“Paradise, stop your engines,” repeated the lieutenant.
Meanwhile a second voice, higher in octave, came over Channel 16. “Jezebel, this is Royal Navy vessel Fortitude. Stop your engines! We are coming aboard.”
Within moments both trawlers were surrounded by high-speed patrol boats and inflatables, most of which were closing in on them as inexorably as though a knot were being tightened.
Andrej remained in the pilot house.
“Paradise, repeat: Stop your engines!” the Welsh lieutenant commanded, and when there was no response, he ordered that a shot be fired into the air.
The trawler Paradise moved forward, under way upon Andrej’s irrational faith that the British navy and the forces allied to it could be outrun. Only when the task force had bracketed the trawler, firing just before its bow and aft of its stern, did the captain relent and, ignoring the silent disapproval of his master, extinguish the ship’s engines. Gradually the mercenary sailors, including the captain, came onto the wide deck, their opened hands raised just above their shoulders.
Oliver led a crew into the hold, where he soon found one of the three warheads, still in the same inner casing it had been in upon its theft from the installation near the Strait of Kerch. Only when he returned to the pilot house did he encounter Andrej, alone with less than half a liter of Stolichnaya on the table in front of him. Next to the bottle rested his book as well as a heavily thumbed copy of Le Petit Larousse, which he had been studying in an effort to improve his French, and the latest glossy brochure from a property agent in Saint-Tropez. In his left hand, firmly in his grip, was his Makarov pistol. Pointing the handgun at Oliver, he said, “Drop your weapon to the floor.” He had been coughing since sometime in the night before, and his voice had grown hoarse.
Oliver evaluated him across the cabin. He was a man with a plain view of his end, the most dangerous kind. Oliver placed his own gun carefully on the floor.
“Now kick it away.”
Oliver did as instructed, then said, “You are in an impossible situation. Don’t make it more painful for yourself than it needs to be.”
“You talk as if you were holding this gun.”
“If you think the men out there will allow you to leave, even with me as your hostage, you are badly mistaken. There are many of us and one of you. If we have to wait you out, we will. If we have to endure casualties, we will do that, too, but those casualties will only make things worse for you. They will not result in your freedom. Where is Philip Frost?”
Andrej replied as though Oliver’s question had not been asked. “I would prefer to be in a British rather than an American prison.”
“That is not for me to decide. Is he aboard the other trawler?”
“He might be,” Andrej said. “What does it matter? Will I be taken to Guantánamo?”
Oliver continued to study the plaintive Russian. “I do not see why you would be, but again it’s a question I can’t answer.”
“I fear Guantánamo,” Andrej said, as though his thoughts were becoming dissociated. “I fear all secret prisons.”
“Then put down your gun and cooperate with us, help us understand—”
“Understand?” Andrej echoed. “What? That we almost made it?”
Oliver offered him the start of a smile. He said, “I will do what I can to help you. I promise you that if—”
Outside the pilot house, sailors had taken up protected positions. Andrej wondered how many sharpshooters’ firearms were trained upon him. “This is no way to die,” he told Oliver.
“No,” Oliver said, “it isn’t.”
“Would you like some vodka?” Andrej asked.
“Thank you,” Oliver replied, playing along as his training had taught him to do, striving, most of all, for time. “That would be very nice right now.”
“Here, help yourself,” Andrej told him, nudging the Stolichnaya toward Oliver with his right palm. “I’ve never enjoyed drinking alone.” With his left hand, as he spoke, Andrej turned the Makarov abruptly toward himself, inserting its barrel between his chapped lips until he could feel the chill and pressure of gunmetal against the parched roof of his mouth. It was the smile of a man who could salvage only irony from failure that exploded across his face.
Aboard Fortitude as it approached the trawler Jezebel, Ty Hunter donned a muslin hangman’s mask the color of flesh. In an effort to further confuse identities, several of the petty officers joined him, deploying the same effective cloak of anonymity.
Unlike the captain of the Paradise, however, the Jezebel’s was not inclined to surrender. He had halted the ship’s engines and immediately led his crew to quarters below. The forsaken stillness the boarding party encountered upon seizing Jezebel not only surprised but disoriented them. That the crew would retreat into the bowels of the ship suggested to Ty that they believed it was the strongest corner from which they could fight, but why? What was there?
Commando style, he advanced in silence with his squad, rounding each corner with his back arched against the steel walls. In the shadows of intersecting corridors, they stopped short of every door, testing each handle and lock with the delicate touches of safecrackers before kicking them in from the side, then resuming safe positions. The galley was empty. The next cabin, an expanded cupboard with two shallow bunks on each side, had been deserted, as had the one beyond that. The head, too, was uninhabited.
He raised his hand, motioned the men behind him toward the entry that led, via an exposed spiral staircase, to the hold below. Just before it Ty noticed, flush with the wall, a panel too small for a man to fit through. Although securable by a dual key and combination lock and fitted with an alarm, these had been left undone. Inside the recess he found an armory, fitted for twenty rifles and as many pistols, for knives of various lengths and grenades and masks. All were missing.
