Through the NVGs he spotted a man gaffer-taped to a chair and a stunned-looking terrorist standing behind him. He directed fire from his 416 into the terrorist’s chest, hit the floor, skidded, landed on his butt, and spun up.
The nerves in his right leg screamed. He ignored them. Located another enemy to his right and directed a burst of fire into his groin. The man screamed and fell back, and almost simultaneously the secure door blasted into the cabin, filling the space with smoke and sucking out the oxygen.
In the midst of hellish confusion and screams in Arabic and English, he gasped for air and looked for targets, who were now harder to distinguish from the crew members because of the smoke, not yet aware that the blast had ripped the 416 out of his hands, and only partially aware of Storm grappling with someone to his left.
Instinctively he reached for his SIG Sauer pistol as Akil charged in, shoved aside a terrorist standing in his way, and in one fluid movement shot him in the face. As the terrorist fell onto Crocker, Crocker saw another, taller one turn to his left, reach for something in his vest pocket, and run in the direction of the captain’s quarters. Crocker intuited what he was about to do. Without wanting to expend the half second it would take to find his weapon, he propelled himself up and lunged onto the man’s back.
Stavros Petras crashed chest first into an upholstered chair and flipped over with Crocker still holding on to his neck. The fall resulted in Crocker landing on his back on the floor, with Petras’s full weight smashing into him, and forcing the air out of Crocker’s lungs. He felt a rib snap and saw spinning stars but he refused to let go, putting Petras in a headlock and squeezing with all his strength.
He reached for his SOG knife with his left hand, aware that the terrorist was desperately clawing for something at the front of his shirt. Crocker didn’t have another hand with which to stop him. He found his knife, raised it, and thrust it into the back of the terrorist’s neck, hoping to sever his spine.
Petras’s whole body jerked three times and froze, and an instant later an explosion from Deck 11 threw both men into the air.
Chapter Twenty-One
The deed is everything; the glory is naught.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As soon as the waiting firefighting and chemical weapons teams from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the explosion, they sped toward the Disney Magic.
Davis and his men had been defusing the explosives on Deck 10 when the propane tanks on Deck 11 went off. Luckily for most passengers and crew, charges on the other decks had already been disabled, and Mancini and Team Delta had unhooked the eight sarin canisters from the ship’s inoperative HVAC system. Also fortunate was the fact that there were no passenger cabins on Deck 11, nor were any crew or passengers present in the Deck 11 teen Vibe Club when the explosion went off. The handful of crew huddling in the Wide World of Sports Bar and Palo restaurant escaped with minor burns and bruises.
Firefighters from the Eisenhower found Crocker, Akil, and Storm using the ship’s fire extinguishers to battle the flames on Deck 11. All three men were only half conscious, bleeding from various cuts and bruises and suffering from smoke inhalation. They had to be overpowered and dragged away.
Crocker came to five minutes later, lying on a deck chair on Deck 4. He squinted up at the man sitting beside him and saw the sun rising over the man’s right shoulder. When he sat up abruptly to see whether the ship’s superstructure was still intact and the fire was out, all appeared normal except for wisps of light-gray smoke from the upper deck. A sharp pain in his lower chest reminded him of the terrorist landing on him, which had probably resulted in a cracked rib. The suit on his right leg was stuck to his skin and caked with blood.
“Who are you?” Crocker asked, wincing.
“Scott Russert, from Putney, England,” answered the man with red hair.
“What are you doing here, Scott?”
“You saved my life, and I don’t even know your name.”
“Crocker. You here alone?” He saw groups of passengers being escorted down to a lower deck.
“Traveling with my family.”
“They’re safe, I hope.”
“Already been rescued. Waiting for me on one of the patrol boats.”
“Shouldn’t you be with them?”
“I wanted to thank you first.”
“For what?”
“For saving my life when I was about to be shot and tossed in the pool.”
Crocker remembered the event; it seemed to have happened a month ago. “Hey,” Crocker said. “Glad I could be of service.”
Scott’s smile revealed a wide space between his front teeth. “You’re one of those bloody but unbowed blokes, aren’t you?”
“Something like that. But I can’t answer that definitively until I’ve checked on my men.”
Of the ten SEALs who had taken down the ship, Crocker had arguably suffered the most damage. Davis and the Team Beta guys on Deck 10 were treated for cuts and bruises, minor burns, and smoke inhalation. Akil had lost a tooth when he crashed through the bridge door. Storm had dislocated a vertebra in his lower back.
The medical staff on the Eisenhower stitched together the skin on Crocker’s calf and taped his ribs. He still wasn’t sure exactly what had gone down on the Magic and didn’t know the identities of the terrorists who had seized the ship. Figured he’d be briefed on all that when he got back to HQ in Virginia.
Most of the SEALs flew to Naples Naval Station in Italy and from there home to Virginia Beach. Crocker and Mancini detoured to Germany to check on Suarez. Both men needed time to process the psychological whirlwind they’d been through. In Crocker’s case, he wanted to get his head right before he returned home and faced Holly. There was always a huge emotional letdown after a mission of this magnitude, and he wanted to be ready.
At the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein, they were escorted by a male orderly who explained that during a typical day the military hospital served 1,178 meals, administered 1,598 doses of medication, handled 2.3 births, and accommodated twenty-three new patients and nine new acute emergencies. The number of incoming acute cases was more than many civilian hospitals admitted in the space of two months.
“What’s the pace like currently?” Crocker asked.
“With combat winding down in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s about a fourth of that,” the orderly answered.
“Good.”
In the ICU on the third floor they found Suarez flirting with a cute blond nurse with a cross tattooed above her right breast. He was covered with thick white bandages from his neck to his waist.
“Glad to see you with a smile on your face again,” Crocker said.
“They’re taking good care of me.”
“I can see that.”
“Heard you guys kicked ass without me,” Suarez said.
“We missed you,” Crocker said. “Everything happened so fast. It’s still a blur.”
“He didn’t do shit, like usual,” Mancini joked.
“Yeah, right. While this guy was jerking off in the engine room, I was killing terrorists.”
“Man, I wish I was there,” said Suarez.
“Hey,” Crocker said, “I meant to ask you, you remember anything from the night you were shot?”
Suarez’s expression turned serious. “Not much. I was standing near the cab of the van, talking to Hassan.”
“Hassan?”
“Yeah, Hassan.”
“What was he saying?”
“Some stuff about his girlfriend. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“He disappeared with the sarin,” Crocker said. “Nobody’s seen him since.”
“I heard. Yeah. Strange dude.”