The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  “Hold fire. Repeat, hold fire,” the commander’s voice thundered back in Bonnie’s earphone. “We just received word from SIGINT that there’s a nuclear weapon onboard.”

  With a sudden thrust of its twin turboshaft engines, the Huey zoomed away from the ship.

  Not a nuclear bomb, Bonnie thought. It couldn’t be.

  The last image she caught of her Vigilant was of a deck crawling with men.

  Then the orange struts of the Golden Gate Bridge obscured the ship from view.

  As terrorists spilled out on deck to fend off the marine Huey helicopter, Ferrar stepped over the fallen attacker, jumped out of the radio room and headed to the front of the cabin.

  He peered into compartment after compartment. Nobody was left inside.

  The ship steamed on.

  Tray had abandoned the metal bomb momentarily to fire off weapons at the chopper.

  From the cursing on deck, he gathered that they weren’t successful, but the mechanical chattering of two submachine guns and the explosion of a rocket launcher continued, followed by a second boom that sounded like a deck gun.

  Then he heard a chorus of cheers on deck just outside the portholes as the helicopter turned tail and retreated.

  Ferrar looked around for cover and decided to head for the lower deck. He scrambled the rest of the way through the cabin as men entered from the sun-drenched quarterdeck.

  His first goal was to disable the engine. In the unlit belly of the ship, he followed the mechanical drone to the engine room at the very back of the cutter.

  The ship was Bonnie’s domain. He wished he had her knowledge of its layout.

  He found a light switch and turned it on. Dim rays fell on the twin engines running side by side. Below that lay a bloody sight. An engineman lay on the deck with a bullet through his head.

  Above the body, a button labeled “Power Cut-off” caught his attention.

  Why not? He pressed it, and instantly both engines wound down to a dead halt.

  Shouts erupted above him as men yelled to the terrorist at the helm. Cries of frustration passed back and forth, before a pair of footsteps pounded for the stairway down to the lower deck.

  Ferrar grabbed the engineman’s lug wrench and switched off the light. Then he moved forward to take up a position in a darkened compartment between the engine room and the stairway.

  He caught the man full in the face with a swing of the heavy wrench. The would-be terrorist crumpled to the deck, and Ferrar fell on him, pulling back on his close-cropped hair. The man had deeply bronzed skin and wore a wool sweater that reeked of perspiration. A tug and twist of the head cracked the man’s neck.

  “That’s for Pug Wilson,” Ferrar said fiercely, recalling the deadly booby trap in the Tora Bora cave.

  A voice shouted down the stairway in Arabic. “Find anything?”

  “Yes. Take a look,” Ferrar called back in Arabic.

  More footsteps, this time two pairs. The second man wore a Coast Guard uniform. Ferrar couldn’t tell for certain, but it could be Tray Bolton.

  This would be for Al Moxley and Colt Sealock, his two other compatriots killed at Tora Bora.

  Ferrar combed the dead man’s clothing for a weapon. Nothing there.

  The two men paused momentarily to adjust their eyes to the gloom.

  Ferrar’s heel banged against a canister. He reached down. It was an air tank.

  “What did you find?” one of the men called, hesitant to advance into the dark.

  “Come look,” Ferrar called, again in Arabic.

  Both men advanced, one silhouette drawing a pistol from inside his warm-up jacket.

  “Where are you?” the man called.

  “Come quick,” Ferrar said.

  The first man to arrive stumbled over his fallen comrade. His pistol clattered to the metal deck. Ferrar swung the air tank down on the man’s head, connecting with a sickening thud. The man fell in a lifeless heap at his feet.

  Then with a roar, Ferrar came back up, swinging the heavy tank at the second man.

  He was too late.

  The terrorist had already crouched low. Against the brightness of the stairway, Ferrar saw him coming upward for a full body blow.

  Ferrar absorbed the brunt of the blow with his abdomen and felt himself staggering backward. The man struck out again with his fist. Ferrar took it squarely on the jaw.

