Corsair

ELEVEN

IT TURNED OUT THAT THE HARBOR PILOT ASSIGNED TO TAKE the Oregon into the Port of Tripoli was their contact. He was an affable man of medium height, with thick curly hair just beginning to gray. His eyebrows stretched across his forehead in an unbroken line, and one of his incisors was badly chipped. He worried at the tooth with his tongue whenever he wasn’t talking, which led Juan to think it was a recent break. There was a little bruising at the corner of the man’s mouth to bolster Cabrillo’s assumption.

The man explained that he did what he did because he needed the extra money to take care of his extended family. His brother-in-law had recently lost his construction job in Dubai, so his family had moved into the man’s house. His parents were both alive, blessings to Allah, but they ate him out of house and home. And he had two upcoming weddings to pay for. On top of that, he claimed he made regular contributions to an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins.

All this information had come in the time it took them to walk from the boarding ladder to Juan’s topside cabin.

“You are indeed an honorable man, Mr. Assad,” Juan said with a straight face. He didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected that the proceeds from Assad’s corruption went to maintaining a mistress, and either she or the wife had recently hit him hard enough to crack the tooth.

The pilot waved a dismissive hand, the cigarette clutched between his fingers moving like a meteorite in the dim cabin. The sun was well beyond the horizon, and the Oregon was far enough from the harbor that little light from the city filtered through the salt-rimed porthole. Juan had only turned on the anemic desk lamp. Although he had disguised himself a bit—a dark wig, glasses, and gauze in his cheeks to puff up his face—he didn’t want Assad getting a good look at him, though he knew from experience that men like Assad didn’t want to take a good look anyway.

“We do what we must to get by,” Assad pontificated. He laid a well-used leather briefcase on Cabrillo’s desk and popped the lid. “Our mutual friend in Cyprus said you wished to off-load a truck and needed visas and passport stamps for three men and a woman.” He withdrew a handful of papers as well as a customs stamp. Juan knew the routine and gave him four passports. They had come from Kevin Nixon’s Magic Shop and with the exception of the photographs bore no accurate information about the crew accompanying Cabrillo into the desert.

It took the harbor pilot a few minutes to record names, numbers, and other information before he stamped a fresh page in each of the passports and handed them back.

He then gave Juan some more papers. “Give these to the customs inspectors for your truck. And these”—he pulled out a pair of license plates and set them on the desk—“will make it much easier traveling in my country.”

That saved Cabrillo the hassle of stealing a set from a vehicle in town. “Very thoughtful. Thank you.”

The Libyan smiled. “All business is customer service, yes?”

“True enough,” Juan agreed.

“How good are you at remembering numbers?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Numbers. I want to give you a cell phone number, but I do not want you to write it down.”

“Oh. Fine. Go ahead.”

Assad rattled off a string of digits. “Give the person who answers a number where you can be reached, and I will call it within the hour.” Assad chuckled. “Provided I am not with my wife, eh?”

Juan smiled dutifully at the joke. “I’m sure we won’t need your services, but, again, thank you.”

Assad’s bonhomie suddenly faded and his eyes narrowed under his unibrow. “I don’t see how three men and a woman in a truck can be any great danger to my country, but if I become suspicious about anything I hear in the news I will not hesitate to contact the authorities. I have ways that keep me out of it, understand?”

Juan wasn’t angry at the warning. He’d been expecting it and had heard it from dozens of such men over the years. Some might actually have had the juice to back it up. Assad could be one of them. He had that look. And Juan knew that next on the agenda, if Assad held true to form, would be a little fishing expedition.

“The American government must be very upset about the death of their Secretary of State,” Assad remarked.

How Juan loved a cliché. “I’m sure they are. But, as you saw from my passport, I am a Canadian citizen. I have no control over what happens with our neighbor to the south.”

“Still, they must be anxious to locate the wreckage.”

“I’m sure they are.” Cabrillo was as stone-faced as a professional poker player.

