He stopped well below the surface and turned towards the hull of the ship. The pain in his leg was almost too much to bear, but he knew he had to ignore it. He didn’t know what to do for his own survival, and all he could think of was to swim towards the belly of the freighter and find a dubious sanctuary.
As he touched the cold, metal surface of the ship, he paused and let himself drift slowly upwards until his head cleared the water. He stopped and pressed his cheek against the cold steel. He reached down and fingered the wound in his leg. He guessed that he wasn’t seriously injured; perhaps it was because the water had absorbed much of the bullet’s energy. But for all that, it still felt as if his leg had been severed. He knew the blood would be oozing from it and once more the fear of sharks crept up his spine.
Marsh looked back towards the circle of light. It was still moving about, still searching for him. There was no shooting now and the uncanny silence had returned. He trod water, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the light. He had no idea what to do now; if he swam away from the ship he would eventually drown. If he gave himself up and threw himself on their mercy…. No, they would kill him before he had even asked for sanctuary.
He heard a sudden splash, the sound of something entering the water. A boat perhaps? The sound came from the stern. Marsh was roughly amidships. The voices returned, shouting from the deck. They sounded agitated, but they were quick, clear, unmistakeable words of command and they flew from the deck above down to the men in the boat.
Marsh tensed, pulled his elbows in and let himself sink deeper until his nose was barely clear of the surface. His common sense told him he was in a trap from which there was no chance of escape. Swim away and drown or remain by the ship and be slaughtered. He knew he had little choice but to swim away, but where to?
Suddenly he heard another voice calling out excitedly. It was coming from the boat, and the man calling out was shouting wildly. The wavering beam of light stopped and moved rapidly across to the boat. It picked out some of the floating wreckage of the Ocean Quest. Now everybody seemed to be getting excited and there were voices issuing commands from everywhere. Marsh inched his way carefully along the hull, moving towards the bow. He intended to use the current distraction to make his way clear of the ship and as far away from it as possible.
Then a hand reached up out of the water and touched him.
Marsh gasped in sheer fright. His spine went rigid and a massive shudder plunged down his back. He spun round and instinctively lunged with his elbow. It thudded into something soft. He went rigid then as he saw Walsh’s corpse roll over and the pale, dead face came up from beneath the dark surface.
He almost lost the will to live then. His nerves were strung so taught they were almost at breaking point, and only a superhuman effort of will stopped him from screaming in uncontrollable terror. Seeing his friend float up from the deep like an underworld spectre, his white face masked in the appalling rictus of death was almost too much for Marsh’s singing nerves to take.
His spine loosened in another massive shudder and he pushed the corpse away. The cadaver refused to move and he lunged at it, feeling sick. He pulled his good leg up and gave the body a massive kick. It drifted from him, face up, away from the hull of the ship. Marsh clawed at the steel hull and pulled himself away from Walsh’s drifting body.
Suddenly there was a cry of exultation from the deck and a rapid succession of shots. Marsh could hear the bullets thudding into Walsh’s body. He saw it roll over under the thudding impact and the shooting stopped.
He was stunned by the horror of it all. He felt sick and weakened, and his strength seemed to be slipping away from him. The water lapped over his face and he felt lethargic and weak. Marsh knew the sea well; he had lived with it most of his life. It had always been a source of immense pleasure to him and he knew how it could turn suddenly and become a threat. He knew that to weaken was to succumb to its inherent menace and had learned to live with the dangers.
He now had to call on those years of experience and his own strength of will to restore his capacity for survival. There was still considerable danger and Marsh knew that he had to recognise that in order to cope with it and survive. There was still a great deal of shouting going on and he could see the men now in the rubber dinghy, shrouded in a circle of light, round Walsh’s body. It was an ironic twist of fate, he thought, that Walsh had saved him that night, even in death.
He considered his situation and knew it was hopeless; there was nothing he could do to resolve it. There would be no sanctuary on the ship and the sea offered no hope. He was hundreds miles from land. To the north lay the island of Haiti. Northwest was Jamaica and beyond that the yawning gap between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba. Jamaica might just as well have been on the Moon for all the good it was going to do him. Whatever he tried, he would be dead within hours. If nothing else, the sharks would see to that.
He edged his way towards the bow of the ship, clinging to the hull, still not knowing what he would do. While the ship was there it was a floating sanctuary; a tangible hope; but all in the mind now.
He swam to the forward end of the freighter and round to the other side. Then he pushed away from the ship, knowing that the crew would only be interested in what was happening elsewhere and not in the darkness where he was. They had their quarry and would be seeking no more. He was about five yards from the ship when he suddenly swam into the anchor chain.
And that was when he saw the other ship!
He held on to the anchor chain, his mouth open in complete shock. He tried gathering his senses and marshalling his fading strength, to make sense out of all this. To see the other ship was certainly a complete shock, but as he reflected on it he soon realised that it was not as surprising as he had first thought; it was almost certainly a transfer of cargo that was about to take place and probably a haul of drugs or illicit arms. And whatever the reason was for these two ships to come together, it did not bode well for him.
