"Looks like he's getting ready to go somewhere," said Holliday.
"Where?" Rafi asked.
Holliday opened one of the folded charts and laid it out on the table.
"As-Sallum to Al-Iskandariyah," he said, reading the chart legend. "The scale is one to three hundred thousand. About a hundred and forty miles from Alexandria. Looks like some sort of harbor."
"As-Sallum is also the last place anybody heard from Peggy and the expedition," said Rafi. "It was their last staging point before crossing into Libya. It's right on the border."
"It can't be a coincidence," said Holliday. He folded the chart again and put it back in the briefcase. He closed and latched the briefcase and put it back exactly where he'd found it. "Let's see if we can find out why our knickknack salesman is going to this As-Sallum," he said.
They left the wheelhouse through the harbor-side door, screening themselves from anyone on the pier. They went forward on the main deck and then carefully down a lower companionway to the foc'sle, listening as they descended. The only sound was the clicking hum of an automatic bilge pump somewhere below and the faint lapping echo of small waves against the hull.
The foc'sle consisted of two small cabins, six pipe berths against the port and starboard bulkheads, a small galley and a zinc-topped mess table with benches bolted to the floor. Dim pan lights dangled above them, throwing shadows everywhere. The ceiling was low, a forest of cables and conduits hanging on metal brackets. The stuffy little area had obviously been in recent use; there were photographs and pinups above the narrow berths and the unmistakable smell of fried onions in the air.
"No one home," said Rafi.
"Let's not stretch our luck," answered Holliday, a nervous edge in his voice. Being belowdecks and blind to possible attack went against all his military experience, not to mention his basic survival instincts. "Five minutes more and then we're out of here."
They made their way aft down a narrow corridor and then stepped through a bulkhead door into a cargo area between the foc'sle and the engine room farther back. The cargo area was stacked with seventy or eighty long wooden crates. The crates were each secured with lead customs seals and stenciled with arcane numbers and letters. The only clue to their contents was a stenciled logo of a rearing horse and the word DIEMACO.
"All of a sudden I'm getting a bad feeling about this," said Holliday.
"What's DIEMACO?" Rafi asked.
"Die Manufacturing Corporation of Canada. They make machine guns."
"Canada?" Rafi asked with a look of surprise.
"Sixth-largest exporter of small arms in the world. Bigger than Israel."
"You're kidding."
"A billion dollars a year. Don't let the maple leaves and maple syrup fool you. The Green Berets can trace their history back to the Devil's Brigade, a Canada-U.S. commando unit. Nobody mentions it much these days, but it was Canadians from the Second Parachute Battalion who trained the Americans, not the other way around."
"One history lesson after another," Rafi said with a grin.
"Let's open one of these up," said Holliday.
There was a short pry bar on a shelf against the portside bulkhead. Holliday used it to twist off the wire customs seal, then slipped it between the crate and its stapled wooden lid. Inside the crate were half a dozen flat, neutral-colored hard cases. Holliday undid the clasps on the top case and opened it.
"Our man's not smuggling stuff out of Egypt-he's smuggling stuff in," said Holliday, peering into the case. Inside, seated in custom-cut foam niches, was an entire weapons system. The weapon was sand-colored with an odd, flat surface texture.
"What is it?" Rafi asked.
"A Timberwolf sniper rifle. Dead accurate at four thousand yards. And I mean 'dead' accurate."
"That's more than two miles."
"That's right," said Holliday flatly.
There were a dozen much smaller cases fitted into the ends of the crates. He took one of the small cases out and dug even deeper, coming up with a dozen or so parcels wrapped in heavy paper. He opened up one of the small cases. Inside was a squat, dead black handgun with a beavertail grip and a snub barrel shorter than his index finger. The entire gun fit into the palm of his hand.
"A Para-Ordnance Nite Hawg," murmured Holliday. "Another Canadian company. Forty-five automatic." He ripped the paper off one of the smaller packages. Boxes of ammunition. He slipped the handgun into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and stuffed half a dozen boxes of ammunition into the left.
"You get caught with a handgun in Egypt and we'll both go to jail for a very long time."
"We get caught by the bad guys without one and we could wind up dead," responded Holliday. He stuffed the empty gun case and the torn paper from the ammunition package back into the wooden crate.
Suddenly there was an echoing metallic clang as the bulkhead door leading aft crashed open. A thin beardless man wearing a grease-stained light blue boiler suit stepped into the cargo hold, frowning and looking as though he'd just awakened from a nap. He blinked, surprised to find two strange men aboard the tug. He said something in a high, almost girlish voice.
"Maa fee shay jadeed?" Holliday couldn't understand a word but the intent of the question was clear: Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my ship? The man reached into the deep front pocket of the boiler suit and tried to pull something out of his pocket. It looked to Holliday like an enormous Webley service revolver that was standard issue for the British Armed Forces from the Boer War onward. As the thin man hauled the heavy pistol up the front sight got hooked on a tear in the pocket and snagged.
Holliday barely hesitated. Heart beating wildly, adrenaline pumping frantically into his bloodstream, he swept up the steel pry bar from the top of the crate, took two steps forward and ripped a vicious curving swipe at the man's head. The hooked end connected with the left temple with a wet crunching sound, stopping him in his tracks. The man shrieked, eyes bulging, and crumpled to the ground, his arm flung out, his hand still gripping the heavy revolver. He didn't move.
Rafi stared down at the man in the boiler suit, horrified.
"Is he dead?"
Holliday bent down and took the Webley, just in case. He felt for a pulse in the man's neck. There was none. There was no visible blood but the side of the man's head looked like a deflated balloon, the bones crushed like a soft-boiled egg.
"Yeah, he's dead," said Holliday with a sigh. He'd seen enough combat to know a corpse when he saw one.
"We've got to go. Now," said Rafi urgently.
"We can't," answered Holliday, shaking his head. "Not yet."
"What are you talking about!?" Rafi asked. "The longer we stay here, the more chance there is of our gift shop guy coming back!"
"That's the point," explained Holliday. "Up to now these people didn't know we were onto them. We leave a dead body lying here it's a whole new ball game."
"What are you saying?"
"We get rid of the body."
It took them almost half an hour and it was an object lesson in the concept of deadweight. They manhandled the limp, dragging corpse up the companionway stairs, arms and legs flopping, head lolling and banging gruesomely up each step. They brought him up on the windward side, the deckhouse shielding them from the pier. Out in the harbor brightly painted fishing trawlers bobbed easily in the shining water like a rustic postcard from the Mediterranean: "Arrived Abu Qir. Hotel not quite five-star, harbor wonderful, wish you could be with us. Love, Alice."
Panting from their exertions, chests heaving, they reached the deck and stopped to catch their breath, the body hidden below the sight line of the gunwales of the old tug. Rafi peered over the side. Thick oily water banged listlessly against the scarred black hull. A rime of harbor muck covered the surface, a mixture of floating garbage, dead fish, plastic, and long dark mats of seaweed.