  With a groan, he landed on top of the two fallen men.

  He groped desperately in the warm, dark, bloody tangle of limbs.

  Where was that goddamned gun?

  Bonnie’s helicopter set down squarely on the fantail of the USS Tribute, where the captain was waiting to escort her up to the command deck.

  There, she found her theater commander Rear Admiral Vince Gerard standing beside the highly decorated Commander Admiral John D. Hanson, a former test pilot and current head of the entire Pacific Command.

  She saluted, then began. “Don’t open fire on the Vigilant,” she said, out of breath. “That man on the Vigilant is a CIA counter-terrorism operative. He’s there to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.”

  “I don’t care if he’s John Wayne,” Commander Hanson said with a thick Southern drawl. “That ship contains nuclear warheads, and that’s enough of a threat for me.”

  “He’s trained to take out terrorists,” she said. “With all respect sir, give him a chance.”

  A phone beeped in the room full of computers and communications devices.

  “Commander, you’ll want this. It’s a call from Washington,” an Executive Officer said, handing a phone to Admiral Hanson.

  “Put it on the horn,” Hanson ordered.

  “This is CIA Director Lester Friedman,” the voice said over the speakerphone. “Do not, repeat not, trust the operative on the Vigilant to take out the ship. He’s a known double agent. Fire at will.”

  “Roger that,” Hanson said, taking a deep breath. “Arm the rockets.”

  A second phone beeped.

  “Another call from the Pentagon, Commander,” the XO said apologetically. He switched on the speakerphone without being told.

  “This is U.S. Congressman Ralph W. Connors speaking. If you so much as harm one hair on the head of that man on the Vigilant, I’m going to single-handedly ax the entire Coast Guard and Navy budget for the next ten decades. Do you read me?’

  The phone clicked off.

  “What is this, a farce?” the General wondered aloud. “Washington can’t tell its asshole from a hole in the ground. How could they run a war? Can’t even get their intel together.”

  Rear Admiral Vince Gerard spoke up for the first time. “It’s clear they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. I think it’s up to us to make a tactical operational decision.”

  “Look at this. You’ve gotta see what’s happening on deck, sir,” another Naval officer shouted excitedly. He handed his field glasses to Commander Hanson. “They’re duking it out on the Vigilant.”

  Bonnie grabbed a pair of binoculars and trained them on her cutter.

  “What’s going on around here?” Commander Hanson roared. “Can’t anyone give me the straight dope? Hold fire.”

  Ferrar couldn’t get a hand on the gun, and the white uniform was advancing on him. He decided his only advantage was the darkness.

  Backpedaling over the rolling carpet of bodies, he retreated farther into the engine room.

  Then he heard another voice calling from the far opening to the deck.

  Jesus, how many of them were there?

  He wracked his brains to remember the layout of the engine room. From his brief glimpse in the dim light earlier, he remembered that there were two huge engines side by side.

  There was a man already down, a Coast Guard mechanic killed by a single gunshot.

  Then the light rays had fallen on a power switch.

  The light bulb!

  He reached up toward a slight warmth just overhead and unscrewed the bulb.

  He held his breath, listenin
g for the man in uniform to arrive. Suddenly, just a yard away, hard-soled shoes scraped across the metal rivets of the floor.

  Take this, Bolton, you bastard.

  He squeezed the hot metal of the light bulb with the glass exposed and swung it with a vicious right hook into the man’s face.

  “Aaargh!”

  Glass splintered in the man’s eyes, blinding him and stabbing deep into the veins and arteries of his face. Ferrar followed up with an elbow to the gut.

  The man doubled over, screaming in Arabic.

  It wasn’t Tray Bolton.

  Ferrar finished him off with a swift blow to the back of the neck, which gave way with a resounding crunch.

  A voice thundered from up on deck. “Who’s there?” It was the deep, distinctive voice of Tray Bolton!

  Ferrar circled the engines and located what he had also vaguely remembered—a ladder extending up to the quarterdeck of the USS Vigilant.

