“We need to get there in time to turn her from the Manhattan side,” the captain replied. “Even then she’s going to have momentum and mass on her side. It will be a tough fight.”
“I’m sure you will win it,” Karchovski said.
“We can try. But you might want to come inside the wheelhouse, where it will be a little safer…that is, if you’re not too busy standing on the bow of my ship playing Admiral Negobatov at the Battle of Tsushima.”
“Didn’t we lose that one?” Karchovski asked with a laugh.
“Da. It was a disaster. The Japanese kicked our asses.”
Karchovski smiled. Russian humor was always so deliciously dark.
Kane cackled as he watched the Ibn Jubair begin a long, slow turn toward Manhattan Island as the police helicopters and patrol boats skittered about, unable to do much more than shine their spotlights on the ship. Red tracers arced through the air from the police boats and were returned in even greater numbers from the enemy. Occasionally, there’d be the sudden bright streak of a rocket-propelled grenade or a missile followed by the flash of an explosion.
Kane had laughed uproariously when a missile went past the helicopter and struck one of the buildings across from Battery Park. A small fuel fire on the water marked where a helicopter had gone down in the initial clash, and two police boats burned merrily. “This is even more fun than I thought,” he said, standing up and clapping his hands.
He leaned over again to look through the telescope, but the smirk on his face disappeared when he swung the telescope back toward the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the tugboats. And more important, the armed men on board the boats.
“What the hell!” he exclaimed. He thought he’d planned for every contingency. Where did Karp come up with those boats on such short notice? Reaching into his pants pocket, he tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for Lucy’s cell phone to turn on. When it did, he called…his nemesis. The unbidden word made him shudder.
“What’s the matter, Kane? Didn’t expect the cavalry to arrive so soon?” Karp said grimly.
“Fuck you, Karp!” Kane snarled. “You call off those tugboats, or I’m going to rape and kill your daughter while you listen. Here, I’m going to put her cell on speakerphone so I can use both hands.”
The cell phone was quiet and Kane began to smile again until Karp spoke. “Lucy, if you can hear me, I love you.”
“I love you, too, Dad, do the right thing! I’ll be okay!”
“No, she won’t, Karp,” Kane screamed. “She’s going to suffer. Now, fucking tell those tugboats to turn around!”
“Can’t do it, Kane,” Karp said. “But I swear to you that when this is over, if you’re still alive, I am going to spend every moment of the rest of my life coming after you. I will hunt you down, and I will choke the life out of you with my own hands.”
“A little vigilante, isn’t that, Mr. Law and Order? What about my Miranda warnings, and all my other constitutional rights?” Kane mocked.
Kane looked at the Ibn Jubair, lit up in the spotlights of the helicopters, and then back at the tugboats. “You’re too late, anyway, Karp,” he snarled. “But I’m still going to rape and kill this bitch, just so that her suffering is the last thing you’ll hear before you die.”
Setting the cell phone down on a desk, Kane walked over to Lucy, grabbed her by the hair, and threw her to the floor. She struggled, but with her wrists and ankles bound there wasn’t much she could do as he began to undo the belt of his pants.
“I feel sorry for you, Kane,” Lucy said. “It’s really a demon that’s making you do this.”
Kane stopped for a moment, then laughed and undid his zipper. “Well, too bad there’s no swine around. Then you could perform an exorcism and the demon would jump into the body of a pig and go drown in the East River.”
“I’m afraid it’s not going to go that easy on you,” Lucy replied. “St. Teresa says the Avenging Angel is on his way.”
Kane laughed. “What avenging angel? Your dad’s about to be turned into a crispy critter. Isn’t that right, Karp!”
“I mean David Grale,” Lucy replied.
At the mention of the name, Kane’s smile faltered. His eyes blazed as he dropped his pants. “I don’t believe in angels.” He stepped toward Lucy, but suddenly she rolled onto her back and kicked up with her feet, catching him in the testicles.
The blow dropped Kane to his hands and knees. Gasping, with spittle flying from his mouth, he stood slowly back on his feet and pulled his knife from its sheath. “I’ll fuck you when you’re dead, bitch!” he bellowed as his eyes rolled insanely.
