Lazlo passed over the now-dented fire extinguisher, which he had held tucked under one arm.
“Here, thought you might like this back. I appreciate the earlier aerial support.”
“You just returned the favor,” Pitt said, then applied the extinguisher to a scattering of small fires that the flare had ignited.
“I didn’t notice this one slip aboard,” Lazlo said, ensuring that Farzad was indeed dead.
“He quickly jumped on behind the first two.”
“I imagine that they’ll try again.”
“Time’s running short,” Pitt replied. “But you might raise that ramp all the same.”
“Good idea. What about us?”
“We might be cutting it close. I trust you can swim?”
Lazlo rolled his eyes, then nodded. “See you below,” he said, then disappeared down the stairwell.
The smoke from the flare cleared quickly out of the shattered bridge windows as Pitt stepped to the helm and gauged their position. The Dayan was more than halfway through its wide U-turn, its bow inching slowly toward the southern span of the Galata Bridge. Pitt tweaked the rudder to guide the big tanker dangerously close to the shoreline as it completed its turn, then he nudged up the engine revolutions. The stuttering and hesitation from belowdecks was worse than before, and Pitt fought to squeeze as much speed out of the faltering engine as he could.
He quickly scanned the shoreline waters for signs of the Bullet , but it was nowhere in sight. After Pitt’s earlier radio call, Giordino had raced at top speed toward the dredge ship and had already passed under the Galata Bridge. As if he knew Pitt was searching for him, Giordino suddenly hailed the tanker on the marine radio.
“Bullet here. I’m past the bridge and just pulling alongside the green cutter dredge. What do you want me to do?”
Pitt told him his plan, which evoked a low whistle from Giordino.
“I hope you had your Wheaties today,” he added. “How much time do you have?”
Pitt glanced at his watch. “About six minutes. We should be along in about half that time.”
“Thanks for bringing the powder keg my way. Just don’t be late,” he added, then quickly signed off.
By now, the Dayan had completed its turn, and the south span of the Galata Bridge loomed ahead less than a quarter of a mile away. Pitt willed the ship to go faster, as he felt the seconds tick by, while the bridge seemed to hold its distance. The timing would be close, he knew, but there was little he could do about it now.
Then the unwanted sound of silence suddenly drifted from the tanker’s bowels. The rumbling and stumbling beneath his feet vanished as the console in front of him lit up like a Christmas tree. The Dayan ’s fuel-starved engine had finally given up its last gasp.
76
Tailing the Dayan a few dozen yards off its starboard flank, Maria gazed at it through a pair of binoculars. To her disappointment, the big tanker had continued to veer away from shore and was quickly approaching a return pass under the Galata Bridge. She realized why when she scanned the tanker’s wheelhouse and caught a brief glimpse of Pitt at the helm.
“They have failed,” she said, her voice nearly hoarse with anger. “Get my last men aboard quickly.”
The yacht’s captain looked at her nervously.
“Shouldn’t we be getting clear?” he urged.
Maria stepped close so that no one else on the bridge could hear.
“We can part once the men are aboard,” she whispered coldly.
Her last three Janissaries assembled on deck as the yacht raced over to the Dayan ’s flank. As the yacht approached the tanker’s accommodation ladder to off-load the gunmen, the stairway suddenly rose off the water. At the top of the steps, Lazlo stood at the hydraulic controls hoisting the ramp up.
“Shoot him!” Maria yelled, spotting the commando.
The startled Janissaries quickly aimed their weapons at Lazlo and fired. The Israeli commando had been watching the men’s reaction and turned to step from the rail. But he lingered a moment longer at the controls, wishing to keep the ramp out of reach. The hesitation proved costly, as a burst from one of the guns caught him in the shoulder.
He immediately lost his balance, falling forward onto the controls, before slipping to the deck to avoid further gunfire. His left arm was numb, and he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, but his senses were still intact as he heard a loud crash from below. One-handing his rifle, he shimmied to the rail, then stood and peered quickly over the side.
To his disappointment, he saw that the lower end of the stairway swung out from the tanker and was positioned just over the yacht. Then he looked closer and realized that it was actually wedged into the yacht itself. Falling on the controls, he had inadvertently released the lower-end retracting cable. The heavy steel platform had shot toward the sea like an arrow. Only instead of striking water, it had crashed into the topside bow of the yacht, penetrating several feet through the deck.
Despite the damage and heightened angle, two of the Janissaries had already leaped onto the ramp and were attempting a fast climb to the top. Lazlo aligned his gun on the rail and fired a sustained round, sending both men flailing over the side and into the water.
Suddenly feeling dizzy from a loss of blood, Lazlo curled back onto the deck and rummaged for a medical kit in his combat pack. Fighting the urge to lay down and go to sleep, he told himself he only needed to keep the yacht at bay a few more minutes. Then he glanced up toward the bridge and wondered how much more time Pitt really needed.
Time was anything but an ally to Pitt now. The last time he checked, there were less than six minutes until detonation, but he tried not to think about it. His focus was simply on driving the tanker a short distance beyond the bridge.
Since the engine had quit, the tanker was sailing on pure momentum. Multiple shipboard generators provided auxiliary power for Pitt to turn the rudder, but the huge single propeller had spun its last turn. The Golden Horn’s gentle current pushed lightly at his stern, and Pitt hoped it would be enough to keep up speed for a few more minutes. Given enough time, the current was ultimately capable of carrying the tanker safely to the Sea of Marmara. But time was going the way of the ship’s fuel.
With agonizing slowness, the south span of the Galata Bridge grew larger in the forward bridge window, and Pitt was relieved to note that the Dayan was still gliding along at seven knots. Sporadic gunfire caught his attention again, and he dared a quick glance out the window. The yacht was so close to the tanker’s side that he could see only a fraction of the boat. He spotted Lazlo, lying near the head of the stairway, and felt assured that the tanker was still secure for the moment.
The underside of the bridge soon loomed up, casting the deck and wheelhouse in a brief shadow. Pitt took to the helm and feathered the rudder controls with nervous fingers. The rest would be up to Giordino, he thought quietly.
“I just hope you can hold your end of the bargain, partner,” he muttered aloud, then watched the shadow cast by the bridge gradually fall away.
77
At 454 feet in length, the Ibn Battuta was one of the largest dredge ships Giordino had ever seen. Owned and operated by the Belgian company Jan De Nul, it was one of just a handful of self-propelled cutter suction dredges in existence. Unlike a regular suction dredge, which slurped up mud and goo from the seafloor using a long, trailing vacuum tube, the cutter dredge also had a digging mechanism, or cutter head. In the Ibn Battuta ’s case, the head was a six-foot-diameter ball faced with counterrotating tungsten carbide teeth capable of chewing through solid rock. Affixed to a hull-mounted boom that could be lowered to the seafloor, the cutter head resembled the open jaws of a megalodon shark waiting to bite.