Death Wave

18

The flight of HH-60H Seahawk helicopters came in low and tight, skimming above the oceans low enough that their rotor wash threw up clouds of spray. There were eight aircraft, each carrying five Navy SEALs, each mounting GAU-17/A miniguns in their open cargo doors, and four carrying AGM-114 Hellfire missiles slung from hardpoints on either side. They came in out of the southwest, out of the late afternoon sun. Before the pirates were even aware of the danger, the Seahawks peeled off, sweeping around the Yakutsk in a counterclockwise circle.

The flight was divided into two platoons, Alfa and Bravo. Alfa was the assault group, Bravo the reserve. With the airspace above and around the Yakutsk suddenly dangerously crowded, Bravo hung back while the four helos of Alfa Group pressed the attack.

Alfa One, the command ship, swung in close, bringing its left side to bear on the cargo ship’s forward deck. A second hovered nearby, offering fire support to the first. The port-side door gunner leaned into his harness as he brought his weapon to bear. He pressed the trigger, and a shrill whine filled the Seahawk’s cargo compartment, the weapon’s six fast-rotating barrels delivering a blistering four thousand rounds per minute onto the target.

The firestorm of 7.62 mm rounds engulfed the step of the Yakutsk’s foremast, slamming off the steel deck and splintering the white-painted wood of the mast itself. Ship crewmen and JeM defenders scrambled for cover as ricocheting bullets and finger-sized splinters sliced through the air.

Firing at a rate of better than sixty rounds every second, the door gunner kept his weapon trained on the base of the mast as more and more chunks splintered away. Abruptly, then, the mast broke free just above the base, jumping and leaning sharply to the right. The gunner shifted aim then, sending the stream of slugs into the port-side attachment point for the foremast’s stays, hammering at the tiny target until wire rope parted and the shackle broke free.

The loose stay whipped and cracked through the air, and the mast, cut loose at its base, began to topple away from the helicopter, falling over the cargo vessel’s starboard side and hitting the water in a cascade of white spray. The gunner had already shifted his aim, targeting a second stay attachment, moving systematically to take out masts and cables that posed hazards to low-approaching helicopters.

On the command helo’s cargo deck, one SEAL leaned over and asked Lieutenant Commander McCauley, “Sir! What happens if we punch a hole in one of those nukes? Game over?”

“Nah,” McCauley replied. “Not unless they’re booby-trapped. But it’ll make a hell of a mess, and I wouldn’t count on having kids afterward.”

“Got one already, sir.”

On the forward deck of the cargo vessel, a Somali pirate emerged from the deckhouse carrying an RPG on his shoulder. Before he could take aim, a minigun burst from Alfa Two literally shredded him from the waist down, splashing an ugly red smear across the steel deck next to the savagely torn torso. The man triggered the RPG as he collapsed, the round striking a stanchion nearby and detonating with a flash.

“We have one Papa down, one Papa down,” came over the SEAL tactical net. For ease of communications, the people on board the Yakutsk were identified as Papas (pirates), as Tangos (terrorists), and as Charlies (crew members). The SEALs would attempt to avoid hitting Charlies, but the Papas and the Tangos were fair game.

The difficulty was in telling them apart in the heat and raw confusion of combat.

On the bridge, high above the deck, a window smashed open on the portside wing, and the flicker of a muzzle flash winked full auto. The SEALs on Alfa One heard a close-spaced pair of loud thumps as rounds struck the Seahawk, but then Alfa Two turned its port-side minigun on the ship’s bridge and sent a stream of rounds smashing through the open window. Glass exploded from the bridge, shards sparkling as it fell in the sunlight.

The ship’s mizzenmast, rising from the deckhouse aft of the ship’s stack, shuddered, then collapsed as Alfa Three hammered at the mast’s step, sending it toppling into the sea alongside the ship. The last of the standing rigging parted with the fall, leaving the Yakutsk dead in the water, a tangle of masts and rigging off its port side.

“Deck approach is now clear,” McCauley called over the tactical channel. “Alfa Three, you are go for deployment.”

“Copy, Alfa One.”

One of the Seahawks circled around the Yakutsk’s port side, turned sharply, and came in across the bow. Hovering above the forward deck, the helicopter hung motionless as a rope curled from the open side hatch and the first Navy SEAL slid down and onto the deck. He was followed by a second man, and a third. The SEALs on deck spread out as soon as they touched down, H&K submachine guns up against their shoulders as they moved. With the last of the five SEALs delivered to the Yakutsk’s deck, Alfa Three moved off, to be replaced by Alfa Four. Within the space of a few seconds, five more SEALs fast-roped to the ship’s deck.

