The Shipkiller

by Justin Scott

  The snake was there. Somewhere close. The buoy chain or the submarine pipeline was almost certainly its home. Would it sense his presence as a new invasion, him as a new invader, and attack again? He wedged the long end of the hose under his arm so he could cover his face.

  The final strands parted grudgingly, fiber by fiber, thread by thread, opposing the blade to the last. He was running out of air again. Then the knife was through, scraping the metal propeller. He untied his lifeline from the shaft and pulled himself back to the red surface.

  In his fear and confusion, he had forgotten to mount a boarding ladder. The Swan’s hull, slippery with oil, loomed above him. He gripped the toe rail on the gunnel and tried to gather the strength to climb up. He was drained by the attack and the long periods without air. He tightened his arms and raised his torso until his face was even the deck. He could go no higher. Water poured from his garments. Locking his elbows, he hung by willpower and waited. When he was lightened, he kicked and thrashed, hooked an arm around a lifeline stanchion, and painfully dragged his body under the lines and into the cockpit.

  He lay gasping on the bench, watching the red sky flicker overhead. When he could, he sat up and stripped off the foul-weather gear. The Swan was drifting from the loading buoy. Already the white bullet shape was a hundred yards away and dwindling into the night. He toweled off and put on dry shorts, feeling his way around the dark cabin, afraid that if he turned on the lights he would find the tiny twin puncture marks and know that the snake had killed him.

  LEVIATHAN was coming. He had to get back to the sea-lane, loose his decoy, and line up his shot.

  Gathering spars, line, oars, a jib, and the floorboards from the Swan’s main salon, he pulled the dinghy alongside and wedged the floorboards into the bottom. He lashed one oar across the boat and another fore and aft. For a mast, he stood the boat hook inside the cross formed by the oars, lashed it tightly to them, then guyed it with nylon line from the stern and sides.

  He hanked the jib onto a line he had spiraled around the spinnaker pole. Then, angling the pole like a dhow’s yard, he lashed the lower end to the dinghy’s bow and the middle to the top of the stubby boathook mast. He led a sheet from the jib’s clew into the dinghy.

  The jury-rigged lateen sail started flapping. Standing over it on the Swan’s stern, he furled it to the yard and tightened all the guys. Then he fastened a spare oar as a combination rudder and keel.

  He sailed back to the shipping lane, attached the block and tackle to the boom, and hoisted up the Dragon. The radio had begun to blare ceaselessly. He moved the block and tackle, then went below and quickly scanned the radio spectrum. The Iranian naval channels were flooded. The VHF traffic could only mean that vast numbers of boats and aircraft were drawing near in concert.

  Again, he saw himself at the mercy of luck. At any moment a patrol boat or helicopter might stumble across him. It was ten o’clock, 2200, and he was approximately twenty miles east of Hll’s sea berth, which meant that LEVIATHAN, due at 2400, was thirty-two miles from Hll and twelve or so from him. If he waited, he would meet the monster in forty-five minutes. Three quarters of an hour, during which a searcher might get lucky.

  He had to cut the time.

  He raised the main and headed east, downwind. The shamal was lightening, the humid mists growing thicker and redder in the gleam of the burning flares. He poled out the spinnaker, trimmed it, caught the breeze. The billowing headsail lifted the Swan and set her running. Slicing crimson seas, she flew to meet LEVIATHAN with her little dinghy skidding on her boiling wake.

  A Vosper-Thorneycroft Tenacity pulled alongside the commander’s Hovercraft, its diesels rumbling easily. Like the Hovercraft, the British-built missile carrier effortlessly maintained LEVIATHAN’s sixteen knots. Her twin machine guns were manned by radiohelmeted Iranian sailors.

  Miles Donner tried to assess her missile complement. She was roving from flank to flank, but each time she had passed it had been too dark to see. Now a leaping gas flare silhouetted the Tenacity. The missiles were under canvas. Disappointed, he turned his attention back to the Hovercraft’s darkened bridge and the officers grouped around the radar screens.