“Where exactly are you from?” Assad asked suddenly.

“Saint John’s.”

“That is in Nova Scotia.”

“Newfoundland.”

“Ah, part of the Gaspe.”

“It’s an island.”

Assad nodded. Test administered and passed. Perhaps the captain really was Canadian.

“Maybe your government is willing to help their southern friends in this matter,” he probed.

Juan understood that Assad needed reassuring they were here about the plane crash and not something else. It was the only logical assumption Assad could make, given the timing of their arrival, and the Chairman saw no reason not to give the Libyan some peace of mind. “I am sure they would be more than willing to lend any assistance they could.”

Assad’s smile returned. “Foreign Minister Ghami was on television last night, calling for people with information about the crash to come forward immediately. It is in everyone’s best interest the plane be found, yes?”

“I guess so,” Juan replied. He was growing tired of Assad’s questions. He opened a desk drawer. Assad leaned forward as Cabrillo pulled out a bulging envelope. “I think this takes care of our transaction.”

He handed it across. Assad stuffed it into his briefcase without opening it. “Our mutual friend in Cyprus told me that you are an honorable man. I will take his word and not count the money.”

It took all of Juan’s self-control not to smirk. He knew full well that before Assad brought the Oregon into its berth, he would have counted the cash at least twice. “You said earlier that business is all about customer service. I will add, it’s also about reputation.”

“Too true.” Both men got to their feet and shook hands. “Now, Captain, if you will kindly lead me to your bridge I will not delay you further.”

“My pleasure.”

CABRILLO HAD ALWAYS HELD the belief that organized crime had begun on the docks and quaysides of the ancient Phoenician seafarers when a couple of stevedores pilfered an amphora of wine. He imagined they had given a cup or two to the guards for looking the other way, and he also thought that someone saw them and extorted them to steal more. In that one simple act were the three things necessary for a crime racket—thieves, corrupt guards, and a boss demanding tribute. And the only thing that had changed in the thousands of years since was the scale of the theft. Ports were worlds unto themselves, and no matter how authoritarian the local rule they maintained levels of autonomy that only the corrupt could fully exploit.

He had seen it over and over in his years at sea, and had used the ingrained corruption of harbors as an entrée into the criminal underground in several cities during his tenure with the CIA. With so many goods entering and leaving, harbors were ripe for the picking. It was little wonder the Mafia was so heavily invested with the Teamsters Union back in its heyday.

Containerization of general cargo had temporarily quelled petty thievery because the goods were locked up in bonded boxes. But soon the bosses figured they might as well just steal entire containers.

Juan was standing on the wing bridge, overlooking the dock, with Max Hanley at his side. Fragrant smoke curled from Max’s pipe and helped mask the smell of bunker fuel and rotting fish that permeated the port. Across from their berth, a mobile crane on crawler treads was swinging a container from a coastal freighter. There were no lights on the crane, and the overhead gantry lamps were shut off. The tractor trailer waiting to take the load didn’t even have its headlights on. Only a single flashlight carried by a crewman standing near the container gave the scene any illumination. Mr. Assad had gone straight from the Oregon to oversee the unloading. Cabrillo could just make out his silhouette, standing with the ship’s captain, on the dock. It was too dark to see the envelope exchange, but Eric had reported the act after watching with the Oregon’s low-light camera.

“Looks like L’Enfant knows his men,” Max said. “Our Mr. Asssad is a busy boy.”

“What was it Claude Rains said in Casablanca, ‘I am only a poor corrupt official’?”

Cabrillo’s walkie-talkie squawked. “Chairman, we have the hatch cover off. We’re ready.”

“Roger that, Eddie. Assad said we can use our own crane to unload the Pig, so get it fired up and ready.”

“You got it.”

Like the mysterious ship tied to the opposite dock, the Oregon was completely dark. On the other side of the harbor, tall cranes mounted on rails were off-loading a massive containership under the brutal glare of sodium-vapor lights. Beyond it stretched a field of stacked containers, and past that was a security fence and a series of warehouses and towering oil-storage tanks.

