From where he stood, McGarvey could see a young man with short cropped black hair and narrow shoulders, his back to the door, seated in front of a rack of radio equipment, most of which had been shot up or smashed beyond repair. The man was dressed as a ship’s officer, but an RAK machine pistol was at his elbow on the desk. He was listening to a portable VHF transceiver of the kind used for ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications. Probably the U.S. Coast Guard channel to make sure that no one from the Spirit had managed to send a distress signal.
McGarvey waited until the door started to swing out, then yanked it all the way open and stepped inside. “I’d like to send a message, if you don’t mind.”
The terrorist was startled. He looked over his shoulder, his eyes going wide at the sight of one of the passengers standing there with a weapon in hand. He shouted something in Arabic, wildly flung the VHF radio, and snatched his gun.
McGarvey reached for the radio with one hand, but missed it. The transceiver smashed against the steel door frame as the terrorist brought his gun up over his shoulder and started to fire even before he was on target, spraying the overhead with bullets, deadly shrapnel flying all over the place.
The terrorist had left him no choice. McGarvey brought his weapon up and squeezed off two shots, one catching the young man in his left shoulder and the second in the side of his head just behind his ear, sending him sprawling across the desk in a bloody heap.
McGarvey ducked back out into the corridor to make sure no one had heard the commotion and was coming to investigate; then he stooped down and picked up the VHF radio. A big piece of the plastic case had cracked open and fell off, exposing the main circuit board, which had also broken in two. The radio was as useless as the ship’s communications equipment. Whatever happened aboard now was up to him.
The terrorist carried no wallet or identification or anything else in his pockets except for a 9mm Steyr GB self-loading pistol, with one eighteen-round magazine, plus two extra twenty-five-round magazines for the RAK. A digital watch was strapped to his right wrist, but he wore no rings or other jewelry.
McGarvey took off his dinner jacket and tossed it aside, then stuffed the pistol in his belt, ejected the nearly spent magazine from his RAK, replacing it with one of the spares. Then he pocketed the second, all the while listening for someone to come up the corridor.
The bridge crew was probably dead, but the ship was still moving, which meant that someone had to be at the helm because running on autopilot in these confined waters would be a dicey business. The same was likely true down in the engine room. The regular crew was probably dead, and one or more of the terrorists were taking care of business.
He cycled the RAK’s slide to cock the weapon and turned to go, but then stopped. Something bothered him. Something about the terrorist’s wristwatch. He went back to the body and lifted the kid’s lifeless arm. The watch was in countdown mode with a few seconds more than seventeen minutes left. But seventeen minutes until what? Until they got off the ship? Or was it something else? McGarvey had a very bad feeling that he was missing something important. He took the watch.
The wind was screaming when McGarvey stepped outside and quickly made his way forward and mounted the port stairs up to the bridge. He flattened himself against the upright and cautiously took a brief peek in the window. A slightly built young woman was at the big wheel. Captain Darling lay on his side by the starboard door in a pool of blood, his eyes open and sightless. Two other officers were down and presumably dead, one at the radar and navigation position to the left of the helm and the other in a crumpled heap beside the chart table aft of the helm.
The woman was frightened. That was obvious from the grimace on her face and the stiff way she stood. But there was no one on the bridge to threaten her, to force her to remain at her post. Unless she was one of the terrorists. For some reason he didn’t think that was the case. The terrorists were almost certainly Muslims, and most Islamic fundamentalist operational cells did not send women out on missions. The major exception was the military wing of Hamas, which sometimes sent women as suicide bombers to Israeli-occupied areas. But this was not a Hamas operation; it wasn’t the organization’s style.
McGarvey looked through the window again. Nothing had changed, and there was no place for anyone to hide. Even if the girl was one of the terrorists, she didn’t appear to be armed. And time was running short. Every second Katy was under the terrorists’ control in the Grand Salon increased her chances of getting shot to death.
He yanked the door open and stepped onto the bridge. The girl at the helm practically jumped out of her skin.
“I’m a friend,” McGarvey said. “Are you okay?”
The girl urgently looked over her shoulder toward the officer lying next to the chart table, at the same time a walkie-talkie lying on a shelf beneath one of the forward windows hissed.
“Achmed, keyf heh’lik?”
McGarvey turned toward the sound, and almost immediately he realized he’d been set up, and that the young helmsman had tried to warn him. He dove for the deck as he swiveled in his tracks and brought his gun to bear on the man dressed as a ship’s officer lying in a heap beside the chart table. The terrorist opened fire with his Steyr GB, the heavy 9mm Makarov rounds starring the forward windows, smashing one of the digital radar displays, striking the already destroyed SSB radio, and plowing into the overhead before McGarvey got three shots off, all of them hitting the man in the back below his left shoulder blade, knocking him down.
McGarvey picked himself up, keeping his weapon trained on the terrorist, but the man was dead. And so was the young woman at the helm, the back of her head a bloody mess where she’d taken one round.
He went to her, but there was nothing he could do. She was gone, and no power on earth could bring her back. He wanted to go over to the bastard he’d just shot and kick his body down the stairs to the Grand Salon and dump it at the feet of whoever was leading this attack.
If it was death they wanted, he was going to give it to them in a very large, and very personal, way.
ELEVEN
With fifteen minutes remaining to zero hour, Khalil was forced to consider his options. Although he had never come face-to-face with Kirk McGarvey, the man was a legend in the intelligence business. No one on the outside would ever know the full extent of the former CIA assassin’s entire career, but there were so many stories about him that if even onetenth of them were true, McGarvey would have to be a superman.
The one story that was absolutely true was his encounter with Osama bin Laden. Khalil knew it was a fact because he got it from bin Laden himself, and Osama never lied. McGarvey had actually come to Afghanistan to seek out bin Laden a couple of years before 9/11. Al-Quaida had managed to purchase a one-kiloton nuclear suitcase demolitions device that was to be used in a strike on the U.S. McGarvey had come to make a trade: the bomb for American concessions in the region, especially on the Saudi Arabian peninsula.
Khalil had met with bin Laden one month before 9/11 to discuss the probable reaction from the U.S., and Mac’s name had come up.
“I looked into his eyes, and what I saw made me wish that he was a friend and not an enemy,” bin Laden said.
“An infidel?” Khalil suggested, testing bin Laden’s depth of respect for the American.
McGarvey had stopped the nuclear attack two years earlier, and there was some concern among bin Laden’s advisers that he might somehow get wind of the plans for the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and White House.