And then he thought about Greg Walsh and his unusual decision to sail this far from Freeport for no other reason than he said he fancied a longer trip. Could it be possible, Marsh wondered, that Walsh expected these two ships to be here? And was his long standing friend and business partner involved in something covert and illegal? Whatever the answer was, Marsh realised that there was very little chance of finding out, because he was unlikely to survive much longer. Unless he could get on board the second ship unseen.
The second vessel was a lot smaller than the freighter that had smashed through the Ocean Quest, no more than about six thousand tons by Marsh’s reckoning. Because she was smaller, her draught was lower and offered him a better chance of getting on board and concealing himself.
He knew there was no way he could get up on to the deck of the freighter, although he had contemplated climbing up the anchor chain. To attempt it would have been suicidal. The smaller ship offered him a marginally better hope.
He began to edge his way carefully towards its stern of the freighter until he was able to pick out the name on the prow of the other ship. It was the Taliba.
Marsh stopped. He knew the boat and he knew who owned it, but there was no way in a million years that he would ever have suspected the man to be involved in something as dangerous as this. And that little knot of truth began to grow in him that his partner, Greg Walsh might have had foreknowledge of what these two ships would be doing here at this precise time and position. And it was that knowledge that meant he had not been killed in a tragic accident at sea.
He had been murdered!
Chapter 2
About a week before the Ocean Quest had been sunk by the freighter, Remo Francesini of the American security service, the C.I.A., had stood in the waiting room of the military hospital at Cape Canaveral in Florida. He was waiting for a doctor to take him along to an isolation ward where a young man lay sick and dying. He was deep in thought and was concerned, not for the young man but for something else that weighed much heavier on his
mind.
Francesini was a big man, over six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. He had always prided himself on his fitness, much of which was a result of serving in the United States Marine Corps and subsequently as a member of the Navy Seals; the covert group of specialists who usually worked behind enemy lines on operations that required courage, stealth and a philosophical attitude to whatever fate had in store for them and to whatever their masters ordered them to do. He eventually left the military to join the NYPD.
Today he was at the hospital in his capacity as head of the Mission Support Office, which was responsible for collecting and collating intelligence information and reporting directly to the Deputy Director of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A. at Langley in West Virginia. Francesini’s boss was Admiral James Starling and it was the admiral who had insisted that he, Remo Francesini should visit the dying man at the hospital and not one of Remo’s subordinates, which would normally have been the case.
He was the only person in the waiting room. He was wearing green coveralls, a surgeon’s cap on his head and covers over his shoes. He would normally have been smoking one of his beloved Havana cigars, but smoking was banned in all American hospitals, so he contented himself with thinking about the reasons why he was there and where he would sooner be.
It was quiet and the walls, which were almost bare, save for a couple of naval prints, seemed to reflect a melancholy that fused with his own. There was a small table in the room and a couple of chairs. There was no reading material.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the twin towers, in September, 2001 by the Muslim terrorist organisation Al Qaeda, the whole of the C.I.A. and the White House had become jumpy at the slightest hint of another terrorist operation on American soil. The bosses at the top of the pile were more nervous than their underlings because it would be their heads and jobs on the line if their departments screwed up.
And Admiral Starling was no different, except that he had the C.I.A. Director of Operations bearing down on him who in turn had to contend with the Oval Office in the White House.
The melancholy feeling that settled in Francesini’s mind was the result of a feeling of hopelessness and a fear that he could not prevent another terror attack by Al Qaeda because their attacks were so difficult to predict or detect, despite the most sophisticated technology available and the magnificent and selfless efforts of the C.I.A. agents in the field.
Home grown terrorism was another factor that troubled him and the unbelievable willingness of second and third generation Arab Americans to support their Middle Eastern cousins in their appalling acts of murder.
A sixth sense told him that what he was about to see and hopefully hear, was a warning that had dropped into their laps by sheer good fortune. But even then, Francesini hadn’t a clue just how significant the warning would prove to be; his task was to glean as much from this as was humanly possible and pray that another atrocity would be avoided.
Sadly, the melancholy in him hid his usual countenance of good humour and confidence. He had a charisma that people usually warmed to, which meant never suspecting for a minute that his worries were ably hidden and could quite easily have been their worries.
A door opened and a naval officer stepped into the room. He was dressed in a similar fashion to Francesini.
“You can see him now, sir.”
Francesini walked towards the open door. “Any improvement?” he asked the young naval officer without any real hope.
The young man shook his head. “He’ll be lucky to last another month. Try not to tax him too much.”
“Has he said anything?”
Again the shake of the head. “No, nothing of significance, but you can still try; you may get something out of him.”
Francesini nodded and followed the officer out of the room. The tap of their heels echoed round the walls of the long corridor, intruding into the silence. At the far end of the corridor, the naval officer pushed opened a pair of swing doors that opened into another passage. He stopped by the first door and beckoned Francesini, opening the door for him.
The room looked clinical and efficient. Beside the bed was an array of monitoring equipment humming quietly, interrupted rhythmically by a pulsing sound from a heart monitor. The green trace on the monitor screen looked irregular and the spikes were erratic.