One of the Oregon’s only working deck cranes started swinging across the horizon, cable paying off the crane’s drum as the crane’s arm was positioned over the open hatch. The braided-steel cable vanished into the hold for five minutes before being drawn back up through the tackle. The boom took the weight easily.

Although he couldn’t see details in the darkness, Juan recognized the shape of the Pig. The Powered Investigator Ground was Max’s brainchild. From the outside, the Pig looked like a nondescript cargo truck emblazoned with the logo of a fictitious oil-exploration company, but under its rough exterior was a Mercedes Unimog chassis, the only unmodified part on the vehicle. Its turbodiesel engine had been bored, stroked, and tuned to produce nearly eight hundred horsepower, and, with a nitrous oxide boost, could push past a thousand. The heavily lugged, self-sealing tires were on an articulating suspension that could raise the vehicle up and give it almost two feet of ground clearance, six inches more than the Army’s storied Humvee. The four-person cab squatting over the front tires was armored enough to take rifle fire at point-blank range. The boxy body was similarly protected.

When Eric and Mark first heard Max’s plans for the Pig, they had called him Q, in honor of the armorer from the James Bond franchise. A .30 caliber machine gun was hidden beneath the front bumper. It was also fitted with guided rockets that launched from hidden racks that swung down from the truck’s side, and a smoke generator could lay down a dense screen in its wake. From a seamless hatch on the roof, the Pig could fire mortar barrages, and could be mounted with another .30 cal or an automatic grenade launcher as well. The cargo area could be reconfigured to meet mission parameters—anything from a mobile surgical suite to a covert radar station to a troop carrier for ten fully kitted soldiers.

And yet, other than the larger than normal tires, not one aspect of the Pig gave away her true nature. She was the land-based version of the Oregon herself. If an inspector opened the rear doors, he would be confronted with the curved sides of six fifty-five-gallon drums stacked floor to ceiling. And if the inspector were really curious, the first row could be removed to reveal a second. The first ones were actually spare fuel tanks that gave the Pig an eight-hundred-mile range. The second row was a façade to shield the interior of the truck, so they played the odds that no one would ever ask to remove it.

“Well, Max old boy, I guess we get to see if this contraption of yours was worth the effort.”

“Ye of little faith,” Max replied dourly.

Cabrillo turned serious. “You’re set on what to do?”

“As soon as you get clear of Tripoli, I’m leaving the harbor and steaming west. We’ll take up a position in international waters due north of the crash site, with the chopper on ten-minute alert.”

“I know you’ll be at the helo’s maximum range, but it’s good to have a little insurance just in case. If things go as planned, you shadow us offshore when we make our escape into Tunisia.”

“And if things don’t go as planned?”

Juan gave him a look of mock horror. “When was the last time things didn’t go as expected?”

“A couple days ago in Somalia, a few months ago in Greece, last year in the Congo, before that in—”

“Yeah, yeah yeah . . .”

A burst of static erupted from the speaker in the wheelhouse. Juan strode in, plucked the microphone off the wall, and said, “Cabrillo.”

“Chairman, the Pig’s on the dock and we’re good to go. Latest intel puts the Libyan search-and-rescue a good three hundred miles from the crash site.”

“Okay, Linda, thanks. I’ll meet you at the gangway in five.” He went back out onto the flying bridge.

Max tapped his pipe against the rail, unleashing a shower of sparks that tumbled down the side of the ship and winked out one by one. “See you in a couple of days.”

“You got it.” Rarely would they wish each other luck before a mission.

JUAN DROVE, WITH MARK MURPHY riding shotgun and Linda Ross and Franklin Lincoln occupying the rear bench seat. All four wore khaki jumpsuits, the ubiquitous uniform of oil workers all over North Africa and the Middle East. Linda had trimmed her hair and tucked it under a baseball cap. With her slender build, she could easily pass for a young man on his first overseas job.

