The access hatch to the six starboard stairwells was open and a dim red light shone from below. The narrow stairs descended eighty feet to the bottom of the ship between the hull and the wall of the farthest aft product tank on the starboard side. Access hatches and stairs for each of the twelve oil tanks, plus the two slop tanks and six pairs of ballast tanks for when the ship was running light, ran left and right.
Graham took a last look around topside. A helicopter low in the sky was heading northwest, the sounds of its rotors against the other harbor and city noises faint on the light evening breeze. No threat there. And what was probably a commercial jetliner was coming in from the north for a landing at Panama City thirty-five miles across the isthmus.
Although the timing was uncomfortably tight, everything was going according to plan. After nightfall, they had retrieved the explosives and their weapons from the four streamlined trunks attached by powerful magnets to the hull five feet below the waterline. Fifty miles out they had attached them to the stern of the ship, where the water flow was the least disturbed, and none of them had been lost.
They faced no immediate threats to the operation. Everything was going according to plan. Yet Graham could feel that someone was coming. It was as if he were game, being stalked by a jungle cat he could not see but knew was there.
As soon as he stepped through the hatch and started down the stairs he was aware of a deep-throated hissing sound, as if he were hearing a powerful waterfall from a long distance, or compressed air being let out of a submarine’s ballast tanks. It was the inert nitrogen being vented out of the tank. They had to do it slowly so that no one in the harbor would hear what was being done and come to investigate. Once the nitrogen was gone, the air spaces at the top of the product tanks would fill with an explosive mixture of gases that continuously evaporated from crude oil.
When that happened, the entire tanker would become a time bomb waiting for a simple spark, or the explosion of a few kilograms of Semtex, to blow sky-high, destroying the entire ship and anything or anyone in its vicinity.
The steel plating of the hull was cool and dry to the touch, but the wall of the product tank was greasy with condensation, and the air stank so badly of crude oil gases that it was practically unbreathable.
Ramati was crouched at the bottom of the stairs, molding a four-kilo brick of plastic explosive to the base of the tank, while Faruq al-Tashkiri, who’d been an electrical rating aboard an Egyptian destroyer, held a red light.
The noise of the venting nitrogen was very strong down here, but it suddenly stopped and Ramati and al-Tashkiri looked up, their eyes wide as if they were deer caught in headlights.
“We’re almost done here,” Ramati said. “And this is the last tank.”
“Good,” Graham said. “The pilot is due aboard in thirty minutes, and you have to clean up, change into the first’s clothes, and be at the rail to greet him and bring him up to the bridge.”
“Give me one minute, Captain, and I’ll have the receiver wired to the detonator,” Ramati said. “But for Allah’s sake make sure that your transmitter is in the safe mode.” He managed a thin, pale smile in the red light. “After all this work I don’t want to go to Paradise empty-handed, with no infidel souls blown to hell.”
Graham took the transmitter out of his pocket and held it up. “No battery yet,” he said. The transmitter looked like an ordinary cell phone. But he’d not taken the battery out; he would only have to enter 9 # 11 and the Apurto Devlán would light up like the interior of the sun in the blink of an eye.
No one aboard would feel a thing. One minute they would be alive, and in the next there would be nothingness.
For just a moment Graham toyed with the idea of entering the code right now. End it once and for all. Maybe most of the rest of the world was right and he was wrong; maybe there was a god after all. Maybe by pushing the buttons now he could be with Jillian just as the Anglican priest at her funeral had promised.
Ramati read something of this from Graham’s expression. “Captain?” he said.
Graham managed a tight smile, and put the transmitter back in his pocket. There were times like these when he thought he might be insane. But it didn’t matter. He was what he was, a product of the world he lived in. “I want you both on deck in twenty minutes.”
Al-Tashkiri was looking at him with a religious light in his face.
Graham nodded. “Only four hours now,” he said.
The young Egyptian compressed his lips as if he was afraid to speak, but he nodded vigorously.
“See you on the bridge,” Graham told them, and he headed back up on deck.
It wasn’t he who was insane, it was Ramati and al-Tashkiri and the other bastards who were willing to blow themselves up for the cause. Even if there were a god, He, She, or It wouldn’t require suicide bombings to kill someone who didn’t believe in the right things. That was the face of insanity.
Maybe it wasn’t the people who were insane, maybe it was the gods.
Topside in the fresh air, he used his walkie-talkie to call Hijazi in the engine room. “Are you ready to answer ship’s bells?”
“Aywa,” Hijazi came back at once.
“English,” Graham radioed.
“Yes, everything is in order here,” Hijazi said.
Graham could hear the excitement in the man’s voice. He was just like the others; they thought they were going to be in Paradise in a few hours. The younger ones had written suicide notes to their families, which would be posted from Karachi when the operation was completed. The older freedom fighters like Hijazi hadn’t bothered. “It’s enough to know that we hurt the bastards,” he’d told the others during training.
“Then stand by,” Graham said. “We should be getting under way within the hour.”
The channel was silent for a few moments. Graham was about to pocket the walkie-talkie when Hijazi came back, his voice subdued.
“God be with you,” he said.
Religious mumbo jumbo, Graham thought. The engine room would be Hijazi’s final resting place and the man knew it. He was simply trying to say his goodbyes. Graham keyed his walkie-talkie. “Insh’allah,” he said.
Pocketing the walkie-talkie he headed up to the bridge. Mumbo jumbo or not, he needed Hijazi and the others for just a few more hours. And if it took mumbling blessings, then so be it.
FIFTEEN
McGarvey was flown across the lake to the military area of Maracaibo’s La Chinita Airport aboard a Venezuelan Navy Sea King helicopter. He was met on the tarmac by a dark-skinned air force captain who introduced himself as Ernesto Rubio.
“I have a Gulfstream standing by for you, sir,” the captain said. “It’s the vice president’s, so I think you’ll find the accommodations pleasant enough.”
The only activity at this hour was on the civilian side. A 747 was taxiing out for takeoff, the last flight of the evening, the one McGarvey should have been on. Gallegos had escorted him to the helicopter, which had landed in a parking lot near the commercial docks, but he had not come along for the ride. He’d been ordered back to Caracas to brief the chief of Venezuelan intelligence on the situation. It had the potential of becoming a major international embarrassment. Zulia State Security had allowed a Vensport ship to be so easily hijacked that the CIA had to intervene. If the Apurto Devlán actually made it to California and destroyed a refinery, the consequences for Venezuela’s already ailing economy would be nothing short of devastating. McGarvey was to be given all the help he wanted, while Gallegos briefed his boss on worst-case scenarios; one of which was that the ship had not been hijacked. If U.S. forces boarded her and found the legitimate captain and crew going about their lawful business, relations between Caracas and Washington would become worse than they already were.