame, and he crumpled to the deck half in and half out of the captain’s cabin.
The women started to scream.
Graham hurriedly stepped over the first officer’s body, dragged it the rest of the way into the sitting room, kicked his gun aside, and closed the door lest someone hear the racket and come to investigate.
Alicia had come into the sitting room. Her hands were clutched to her breast, and she was wailing Vasquez’s name. But Irina had grabbed the M8 carbine from the bed, and was fumbling with a magazine of ammunition, trying to load the weapon.
“You should have minded your own business,” Graham told Alicia, and he shot her in the face, the bullet striking her at the bridge of her nose, killing her instantly.
Irina was frantically trying to get the magazine into its slot in front of the trigger guard, but in her haste she was forcing it in at the wrong angle.
Graham walked across the sitting room, careful not to step in Alicia’s blood.
Irina looked up at him, her face screwed up in a mask of absolute terror.
“You’ll never get it loaded that way, my dear,” Graham said. He smiled.
“You’re the devil!” she cried.
“Da,” he said in Russian, and he shot her in the forehead from a range of ten feet.
Her body bounced off the bulkhead and crumpled to the deck, leaving a bloody streak on the white wall beside the large square window. But no blood got on the bedcovers, which for some reason Graham found pleasing. He’d always liked to think of himself as a tidy man, and the sooner he could get his operators aboard the sooner the ship could be cleaned up.
Graham let himself out of his quarters, and headed down one deck. He had changed his plans. Now that the first and third officers were dead, it left only Sozansky and Chief Engineer Kiosawa alive, probably in their quarters. He meant to kill them first before sweeping through the galley and the crew quarters.
At the end he would descend to the engine room, kill the crew, and slow the big computer-controlled turbines to idle.
Nothing would get in his way. In less than ten minutes he would be the only one alive on the Apurto Devlán.
A few minutes after two, the oil tanker was making less than one knot through nearly flat seas, under an overcast, pitch-black sky. Graham stood on the main deck amidships on the starboard side. The forty-eight-foot Feadship motor yacht Nueva Cruz out of Santiago de Cuba, showing no lights, was directly below, its pilot matching speeds perfectly.
Ali Ramati came out on the yacht’s aft sundeck, and waved. He was a slightly built man who’d shaved his beard and his head to make him look very much like Vasquez. He was from the West Bank town of Ramallah, and he was a little crazy, but he was dedicated and bright. He had trained as Graham’s first officer for this mission, and, like the others, he was prepared to commit suicide for the cause without hesitation.
The rest of the crew, fifteen of them men, most from the Philippines, plus the two women from Cairo, would remain out of sight until the boarding ladder was safely secured to the tanker, and they were given the all clear.