Specter

11

Roselli was twenty meters from the Glaros when he heard the thunder of a big boat's engines, heard the sharp, barking rattle of automatic weapons fire. Bobbing in the water, he wiped his eyes with his hand, trying to clear them. The guard aboard the target boat had picked up what looked from here like an AKM assault rifle, run up to the craft's sun deck, and begun firing into the night. Roselli dove, expecting to hear the snapping impacts of bullets in the water around him… but when all he heard was the rapidly swelling throb of a boat's engines, he surfaced again.

Katris was aiming the AKM at something farther out in the harbor. Turning in the water, Roselli saw the target… a Dilos-class patrol boat bearing down on the anchorage, its bow rising above the white mustache of its bow wave. A searchlight glared from high up on its superstructure, and Roselli looked away to keep from being blinded.

A Dilos. He'd studied the different ship classes on the Greek Navy lists during the flight from the Nassau to the Jefferson. The Dilos class was a motor patrol craft twenty-nine meters long and displacing seventy-five tons. Armament would be a couple of 20mm machine guns, her top speed about twenty-seven knots. If the Glaros was able to get under way, the pleasure craft would outrun the larger boat easily, especially within this crowded anchorage where maneuverability was as definite a plus as speed.

Jaybird bobbed in the water a few meters to Roselli's left. Which direction… forward or back? The occupants of the Glaros were thoroughly alerted now, and getting onto her deck was not going to be easy. Roselli could see movement on her flying bridge now. Somebody must have emerged from the cabin and be working to get the boat moving.

The Greek patrol boat's engine throttled back, and the piercing ululation of a siren blanketed the harbor. Katris stooped swiftly, tugged at the mooring line which was looped over a cleat on the deck, and tossed it over the side. Glaros was drifting free now.

The guard stood upright again, raising the assault rifle to his shoulder for another burst. The patrol boat was not firing… a good decision, Roselli thought, since the city of Salonika lay directly behind the target. God, what shit-for-brains space cadet had engineered the tactics of this search and seizure?

Then, Katris's head literally exploded in a bloody spray of tissue, blood, and bone. The body went up on its toes, then toppled backward onto Glaros's sun deck, blood fountaining across the forward cabin windows. One of the Delta guys on the White Tower had just reached out and touched someone with that big Haskins rifle. In the same moment, the Glaros's engines coughed, then gunned to life.

Raising his hand from the water, Roselli caught Jaybird's attention with a wave, then vigorously pumped his fist up and down. Jaybird nodded, and the two SEALs plunged beneath the surface, swimming hard toward the thirty-foot boat. In the underwater blackness, the Glaros's engines sounded deafeningly close. Kicking with powerful, scissoring strokes, Roselli swam until he sensed more than saw the hull of the boat just above his head. Moving by touch, he freed the tightly wrapped hank of nylon line that he wore on his belt, tugging the knot loose that held it together, then letting the line unfold.

The thunder of the Glaros's engines pounded through the hull. With a heavy thump-chunk, the boat's pilot put the craft into gear, and the twin screws, motionless until that moment, churned to life. The boat began to move, and the pressure of its passing pummeled Roselli's body.

Turbulence from the spinning screws clawed at him, but he twisted to face them, moving his arm in an arc to spread the tangle of nylon line in front of him like a net. The deadly slice of the screws bore down on him fast; jackknifing, he brought his feet up and kicked, hard, shoving off from the keel of the moving boat. Its bow wave gave him added thrust, pushing him deeper into the water. The prop wash caught him and twisted him violently, but he kept kicking, swimming as hard as he could to get under and behind the churning of Glaros's propellers. With the violent exertion, his body was demanding air, his chest aching, his heart hammering.

Then the thunder of the engines, the pounding of the screws, suddenly took on a new sound, a sharply rising whine of protest ending in a loud clunk. One of the screws was still turning, but the other had stopped, its shaft fouled by Roselli's line. Rising through the blackness, Roselli broke the surface five meters astern of the boat, mouth open, gulping down a full draught of cold, wonderful air.

