The fury grew inside him, and so too did his senses. He could feel everything now. Several men crowded together inside working feverishly on something — the bomb — getting it ready, excited about the prospect of the death and destruction they were about to rain down on the heads of the innocent.
Not this day. He breathed through gritted teeth. And not any day.
Casey’s small boat bumped up against the huge yacht and she looked up the twenty feet to where the men hung over the edge looking down at her.
“Aren’t you boys a sight for sore eyes!” Casey called coquettishly. “Heroes come to rescue a damsel in distress!” They stared flat-eyed for a moment.
“How’s the fishing?” Casey flashed the men the biggest, flirtiest smile she could muster.
One with jug ears shook his head and then took a thick cigarette from his mouth for a moment. “No fish.”
“Haven’t you got a fish finder?” Casey looked along the length of the boat, trying to see if there were any other inquisitive eyes on her. Satisfied she looked back up at the men.
Jug-ears smirked. “I have a woman finder. And it’s pointing at you.”
“Ooh, I’d love to see it. Is it a big one?” Casey winked.
The two men conferred for a moment, guffawed and then slapped each other’s shoulders, perhaps not believing their luck. They seemed to make a decision then grinned widely down at Casey.
“We drop a ladder.”
“Yay!” Casey clapped her hands and then quickly dropped them, not wanting the men to see the gnarled knuckles and blunt fingers.
As the pair went to find a ladder, Casey hummed softly and pulled on a pair of gloves. These were no ordinary gloves, but HAWC Special Forces issue with armor plating across the knuckles and backs.
To the men it would have looked like she didn’t want to get her hands abraded from the coming ladder climb. She flexed them, smiling as her excitement peaked. Casey had been a HAWC for several years now, and though she wasn’t as tall as the male operatives of her Special Forces unit, she made up for it with a mix of ferociousness and expertise in hand-to-hand combat that made her one of the Arcadian’s first choices as backup on many missions.
“Party time,” she whispered as a ladder unfurled beside her.
Casey went up the rungs quickly, and one of the men reached down to grip one of her upper arms and pulled her over the side.
The man held on tight and frowned. Perhaps expecting to feel soft flesh, but instead finding rock-hard muscle. The jug-eared one got behind her and grabbed at her long hair planning to pull her head back. He would have exposed her throat and had her immediately in a position of submission.
But the long hair came off in his hand, and he stood staring at it for a few confused seconds as if he’d just caught a strange and disgusting species of animal.
Casey started to laugh at their expressions, and imagined the disappointment and surprise at instead of having some sort of lost bimbo woman, the person that stood before them had a white flat top, scarred face and a neck that was corded with veins and swirling with tattoos.
“Ack.” Jug-ears threw the wig to the deck. “This is no woman.” He drew a hunting knife.
The other terrorist, still holding her upper arm, went to spin her around to face him, and Casey went with it, using the momentum to come in fast. She brought the point of her elbow back hard into his eye socket. There was a wet sensation on her skin, and also the satisfying crunch of orbital bone.
Before she let him go, she jerked his arm straight, and then brought the same elbow point down on the back of his elbow, crunching the joint.
“Ouch.” She grinned. “You like that?”
He howled and backed up, one arm hanging useless and the other hand over his eye. Before he was out of range, Casey shot out a roundhouse kick, knocking him over the side to the water.
She turned toward Jug-ears, her face pulled into a smirk. He lunged with the blade, and it shot forward toward her stomach. Casey used a flat strike to deflect the thrust, and then grabbed his wrist and twisted it, hard and fast. She held him, his arm at an odd angle, so she could simply reach down to yank the knife from his hand.
“Should have gone fishing, asshole.”
She wanted to take the blade and bury it into one of his jug ears, but her primary orders were to secure the wheelhouse — and she still had questions for them.
“It’s your lucky day.”
She curled one hand into a fist, and smashed it down on the bridge of his nose. The armor plated HAWC glove was like a house-brick and her arm a pile driver. Jug-ears was smashed to the deck and Casey crouched beside him. She put a hand over his mouth, raised the man’s knife and then slammed it down on his hand, spearing it to the wooden deck.
She ignored the muffled scream, and in Arabic, she whispered through a terrifying smile.
“Listen and live; are there any others like you in the wheelhouse?” She took her hand away from his mouth.
The man looked up, blood running thickly down his chin from his shattered nose. He gritted bloody teeth and began to curse in Arabic.
“I see.”
Casey grabbed his skewed nose and twisted, crunching the already broken cartilage. He began to howl and she clamped her other hand over his mouth.
“Shush, shush, there.” She leaned closer. “Now, you want to try that again?”
She began to twist once more, but he shook his head.
“No one there,” he hissed.
“Good boy.” She stood, looking down. “Hey, you forgot to show me your woman finder.” She chuckled for a second or two, before smashing her armor-plated fist down like a sledgehammer onto the back of his skull.
The base of his head dented inwards, and the man started to convulse.
“Oops.” She shrugged. “Oh well.”
She shoved the body over the side, and then sprinted up the steps to the upper-deck wheelhouse, saw it was empty, and pressed the stud at her ear.
“Wheelhouse is ours.”
After hearing Casey tell him the boat wasn’t going anywhere, stage one was now complete, and Alex placed a hand against the woodwork. He could sense the men inside — six of them — one would be a technician, the other five would be the heavy hitters, men prepared to brutally kill or die in the name of what they believed.
He inhaled slowly through his nose, smelling the faint trace of ozone in the air — he didn’t need a Geiger counter to tell him there was high-grade enriched plutonium and an initiator being assembled behind the door.
Alex knew the components were safe to transport when kept separated. But once they were put together as a single device, the risk of detonation went up exponentially. You only constructed a tactical device when detonation was imminent. That told him the terrorist cell believed they were geographically in place and just about ready.
The other thing he knew was that the amount of leakage he could sense meant the men inside were as good as dead, and they probably couldn’t care less, as the Manhattan would be vaporized anyway. In a way, they would be the lucky ones, as a dirty bomb wasn’t designed to contain the initial uranium collision that triggered the nuclear explosion. Instead it was meant to break apart immediately and disperse its toxic particles.
The impact blast would be a lower intensity, but the high lethality factor came from the rapidly outward-spreading cloud of deadly radioactive material. Once it touched the skin, or was embedded in the respiratory system, then depending on dose, it either killed quickly or slowly and agonizingly over a few weeks. It would even corrupt waterways and the ground soil for generations.