It was still dark by the time the lights of Tripoli faded in the rear-view mirror. Traffic on the coast road was nearly nonexistent, and after an hour they had yet to come upon any roadblocks. A police cruiser had slashed by, its dome lights flashing and its siren keening, but it passed the truck without incident and vanished into the distance.

Cabrillo was confident in their fake papers, but he preferred to remain anonymous as long as possible. He wasn’t as worried about a legitimate stop by the authorities. What concerned him were corrupt cops setting up roadblocks to shake down motorists. He had cash on hand for such a situation; however, he knew things could spiral out of control quickly.

Mark had keyed in way points on the Pig’s integrated navigation system to get them to the downed airliner, and it was just their luck that there was a roadblock less than a hundred feet from where they were supposed to leave the highway and begin their trek into the desert. Two police cars were parked so that they cut the two-lane road down to one. A cop wearing a reflective vest was leaning into a car headed in the opposite direction, his flashlight bathing the interior of the sedan. Juan could make out two more men in one of the cars. He suspected there was a fourth keeping himself out of view.

As he slowed, Juan asked, “Murph, can we pass through and turn farther down the road?”

The young weapons expert shook his head. “I mapped our route exactly from the satellite pictures. If we don’t turn here, we come up against some pretty steep cliffs. You can’t see it in the darkness, but there’s a switchback trail just to our left that will get us to the top.”

“So it’s here or never, eh?”

“ ’ Fraid so.”

Cabrillo braked the big truck far enough from the makeshift roadblock so the car could pass him once the cops were satisfied. In a concealed pocket to the right of his seat he could feel the butt of his preferred handgun, the Fabrique Nationale (FN) Five-seveN. The military-grade SS190 rounds had unbelievable penetrating power, and, because of their small size, twenty could be loaded into a comfortable grip magazine. He left it for the moment.

At this distance, Juan could see it was a family in the car. The wife’s head was covered in a scarf, so her face was a pale oval in the flashlight’s glow. She held a baby over her shoulder and was bouncing it gently. He could hear its crying over the wind. A second child was standing in the backseat. Though he couldn’t understand the words, he could hear the tension in the voices as the father argued with the cop.

“Is this stop legit or a case of mordida?” Linc asked, using the Spanish word for bite and the Mexican euphemism for bribery.

Juan was opening his mouth to reply when suddenly the cop pulled back from the open car window and yanked a pistol from his holster. The woman’s startled scream echoed across the night, pitched even higher than the infant wailing in her lap. The husband in the driver’s seat threw up his hands in supplication.

Car doors were flung open as the other two police officers jumped from their vehicles, both going for the automatics on their hips. One strode toward the passenger’s side of the sedan while the other raced toward Cabrillo and his team, his pistol leveled at the cab.

Juan’s wary apprehension turned into instant fury because he knew they were going to be too late.

Mark Murphy yanked open the glove compartment and a tray automatically slid out and opened to reveal a flat-panel display and a keyboard with a small joystick. As he fumbled to activate the forward-mounted machine gun, the cop who had been leaning into the car fired.

The hapless driver’s head exploded in a red spray that coated the inside of the windshield with blood and gore. It obscured Cabrillo’s view of the gunman firing twice more. The woman and her baby’s cries were cut off mid-keen. A fourth shot, and Juan was certain the kid in the backseat was dead in what he now knew was a shake-down gone bad.

Instinct took over. Cabrillo jammed the transmission into gear and hit the pedal. Acceleration wasn’t the Pig’s strong suit, but it lurched from a standstill like a snarling animal. The cop running for them stopped and opened fire. His bullets gouged harmless craters into the safety glass or ricocheted off the truck’s armored plate.

“Got it,” Mark yelled.

Juan glanced over for a second. The video screen showed a camera mounted beneath the secreted machine gun that gave Mark an aiming reference. The gun had lowered itself so the barrel peeked from under the bumper.

