War Lord

Thirty-two

I got out of there as quick as I could, but by the time I reached the hatch separating the hold from the superstructure I was soaked through with gasoline, choking on it, spitting it out. The stuff was burning my eyes, nose and throat, stinging the burns on my arms and neck. I dragged myself up the ladders and tried to think about what I could do. The best I could come up with was to change course, bring the ship around one-eighty degrees. Maybe the answer lay in the opposite heading to the one programmed into the autopilot.

On the way to the bridge, I stopped by a dead Somali wearing a scarf. I took it off him and used it to wipe the gas off my face, hair and forearms. A satellite phone was lying in pieces in the pool of blood beside him. Shit, I could’ve used that phone.

Standing up, I checked the surroundings. It was then that I noticed an oil fire burning in a fifty-five-gallon drum down on the stern, sending up a column of smoke that probably trailed behind the ship for miles. Why hadn’t I noticed it before? Probably the fact that it had been night had something to do with it. But now the sky had lightened out to the east. Within half an hour, it’d be full daylight. Looked like another perfect tropical day on the way — blue sky, fresh winds, mushroom cloud.

When I arrived back at the wing, another surprise greeted me: a voice. The wind made it impossible to hear exactly what was being said, but someone was on the bridge. I drew the Desert Eagle, released the safety and then stole a quick glance around the edge of the door. Nothing. The wheelhouse area was empty, just as I’d left it. But someone was talking. And he was in the radio room, sending a radio transmission. I stepped into the bridge, out of the wind, got down low, crept forward and heard an African-accented voice say, ‘… we are sinking by the stern following echo romeo fire. Require urgent assistance. Crew taking to the boats.’

There was a pause of around five seconds. I tensed, got ready to move, then the message repeated, ‘This is MV African Spirit, one forty-nine zero three south, forty-one fifty-two eleven east. SOS. We are sinking by the stern following echo romeo fire. Require urgent assistance. Crew taking to the boats.’

Second time around sounded identical to the first transmission — no difference at all in the wording, the inflection or the tone. I edged along the wall and peeked around the corner. The radar room was empty. The message was a pre-recorded duck call. So this was how they were gonna pull it off. The oil fire off the stern was part of it, probably detonated by an ignition device remotely activated by the Toshiba twins. And when the assistance hurrying to the rescue was nice and close, where Ed Dyson predicted the best results — downwind — this big dirty bomb would detonate.

Now that I knew how von Weiss and the White brothers intended to pull off their attack on US naval assets, I could also come up with a plan for a counterattack. I grabbed the latest weather information off the radar display. The wind was out of the southwest at eighteen knots. If the African Spirit was roughly in position now to cause the most potential damage, then what were probably the targets — Enterprise, Leyte Gulf and possibly other ships assigned to Task Force 151 — were currently lying just over the horizon to the northeast. So it followed that the best course of action was to take this tub to a place where there was a chance the winds were blowing onshore. In short, the only option I had was to drive this tub onto the beach. From memory, there wasn’t much in the way of habitation in this part of the world — no coastal towns or villages. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure about that, though, so it was a gamble, but the only other option I could see was to find a life ring and jump.

I made the decision quickly — holstered the Desert Eagle in my belt, hopped to the control panel, flicked the switch disengaging the autopilot and spun the remaining spoke in the wheel counterclockwise. The ship immediately responded, leaning to the right as it carved a wide arc to the left, the spherical compass mounted overhead on the ceiling bobbing and rotating in its bath, coming onto a roughly west-northwest heading.

‘Step back from the helm!’ demanded a voice suddenly from out of nowhere.

The unexpected intrusion made me jump. Je-sus! I turned and saw Charles White. The fucker had come back and brought a small posse with him. The damn satellite phone — a call must have been made. He stepped through the scorched and battered door armed with an FN, and one of his bodyguards and a Somali squeezed through behind him.

‘An’ I thought von Weiss was jerkin’ me off, man,’ said White. ‘I remember yo’ ass from the Congo. It was you, wasn’t it? An’ you wuz down in the hold, snoopin’ around. It’s Cooper, right, asshole?’

