him.
What the hell is he doing out here at this time of night?
The sailor had something in his right hand, down against his leg. He was concealing it behind his thigh. A doper? Carrying a joint? Naw, it was an object of some kind.
Van Housen stepped back against the bulkhead, partially out of sight because of the way the catwalk zagged outboard around this nearest ladder up from the O-3 level.
As the sailor in a sweater came around the corner, Van Housen was watching his hand. It swung up. A gun! It flashed — Van Housen heard the dull pop — and the bullet rocked him, but he had already launched himself forward. His momentum drove the sailor back against the rail, stunning him. Van Housen wrestled for the gun. There was a silencer on the barrel. He smashed the sailor’s arm against the railing. The pistol fell. Van Housen punched his assailant in the stomach, then again. The man doubled over.
Van Housen could feel himself weakening.
Got to stop this guy! Got to! Before I go down.
He seized the man by the belt and one arm and heaved him up and outboard as he exhaled convulsively from the exertion. The man sprawled on top of a life-raft canister. Van Housen tore the wool cap off and grabbed him by the hair. He smashed his fist into the sailor’s face.
No strength. The blow was weak. His legs were buckling.
The marine summoned every last ounce of strength and hit the man again in the face, swinging with his weight behind the blow. The man slid backward off the canister and disappeared, falling toward the sea.
Van Housen collapsed on the catwalk grid. His sound-powered headset had come off in the fight. He felt his stomach. His hand was warm and black and wet. Blood!
He was fainting. He lowered his head to the grid to stay conscious and felt for the headset. He pulled it toward him and fumbled for the mike button. “This is gun one …”
Then he passed out. He was unconscious when another sailor in a sweater with a pistol in his hand emerged from between the planes on the flight deck and stood looking down into the catwalk.
Lance Corporal Van Housen never felt the next bullet, which killed him.
Admiral Parker was wearing white uniform trousers and a T-shirt. Apparently he had just pulled the trousers on after his orderly woke him. Jake told him about the incident at the Vittorio, and Judith Farrell and Toad Tarkington’s involvement.
“Hell yes, I’ll release a flash message. You briefed Captain James on this yet?”
“Not yet, sir. I just heard this from Tarkington and the captain’s busy with the man overboard.”
“The captain called me just before you knocked. One man’s still in the water and one’s on his way to sick bay, half dead.” Parker turned to his aide, Lieutenant Franklin Delano Roosevelt Snyder. “Get my clothes, Duke. It’s time we went up to the bridge.” As he dressed the admiral told Jake, “Tonight’s Shore Patrol officer has been found dead on the quay. Neck broken.”
“What?” Jake said.
“Murdered.”
“Where?”
“Right in the Shore Patrol office. He was found just a few minutes ago.”
Jake Grafton seized the arms of his chair and leaned forward. “Lieutenant Flynn?”
“Yes.”
“I saw him go toward the office just before I boarded the mike boat to come out to the ship. He went down there with a chief who was on Shore Patrol duty tonight. The chief came back down the quay alone and rode out to the ship on the boat with me. He’s aboard.”
“Did you ever see the chief before? Know his name?”
Jake tried to remember. “Duncan? No … Dustin, I think. Dustin. And I can’t recall ever seeing him before.”
The admiral finished lacing his shoes, straightened and started for the door. Jake and Duke Snyder followed him. “Here we sit,” the admiral muttered, “three miles from the beach on the most valuable target in southern Italy. And we may already have an intruder aboard.”
“Or more than one,” Jake said, recalling the unusual number of drunks on the boat this evening and the confusion on the fantail when the two men went into the water.
Colonel Qazi charged up a ladder on the starboard side of the ship with his two men carrying gym bags right at his heels. At the top of the ladder well, on the O-3 level, they turned inboard to the long passageway that ran the length of the ship on the starboard side. Although this was one of the two main thoroughfares on this deck, it was narrow. Men could pass each other shoulder to shoulder in the corridor, but the knee-knockers were only wide enough for one man at a time to pass through. Qazi consulted the numbers on the little brass plaques near the doors of the compartments as he walked past. He knew the numbering system, but he couldn’t readily visualize just where he was from reading the numbers. For the first time tonight Qazi knew a touch of panic. These passageways all looked the same, narrow and full of ninety-degree turns. The place was a maze, a labyrinth of walls and doors and passageways that led off in every direction but the proper one. When the watertight doors swung shut, he would have to fight his way from space to space and he would never know just where he was or where he was going. He would be trapped like a rat.
He touched the arm of a sailor walking aft. “I’m new aboard. How do I get to the communication spaces?”
“Port side, Chief.” The sailor gestured toward a passageway that led off to the left, presumably to join with the port-side passageway that paralleled this one. “And forward maybe fifty frames. There’s a window to pass messages through. You can’t miss it.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” The sailor hurried away. Qazi and his men strode down the indicated passageway.
They were in luck. Just beside the window where the clerks accepted messages for transmission, there was a security door which was locked and unlocked by an access device mounted head-high on the bulkhead. The access device had a keyboard into which those who sought entrance tapped a code, which changed weekly. And as Qazi approached, a sailor was tapping on the keys, which were hidden from an observer’s view by a black lip which surrounded the keyboard.
The sailor started through the security door just as Qazi reached him and planted his shoulder in the man’s back. They crashed through the door together, the two gunmen right behind, extracting their Uzis from their gym bags. Black security curtains screened the doorway from the rest of the compartment. Qazi pushed his man through the drapes into the room and Jamail and Haddad, the gunmen following, stepped clear to each side and opened fire. The silenced weapons made a ripping noise. Spent shells spewed from the ejection ports. The sailor who had preceded Qazi spun toward him, and the colonel grabbed his head and broke his neck.
The other five Americans in the compartment died under the hail of bullets.
The office spaces were lit in white light, in contrast to the red light which had illuminated the ladders and passageways. As their eyes adjusted, the gunmen ran deeper into the communications complex, using their weapons on the four other sailors they found there. Qazi went into the equipment room. Banks of panels with dials and gauges and knobs covered the walls. Or did they? There seemed to be lights behind this equipment. Over there was a passage. Perhaps the power cables came in back there. That communications technician Ali had interrogated, what had he said?
Qazi stepped through the gap in the seven-foot-high gray boxes.
He saw the fist and the wrench swinging just in time, and ducked as the wrench smashed into the panel beside him.
The man wielding it was young. Young and black and scared. And quick. He had the wrench swinging again before Qazi could react. The colonel tried to fall, and the wrench struck his head a glancing blow.
He was on the floor, dazed, and the sailor was on his chest, pinning his arms with his legs, drawing back the wrench for the coup de grace, his lips stretched back exposing his teeth, the cords in his neck as taut as wires.
Qazi heard a pop and blood spurted from the side of the American’s head. The corpse collapsed on top of