“Andy! Help me!” Lucy screamed.
“That little son of a bitch isn’t helping anyone….” Kane couldn’t finish his sentence as he doubled over, as though he’d been struck again, and dropped the knife. “Nooooo!” he screamed.
“Andy. He’s going to hurt me,” Lucy yelled.
“I won’t let him,” Andy replied. “He wasn’t in charge of me. I still warned your dad.”
“Yes, you did, and you were a good boy. Now it’s your turn to be the strong one, Andy.”
Kane’s hideous face twisted again. Blood surged wildly through the veins in his ruined skin as his eyes bugged out of their ruined sockets. He turned to Abu and snarled. “Shoot, you fucking idiot!”
“Stop it,” Abu yelled, stepping between them and pointing the gun down at Lucy.
“Don’t shoot her,” Andy yelled. “Shoot me!”
Fear contorting his face, Abu pointed the gun back at Kane.
“For God’s sake, you moron, shoot the fucking witch,” Kane yelled.
Abu stared at Kane and nodded. He turned toward Lucy and raised the gun. A grunt escaped his lips and his mouth made little motions like a fish’s. He dropped to his knees, the gun clattering away, and then fell forward onto his face, Kane’s knife buried in one of his kidneys.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Andy apologized.
“It’s okay, Andy,” Lucy said. “You did it to protect a friend. Now untie me, please.”
Andy leaned over the twitching body of Abu and pulled the knife out. Abu suddenly shook his head violently and made a noise like a man stepping into a cold shower.
Lucy had managed to sit up and saw that the man with the knife in front of her no longer acted like a ten-year-old boy. Instead, he was a middle-aged, and very angry, sociopath. “Now you’re going to die, bitch.”
Kane paused as he heard Karp’s voice on the speakerphone. “Got it, Espey?”
Stalking over to the phone, Kane sneered. “Got what, Karp? I’m about to gut your daughter like a pig. So what have you got?”
“You, Kane, just you.”
Suddenly, there was a loud explosion from the front of the house followed by the sound of gunshots and shouts of “Federal agents, drop your weapons.” More gunfire erupted.
Howling with rage, Kane turned to kill Lucy only to see that she had almost reached Abu’s gun. The hunter was about to become the hunted. He dodged out of the room just as a bullet crashed into the wall behind his head.
When it became clear to Abdullah that the tugs would intercept him before he could get as far as the Brooklyn Bridge, he’d changed plans to run aground as far up the island as he could get. Looking at the map, he thought maybe as far as the South Street Seaport Museum and Circle Line boat tour docks.
Now he was willing to settle for the Battery Maritime Building in front of One New York Plaza. The captain had swung the Ibn Jubair in a wide turn and had the ship running straight for the land, where Abdullah could see the lights from the cars on the FDR Drive, while off to his right the Brooklyn Bridge still smoldered. He imagined thousands of people in the glass towers in front of him watching the approaching ship, not knowing the horror they faced. It will still be a glorious end!
Two police helicopters still buzzed around like hornets while the police patrol boats kept making valiant but ineffectual runs at the ship as his men continued to d
rive them off. The only real obstacles now were breaking away from the path they’d taken along the shoreline and running at an angle toward the Ibn Jubair.
Already tracers were flying between the tugboats and the ship. His men seemed to be running out of rocket grenades and missiles as they fired them more judiciously to keep the helicopters and boats at bay.
“They’re going to reach us before we hit land,” the captain said.
“Go as fast as you can and turn into them,” Abdullah said. “Run them over.”
“I’ll try, but they’re more maneuverable and probably will avoid a direct blow.”
Abdullah turned to one of his men. “Go tell the others to concentrate their fire on the tugboats. They must buy us more time.”
As he watched, a rocket grenade screamed away from the ship’s bow and struck one of the tugboats. But it hit the upturned prow a glancing blow and exploded without seeming to cause any damage.