Glaros was still moving but circling hard to the left, the Zodiac raft tied to her stern wallowing along in her wake. Beyond, the Greek patrol boat was looming closer, perhaps a hundred meters off, the dazzle of its searchlight bathing the motor yacht in a brilliant, blue-white glare. By the light, Roselli could see a man wearing white boxer shorts leaning over Glaros's transom, a boat hook in his hands as he tried to poke and probe at the fouled starboard screw. Behind him was a dark-haired woman, bare-breasted, screaming in shrill terror. Smoke from the boat's exhaust boiled off the surface of the water. Suddenly, Glaros's second engine whined, shrieked, then ground to a thump and silence, and the yacht went dead in the water. Jaybird surfaced a few meters away, close alongside the Zodiac, gasping for air.

The man with the boat hook shouted something in Greek, and Roselli hoped he wasn't calling for a gun. No… apparently the guy hadn't seen the swimmers yet. He was still trying to reach the screws with the hook, assuming, perhaps, that they'd been fouled by weed or by garbage floating in the harbor, and yelling at his partner up on the boat's flying bridge. He shouted again and Glaros's engines whined, but failed to kick over.

Jackknifing once again, Roselli dove, swimming quickly toward the stern of the boat, passing beneath the Zodiac, then surfacing explosively within touching distance of the transom, looking straight up into the startled face of the man with the boat hook. Rising like a rocket out of the water, Roselli stretched out both arms, grabbed the shaft of the boat hook, and yanked hard. The man, caught off balance and completely by surprise, gave a loud wail as he soared headfirst off the stern of the Glaros and splashed into the sea.

Roselli's movement carried him up, then back under water. Kicking back to the surface, he launched himself toward Glaros's fantail, grabbing the top of the transom and boosting himself up… then muscling himself up and over the top in an untidy somersault. He landed with a loud, wet thump in the boat's after well deck at the feet of the screaming woman.

"Easy! Easy!" Roselli yelled, holding up a hand, wondering if she understood English, but the woman kept screaming, her hands holding her head, her breasts dancing and bobbing wildly as she jumped up and down. Roselli was less interested at the moment in her movements, though, than he was in her safety. Snapping out with one foot and rolling to the side, he swept the girl's long, bare legs out from under her, spilling her to the deck with a startled bump. His boarding technique had been less than stealthy, and he didn't want innocent bystanders hit if the guy up on Glaros's bridge decided to start shooting.

He unknotted the heavy cloth bag still dangling from his makeshift belt. Inside was one of the Smith & Wesson automatics, which he dragged out as he came to his feet. Clicking off the safety, he braced the pistol in both hands, aiming it up the well deck ladder toward the flying bridge, where the boat's pilot was still trying to get the engines started again. "Stamatiste!" he shouted, using his sole word of Greek. Papagos had coached him on it an hour ago. "Stamatiste! Stop!"

Taking the first three rungs of the ladder, Roselli moved halfway up to the flying bridge level, until he could see the entire deck. A man in trousers and an unbuttoned sports shirt stood at the control console, his hair in wild disarray, a .45-caliber Colt automatic clutched in one hand.

"Stama-fucking-tiste, you son of a bitch!"

The man turned and stared into the muzzle of Roselli's Smith & Wesson, and some of the wildness seemed to go out of him. He slumped into the pilot's seat, the Colt spilling from his hand and clattering onto the deck. He raised his hands as Roselli climbed up the rest of the way onto the bridge. Kicking the .45 away, he grabbed the man's collar and forced him facedown onto the deck. Standard takedown. Roselli kicked his legs apart, jammed one foot against his crotch, then kneeled on the guy's buttocks, using his left hand to check for other weapons beneath his shirt.

Where was Jaybird? Roselli didn't see him, but he did hear a frantic splashing and stole a glance aft. The woman, evidently, had recovered enough to make one rational decision, at least, and was swimming toward the promenade in a thrashing flurry of legs and arms. "Wonder what the indecent exposure laws are like in this town," he wondered half aloud. His prisoner rasped something in Greek, and Roselli roughly shoved the muzzle of his pistol against the base of his head to quiet him. Seconds later, the patrol boat, engines throttling back, rumbled slowly up to the Glaros, starboard side to, the searchlight sweeping the yacht from bow to stern. Squinting past the glare, Roselli could see a dozen armed men standing along her rail. A loud-hailer voice boomed something at him in Greek, and with a sharp chill Roselli realized that, so far as those guys were concerned, he was an armed man aboard a hostile craft.