My hand was still on the wheel spoke, the ship still coming around to its new heading. ‘Where’s the rest of your party?’ I asked.

He smirked. ‘One o’ me’s more than enough to take care o’ the likes o’ you, man.’ He raised the business end of the FN and pointed it at my face. ‘Now step the fuck back from the wheel, motherfucker,’ he repeated.

I did as I was told and took a step back. A small step.

‘Who do you work for? The Brits? CIA?’

‘Alabama Thornton.’

‘What…? Who the fuck’s that?’

‘She’s a topless tall.’

‘What?’

‘A showgirl from Vegas.’

‘Don’t shit me, asshole. You CIA, man. Have to be.’

‘Insults will get you nowhere. What about Kim Petinski? You killed her, too?’

‘What do you think, dipshit?’

‘You’re not getting off this boat is what I think.’

He replied with a smile, shared with his bodyguard. ‘Tough talk for a fuck who’s walkin’ dead.’ He sniffed the air. ‘What’s that you wearin’, man? Eau de Fuckin’ Exxon?’ He laughed and took a cigarette from behind the ear of the Somali standing beside him and put it in his mouth. He snapped his fingers and the Somali passed him a gold Zippo.

‘Blowing this ship up with the nuke. What’s in it for you and your brother?’ I asked him.

‘Bin Laden gets a replacement.’ He sneered. ‘Mohammed Ali-Bakr al Mohammed, most audacious war lord who ever lived. And he’ll be in our pocket.’

‘Don’t bet on him living long,’ I said. ‘A hundred nukes gets you respect, one nuke just gets you assassinated.’

‘Let’s talk about killin’. You whacked one o’ mine up on Sugarloaf. Was you, right?’ He flicked back the Zippo’s lid and rolled the lighter along his thigh. Sparks and a flame jumped onto its wick. He brought the flame to the bent hand-rolled smoke between his lips, talking around it. ‘I figure you the one who pushed him off the mountain.’

I gave a shrug that partly said I had no idea what he was talking about and partly said fuck yeah.

‘In case yo’ wonderin’, yo’ English bitch gave that up before we snuffed her, while von Weiss watched me givin’ it to her in the ass.’ He tossed the lighter at me. It hit my leg, just above the knee. My world slowed. The flame found the gasoline soaked into my pants. It jumped and danced and expanded with excitement. It engulfed my leg, and then jumped to my other leg. It caught my webbing next and, within seconds, I was a torch. Heat exploded around me. Through the orange flames I saw Charles White laughing. My immolation was a joke and he was sharing it with his bodyguards and the Somalis. I shook my arm, tried to shake the flame off it, but it was glued to me. I took a step backward, then another, turned around and around, the heat unbearable. And then I ran, until I found myself in the cabin where I dived onto the floor, into the foam. The flames were snuffed out in an instant, choked by the chemicals. I rose up from the floor, covered in the stuff, and I was not happy. White was standing in front of me in the doorway. The smile died on his lips when I pulled the trigger on the Desert Eagle. A shot of yellow flame spewed from the barrel. An instant later, the .44 slug ripped the arm and shoulder clean out of his body. The force of the impact spun him around and I glimpsed his exposed heart beating in the raw hole where his arm and shoulder used to be.

The Somali was first to react. He raised the Atchisson AA-12 I’d discarded to his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The shotgun barked and the Somali screamed as his hand blew off at the wrist. Half his face was also airborne as he fell to the floor, shrieking. The bodyguard and the remaining Somalis were going for their guns as I raised the .38 and started pulling the trigger again and again. The soggy, foamy weapon jumped around in my hand, but at the distance of a few feet not even this piece of shit could miss. It wasn’t a pretty handful of seconds, dum-dum rounds being about as anti-personnel as small-arms ammo gets.