“Alfa Four element, on deck! Moving!”

An armed man — whether Papa or Tango, it was impossible to tell in the battle haze — appeared on a walkway along the side of the bridge house and was immediately cut to bits by a minigun burst from Alfa One. Alfa Two moved aft, drifting into position, then delivering its five-SEAL payload to the Yakutsk’s fantail.

“Alfa Two element, on deck! Moving!”

Alfa One continued to hover alongside the ship, LCDR McCauley directing the attack. At his command over the network, Bravo One moved in then and took up station off the ship’s starboard side, flying shotgun as Alfa One moved in to deliver its five SEALs. TM1 Johnson tossed a coiled line out the open door.

“First up!” McCauley yelled. One by one, then, the SEALs grabbed hold of the line with gloved hands and jumped out into wind-blasted space. McCauley went down last, a dizzying descent through the hurricane blast of the Seahawk’s main rotor, landing on the open area directly above the Yakutsk’s bridge.

He continued to hear radio chatter from the other SEALs as they moved through the ship. “One-three! I’m on the bridge! Two Tangos down, two Charlies down!”

A ladder led down to the port bridge wing, then past the piles of broken glass, a dropped weapon, a torn body in a pool of blood. Inside the bridge proper, the other four SEALs of Alfa One were checking for survivors in cupboards, behind the compass binnacle, inside the tiny head.

“Alfa, Alfa Three-one,” sounded in the radio receiver in McCauley’s ear. Nearby, two of the SEALs in his element kicked open a door leading off the bridge and found two men cowering inside the ship’s radio shack. “Fo’c’sle secure! We have six Charlies, two probable Tangos, tripped and zipped.”

“Copy, Three-one.”

“Alfa One-one, Bravo One-one,” another voice said.

“Alfa One, go,” McCauley replied.

“NEST One and NEST Two are inbound,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Carl Raleigh told him. “ETA five mikes.”

“Copy that,” McCauley replied. He glanced around the ruin of the Yakutsk’s bridge. Holloway and Yancey had dragged the two men out of the radio compartment and forced them onto their bellies and were now zip-stripping their hands behind their backs. Judging by their clothing and pale skins, they were ship’s crew and probably Russians, but in an op like this one you did not take chances. “Objective’s bridge is secure. Two collaterals.”

“Copy bridge secure, Skipper.”

McCauley glanced at his watch. Two minutes, fifteen seconds had passed since the first minigun burst, and he’d been on board the ship for fifty seconds.

Rubens watched the battle unfold on the big screen as the images were relayed from an orbiting Fire Scout UAV to the Lake Erie, then by satellite back to Fort Meade and the Art Room.

“Objective’s bridge is secure,” came through on the speaker in the Art Room’s ceiling. “Two collaterals.”

The minigun fire directed at the bridge must have swept through the compartment like a storm, killing two terrorists and two crew members. Collaterals — collateral damage, meaning civilian casualties — were unavoidable in a fight like this. The SEALs were there to secure the nukes, not rescue the Yakutsk’s crew. There would be apologies to the Russian government later, perhaps reparations as well, but the imperative at the moment was to clear the ship of hostiles. The NESTs — Nuclear Emergency Security Teams — were on the way now. The SEAL assault force did not have much time.

This is the tough part of the job, Rubens thought. Sitting back here in a nice, safe underground fortress playing puppet master, giving orders and watching others carry them out seven thousand miles away.

“So how do you think this is going to go over at the White House, sir?” Telach asked him.

“Not well.”

If there’d been any other way …

“You know we’re behind you, sir. Every one of us.”

Rubens smiled. “I appreciate that.”

But if it came to a sacrifice, to someone needing to put his neck on the chopping block, Rubens would make sure that it was his neck, that no one else would go down with him.

The decision — and the deception — had been his, and his alone.

“Alfa, Alfa Three!” A voice called. “We’re in the Number One Cargo Hold. Two Tangos down, hold secure! Moving to Hold Two!”

As always when it came to Washington politics, success became the best form of validation. If this op off the island of Socotra was a success — if the nukes were found on board and no Islamic militant loony decided to push the button and go straight to paradise in a sun-brilliant flash — the status quo would be maintained. Desk Three would survive, the NSA would survive, even Rubens’ career might survive — though that wasn’t what was important here. Diplomacy would smooth things over with the Russian government, especially since the Russians wouldn’t care to admit that suitcase nukes had been stolen from one of their facilities, then shipped by terrorists on board one of their freighters.