He paused at the bedside and looked down at the man lying on the bed. There were two bottles hanging from a stainless steel contraption with tubes branching down to the patient’s arms. He was in his thirties. Francesini knew that from the man’s notes he had read when he had arrived at the hospital. There was an oxygen bottle beside the man’s bed, but at the moment it was not in use.
Most of his hair had fallen out and what was left hung in small, wispy clumps from his scalp. One eye was closed. The other eye was open but red and angry and weeping. He had suppurating sores on his face and neck and they continued unseen down his body to the soles of his feet.
Francesini knew the man was suffering from bone calcium deficiency, leukaemia and dysentery. He felt desperately sorry for him, not because he was dying, but because of the long and painful end to the poor man’s life.
He was dying from radiation sickness.
Francesini pulled a chair over and sat beside the bed. He studied the man for a while and wondered if he would learn anything because the poor wretch looked comatose. The dying man had been picked up somewhere along the Florida Keys, wandering aimlessly along the road. The police had been called by some concerned citizen who described the man as looking like he had been in a road accident. It was true and he had been in a sorry state even then when the police picked him up. He had no identity papers on him and did not look like an American, although that in itself was not significant. So the local authorities had put him into hospital until the immigration department could deal with him.
The poor man had lain there for several days before a retired army doctor chanced by. What the doctor saw reminded him of clinical notes he had studied in his early days as a junior army doctor. The notes were comprehensive and were of Japan after the atomic bomb. And what the sharp old medic suggested to the Pentagon sent shivers down their spines and set the alarm bells ringing all the way to the White House. The sick man was immediately transferred to the isolation wing where he was now.
“I wish you would say something,” Francesini muttered. “You’re not being much help to yourself. You came to us but you won’t say why. The doctor says you could be ok, but you need something to give you hope.” It was a lie and it rolled glibly of his tongue.
The man’s eye moved and he turned his face a little. Francesini was encouraged.
“If you have a family, we can let them know. We can bring them here for you.” He leaned forward, getting closer. “It doesn’t matter where they are; we can get them.”
The man’s lips moved as he tried to form a word. Francesini watched closely as the blistered lips trembled, the blood from the sores on his mouth was still wet. Suddenly the man’s hand reached out and grabbed Francesini’s wrist and a word tumbled out. His voice was faint and cracked. It was virtually hopeless. Francesini shook his head knowing he could do nothing for him unless he knew more.
The strength in the man’s grip ebbed away and he relaxed. Francesini took hold of his hand and held it.
“How did you get the burns?” he asked, not expecting an answer. “What are they doing? What are they up to?” Francesini didn’t even know who ‘they’ were!
The frustration threatened to tip the quiet calm into boiling emotion. He wanted to wring the truth from the man and bully him into answering his questions. But he never did; he just sat there and talked softly.
He left the room after twenty minutes, discarding his protective clothing in a bin that was outside the door. He called at the reception desk to tell them that the dying man was asleep, and would they inform the doctor that he was leaving.
It was a bri
ght, uplifting day outside the hospital and the warm sun on his face gave Francesini a reason to feel a little better as he stepped out into the sunshine. He took a cigar from his pocket. He lit the cigar and drew in a lungful of smoke.
“Taliban,” he muttered to himself. Was that the word the dying man had been trying to say, Taliban? Muslim fanatics who used to hold the reins of power in Afghanistan?
“I thought we had thrown them out,” he muttered to himself.
Then he shook his head, blew the cigar smoke out leisurely and wondered what Admiral Starling would have to say.
*
Marsh shivered. He felt cold, but that didn’t concern him too much; it was a warm night and the chill would soon pass. He thought about his own situation and what he could do and how he could get out of it. The irony of it did not escape him; he made his living getting wet and avoiding death. This time he wasn’t enjoying it, neither was he getting paid!
The self-indulgence passed and despair crowded in, swarming over him as he recalled the terrifying moments surrounding Walsh’s death. It was the nature of it and the following circumstances that horrified him. He wondered if he would ever get home to Freeport in the Bahamas where they lived to report everything to the police. He thought too of Helen, Walsh’s widow, and how he would tell her. In fact, what he would tell her.
Marsh had been a partner in their underwater survey business with Walsh and his widow, Helen for a good number of years. They owned a boatyard in Freeport and also their own, underwater survey vessel. Although business had been good over the years they still struggled to pay off their short term loans and the mortgage on the yard and the submersible.
He had seen the Taliba, the ship now alongside the freighter, in Freeport. It was shortly before Greg Walsh had agreed to work on a relatively short commission for its owner, Hakeem Khan.
Khan was a wealthy oceanographer and explorer. He was well known among oceanographers the world over. And he was well respected. Walsh had worked on that commission for a few months, but it had not involved Marsh or Helen. Marsh could never figure out why Walsh had excluded him. It hadn’t been a contentious issue really and in fact had given Marsh an opportunity to spend some free time on his own in Europe, taking in the old capital cities and doing some ski-ing and getting in après ski in the best traditions of a bachelor.
The Devil's Trinity Page 2