“Do it!” Juan snapped.

Mark keyed the weapon, and a juddering vibration rattled the truck while a plume of fire erupted under the cab. Bullets tore into the road in a line aimed straight for the nearest gunman. The corrupt cop turned to run to his left but made his move too early. He gave Murph ample time to adjust his aim. The rounds took the cop in the calf, and then walked up his body, punching holes into him at a rate of four hundred rounds a minute. The kinetic force drove him to the asphalt and rolled him once so he lay faceup. His torso looked as if he’d been mauled by a lion.

The cop who had gunned down the family lunged for his car while the third retreated back to his. Mark lifted the trigger as soon as the first one was down and swiveled the barrel to take on the third killer. Rounds pummeled the car, blowing out its windshield and side windows and shredding the bodywork. Both tires deflated, and the vehicle settled closer to the road. The gunman found temporary cover behind the partially closed door but must have understood his position was untenable. He scrambled across the seat, threw open the far door, and fell to the ground on the opposite side of his cruiser. He hunkered behind the front tire and kept low as autofire raked the vehicle.

For the moment, he was neutralized, so Juan cranked the wheel over and steered for the other car. The triggerman was halfway into his seat when the Pig’s powerful halogen lights swept across the car and then centered on him. He raised his pistol and fired as fast as the gun would allow. His rounds had no more effect than his partner’s on the truck bearing down on him.

Cabrillo felt nothing but cold rage as he drove straight for the murderer.

“Brace yourselves,” he said needlessly an instant before the Pig barreled into the cruiser.

There was a terrific crunch of metal as the door slammed into the gunman’s body, cutting off one leg at the ankle, one arm at the wrist, and his head. The impact skidded the police cruiser until its tires hooked on the macadam and the car flipped on its roof.

“First car! First car!” Linda cried from the backseat.

Juan looked over to see the driver was reaching into the cruiser. No doubt going for his radio, he thought. He had no time to turn the ponderous truck to line up the .30 caliber, so he pulled the FN Five-seveN from its hiding place and tossed it back to Linda. She caught it one-handed while the other hand was cranking down her bulletproof window.

She thumbed off the safety and opened fire as soon as she had the room to stick the gun out the window. Linc reached over to keep cranking it down to give her a better field of fire.

Linda’s angle was all wrong to hit the gunman, so as the window lowered she thrust her upper body out of the truck, bracing herself by gripping the big side mirror with her left hand. She then fired. She was cycling the trigger so fast the distinctive whip-crack of the Five-seveN sounded like a string of firecrackers.

Cabrillo was about to caution Linda that he suspected there was a fourth shooter manning the checkpoint when the crooked cop emerged from behind a dune near the shoulder of the road and opened up with a machine pistol. The weapon was woefully inaccurate at this range, and at five hundred rounds a minute it took only four seconds to unload its long magazine. Rounds whipped around the Pig, flying off when they struck the armor and starring the glass when they hit the windshield. One round flew through the open window over Linda’s hunched backside and struck the doorframe an inch from Linc’s head. The impact gouged a sliver of metal off the frame that sliced into the ex-SEAL’s neck. Had the angle been just a few tenths of a degree different, the shrapnel would have sliced his jugular.

Pressing one hand to his bleeding neck, Linc had the wherewithal to grab Linda’s ankles when Juan spun the wheel to put the armored side of the Pig between them and the shooter. He barely kept her from tumbling to the road.

“You’re hit,” she said when she saw the blood oozing through his fingers.

“I’ve cut myself worse shaving in the morning,” Linc deadpanned. However, he didn’t demur when Linda unclipped a first-aid kit stored under her side of the bench seat.

Cabrillo had spun the Pig in a tight turn to line up the underslung .30 caliber for another go. Linda’s actions had bought them the few seconds they had needed. Her cover fire had pinned the gunman behind the cruiser once again, and only now was he reaching back in to work the radio.