Sometime during all the gunfire, the Somali with the missing hand and face stopped screaming. I hobbled over to the mess on the floor that was Charles White. He lay sprawled and bloody against the forward bulkhead. His eyelids fluttered open and his eyeballs rotated upward, attempting to focus on me. Okay, so I admit that killing him felt good, like a reward for effort. And the fact that he knew it was me who killed him — well, that just made the good feeling complete. The vacuum his death would create in von Weiss’s world would be filled pretty much instantly by some other piece of filth, but just at that moment I couldn’t care less. It was personal for me with Charles White. His eyelids and eyeballs went slack as his chest contracted and his dying breath wheezed from his slack mouth. I put a bullet in his ear to make doubly sure of it. And, yeah, if my calf had been up to it I’d have busted a move.

Next stop, the helm — what was left of it. There might be others returned to the ship making their way to the bridge. Outside, the sun was now over the horizon, the air noticeably warmer. My Seiko told me that we were well inside the last hour of Toshiba time. I checked the radar display and turned the spoke half a rotation to ensure I was taking the fastest route to the beach, ten miles ahead — around forty minutes away. It also told me there was a vessel in pursuit of the African Spirit and it was closing fast.

Jets screamed by, barely clearing the bridge. US Navy Super Hornets. They’d come from the south and were gone from view in seconds. The ship giving chase, the jets — shit, maybe that pre-recorded SOS was working. The aircraft passed by low overhead again, coming from behind the stern this time, and the shriek made the fluid in the overhead compass dance. I watched them scribe a tight turn off the bow, washing off speed. They continued the turn and I followed them through it until I lost them somewhere behind the ship, the view obscured by the superstructure. Seconds later they appeared again on a parallel course to the ship, their gear and flaps lowered, rocking their wings from side to side. Okay, so the Navy was aware of the engine fire and had answered the SOS. Most likely they or the ship in my six o’clock, or the Enterprise, or Leyte Gulf or any number of other Task Force 151 vessels out there were trying to contact me, but with the African Spirit’s comms rigged the way they were, it wasn’t being received and I couldn’t make any reciprocating calls even if I heard them.

The US Navy flew another circuit. When they came around again, I went out onto the wing, stopping to pull a ski mask and a rifle off one of the corpses. I put on the mask and waved the rifle over my head. I did that so the pilots would get a different picture to the one they’d been briefed on. They’d come to buzz a ship that had broadcast an SOS, and instead they’d find one occupied by pirates. I wasn’t sure how that would shake things up, but I was hoping for caution on the part of the Task Force. The aircraft finished their pass, went to afterburner and vanished so fast it was like matter transfer had been involved in their disappearance.

I stood on the bridge, watched the approaching coast and tried not to faint. I don’t know how long I stood there, listening to my breathing, my thoughts flicking between the violence of the night just past, of what had happened to Sweetwater and what might be happening to Petinski if she was still alive.

I don’t know what snapped me out of it, but when I did, the radar screen said the shoreline was less than ten nautical miles off the bow. It also showed that the vessel giving chase to the African Spirit had halved the distance and was now five nautical miles behind. It had to be doing thirty knots to our fourteen. It had to be military. I limped to the stern to see if I could get a visual. The column of black smoke off the stern stretched for miles, climbing high into a sky that was a clear bright blue. A fleck of gray sat on the horizon. It was too far away to get a fix on the type of ship. I swept the line separating sea from sky and saw four black specks above it, off to the northeast, closing the distance fast. Helicopters — Seahawks from the Enterprise or Leyte Gulf. They’d be overhead in three to five minutes and their crews would be confused about what was going on aboard the Spirit. A comment I’d made to White came to mind, the one about a hundred nukes getting you respect and so forth. Did I really think I was getting off this tub alive?

