Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  Mendoza was excited. He reloaded and went to the locker door. He fired a couple of shots into the bodies, then a couple more. Fernandez joined him, reloading his gun, and he too fired into the bodies.

  Bahmad raised his MAC 10 and fired a short burst, at least a half-dozen rounds catching the two drug runners in the backs of their heads. They were driven forward into the locker on top of the pile of bodies, none of which was moving any longer.

  Bahmad stood for a long time listening to the relative silence, and waiting. The storage locker doorway had a raised lip so very little blood had gotten out into the pantry, only a few splashes here and there on the deck.

  Finally the distant vibration of the engines died and he could feel the change in motion as the ship began to slow down.

  He laid the MAC 10 aside for a moment to push Fernandez’s and Mendoza’s legs all the way inside the locker and close the door, then went back through the galley to the main athwartship corridor. A radio played music from somewhere, barely audible. It sounded Latin. A woman was singing. Other than that, the ship was very quiet.

  Outside, he looked over the rail. The Aphrodite’s bridge was deserted, and the boat wallowed at the end of her tether, her engines idling with pops and throaty rumbles in neutral. Everything had gone smoothly to this point, but he smelled trouble now.

  He scrambled down the ladder to the speedboat and hopped nimbly aboard the foredeck. He nearly lost his footing on the slowly pitching deck, but then regained his balance and sprinted aft to the open bridge. When the Margo’s engines had been shut down, Morales had dropped the Aphrodite’s engines into neutral and since he was no longer needed to tend the helm he’d gone below. But why? To do what? Get a beer?

  Bahmad dropped down on the deck between the curving windscreen and the sleek radar bridge just as Morales, a pistol in his hand, came from below.

  “What the fuck—” he said, rearing back.

  Bahmad calmly raised his MAC 10 and fired a burst into the man’s chest, driving him backward down into the main saloon with enough force that he broke his spine on the edge of a cabinet before landing dead in a bloody heap.

  One step at a time. It was all coming together. He could see with perfect clarity each step he had taken from the mountains in Afghanistan months ago when he had first devised his operation, here and now to this point. There wasn’t much left to do except deliver the package at the correct time and place, and history would be his.

  Careful not to step in the gore, Bahmad went below and let his eyes sweep the cabin. There were several empty beer cans on the table, an empty speed-draw holster on the cushioned setee and a bullet-resistant vest lying next to it. It was curious that the man hadn’t taken the time to put it on if he thought there was going to be trouble, unless he’d been interrupted. The SSB radio was on and still tuned to the frequency that he’d used to contact the Margo. Nothing was different, and yet he sensed something; something just outside of his awareness, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was missing something that was possibly important and it irritated him.

  He glanced at Morales’s body, then went forward to the head where he shot out the seacocks for the toilet and sink. Water immediately began gushing into the boat in two-inch streams.

  He did the same for the seacock serving the galley sink, and the seacocks for the aft stateroom toilet, sink and shower sump.

  Already the water was a couple of inches above the floor boards, the bilge pumps unable to keep up. Bahmad opened several portholes so that the boat would sink easier without trapped air, then went up to the open deck, closing and latching the door.

  Aft on the sundeck, he pulled up the two large teak floorboards exposing the slowly idling engines nestled in their spotless, silver insulated compartments. They were huge ten-cylinder supercharged diesels and needed a lot of water for cooling. Two hoses, each of them five inches in diameter, sucked raw water from the sea through strainers and directed the flow to the massive heat exchangers. Bahmad reloaded and shot both hoses completely apart. Instantly two streams of seawater with the strength of firehoses began rushing into the engine compartment, flooding the air intakes. Within seconds the diesels sputtered and died.

  Bahmad calmly climbed back up onto the foredeck and made his way to the bow. The boat was already down six inches on her lines. He jumped across to the Margo’s boarding ladder, then took out his stiletto and cut the tether holding the powerboat.