"American!" he yelled as loud as he could. "U.S. Navy!"

"Put down the gun, Mr. Roselli," the loud-hailer voice barked in accented English.

Sailors on the Greek vessel were reaching down with boat hooks to grab Glaros's rail and pull her up alongside. Roselli felt the deck shudder, heard the creak and scrape of the yacht as it bumped across the long, dirty white fenders hanging down the patrol boat's side.

"Roselli!" the voice called again. "Put down your gun or we fire!"

Shit! These guys were supposed to be on his side!

Carefully, ostentatiously, he placed his pistol on the bridge control console, then raised his hands and clasped them behind his head. He stayed on top of his prisoner, however, digging in with his knee to convince the man that it would be wiser not to move. "Don't even think about it, pal," he said, wondering if the man understood English at all.

Greek soldiers in camouflage uniforms began leaping aboard the Glaros, as sailors used boat hooks to draw the two vessels together. In a moment, both Roselli and his prisoner were being herded back down to the well deck at gunpoint.

The woman who'd dived overboard was gone. Some of the soldiers started searching the Glaros, and in moments he heard a piercing shriek from inside the cabin. Seconds later, the laughing soldiers emerged, pulling along a girl — she couldn't have been more than eighteen — wearing nothing but long blond hair and a terrified expression. There was no sign of Sterling, however, or of the man Roselli had tossed over the side. As soldiers roughly handcuffed his wrists behind his back, Roselli grinned.

The Zodiac that had been tied up astern of the Glaros was gone, its mooring line snicked clean through by a SEAL diving knife.

Murdock stood on the promenade below the White Tower, watching as the Greek patrol boat edged closer to the promenade waterfront. Solomos stood beside him, scowling, while Brown and Papagos leaned against the tower wall, under guard.

"Lieutenant," Solomos said quietly, "I am going to take great personal pride in seeing you broken. You have exceeded your authority, abused my hospitality, and threatened the success of my operation here."

Murdock said nothing. There would be no reasoning with Solomos, not now. The man's pride had been injured, and this was a nation that took pride very seriously indeed.

Politics. Shit!

Every so often, the SEALs were forced to operate in a political environment, something quite different from the sea, air, and land elements which they'd been trained to deal with. Getting SEALs to behave diplomatically, or to follow the rules, or to avoid stepping on toes, was difficult to say the least. Sometimes it was even dangerous.

In October of 1985, members of SEAL Team Six and the Army's Delta Force had been deployed to Sicily in order to carry out an assault on the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which had been commandeered in the eastern Med by four terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Front. A joint plan had been conceived between the assault force and a team of Italian commandos who were also participating. The SEALS would board the cruise ship and take down the terrorists, then allow the Italian team to come in and take the credit, a ploy that had been used several times already by both the SEALs and Delta to keep those units out of the spotlight of media attention.

Before the operation went down, however, the terrorists had surrendered after being promised safe passage by Egypt. Only after the terrorists had gone ashore at Port Said was it learned that they'd murdered one of the passengers, an elderly American confined to a wheelchair, and thrown his body overboard. Despite American protests, the Egyptians allowed the terrorists — together with several PLO negotiators and Abu Abbas, the terrorists' leader who was posing as a negotiator, and four members of Egypt's Force 777 counterterror unit — to board an airliner for a flight to the PLO's international headquarters in Tunisia.

In a swift and determined series of maneuvers, planned and coordinated by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North at the White House, four F-14 Tomcats off the American carrier U.S.S. Saratoga intercepted the Egyptian airliner and forced it to land at a NATO military airfield at Sigonelia, Sicily, where the SEALs were waiting for them. Moving fast, the SEALs had surrounded the aircraft on the runway, prepared to fight with the terrorists if necessary.