If things went wrong, however — if a terrorist did manage to detonate the nukes rather than see them recaptured, or even if the NESTs got on board and the nukes turned out not to be there — the diplomatic fallout would be damned near as bad in some ways as real fallout might have been, at least in terms of finger-pointing and cover-your-ass recriminations.

Still, Rubens played the cards he was dealt.

The chance to stop an Armageddon-born nightmare was absolutely worth any risk to himself, to the agency, to the men now boarding that ship.

The enemy was getting closer.

Syed Rehman Ashraf crouched in the darkness, listening to the approaching enemy. He wasn’t sure who they were — American Delta Force, SEALs, or Marines; British SAS; Israeli Mossad; even Pakistani Black Storks, their Special Service Group. He knew only that they were deadly, black clad, and silent, shadows descending from the helicopters onto the freighter’s deck who’d proceeded to kill his fellow fighters with a ruthless and implacable efficiency. Interception by a foreign counterterrorist force had always been a possibility in Operation Nar-min-Sama, and the fighters accompanying the weapons had been prepared to sacrifice themselves in the name of Allah.

That was why Ashraf was here in the near darkness.

The weapons had been stored in the ship’s forward hold, carefully hidden in a wooden crate identical to the crates of machine tools around it. The hiding place was sheltered by several empty crates positioned next to a bulkhead; slinging his assault rifle, Ashraf shoved the empty crates aside, then used a knife to pry open the one he was after.

He could hear the distant stuttering thunder of helicopters, punctuated now and again by the high-pitched shriek of their weapons. He’d seen Achmed literally sliced in half by one of those guns, and was still shaking.

The lid peeled back off the crate, and Ashraf began pulling out sheets of plastic packing material. Inside were two trunks, aluminum painted a dull olive drab, with numbers and Cyrillic lettering stenciled on the top and sides. He had to struggle to haul one out and lower it to the deck. It was heavy — at least thirty kilos — and it hit the deck with a thud. He froze for a moment, listening. Had the enemy heard?

Apparently not. He heard footsteps on the steel ladder in the next hold aft. He’d already dogged the watertight door leading into this hold, however, and jammed a length of pipe into the locking wheel to keep it shut.

He used a key on a chain around his neck to open the lock on the trunk.

Ashraf knew nothing about nuclear weapons, save that they were powerful enough to destroy cities, and that Allah had seen fit to allow several of them to come into the possession of the Army of Mohammad. The devices had been intended for use against the hated Jews, but that, unfortunately, was not to be. Rather than have the enemy take the weapons back, he would trigger this one, vaporizing ship, helicopters, and the black-clad attackers in a single, brilliant flash of God’s light …

The HH-60 helicopter off the Lake Erie swung in above the Yakutsk’s forward deck, hovering low above hatch covers and tangled rigging. The ship was dead in the water, but the seas were high enough to give the vessel an uncomfortable pitch up and down beneath the chopper’s keel. “You’re good to go, sir!” one of the helo’s crew shouted. “Good luck!”

Dean held the descent rope in one gloved hand, gauging his chances of breaking an ankle. He’d fast-roped in his physical quals several months back, but that had been off a stable wooden tower in the pine forests of the Farm. The tower hadn’t been drifting on the hurricane blast of its own rotor wash there, and the ground had not been pitching up and down with the rolling sea.

He grinned at Akulinin, gave the Russian a thumbs-up, and stepped backward out of the helicopter as Akulinin tossed him a jaunty salute in reply.

Dean slid rapidly through thirty feet of emptiness and hit the deck with flexing knees, meeting it as it came up with the ocean swell. Rotor wash blasted the ship’s forward deck. As soon as Dean was down, the rope went up and the helicopter moved off, slowly circling. Akulinin would stay with the helo, in reserve as team liaison officer if something happened to Dean.

“I’m on the ship,” Dean said.

“Copy that,” Jeff Rockman said in his ear. “Watch yourself, Charlie.”

“Mr. Dean?” a Navy SEAL said, anonymous in his black balaclava. Dean was dressed the same — balaclava, black utilities, Kevlar vest, and combat harness, with an H&K submachine gun harnessed to his side. “This way.”