  The Aphrodite slowly began to drift away, her bow much higher now than her sinking stern. She would be completely gone in minutes.

  Topsides Bahmad found the control for the boarding ladder and brought it up, secured it in its cradle and closed the rail gate.

  The last he saw of the Aphrodite before he went inside, she was fifty yards away, her aft deck awash, her bow rising up at a sixty-degree angle.

  U.S. Coast Guard Station San Diego, California

  “Coast Guard Station San Diego, Petty Officer Wickum.” the young man answered. It was 2:00 A.M. and he’d just started on his fifth cup of coffee this shift to keep awake. Absolutely nothing worth a shit was on television tonight.

  “This is Special Agent Susan Ziegler with the Drug Enforcement Agency, let me talk to your OD,” she said urgently.

  “Yes, ma’am, stand by.” Wickum slid over to the duty officer’s door. The young ensign, his feet propped up was reading a copy of Playboy. “Got a woman from the DEA on one for you, sir. Sounds stressed.”

  The OD put the magazine down and picked up the phone. “Ensign Rowley, may I help you, ma’am?”

  “I’m Special Agent Susan Ziegler, DEA. I’m about a hundred miles south of you, just outside Ensenada. Is your MECODIR program up and running?”

  “Ma’am—”

  “I’m on your list, Ensign, look me up. Star-seventeen-bright. Do it quick because you might have a problem coming your way.”

  “Stand by,” Ensign Rowley said, he put her on hold. “We’ve got a possible MECODIR request,” he told Wickum. “Pull it up while I make sure she’s who she says she is.” MECODIR was a Message Content and Direction program that was new to the Coast Guard. Receivers scanning millions of frequencies automatically monitored radio transmissions from seaward around the clock, recording their content and the direction they came from for review by the Coast Guard itself along with a host of other law enforcement and intelligence-gathering agencies. It was a NASA-designed program that had gone operational six months ago. Messages were stored digitally for up to one month. If they were not retrieved by then they were automatically erased. Maydays, or other standard distress calls, kicked off alarms so that human operators could intervene.

  Susan Ziegler’s name and the proper identifier code were listed in the authorized users manual and he reconnected with her.

  “Yes, ma’am, we’re up and running.”

  “We received a partial message that we think came from one of our deep cover agents about twenty minutes ago. Since then there’s been nothing. We think that he’s aboard a fifty-foot speedboat called Aphrodite somewhere off shore. We’re not sure how far out he was, but we picked him up on fourteen three-ten at oh-one-forty hours on a relative bearing of two-five-four degrees. Puts him a little south of west from us.”

  Wickum slid back to his console and brought the MECODIR program up on his monitor.

  Ensign Rowley could see him on the other side of the glass partition. A couple of the other night-duty operators drifted over to see what was going on. “Okay, ma’am, we’re pulling that up now. Be just a couple of sees.”

  “I want a cross bearing so we can tell exactly where he is, and a filter wash on the message. It was broken up. Sounded like heavy interference of some kind.”

  Wickum raised his hand. He’d found it.

  “I’m transfering to a headset,” Ensign Rowley said. He put the call on hold, grabbed a headset, went out to Wickum’s console and plugged in. “Ma’am?”

  “I’m here.” She sounded strung out.

&n
bsp; The message came up on Wickum’s screen. “We have it,” Ensign Rowley said. “It’s weak. Relative bearing two-one-five. Stand by.” Wickum entered the bearing Susan Ziegler had given them and the computer instantly crossed the two and came up with a map position. “That’s ninety-seven nautical miles southwest of your position, ma’am. We’re bringing up the audio now.”

  Wickum played the very garbled message through once. It lasted only five seconds and was extremely broken up, as if the antenna were bad or blocked. He put the message on a loop so that it would repeat itself over and over again, and began dialing in circuits that would filter out some of the interference and allow the computer to help reconstruct some of the words. It was like fine-tuning a radio to get the best reception. The machine could do it on its own, but human operators still did a better job.