Heading back to the bridge, I stopped out on the other wing. A line of thick white clouds had settled over the shore and the color of the ocean was changing from deep blue to blue green as the seabed rose to the continental shelf. Checking my Seiko, the ship-bomb was programmed to blow in seventeen minutes. If I was still on board, I’d be aware of the detonation for perhaps a split second before the concussion and heat wave sent my ashes to hell. The Spirit would ground itself on a shoal or run up onto the beach at roughly the same time. The prevailing wind still seemed to be coming from the southwest. Maybe this little plan of mine was futile. Meanwhile, I’d seen no sign of anyone else on board. There were no more surprise guests. The ship was mine. I had no idea how to reset the autopilot, but the Spirit was pretty much going where it was pointed. But just to make sure, I took the singed scarf from around my neck and wrapped it around the remaining steering wheel spoke and tied it off so that it was jammed in position. The exposed skin on my arms and neck was throbbing. Blisters were forming. My calf was aching. There wasn’t much left to do, but some khat would sure be handy to help me get it done.

Flat snarls heralded the arrival of several Sea Kings. I hopped out onto the wing. Two of them were a quarter of a mile away on a parallel course to the Spirit. I didn’t stay out on the wing too long. There might be SEALs on those choppers, and I might be considered a legitimate target. The nearest chopper was flashing a light at the bridge. I figured it was probably Morse, but as I didn’t know any Morse other than dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot, the code for SOS, I had no idea what was being communicated.

The water was now light green and I could clearly make out a line of white where the surf was breaking onto the sand a mile ahead of the bow. Time to move. It was maybe less than three minutes till this tub blew its dirty secret into the sky. I could already visualize the headlines. Heads would roll. Mine would be toast.

I headed for the back end of the boat a last time. My leg was well and truly seized. The ricochet or bullet fragment or whatever it was that had performed a little impromptu surgery on my calf muscle had cut through a nerve, or was lodged against it, sawing through it with every step. I pushed myself along the wall, using it as a support, trying to keep my weight off that leg. I wasn’t looking forward to negotiating the three ladders down to the open deck, but I took them as fast as I could and tried to ignore the screams ripped from my own throat when I stepped onto each of the metal decks. I opened the hatch out onto a burst of sunlight. Down at sea level, the ship seemed to be going faster, overtaking the swell lines. The water was a pale green now, the sandy bottom clearly visible. The naval vessel was close, turned side-on about half a klick away, its commander probably nervous about running aground. The ship appeared small — it was some kind of destroyer or frigate and not one of ours, but the Seahawk hovering over its stern probably was.

I peeled off the body armor and dropped it onto the deck, along with the .38 rounds in my pocket and the NVGs flipped up on my head. I climbed up onto the gunnel with difficulty. The turbulence coming off the propellers boiled with puffs of sand. I didn’t think too hard about jumping, in case thinking about it changed my mind, and stepped off into midair. Half a second later, I hit the wash.

Coming to the surface no problems at all, I watched the Spirit charge full steam toward the beach less than a klick ahead, a surf beach. I could see the backs of the waves crashing onto the sand. Beyond, the yellow sand was a thin line of low khaki-colored scrub. I couldn’t see any vehicles or smoke indicating habitation. Nothing to indicate wind direction either. Small fish nibbled at my calf, drawn by the blood, followed by something a little larger that hit my leg and started tugging at it, its teeth caught in the tourniquet.

I lifted my eyes and saw the ship suddenly pitch sideways and roll a little. It had struck the bottom. And then the sides of it bulged and three geysers of bright orange flame, one from each of the holds, shot several hundred yards into the sky. A split second later the entire vessel was engulfed in a vast expanding ball of gasoline that rushed toward me along with the shock wave. I ducked below the surface as the concussion pulse punched through the water. It punched the air out of my lungs and threw me around like a cork in a bath. Dazed and disoriented I bounced off the sand bottom, the world above the color of flame as the pall of ignited fuel spread over the air and sea. My lungs were raw and hot, close to bursting. Secondary detonations pulsed through the water pummeling me like body blows from a heavyweight. I needed air, but I was trapped below. I had to breathe or die. Nowhere to go. The oxygen-starved world was turning gray. I began to slide toward the bottom. Or the top, I wasn’t sure which. I opened my mouth, lungs and chest convulsing. Water rushed in. I choked. My lungs were bursting, seared, the taste of copper and gasoline in them. ‘This is it,’ a quiet voice said somewhere inside, a moment of peace. ‘You’re gonna die. It’s not so bad. Just accept it. Breathe…’