No one would notice a lone man stepping ashore and disappearing into the darkness. And even if they did, by the time they reacted the ship would be gone in a brilliant flash of searing heat, and they would be dead.
NINETEEN
McGarvey and Herring had donned headsets so they could communicate with the flight crew. They’d flown low and fast straight south along the route of the canal, coming across Gatun Lake no more than twenty-five feet above the water, in excess of 140 knots. They were at hover two hundred meters out from the locks.
The side hatch was wide open, and Herring’s operators were ready to deploy. Two chopper crewmen manned the 7.62mm machine guns. There was no way Graham or anyone else was getting off the ship alive.
A cruise ship, all her lights ablaze, was in the forward lock, the Apurto Devlán right behind her in the middle lock.
“Do you see any activity on deck?” McGarvey radioed the pilot. The flight crew was wearing night-vision equipment.
“Two bad guys on deck, at the bow,” the pilot radioed back. “Look like line handlers.”
“What are they doing?”
“One of them is on his knees,” the pilot came back. He hesitated. “Almost looks as if he’s praying.”
“He is,” McGarvey told Herring. “It means they’re ready to pull the trigger. We have to take them down now.”
Herring motioned for his operators to lock and load. He radioed the pilot. “Take out the two bad guys on the bow as we pass over them. Set us down in front of the superstructure. Soon as we’re feet dry, I want you to dust off and stand by off the starboard midships. Anybody tries to jump ship, take them down. But watch out for the canal workmen ashore.”
“Wilco,” the pilot responded crisply.
Kulbacki had produced a ship’s diagram of the Apurto Devlán, and on the short flight down from Panama City he’d gone over the deployment orders with the team. The drill was a standard one that they’d practiced countless times on ship mock-ups in San Diego.
It was assumed that the Panamanian pilot would be topside on the bridge, so everyone on deck would be considered hostile and would be taken down.
A three-man team would head to the engine room, taking out anyone they encountered; their objective was to secure the engineering spaces from any kind of sabotage, including disabling the engines and/or the steering controls, before they swept the rest of the ship for terrorists.
Kulbacki would lead his team of three operators on a lightning-fast sweep, first to the twelve oil tanks to find and disable any explosive devices, and then into the bilges to look for kickers that might have been placed to take out the ship’s bottom and sink her in the middle of the lock. Their orders were to take down any and all hostiles they might encounter.
Herring would accompany McGarvey up to the bridge, taking down any bad guys they ran into, securing the Panamanian pilot, and subduing Graham without killing him, if at all possible.
“The knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, or wrists,” McGarvey said. “Anywhere but the head or torso.”
“That’ll be tough if he’s shooting at us,” Herring said. “You sure you don’t want to wear a vest? We brought one for you.”
McGarvey shook his head. “When he shoots it’ll be a headshot.”
The big helicopter suddenly banked hard to the left, the open hatch on the low side, and roared along the length of the cruise ship, the tips of its rotors clearing the ship’s gigs by less than ten meters.
Kulbacki and another man positioned in the hatch would be the first to hit the deck.
There were passengers on the promenade deck of the cruise ship. Some of them waved as the helicopter passed.
“Take out the two on the bow,” Herring radioed to the gun crew.
“Wilco,” someone responded.
A second later the pilot swung the tail around so that the nose gun was pointing at the men on the Apurto Devlán’s bow, and started to sideslip along the length of the open deck. Both machine guns opened fire at the same moment, and stopped almost immediately.
“Scratch two,” one of the gunners radioed.
The operator crouching next to Kulbacki in the open door suddenly lurched backwards.
“Incoming fire,” Kulbacki shouted, and he sprayed a deck hatch that was open amidships.
The helicopter set down hard just forward of the superstructure and immediately came under intense small-arms fire from somewhere aft. Small-caliber bullets pinged into the fuselage, and ricocheted off the ship’s deck.
Herring and another of the operators shoved McGarvey aside and hauled the downed man to his feet, as Kulbacki and the other SEALs exploded from the open hatch and laid down a heavy line of fire toward the port and starboard passageways.
The operator who’d taken a round in his chest armor would have a hell of a bruise by morning, but otherwise he was still good to go.
“Clear!” Kulbacki shouted.
McGarvey was next out of the chopper, rolling to the right so that he would be out of the way and in the shadows of the towering seven-story superstructure. He noticed out of the corner of his eye that the mule driver on the starboard bow had jumped out of his locomotive and was heading across the access road in a dead run.
Herring and the last operator jumped down on deck, and as soon as they were clear, the helicopter lifted off with a tremendous roar, banked almost over on its side, its rotors barely clearing the deck, and accelerated over the mule, while turning its nose gun back toward the ship.
Camera flashes were coming in a nearly continuous stream from the stern of the cruise ship twenty-five feet above them.
“Marchetti, go.” Herring pumped his left fist, and the three operators who would take care of the engineering spaces headed aft. They would leapfrog along the portside passageway, and thence into the ship and down the ladder, clearing the way ahead with flash-bang grenades, and then shooting anything that moved.
Kulbacki and his three men had already started forward to the product tank access hatches, to find and disarm the explosive charges. Each of them would take one tank, and with any luck they would run into light or no resistance and the job could be done in a few minutes.
If they did have to fire they would need even more luck that they wouldn’t inadvertently touch off an explosion in one of the tanks, which would set the others off like a string of firecrackers.
But, as Kulbacki had explained with a sardonic grin on the way down here, “That’s the chance we signed on for when we put on the uniform, sir.”
At that moment a light breeze sprang up, blowing the sounds of the chopper’s exhaust and rotor noise away, and the Apurto Devlán became as quiet as a ghost ship. The hairs at the nape of McGarvey’s neck stood on end.
It wasn’t this simple. They were forgetting something. He was forgetting something. Something in Graham’s file that the Brits had not yet sent to Otto. Something they were hiding?
“The next part is your show, Mr. McGarvey!” Herring shouted.
“Right,” McGarvey said. “The bridge.” He sprinted to the portside passageway, then aft to the first doorway. The hatch was open.
Two men dressed in dark blue coveralls, APURTO DEVLÁN stenciled on the backs, were down with headshots, blood spreading on the steel deck. Marchetti and the other SEALs heading down to the engine room had taken them down.
McGarvey hesitated only a moment to make sure they were dead. He didn’t want some fanatic filled with religious zeal coming up from behind. A tight-lipped Herring nodded his approval.
A stairway led six decks up to the bridge. McGarvey stopped at the first turn and motioned for Herring to hold up. He cocked an ear to listen for sounds from above. For a moment the ship was silent, but then he thought he heard someone talking.