  Very slowly a few recongizable words began to emerge from the mush. “ … home plate … we’ve … trouble.” There were three seconds of nothing useable. “ … going down, but … Stand by! Stand by!” The message ended after that.

  They played the message several more times, but nothing else became recognizable.

  “Okay, that’s our agent and it sounds like he’s in trouble.”

  “We’ll start the precoms and excoms tonight, but we can’t send a chopper up until morning. If you’re declaring an emergency we can get a cutter headed that way within the hour though.” Precoms, short for preliminary communications, was a quick search by radio for any and all ships in the vicinity of the last known position of the vessel in distress. Excoms, or extended communications, expanded the search pattern to a much broader area including marinas, lighthouses and other facilities on shore. A lot of the time vessels calling Mayday were found hours later safe in some harbor, not bothering to call anybody to say they were safe.

  “I’m declaring a Mayday, Ensign. But if he’s aboard the Aphrodite and he’s in trouble you can expect armed resistance. Pass that along to your people.”

  “We’re on it, ma’am,” Ensign Rowley said. “If you come up with anything new shoot it up to us, would you?”

  “Right,” Susan Ziegler said, and she rang off. Ensign Rowley went back into his office to start calling in people. It was going to be an interesting night after all.

  M/V Margo

  The wind whipped around the corner and Bahmad had to brace himself against a piece of angled steel in order to accomplish his task without making a mistake.

  They were heading directly west at their best speed of nineteen knots in order to put the most distance between them and where Aphrodite sunk before dawn. Something about Morales and the setup aboard the drug boat had continued to bother him until they had gotten underway, and it finally came to him.

  The SSB radio in the Aphrodite’s main saloon was set to the Margo’s frequency. The one Bahmad had used to make contact. But he finally remembered that before they had left Rosario the captain had switched the set to a different frequency. Morales had been up on deck at the time and had not seen it.

  It was a small discrepancy. But paying attention to such seemingly minor details had saved Bahmad’s life before. It was possible that Morales had radioed somebody and when he heard Bahmad coming back aboard he had switched frequencies.

  When it got light they would turn north again, on a parallel course to their previous one, but more than seventy nautical miles to the west of the Aphrodite.

  The last of the inner latches clicked up, and Bahmad raised the lid of the bogus life raft cannister to expose the control panel.

  Green was in the chart room replotting their course to San Francisco, and Schumatz was below tending to the engines. There was no one to see him. He was alone and he could feel the power emanating from the device. The Americans had invented nuclear weapons, the other nuclear powers simply stole the secrets from them. And now that might was coming home to roost. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That was the adage Westerners foolishly liked to bandy about. But none of them really understood what they were saying.

  That would change in less than thirty-six hours.

  Shining the narrow beam of a penlight on the keypad Bahmad entered the ten-digit activation code, and the panel suddenly came to life.

  He hesitated for several seconds, his fingers poised above the buttons. Even now he could walk away from this insanity. He could kill the other two, rig the ship to sink and fly the helicopter to a deserted stretch of beach and make his way to Mexico City from where he could disappear. He had learned to fly helicopters courtesy of the British SIS, a fact he’d concealed from the others.

  But he would go ahead with this for the same reason he had come up with the plan in the first place. The infidels had killed his parents. It was a fact that no act on earth or in heaven could erase. His parents would never return from their graves. What he had done in the name of Islam, and what he was doing now, was not his fault. He’d been made to do this thing by the one senseless act the American-backed Israelis had carried out on innocent civilians. Now they would pay.

  He sat back on his heels in the darkness for a few moments longer, contemplating exactly how long it would take him to get to the helicopter, start the engine, lift off and fly to a safe distance before the weapon exploded.

  The hills would help. He could duck down behind one of them on the Sausalito side of the bridge.

  He entered sixty minutes and five seconds on the keypad, and entered the start code. The panel beeped softly and the LED counter switched from 00:60:05 to 00:60:04, then 00: 60:03, 00:60:02, 00:60:01.