  He quickly climbed the metal rungs and pushed against the trapdoor at the top. It was locked.

  Then, inches from his face, the lock screwed open, and daylight flooded in.

  “Ah, here’s the traitor,” a silhouette said against a backdrop of the blue heavens.

  The figure wore a Coast Guard uniform. It was Tray.

  “We’re both going to hell today,” Tray said, and pulled Ferrar up the final few steps. “The whole city will go sky high.”

  Ferrar looked around. They were circled by the gleaming edifices of civilization and a row of warships facing off with them just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Above him, sunlight glinted off the spider web of the bridge with its row of captive onlookers.

  Who had brought all of these people together? Tray certainly hadn’t advertised the event. Were they there because of him? Had Tray used him to lure all the people?

  Then he spotted the leather briefcase lying open on deck, several vials of heroin scattered around it. A used needle and rubber tube were casually tossed aside.

  “Trying to go out in a blaze of glory?” Ferrar asked.

  “Something like that,” Bolton said. “I sure hope Bonnie’s watching this, so she can see what happens to traitors.”

  “You can rest assured that the entire country and international community is watching to see what I do to you,” Ferrar said.

  Tray shook his head sadly. “You still don’t get it, do you.”

  Ferrar tried to clear the fatigue-induced cobwebs from his brain. Oh sure, Tray Bolton had painted him as a traitor to his country. It was some show he had put on.

  He gestured toward Tray’s briefcase. “Can’t look death straight in the eye?”

  Tray shrugged it off. Then his shoulders knotted, and Ferrar found a fist flying in his direction.

  He caught it with the side of his head. He expected a kick, and it came next. He fielded it with an upward movement of his arm, and it glanced harmlessly off his body.

  “Martial Arts 101,” Ferrar said. “Can’t you come up with something more original than that?”

  Unexpectedly Tray faltered backward as if dizzy.

  Ferrar’s instincts told him something else was wrong. Tray was coming unglued.

  “What is it?” Ferrar asked, looking around the deck. “What’s going on here?”

  “It could have been a very good friendship,” Tray said, staggering back several more steps.

  “Oh, come off it,” Ferrar said. “We’ve competed for everything since the day we met.”

  “…and now you’ll blow up San Francisco,” Tray said, shaking his head sadly. Then he suddenly clutched his temples in a spasm of pain.

  “What are you talking about?” Ferrar said. He looked upward at several noisy helicopters trying to corner him as they circled for a closer view. “It’s your bomb. I didn’t set it.”

  Tray stumbled and fell onto his rear. Then, with an ironic twist of his lips, he said in a husky voice, “You lose.”

  His jaw fell slack and he dropped flat on his back. He stared upward unblinkingly. A look of satisfaction was fixed on his face as if justice had finally been served.

  “Don’t give out on me,” Ferrar said, and shook his erstwhile friend by the shoulders. “Not now,” he said through gritted teeth.

  But there was no response.

  And there was no time.

  Ferrar whirled around and flew into the cabin after the bomb.

  In her Georgetown home, Rebecca Friedman watched the television dumbfounded as she saw her supposedly dead son still alive and fighting Ferrar on the deck of a Coast Guard cutter.

  “That’s my boy,” she whispered proudly to herself. She picked up the phone and dialed the number of her husband’s cell phone.

  After half a dozen rings, he picked up. “Friedman here,” he said soberly.

  “He’s come back to save San Francisco,” she cried excitedly.

  “Hold on, dear. We’re not so sure.”

  Ferrar plunged into the interior of the Vigilant. The metal box stood as before, just under the gun deck.

  The two latched covers stood open on top of the bomb. Beneath each cover were rows of buttons and illuminated characters.

  The first mechanism was a clock ticking off seconds. It read “20. 19.” He knew what that meant.

  The second display was more puzzling. It read “TRA_” with a blinking cursor under the missing last letter.

  What the hell? It looked like a secret code to deactivate the bomb. Tray must have used his own name as the deactivation key.