  LEVIATHAN was an enormous black presence half a mile behind. The great hull and the towering aft structure moved across the flickering gas flares like a cloud over stars. Two thousand yards to Donner’s right another Hovercraft covered the tanker’s starboard bows. There were two more Hovercraft astern. The escort began to veer closer to the ship, because ahead the sea-lane narrowed as it passed through an oil field.

  Stationed forward of LEVIATHAN, a stately frigate cleaved the Gulf. Donner thought it was interesting that the Iranian commander was here on the Hovercraft off LEVIATHAN’s port bow rather than on the frigate. The man moved freely from ship to helicopter, commandeering whatever vehicle suited his purpose, confident his sophisticated communications systems would give him control from any point. Speed, not size, was where the power lay in this modern navy.

  Donner had succeeded beyond his hopes. LEVIATHAN was safe; it was all over but the shooting. In addition, he had established a good relationship with the Iranian commander, a competent officer, well placed and obviously on his way up to be given charge of this crack squadron. And, to ice the cake, he had the chance to submit to the Mossad a cracking good report on the Shah’s Navy.

  An officer cried out. The others clustered closer to the radar screens. Donner shouldered among them. “What is it?” he asked the commander.

  “Target a mile ahead.”

  He shouted in Persian. The Hovercraft roared. Beside it, the Tenacity missile boat cut in its Rolls Royce gas turbines and the two craft howled side by side at forty-five knots.

  The commander finished speaking into a radiophone. He pointed at the officer manning the controls. The Hovercraft shot forward. Sixty-five knots, Donner guessed. A quick glance at the speed indicator told him it was more. They left the Tenacity in their wake and flew past the frigate, which, to judge by its sharply curling bow wake, luminous in the light of a gas flare, had also speeded up. The bridge officers picked up the telephone to speak to their gun crews.

  Donner stepped closer to the radar screen. Bright blips marked the ships, dimmer ones the towers of the oil field around the channel.

  “Why should we suddenly see him?” he asked the commander. “His boat hasn’t shown up on radar before.”

  “Perhaps it’s just a glitch. Perhaps another boat.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Donner. “You’ve already swept the area. It shouldn’t be another boat. And glitches don’t usually stay on the screen that long, do they?”

  “We’ll know in thirty seconds,” said the commander.

  Donner watched the target light grow stronger. Suddenly he realized what had happened.

  “It’s his weapon! He’s got it on deck. He’s preparing to fire.”

  The Iranian’s face tightened. “Of course.” He spoke rapid Persian into the telephone.

  “I’ve ordered them to fire as soon as they see him.”

  Donner was surprised to see distaste in the Iranian’s dark face, as if he weren’t pleased with the idea of directing such firepower at a single man. The Israeli smiled his understanding. “You had to. You can’t take chances if he’s ready to fire himself.”

  The Hovercraft howled into the night, bumping on the swells like a jet liner in rough air. The space between the target light and the center of the radar screen decreased rapidly. Other brighter lights on the scope showed that the Iranians were lining up for a cross fire.

  Hardin’s boat would be visible in seconds, dead ahead. Donner peered into the wispy burned haze, sighting over the heads of the sailors manning the brace of machine guns on the bow turret. On either side of the bridge were surface-to-surface missiles, their deadly snouts depressed to the lowest angle.

  “There he is!” yelled Donner.

  Hardin’s sloop exploded out of the red mist under full sail. Her booming spinnaker billow
ed crimson in the light of the flares, tight as a drumhead, glistening with the strain. Her main, an elegant quarter moon, stood tall behind it.

  The Iranian commander screamed an order and the Hovercraft, banking into a wide turn, shuddered from the recoil of the big machine guns on the bow. Tracers arced over the water and lighted through the Swan. Fire poured from another Hovercraft. Shell geysers straddled the sailboat. The sails blinked white and red as they were lighted by muzzle flashes and the blaze of exploding shells.

  Donner raised his binoculars. He could see Hardin’s figure crouching ahead of the helm in the cockpit trying to fire. A missile lanced through the night, holed the spinnaker, and exploded in the water behind the Swan. A shell burst over the cabin. The mast toppled forward, dragging the sails into the water.

  They were closer now and Donner could see debris flying from the cabin roof. A line of bullets stitched the hull from bow to stern.