  Bahmad pressed the interrupt button and the counter stopped at 00:60:00. He entered another series of codes that removed the nuclear weapon’s failsafes and entered in their places a series of counter-measures that would make it next to impossible to shut the bomb down.

  Now simply pressing the start button would begin the countdown at sixty minutes, and nothing could stop it from happening.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Chevy Chase

  The headaches were back. McGarvey got out of bed at six, quietly so as not to awaken Kathleen, and went into the bathroom. He softly closed the door, switched on the light and looked at his haggard image in the mirror. The hair on the side of his head where the surgeon had gone in with a tiny laser cauterizing tool had grown back. There was a ninety percent cure rate. But if the headaches returned it meant they’d missed a bleeder and would have to go back in. It’d mean another six weeks of convalesence.

  He hadn’t had any choice in the matter the last time, but he was going to have to hang on now. Whatever was going down was going to happen very soon. All the evidence pointed to it, and his gut bunched up in knots as it did before every major mission. The biggest problem they still faced was not knowing where the attack would come. So far they hadn’t come up with a single clue.

  Bin Laden and his staff were bunkered in Khartoum. There had been no definitive word on where his wives and children had gotten to, but since none of the CIA’s assets in the region had made any positive sightings, they were guessing that bin Laden’s family was with him in the compound. In some way that had been the most ominous bit of news all afternoon. Bin Laden had lost one daughter, he didn’t want to lose another child. He had brought them to his side, to the one place that he considered was safe, unassailable. They couldn’t stay there forever, of course. The situation in Khartoum was far too unstable. But for now it was where they were staying; waiting.

  Bin Laden would have made plans though. He knew that he could be dead before the year was out, so he would have worked out what would happen to his family afterward. After not only his death, but after the nuclear attack on the United States. Maybe the CIA could guarantee the safety of his family in exchange for the bomb. They could try.

  “Yeah, right,” he told his image in the mirror. It’d be the same kind of a deal that we’d offered him just before we’d killed his daughter.

  He took a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols with a glass of water, then rinsed his face, switched of
f the light and went back into the bedroom. Kathleen was up and she was putting on a robe.

  “Sorry, Katy, I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, coming around the bed to her.

  “It’s time to get up anyway,” she said. They kissed, and she looked at him critically. “Did you sleep all right?”

  “I’ve had better nights, how about you?”

  She touched his face. “Fine,” she said. “But you look tired.

  “When we get past this one, you and I are going to take a vacation. A cruise.”

  She smiled warmly. “I’d like that. Why don’t you take the bathroom first, and I’ll get breakfast started.”

  “Nothing heavy, Katy, this is going to be a tough one.” Kathleen gave him another smile, as if he’d just stated the obvious. He grinned sheepishly. “If I knew how to golf, I’d retire right now.”

  “You could learn,” she said, and she went downstairs.

  McGarvey lit a cigarette and went to the window that overlooked the golf course. The sprinklers were still on, but the first golfers would be on the course within a half hour. The windows in the house were bulletproof Lexan plastic. Eight weeks ago the doors and locks had been seriously beefed up and the CIA had installed a state-of-the-art security system around the entire property. But somebody on the fifteenth fairway could pull an RPG out of his bag and punch a hole in here like a knife through Swiss cheese.

  A cheery thought to start off the day, he told himself. But he was back for the duration this time. He wasn’t going to run out in a stupid attempt to draw off the bad guys. This time when they came looking for someone to hurt, they were going to find him. His jaw tightened. One-on-one. That’s what he really wanted. Sorry that your daughter was killed, but you put her in harm’s way. Killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people would not bring her back.

  His anger, which had percolated all night, spiked and he savagely ground out his cigarette in the ash tray. One-on-one, he told himself again, going into the bathroom. Him and Ali Bahmad on any field of play with any weapons he wanted. Soldier against soldier. Not soldier against women and children; especially not handicapped women and children.