  15 seconds.

  Ferrar looked below the TRA_ at the alphanumeric keypad. Images of his life passed rapidly through his mind, not the thoughts of a dying man, but of someone trying to unscramble the unrelated details of his life in search of a clue.

  10 seconds.

  Then an image of Bonnie floated to the fore. She was young again, college-aged. She was leaning toward him, and offered him a mug of foaming beer.

  5 seconds.

  In his mind, he glanced up at the wooden walls behind her. Several lobster pots and traps hung from hooks. It was her summer job in Maine. And the restaurant was named—

  He typed a “P.”

  The clock stopped with 1 second left.

  He let out his breath and closed his eyes.

  Suddenly completely exhausted, he collapsed to the floor and sat propped up against the bomb.

  Law enforcement could capture him if they still wanted. He’d broken more than a few rules, but saved even more lives.

  At last, he stood up and wandered back through the ship. It had been Bonnie’s ship all along. He was just along for the ride. He could imagine her commanding it. He would turn the helm back over to her.

  Tray’s body lay heaped on the large quarterdeck, the victim of a final overdose.

  Ferrar stripped his own bloody shirt off his back and pulled his T-shirt over his head.

  Waving the white T-shirt in the stiff breeze, he signaled to whomever might be watching.

  The ship was secure. All was well.

  Only a few seconds had passed before Ferrar heard the whirr of a helicopter approaching from behind. Just like the chopper at Tora Bora, he recognized the sound of a Huey. He felt his body give an involuntarily flinch.

  But he was too tired to hit the deck for cover. He no longer reacted with the trained instincts of a commando.

  He had turned that part of him off.

  The chopper hovered overhead, the cold gust tearing the T-shirt from his grasp. He lowered his empty hands and closed his eyes.

  Let the bullets slice through his bare chest.

  But the bullets never came. Instead, from the belly of the beast a hoist lowered a rope with a figure in a military jumpsuit and combat helmet.

  Ferrar turned to face the soldier, his arms down by his sides. Landing on deck, the soldier turned and pulled off his helmet.

  It was Bonnie Taylor!

  Her layered blonde hair blew around her face, and she lifted a hand in salute.

 
Ferrar raised a weary arm and returned the gesture.

  Then she dropped her helmet and ran across the deck toward him.

  “George,” she cried, her voice exuberant. “You really did slay the dragon.”

  “St. George to the rescue,” he said with a relieved smile.

  He reached out and scooped her off her feet. Spinning her around, he formed their own whirlwind on the quarterdeck of the cutter. He noticed other ships circling closer: yachts, motorboats and Naval coastal patrol ships. Suddenly he was back in Bar Harbor skimming over the sea with his true love.

  “Incoming!” a bullhorn announced from a rapidly approaching naval amphibious assault vessel.

  Ferrar glanced over Bonnie’s shoulder. How handsome the bridge looked—intact and strong as ever in the morning light.

  Then he noticed a rectangular object spiraling down from the Golden Gate Bridge. The huge pink sail descended rapidly toward them.

  “Look,” he said, and let out a laugh. “I think we’ve got company.”

  He turned Bonnie around to watch as the parasailer, a naked young man with a happy grin on his face, dropped down beside her and embraced both of them as a television news helicopter swirled closer.

  “Welcome home,” she told Ferrar. “For better or for worse, welcome home.”

  Epilogue

  Many Americans chalked up the events of December 11th to post-9/11 jitters.

  No television cameras found the nuclear device and the military quickly covered up its existence. For all anyone outside of a handful of DC officials knew, the events at the Gateway Arch and the Golden Gate Bridge were cases of the FBI and military overreacting to perceived threats.

  The military buildup in Afghanistan and the cloud of war on the horizon in Iraq quickly consumed the news media, and December 11th was quickly forgotten.

  Except by a select few.

  Hank Gibson, Director of the FBI, could have handed out loads of special citations to his agents in the field. But, what do you say on a plaque when his agents were chasing the wrong man?