At once he stopped his men. “It’s a trap,” he said, mouthing rather than speaking his words. He gestured to one of his team that he required a pencil and paper. The petty officer scurried, and both were quickly found in the pilot house, then handed down to him, whereupon he sketched his plan.
To start with he had to answer the question upon which all else depended: Was Philip Frost still aboard or had he somehow managed to flee Jezebel? If he was aboard and cornered, who knew what he might do? If not, could the crew be lured into thinking he had returned? An invasion of the hold could not even be considered. His men would be picked off on the stairs. The other obvious possibility, of using gas to subdue their adversaries, posed too many complications. Would the missing masks defeat any such attempt? Would the tactic even work if the hatches of the hold were opened and the resulting ventilation proved sufficient to disperse the fumes? Ty had no idea, but he was less worried about these constraints than about the possibility of a gunfight with explosives going off or, even worse, a direct assault on the warheads. Caged men faced with futility would resort to anything, and though he did not believe that nuclear warheads could be so nimbly detonated, like Oliver he did not wish to put his supposition to a test.
He touched his forefinger to his lips, signaling utter silence. On his pad he drew instructions for the deployment of the other sailors in the force. How odd life was, he thought, that it might be his acting talent he would have to rely upon in this most real of adventures. Closing his eyes, Ty let his mind drift back to the challenging and exhausting classes in dialect he’d taken before shooting his second film, then to the glissando-like conversation of Ian’s guests, settling finally, he was not sure why, on the mysterious Al-Dosari twins.
When he spoke, it was in Arabic, then in English tinged with the accent of Arabia, the accent he had acquired as a boy. “Philip!” he called sharply, more as a command than a request, for at the bullfight in Seville he had noted Philip’s deference to both Al-Dosaris. “Philip!”
Ty waited. When no respon
se came from below, he said, in rapid Arabic, as if one twin were addressing the other, “Where could he be?”
“I’ve absolutely no idea,” he replied to himself, in the same language and yet a slightly differentiated voice.
“Philip!” he called again. “Show yourself, please! You don’t understand what’s transpired. We’ve reached an accommodation.”
Again Ty hesitated, his eye on the stairs, his Glock aimed at the entry leading to them. “They are being entirely reasonable,” he said, resuming his original Arabian-English diction. “We’ve been granted safe passage in return for our cooperation.”
The instant he concluded, the silence returned. On the pad, hurriedly, he wrote, “Captain’s name?” then tore the page at once from its binding and handed it off to a nearby sailor. The sailor moved stealthily, first backward through the cabins, then to the pilothouse above.
“He must be on the other trawler. Pity,” Ty said with resignation, still in character.
When the sailor returned, he handed Ty a wrinkled receipt from a chandlery in Palma. Although the last name had been smudged, the first, Roman, was plainly legible. Ty shot the sailor a smile. The time had come, he realized, to go for broke. He entwined the fingers of both hands, at which point a sailor opposite him crossed himself.
“Ah, there you are, Philip!” Ty exclaimed, still an Arab at home in English. “Where on earth were you?”
Summoning his best impersonation of a caustic Philip, Ty replied, “Where did you think I’d gone? For a swim?” He hoped it would suffice for the Slavs who were his audience.
“It’s not as big a problem as you think,” the imaginary Arab continued.
“I am glad to hear it.”
“As a matter of fact, the hounds have been called off.”
“Interesting,” said Ty’s Philip.
“Isn’t it just?” intoned the Arab, whose voice was of deeper register. “Where are your captain and his crew? We should be under way.”
“I don’t know, probably hiding. Wouldn’t you be?”
“What’s the captain’s name?”
“Roman.”
“Call him, then, won’t you? The sooner this business is done, the better.”
“Roman!” Philip shouted into the hold.
“Roman!” echoed one of the Arabs.
But the uneasy quiet immediately returned. Ty listened. Hearing only his heartbeat, he began to count, in his head, slowly down from ten. On three he thought he could hear shuffling; on a long-delayed two, the response that rose from the hold was unambiguous.
“Mr. Frost,” the captain inquired, in a deep voice rendered tentative by fear.
“Get up here, will you?” Philip said. “We’re losing valuable time.”
“Mr. Frost,” repeated the captain.
“Roman,” Ty’s Philip snapped, with pitch-perfect admonishment. “I will explain everything you need to know when you get up here. But I can’t keep shouting.”
Then, hearing footsteps strain the iron staircase, Ty settled beside the entry. The steps grew louder. As the captain emerged into the corridor, Ty forced him back with a fierce and sudden choke hold, then pressed his Glock 23 into the man’s thick, sunburned neck. Before the captain’s eyes, Ty now held a sheet of paper. “Tell them to come up,” it read. “Tell them that everything is all right. No tricks. ” The last, which translated as “We speak Russian,” constituted, along with the words for “hello,” “good-bye,” and “thank you,” all the Russian Ty knew. He prayed the captain would not see through his bluff.