He looked around the ship’s forward deck. A small group of men, ship’s crew, most likely, lay facedown, hands zip-stripped at their backs, a watchful and heavily armed SEAL crouched nearby. Several bodies — and pieces of bodies — lay elsewhere, in front of the bridge house and near the wreckage of the foremast. There were no signs of fighting, no indication of any ongoing resistance whatsoever. Several SEALs stood or crouched at key spots, where they could command the vessel’s deck areas.

“Is the ship secure already?”

“We still have some holdouts below, sir. I’d keep my head down if I were you.”

Dean followed, moving aft toward the deckhouse.

In other special ops takedowns carried out on behalf of the Agency’s Deep Black programs, Dean had been in charge, at least technically. In the assault on the hijacked cruise liner Atlantis Queen a few months before, he’d led an NSA Black CAT assault team, parachuting onto the ship’s fantail with the other operatives and leading them against jihadist terrorists holding the ship and its passengers hostage. This time, though, he was definitely a supernumerary, present as Desk Three’s eyes, ears, and voice, but a noncombatant rather than a part of the assault team.

It was comforting to have the H&K nonetheless.

Syed Ashraf heard a bang at the hatch leading to the next hold aft and began working more quickly. It was fussy, complicated work, removing one sixty-centimeter cylinder from the heavy trunk and attaching it to a shorter, lighter cylinder, matching end to end, and screwing the connections tight with a small screwdriver. The only light in the hold came from a couple of small bulbs up high on the overhead and from emergency lighting panels at the bulkheads. It was hard to see what he was doing, almost like working in the dark.

Back at the training camp in northwestern Pakistan, he’d practiced the operation time after time until he could do it blindfolded. His trainers hadn’t told him much about how the assembly worked, but his understanding was that the shorter cylinder was packed with plastic explosives, and when those explosives detonated, they would slam one piece of a heavy gray metal down the length of the longer tube so that it smashed, with a lot of energy, into a second mass of gray metal at the other end. Something about having more than a certain amount of the gray metal all together in one place, he’d been told, would cause the device to explode with far more energy than would be liberated by the relatively small amount of C-4 packed into the shorter cylinder.

For the thing to work properly, the two cylinders had to be screwed tightly together just so. If they weren’t perfectly aligned, he’d been told, the detonation would be much smaller than expected, and might fail altogether.

Ashraf felt an unpleasant queasiness in his stomach, but he continued working.

“Sir!” Marie Telach called. “We’re getting a gamma trace from the ship!”

That sent a cold prickle up Rubens’ spine. It meant that someone on board that ship had opened up one of the suitcase nukes.

“How much?”

She pointed at an indicator on her console. “Not much — but higher than background. The Geiger counter you had them put on board the UAV is picking it up.”

If alpha and beta particles could only be detected at close range, gamma rays penetrated most common substances, and they did so at the speed of light. While gamma rays would have been present on the truck bed and elsewhere during the Operation Haystack search — gamma radiation was released as part of the decay of alpha particles — they would have occurred in very small quantities, so small that they were lost in the overall count of background.

The radiation detector installed on board the circling Navy Fire Scout was getting a count now high enough to suggest that one of the suitcase nukes had been opened on board the Yakutsk, exposing the plutonium-239 inside. Radiation levels weren’t dangerous, by any means, but the fact that the Fire Scout was picking up gamma radiation at a range of over a mile suggested that someone had removed the nuke from its suitcase — almost certainly in order to trigger it.

Led by the Navy SEAL, Dean had just joined Lieutenant Commander McCauley on the Yakutsk’s bridge. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Dean,” McCauley said. Like the other SEALs, he was anonymous in black combat dress and balaclava face mask. “I hope—”

Dean cut the officer off with a sharp wave of the hand as a warning squeal sounded over his comm implant. Someone in the Art Room needed to talk to him right now. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Charlie!” Rubens’ voice replied. “We’re getting a Geiger counter reading from somewhere on board that ship! Best guess … someone’s prepping a charge for detonation!”

“Copy,” Dean replied. His throat was tight, his mouth dry. He looked at McCauley. “They’re picking up radiation Stateside,” he said. “Someone’s getting ready to set off a nuke.”

“Shit. Wait a sec—” McCauley touched fingertips to one ear, listening. Someone was talking to him over the SEAL command net. “The hatch leading to the forward hold has been locked from the other side,” he said. “One guess where our Tango is playing with his new toy.”

“We need to get in there,” Dean said, “by any means you have available!”

McCauley touched a switch on the radio strapped to his shoulder. “Bravo One, Alfa Team Leader. We need door-kickers on the forward deck, and we need ’em now!”