Mark opened fire as soon as he had a shot. He wasn’t aiming for the driver’s compartment. The shooter was too well protected. Instead, Mark riddled the rear of the vehicle until gasoline gushed from the perforated tank. Because every seventh round was a magnesium-tipped tracer, it took only a second-long burst to ignite the growing lake. Flame blossomed from under the car in a concussive whoosh that was strong enough to lift the car’s rear end off the asphalt. The Libyan started running for the desert but wasn’t fast enough.

The mixture of fuel and air in the tank exploded spectacularly, flipping the car into the air, its undercarriage burning like a meteor as it cartwheeled. It crashed into the dirt a few feet from the fleeing gunman and kicked up a flaming spray of dust that engulfed the man. When it cleared, his clothes were burning, flaring like a torch. He dropped to the ground, trying to smother the flames, but he was soaked in gasoline and the fire refused to die.

Murph sent another burst from the machine gun into him. It was a mercy shot.

“Where’s the last guy?” Juan shouted.

“I think he took off into the desert,” Linc said. Linda had a gauze pad taped to his neck and was cleaning the blood from her hands.

Cabrillo cursed.

It was only a matter of time before another vehicle came along. But he had no choice. They couldn’t afford to leave any witnesses behind. He heaved the wheel over and left the road.

The Pig’s rugged suspension handled the soft sand with ease, and soon they were barreling along at forty miles per hour. The gunman’s tracks were clearly visible in the beam of the halogen lamps, widely spaced divots that told him their guy was running with everything he had.

It took only another minute to spot the corrupt police officer sprinting like a startled hare. Even with the big truck bearing down on him, he made no effort to surrender. He just kept running. Juan brought the Pig up right on his heels so he would feel the engine heat burning into his back.

“What are we going to do with him?” Mark asked. There was genuine concern in his voice.

Juan didn’t answer for a second. He’d seen and caused death in a hundred forms but hated killing in cold blood. He’d done it before, more times than he cared to think about, but he knew every time he did he lost a little more of his soul. He wished the Libyan would turn and fire at them, but Juan could see the man had abandoned his weapon back at the checkpoint. The smart thing would be to run him over and be done with it.

Cabrillo’s ankle flexed to gun the engine and then relaxed again. There had to be another way. The gunman suddenly tried to dodge out of the way of the Pig. He lost his footing in the soft sand and went down. Juan slammed the brakes and turned the wheel sharply, skidding the truck in a desperate bid to avoid running the guy over. All four of them in the cab felt the impact.

Before the Pig had settled on its suspension, Juan had his door open and was jumping to the ground. He bent over the body. A quick glance told him everything he needed to know. He climbed back into the truck, his mouth a tight, fixed line.

Cabrillo focused his mind on the image of the man firing at the Pig, of Linda hanging out the window, of the flesh wound in Linc’s neck, but nothing he knew would make him feel better about what had just happened. When they regained the road, he drove for the civilian vehicle. The one police cruiser was still burning.

Juan took back his pistol from Linda, rammed home a fresh magazine, and racked the slide. He jumped down from the cab, keeping the weapon pointed in a two-handed combat grip, swinging from one mangled police car to the next. He reached into the first one and yanked the radio microphone from its attachment point and tossed it into the desert, in case a Good Samaritan came along and wanted to call the authorities. The second would be a melted puddle of plastic, so he ignored it.

He approached the family sedan, taking a deep breath as he leaned in the window. The smell of blood was a coppery film that coated the back of his throat. The husband and wife, as well as their two children, were dead. The only solace he could find was the bullet wounds had been instantly fatal. That did nothing to lessen his anger at the senseless slaughter. He noticed a slim wallet sitting on the father’s lap. Ignoring the blood splatter, he grabbed it. The driver’s name was Abdul Mohammad. He had lived in Tripoli, and, according to his ID card, had been a high school teacher. Also in the wallet Juan found just a couple of dinar.

He didn’t feel so bad about running down the fourth gunman.

The young family had died because they were too poor to pay a bribe.