Then a political complication had arisen, Italian carabinieri had appeared, surrounding the SEALs and ordering them to stand down. The Italians were outraged that the Americans had taken military action on their territory; for their part, the SEALs thought that the Italians — who'd caved in to terrorist threats in the past and not always carried through with what they'd promised to do — would let the hijackers escape.

A tense standoff ensued for nearly an hour, with the Italians demanding the release of the airliner's occupants, the SEALs refusing. A radio conversation on a tactical channel overheard by several officials at the scene added a new note of tension. Two SEALs were quietly discussing whether or not to take out the Italians, and how best to go about it. Only when the American Secretary of State received assurances from Rome that the terrorists would be tried for murder did the SEALs — somewhat reluctantly — stand aside and let the carabinieri take charge of the prisoners. Even at that, the SEALs didn't give up the chase entirely. When the terrorists were flown to Rome, two of the SEALs followed close behind in a small plane, claiming engine trouble to enable them to land behind the other plane and maintain surveillance of the carabinieri and their prisoners.

Eventually, the terrorists were tried, though Abu Abbas — the mastermind of the original hijacking operation — had been allowed to walk away by Italian authorities almost as soon as he landed. The murderers received sentences of from fifteen to thirty years; Abu Abbas and two fellow plotters were sentenced to life in prison in absentia… not that anyone expected that they would ever be brought to justice.

SEALs and international politics, Murdock reflected, simply did not mix.

The patrol boat Lindow was secured by lines passed down and slung over bollards rising from the pavement, and a gangplank was dropped over the side. A moment later, a line of six Greek soldiers came filing ashore, along with Roselli, one male prisoner, and a young woman wearing a sailor's dungaree shirt several sizes too large for her. All three were handcuffed with their hands behind their backs, and each was guided down the ramp by a Greek trooper.

"Come on, Captain," Murdock said to Solomos. "What's with the handcuffs?"

"Standard operating procedure, Lieutenant," Solomos said blandly. "All prisoners must be secured for their own protection and the protection of the arresting officers while they are being processed."

"You're not arresting my man, are you?"

"I am. I am arresting all of you. You will be held here in Salonika until my office can make arrangements to turn you over to American naval authorities."

"Aw, damn it all, Captain! How come?"

"Your interference has jeopardized a Greek counterterrorist operation and resulted in the escape of at least one suspect. Further, your activities triggered a gun battle in Salonika harbor, one in which innocent bystanders could have been killed. I will be very happy to see the last of you, Lieutenant."

"That's bullshit, Solomos, and you know it! You people weren't going to do a damned thing about those suspects, and the gun battle started when your damned soldiers charged in with searchlights and sirens!" He didn't mention that sniper shot from the tower that had taken out the gunman. Solomos didn't appear to be including the Delta Force team in his little tirade. Papagos and Brown were standing nearby, under guard but not yet handcuffed. Solomos's people appeared to be ignoring the Delta men still in their tower-top OP.

"We appear to be missing five of your men, Lieutenant," Solomos said. "There were nine of you. Where are the others?"

"Seeing the sights."

"At this hour of the night? I don't think so."

"Then they're bar-hopping. Maybe you should go check some of your local taverns. Or the whorehouses."

"I have a better idea. You may be more willing to discuss things with us in a reasonable manner at the police station." He reached into a back pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs. "Turn around, and place your hands behind you."

Murdock hesitated, as if he didn't quite know what to do, looking from Papagos to Brown to Roselli. Roselli gave him a broad wink, a sign that he, at least, thought things were going well.

Good…

They'd gone over as many of the possibilities as they could think of earlier, while planning this op with Beasley and the Delta people. He'd emphasized to both Roselli and Sterling that they needed at least one of those men off the yacht, no matter what. With all the lights and confusion, Murdock hadn't been able to see clearly what was happening when the patrol boat had drawn alongside the Glaros, but the fact that both Jaybird and one of the suspects were missing was a hopeful sign.

He just hoped Jaybird had indeed managed to carry off his part of things, or this whole show would all be for nothing.