In the meantime, the men on the tugboats were pouring a withering fire at the ship. Being higher out of the water, especially in the wheelhouses, the shooters in the tugboats were much more effective than those of the Harbor Patrol. His men were taking more casualties and having to keep their heads down between shooting a few rounds themselves. He ducked as a stream of bullets crashed through the window of the bridge.
Abdullah heard a strange sound and turned to see the captain sitting on the floor holding his throat. Then the man’s hands dropped; half of his throat had been shot away.
As God wills, Abdullah thought. We don’t need a captain anymore.
The shooting from the deck intensified as the two tugboats approached. Some of his men ran outside the bridge and began shooting down as first one and then the other tug slammed in at oblique angles. Abdullah fought to keep his feet. He looked down below, where men from the ship and men on the tugboats blasted away at one another from nearly point-blank range.
As the tug closest to the bow revved its engines and strained against the Ibn Jubair, the other suddenly turned to bring itself sideways to the ship. “They’re boarding!” one of his men outside the bridge shouted. The man lifted his rifle to shoot, but his head disappeared in a fine red mist. Then a man outside the door was struck in the chest by a round that nearly cut him in two from the side.
Heavy round, Abdullah thought as he ducked. A sniper on the bridge? “More power, more power!” he screamed.
“This is all she has,” shouted the helmsman, who kept trying to turn the wheel against the pressure of the tugboats.
Mindful of the sniper, Abdullah kept the bulkhead between him and the Brooklyn Bridge as he stood. The gleaming One New York Plaza tower rose before him, beckoning him, to intertwine its fate with his. The ship was still moving forward, but slowly, inexorably, the tugs were winning the battle.
It was clear that the Ibn Jubair might come within yards of the Maritime Building, but it would not strike the shore hard enough to rupture the hull. There was only one thing left to do. But there wasn’t much time. Shooting from the rear of the ship meant that the boarding party from the second tug had fought their way onto the Ibn Jubair.
The men on the deck in front of him still kept the helicopters at bay, though there were more now and they were bathing the ship in bright light, and prevented any men from the first tug from coming aboard. But it was a matter of time before they ran out of ammunition or were picked off.
Abdullah pulled his handgun from its holster and grabbed a grenade launcher. “Keep us as close to that building as you can,” he said, pointing at One New York Plaza. Then he turned to Stupenagel, who had taken cover beneath a steel shelf. He pointed the gun at her. “Get up.”
When they got to the door to go out, he put the gun against her back. “Just so you know, there is a sniper on that bridge; if you hesitate, he’ll kill you as soon as me,” he said. “But if you try to get away, I will shoot you. Now run.”
The two darted through the door and had just ducked into a covered stairwell down to the deck when a bullet clanged off the steel above their heads. “That’s your friends. Perhaps they think you’re Ajmaani,” he said with a laugh.
“As long as they shoot you, too, I’ll be happy knowing there’s a special place for you in hell.”
Abdullah pressed the gun to her head again. “Tonight, I dine with the Prophet and all the mujahedeen who fought for Allah before me. Now go down and out onto the deck. But be careful. You have men with guns trying to shoot you.”
As they reached the deck, Abdullah saw a young man with an assault rifle who appeared to be in shock. “You, come with me,” he said, slapping the boy.
Numbly, the boy nodded and started to move out when a bullet caught him in the back, striking his spine and dropping him like gelatin to the deck. “Your friend the sniper,” Abdullah said as they ducked behind a metal shed. “I want you between him and me. Falter once, and I will shoot you first.”
“So gallant,” Stupenagel said. “But I guess hiding behind women is pretty par for the course.”
Abdullah shook his head and smiled. “You know, Ariadne, I cannot wait until I no longer have to hear your voice.”
“Feeling’s mutual, bub. Want to tell me where we’re going? It’s kind of hard to move around with my wrists tied.”
Abdullah looked around the shed. “I need to get to the middle,” he said. He didn’t feel it necessary to explain that he wanted to reach the valves that had been modified to dock with the tanker and allow the Ibn Jubair to transport LNG. If he could release the valves without getting shot, he might still be able to ignite the ship by firing the grenade into the tanks.