The captain attempted to nod. Ty tightened his grip then loosened it sufficiently for the captain to breathe more easily. Even as he did so, Ty ground the gun deeper against the Slav’s skin. Once the captain had spoken, Ty gagged him with a wet bandanna. Withdrawing his pistol and stepping slightly back, Ty shot out his hand to deliver a swift knife edge blow, or shuto uchi, to the side of the man’s neck, a blow not often as disabling as it appeared to be on the screen, yet in this instance sufficient to disable the captain long enough for him to be taken into custody.
Now, one by one, the Slavs ventured forth from the hold, and one by one, off balance after their climb and afraid to arrive with a weapon pointed at Philip Frost himself, they were seized from behind, subdued, disarmed and bound.
In the hold the two at-large warheads, like the one aboard Paradise still disguised as turbines, were immediately surrounded by sailors, Special Boat Service boys who had trained for such work. These sailors would guard the weapons until they’d been safely returned to their makers, after which they would be disarmed and decommissioned.
Ty exhaled a deep breath. Exhausted, he let his frame collapse against the wall, his legs stretch prone across the corridor as the trawler’s engines started and the old ship turned back from what had once been the edge of the world.
Lost in the view from the trawler’s stern as it gained speed and distance, painted out by the shadows of gathering clouds, was the ascent of a solitary diver on the far side of one of hundreds of local fishing boats. Clutching the barco’s wooden hull with relief, the diver handed up the underwater jet that had brought him so far so rapidly. The man in the barco accepted it willingly. Searching the horizon before removing his mask, the diver drew himself up and flung his legs over the narrow washboard. As soon as he removed his mask, Philip wiped his face with a proffered towel, keeping himself close to the boat’s floor, too low to be spotted from shore or other craft. From within his wet suit, he removed a soft waterproof kit and from that a telephone. When he had scrolled to the number he sought, he immediately pressed CALL. “Hello, is this Franz?” he asked.
“I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.”
“No, well, it’s because I’ve had a sudden change of plan,” Philip told him, with almost ethereal calm. “I would like you to meet me at the eastern extreme of Tarifa Harbor in one hour. Would that be possible?”
Franz hesitated. “With the same boat?” he inquired.
“You haven’t sold it yet, have you?”
“No,” Franz assured him, “of course not.”
“I will also be in the same boat,” Philip said. “When you spot us, keep a distance of fifty yards. I will swim to you.”
“As you wish,” Franz conceded.
In fact, it was exactly one hour later when Philip spotted Franz slowing the Contender far from the bustling ferry lanes of Tarifa. “We’ll anchor here,” he told the mate who was now captaining the barco, then checked his tanks and underwater jet. “You’ll want to lose yourself for a time. That will be something more easily accomplished in Morocco or elsewhere in the Middle East than in Spain right now.”
The mate returned his unforgiving scrutiny.
“This should both erase your memory and help,” Philip said, unfolding his left hand to reveal two Golconda D-Flawless Type IIa brilliant-cut diamonds he had removed from the waterproof kit along with his mobile and a single silicon chip. He could not be sure of the diamonds’ exact worth but guessed that even in a distressed market where no questions would be asked they would be likely to fetch a quarter of a million euros. “I may require your services in the future,” he told the mate. “Have you an e-mail address that will not change?”
The mate grinned, then slowly spoke his address, repeating it a second time, just in case. “Are you certain you’ll remember it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Philip said. “I don’t forget.” For a few seconds, he hesitated, studying the shiny microchip that contained the algorithmic codes to the suddenly and forever lost warheads.
“What’s that?” asked the mate.
“Nothing,” Philip replied, his voice wistful and resigned as he let the chip go in the evening wind to skim, settle upon and drown in the unforgiving Mediterranean. “Absolutely nothing but useless information, the curse of the w
orld we live in.”
All at once he lowered himself over the barco’s side and, without a splash, descended beneath the surface of the ancient indigo sea.
Chapter Fifty-four
“What are we are doing on this plane?” Isabella asked.
“I told you,” Ty said. “We’re going for a ride.” Ever since they had arrived back at the Gibraltar dockyard, Oliver had shepherded Ty, first to a clandestine rendezvous with Isabella in an overcooled holding room at the Royal Air Force terminal, then, almost immediately and with her once more in tow, aloft.
“I’ve had enough adventure for one day, thank you very much” Isabella shot back, glancing about the burled-wood and glove-leather cabin. “What kind of plane is this? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one quite like it.”
“Very few people have,” explained Oliver. “Actually, it’s a prototype for the new QSST.”
“QSST?” inquired Ty.
“Quiet Supersonic Transport,” Oliver said.
“Of course,” Ty said, “how dim of me!”
“I thought you might have guessed as much from its sleek beak and aft wings.”
“Whose is it?” Isabella asked.
“It belongs to a friend of a friend,” Oliver said.
“Where exactly are we going?” Ty asked.
“What a good question,” Isabella added.
“You are going home,” Oliver said, “in time, in fact, for dinner out.”
Ty looked at Isabella in a way he hoped would project his own astonishment. “And Isabella, where is she going?”
“That’s entirely up to her.”
Isabella immediately grimaced—in a way, Ty now realized, of which he had become more than fond. “But I can’t go anywhere,” she said. “I don’t even have my passport.”
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