  The figure in the cockpit was flung to the deck by the impact, and a second later the self-steering vane blew away, gliding for a moment like a disembodied airplane wing. An explosion fragmented the cabin roof and flames flickered in the broken windows.

  The Iranian shouted over and over into the telephone and gradually, as the shattered boat sank deeper and deeper, the gunfire ceased.

  For Hardin it was like hearing a murder on the street too far away to stop it, too close not to know. She had carried him over three oceans and her parting gift had been a few more yards of space, a moment or two of time.

  He sat in the bottom of the rubber boat, his back braced against the stern, the Dragon half on his shoulder and half in a sling suspended from the mast. Steering back into the sea-lane from a cluster of oil rigs that had hidden him from radar, he let the lateen sail pull the dinghy east. It ran before the wind, self-tending, squatting deeply under the weight of the weapon. Small waves kept threatening to break over the stern.

  Hardin peered through the binocular sights, saw nothing, watched over them, squinting to pierce the red gloom. The gunfire had stopped. They’d be circling the spot where she sank, looking for his body.

  He sensed a difference on the horizon. A color rather than a shape. It was blacker ahead than it had been. He saw rapidly moving lights off to one side of the shadow. A ship that grew quickly. It was a frigate speeding on a course that would pass close to starboard.

  The blackness deepened. Then, in the blaze of a burning sea rig, he saw the white crown of LEVIATHAN’s bridge, impossibly high, as high as an office building, and topped by the twin funnels which were LEVIATHAN’s and LEVIATHAN’s alone. But it was distant, far away. What was closer, much closer, was the black wall that was LEVIATHAN’s bow.

  The Swan would not sink.

  In the cabin the water rose to the chart table, and that flooding extinguished the worst fires.

  Her decks were gouged and splintered, her mast gone, trailing beside her, held by her sheets. The radar reflector, clipped to a stay, lay in the water, hidden by the spinnaker. The coach roof, the hatches, and the foredeck had been blown wide open by an exploding shell. She was riddled above the waterline and many of the shots, having been fired from higher platforms, had exited underwater.

  She should have broken up, but her stringers and stiffeners held tenaciously to her hand-laid-up hull, and she was still floating, her bow still pointing the last course Hardin had given her.

  Donner’s quick eyes swept the smoking wreckage, took in the splintered teak, the holes, the fallen rigging. He recalled that he had first seen her driving into a Channel gale, glittering in his spotlights like an expensive toy. Then demasted, drifting into Table Bay. What glittered had been swept away by the sea, and he had seen that the glitter had fooled him. She was a simple and powerful sailing machine. His eyes lingered on the cockpit, fixed on the sailbags scattered around the steering pedestal. One of the seat covers had been blown off and the dinghy locker it had covered was empty.

  “It’s a trick!” yelled Donner.

  The black wall began to fill the sky. Hardin was sitting at wave height and it was higher and wider than he had ever remembered or imagined in his worst nightmares. It didn’t seem possible that anything that big could be moving. But it was moving, fast, and looming closer and closer with each second.

  He put his eyes to the binocular sight and zeroed the cross hairs in on the center of the black. Then, carefully and slowly, he lowered the muzzle until the cross hairs settled on a line just above the water.

  The line flashed like a grin, a malicious smile of waves breaking on the giant’s prow. That was his target. The only part of a ship where a hit could sink it. From one shot, LEVIATHAN would not explode, but at sixteen knots, the tanker couldn’t stop before the tremendous pressure of its own momentum smashed open its bows after he had blasted a starter hole with the Dragon.

  LEVIATHAN was less than half a mile away. A giant black wall in a blazing red sky. He waited. Closer. A gas flare behind it set a crown of flame between its twin funnels. Hardin sighted the white line on her bow and fired.

  The rocket leaped out of the launcher with a loud whoosh. The booster ignited with a startling white light and the Dragon raced across the swells. The smoked glass had protected Hardin’s eyes from the booster glare, but it confused him for an instant. Then he found the rocket in the sight and manipulated the guidance switches, steering it left as it veered off center, raising it as it threatened to dive into the water.