He stuck the gun in her ribs. “Let’s go.”
“I got two bad guys trying to work their way forward,” Blanchett said to Karp. “One’s a woman. I think she might be Malovo. And the other one could be Omar Abdullah. I only saw him briefly.”
Blanchett kept the crosshairs of his scope on the spot where he’d last seen the two duck after he shot the second man. His first attempts to help Karchovski’s men in the tugboats had been off. It was a long shot at a moving target, but the toughest part had been judging the rise and fall of the vessel. He had to time it along with all the other variables. But he was getting the hang of it and had hit several men—concentrating on those he saw with grenade launchers or handheld missiles, as well as two who’d been shooting downward at the tugboats from the ship’s bridge.
The man and woman suddenly darted from their hiding place. Blanchett squeezed a shot off but knew that it would miss. Before he could chamber another round, the woman, a blond, and the man ran forward again and hid. “They’re pretty determined to get wherever they’re going.”
Karp looked through his binoculars at the ship going forward from where he, too, had last seen the pair. He was trying to keep his mind off the last sounds he’d heard from Lucy’s cell phone—an explosion, shots fired, shouts, and a horrible scream before the phone went dead. Nothing you can do. Help Ned. He came to a group of valves partly obscured by several metal boxes in the middle of the deck, which he presumed led to whatever was beneath.
“I’ll bet they want to get to those valves,” Karp said. “If they can release the gas that way, they might still ignite it. I’d hate to see what it will do to those buildings and whoever’s in them.”
Ned patiently watched through the scope, his finger poised on the trigger. He followed the rise of the ship with his crosshairs on the spot where he thought the terrorists would have to appear if the valves were their destination. He saw movement and began to pull the trigger as a blond head appeared.
“Oh shit, it’s that reporter, Ariadne!” he exclaimed.
“What? Who? Who did you say?” asked Gilbert Murrow, who’d been standing behind them and now moved to the railing.
“Abdullah is using her as a shield,” Ned replied. “He’s at the valves. I think he’s trying to turn them. He has a gun on her, but I can’t get a clear shot.”
“You’re going to have to tak
e the shot, Ned,” Karp said.
“I’d have to kill her first,” Blanchett replied, his voice strained.
“No, please,” Murrow pleaded.
“You can’t let him open that valve,” Karp shouted.
Murrow fainted at the moment Blanchett pulled the trigger.
On board the Ibn Jubair, Ariadne Stupenagel crouched in front of Abdullah. Let’s see, she thought, if they think I’m Malovo, they’re going to keep trying to shoot me. The shooter fires when the ship gets to its high point.
She waited for the ship to rise and at the moment before it would drop again, she fell to the deck. Something buzzed over her head like a giant bee. She looked over to the side and saw that the bee had stung her former lover and that he was no longer among the living. God, I promise, if you just let me get home to my Murry, I’ll never have sex with bad men again.
She was still thinking about her next move when two men suddenly appeared, pointing weapons at her. “Oh, come on,” she said. “I’m tired of getting shot at.”
“Then maybe you’ll want to get up and come with us,” one of the men said. He pressed a microphone attached to his black sweater. “Officer Tomaso reporting in. We have one female hostile. The midsection is secure.”
“Who are you calling hostile, sweetie,” Stupenagel said. “I’m about the friendliest girl you ever met. I was a hostage, not one of the bad guys.”
The other officer laughed. “She’s got you there, Tomaso.”
“Yeah, yeah, Baines,” Tomaso replied. “Sorry, ma’am, but I’m going to have to cuff you until the sarge says otherwise.”
“Handcuffs? Why, I hardly know you,” she replied. “Oh, before I forget. There are a couple of federal agents holed up somewhere on the ship. They’re the ones who stopped these jokers from torching lower Manhattan. You might want to tell your guys not to shoot them, or for that matter to get too close, or they might get shot.”
As Tomaso relayed the information about Jojola and Tran to his superior officer, Baines checked on Abdullah. “Man,” he said with disgust, “a .50 cal sure makes a mess.”
Capture (Butch Karp Thrillers) Page 44