Syed Ashraf completed the final connection, tightening the last screw holding the two major components of the weapon together. Next, he needed to attach the battery, which was in a separate case at the end of the cylinder, threading the bare ends of two copper wires around the battery posts and tightening the connections.

Done.

The trigger was still inside the case, connected to a timer. The detonator planted inside the C-4 charge within the weapon’s base could be set off by any of several means — by sending a radio signal to the trigger from a remote control unit, by activating a small LED display timer, or simply by pressing a button with a direct line of sight to the weapon. Any of those would fire the detonator, which in turn would set off the C-4, and that would slam the two pieces of metal inside the cylinder together, and the world would be illuminated by God’s holy light.

Only one more step remained — and that was to snap two triple-A batteries into the trigger, which looked like a small TV remote. The batteries were included within a small plastic bag; al-Wawi had thought of every contingency. Ashraf popped the back off the trigger’s battery compartment and opened the plastic bag.

The batteries snapped into place, one, two, and he replaced the cover.

Timer set to zero … detonator armed …

All that remained now was to …

“Fire in the hole!”

Dean crouched lower as a SEAL pressed a switch. Yard upon yard of detcord wrapped around the locks, hasps, and flanges of the forward hold deck hatch went off with a piercing bang, followed a split instant later by the heavier blast of multiple charges of C-4 laid around the hatch perimeter. Bits of metal pinged and shrieked off the side of the deckhouse as the hatch was peeled back, lifted bodily into the air, and spun to one side like a misshapen, square-cut Frisbee ten feet across.

The C-4 and detcord — the “door-kickers” requested by McCauley — had been dropped onto the deck moments before from one of the HH-60 helicopters. Several SEALs wired the explosives to the locked forward hatch, an evolution that had taken less than two minutes. McCauley gave the word, and a SEAL fired the charge.

Now Dean and four Navy SEALs rushed forward from where they’d taken cover in front of the deckhouse, playing out black nylon line behind them as they ran. The open hatch yawned in front of him, a smoky haze still blanketing the deck around it as he stepped over the edge and into emptiness.

The ends of their lines were secured to cleats on the deck behind them, and they fast-roped into the hold, a drop of about twenty feet, letting the rope slide through gloved fingers as they descended.

Dean spun dizzyingly at the end of his line …

Ashraf lay sprawled on the deck, stunned and bewildered. The sudden blast, the sudden explosion of sunlight spilling into the hold, had taken him completely by surprise, convincing him just for a moment that something had gone wrong, that the weapon had fired accidentally, before he’d had a chance to press the trigger.

As he looked up, he saw shapes, faceless black shadows, gliding down through the light at the center of the hold. The trigger lay on the deck a meter away; his AK-47 was leaning against a crate beside him. For just an instant, he hesitated …

They were coming down approximately in the middle of the hold; as he spun clockwise at the end of his rope, dropping fast, Dean caught a glimpse of a lone figure lying beside a stack of crates against the hold’s forward bulkhead. He hit the deck, released the rope, and brought his H&K up, snapping off the safety. From the deck, he could no longer see the figure by the crates.

“Wakkif!” Dean yelled, racing forward. “Stop!”

He rounded a stack of wooden crates just as two SEALs above and behind him, still suspended on their ropes halfway down from the open hatch, triggered their H&Ks. A bearded man in a headcloth and fatigues twisted in front of him, trying to bring his AK to bear. The SEALs fired multiple three-round bursts, triggering them so fast they sounded like a full-auto fusillade, slamming the Tango in head and chest, knocking him backward against the bulkhead, blood splattering across steel as he collapsed.

Dean reached him an instant later. “Tango down!” he yelled.

The man was clearly dead, eyes open and glassy. Something like a remote control unit lay on the deck just beyond his reach.

Dean’s gaze flicked from the trigger to the recently assembled weapon to the dead terrorist and back to the trigger. A timer display on the weapon read “000.” The thing might be booby-trapped, set to go off if he pulled the wrong wire … but one thing he could do was scoop up the remote control trigger. The back panel had popped off. He flipped out the two batteries.

The world did not vanish in white light, and Dean let out a sigh of pent-up stress.

Then he glanced inside the crate.

“Art Room,” he said, as two Navy SEALs came up behind him. “One Tango down, weapons secure.”

“Thank God,” Rubens said.

“Don’t thank Him yet,” Dean replied. “We still have a small problem.”

“What problem?”

“I only see two trunks here. Unless they’re hidden someplace else on board, we’re still missing ten suitcase nukes.”