  The sight splintered, stinging his face with flying glass and metal, and his arm burned like fire. The water boiled around him. Something tugged at the dinghy’s side and air began to hiss out of it. He heard gunfire behind him. More bullets plucked at the rubber and the dinghy began to collapse.

  The rocket streaked toward LEVIATHAN. Hardin was struggling to control it with the mangled wire guide when a wave curled over the stern and sank the dinghy. The heavy launcher pulled him under and the last he saw of the Dragon was its tail glowing white against the black of LEVIATHAN.

  BOOK FOUR

  30

  A jaratu pointed her sloop close to the wind. The little boat leaned over at a lively angle and darted across the bay. She gripped the tiller and leaned back, hiking out, her taut body poised exultantly between air and water. The tiller tugged her hands like a friendly animal. Radiant sunlight, hot on her bare shoulders, glittered everywhere on the dancing chop.

  She sailed all day, crisscrossing Lagos harbor, shuttling between ocean berths and quiet lagoons. At last she turned back to the marina. She had stayed too late and it was almost dark when she passed the jetty that marked the outer reaches of the sprawling yacht basin.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She saw a squarishly built man on the end of the rock pile a hundred yards away. For a long second it could have been him. She strained to see in the facing light, willing a miracle. Then the man turned and walked to a Land Rover. He looked slighter than Hardin had been, and he wore the khaki of a Nigerian soldier.

  How often had that happened? How often had she glanced startled at a white man on the street? How often had her mind conspired to deny the news that Miles Donner had brought her six months ago? How often had she prayed her intuition would prove him wrong?

  Some level of humanity she hadn’t thought the Israeli possessed had compelled him to tell her personally. He claimed he had stayed with the Iranian search teams in hopes of persuading them to give him custody if they found Hardin alive. But all they ever recovered were shreds of the dinghy he had last sailed—mangled strips of rubber spit up by LEVIATHAN’s gigantic propellers.

  She had been too numb and grief stricken to care if it was true. Hardin filled her mind, and nothing else, including the nature of his death, seemed important. He had left her empty, it was true; she missed him achingly. But she also held a memory of having loved in a full rich way she never had before and thought she never would again.

  Miles Donner occasionally detoured through Lagos on his way home from photographic jobs and, now that he was
no longer an active agent of the Mossad, he was a welcome guest in her father’s house. Ajaratu had long since moved out—much to the delight of her father’s mistress—but whenever Donner visited, she returned to play the part of her father’s hostess. Donner drank too much one afternoon and they took a walk alone in the garden. She had learned that even retired, he would speak candidly only out of doors.

  “Why did you betray him?” she had asked, Hardin’s own futile questions echoing in her mind.

  “He was no longer an asset,” Donner had replied. “We dealt in practicalities.”

  “But you could have just let him be,” she said, sudden anger rising like a choking mass in her throat.

  Donner denied it. “As Hardin used to say, ‘It doesn’t work that way.’ Advantage can be found in every situation. By helping try to stop him we were making friends in the Gulf states, just as we found a good friend in your father when we rescued you.” He continued, his voice slurring. “Ajaratu . . . if it’s any consolation, I tried to save him.”

  She hated Donner, and yet she tolerated him. She even encouraged his visits, for the simple reason that she was, sometimes, inexplicably and absolutely sure that Hardin was still alive. If he were, Donner would learn of it. But whenever she raised the subject of the hunt in the Persian Gulf, Donner’s response was never more than politely noncommittal; he knew nothing. And as the long weeks went by, and then the months, Ajaratu sadly watched time lay waste to her intuition until its wreckage began to look more like hope than truth.

  She wondered if Hardin had ever felt about his loss the way she felt hers. Had he ever blamed his wife for dying as bitterly as she sometimes blamed him? Carolyn at least had been innocent, but he had courted his death. There were nights she railed against his implacable fury, screamed her own anger, pleaded with God to undo what Hardin had done.

  But her anger had cooled. She couldn’t blame him anymore. Hardin’s passion had been beyond his control. Had he denied it, it would have killed his soul as surely as LEVIATHAN had destroyed his body.