of thousands, from New Jersey to Maine and crippling the American economy by poisoning ships and docks and ports and cargoes all along the northeastern seaboard… that would bring fresh and eager recruits flocking to the Cause. They would come, they would train, they would strike, and they would continue striking until America was humbled, until America was destroyed.
And Hammed and Abdul and Rahid himself would again have peace.
In the meantime, he dreaded the night, and the Americans who'd made it their own…
Kellerman had practiced this climb hundreds of times, but he'd not expected to be making it while the ship he was boarding was surging ahead at twenty knots or more. Twice he'd nearly fallen, but at last he grabbed the lowest line of the safety railing along the ship's bulwark and rolled himself over onto the deck.
They'd deliberately positioned the ASDS alongside the Sandpiper directly beside the aft end of the deckhouse. The midget sub was invisible to radar and all but invisible optically to any lookouts. Unless their luck was very bad, the SEALs should be able to get aboard without being seen.
But Murphy is an uninvited guest at every military evolution. Forward, just five yards away along the covered passageway between deckhouse and railing, a watertight door swung open and two men stepped out. Both had AK-47s slung over their shoulders.
Kellerman was wearing standard VBSS gear, including combat harness and black wet suit, his face blacked, a AN/ PVS-14D night-vision monocular over his right eye and a watch cap over his head. He was carrying an H&K SD5 strapped to his back along with a rolled-up caving ladder, but getting his primary weapon unhooked and into play would be too noisy, with too much movement, with the enemy just a few steps away. If they turned to face aft…
Kellerman was already unholstering his pistol, the Navy version of the P226, a sound suppressor already screwed over the muzzle. One of the men leaned against the railing, looking out over the sea as he struck a match and lit a cigarette. The other turned and looked straight at Kellerman.
'Min haida?' the man said. The words sounded calm, perhaps curious. It was so dark he probably wasn't seeing anything more threatening than a shadow crouched on the deck. Two-handed, Kellerman fired and kept firing, snapping round after round into first one man and then the other, shifting his aim back and forth as the two tumbled back from the railing. One tried to reach for his rifle, then slumped with two holes side by side just above his left eye.
Swiftly Kellerman reloaded his pistol, then holstered it. He unhooked the caving ladder from the back of his harness, attached the free end to the railing, and let the roll deploy itself down the side of the ship. Garrison was already climbing the boarding hook, coming up hand over hand as Kellerman had done. Lieutenant Rogers was already in the ASDS hatch, securing the base of the caving ladder and preparing to come aboard.
The two bodies were dragged aft and sent tumbling over the fantail. Kellerman then unshipped his H&K and took up a security position forward of the ladder, waiting as the rest of his team came on board.
Dean stood beside the massive security door, exchanging glances with the other three, Brisard, Morgan, and Henderson, close behind him. 'Ready?' he asked, and all three nodded.
Dean and Brisard carried H&Ks, Morgan a CAR-15, and Henderson his full-auto shotgun, still loaded with 19mm frag-12s. The door was locked, of course, and the ID key cards they all carried no longer worked.
But they had another means of entry. Dean reached into his retrieved combat harness and pulled out a small, waterproof pouch. Inside was a laminated card a bit larger than a postage stamp. Taking the card, he positioned it over the thumbprint reader and pressed the activation button.
Their secret door-opening device was actually nothing more than a laser photocopy of the thumbprint of David Llewellyn, the ship's chief security officer. His prints, of course, were on file back in Southampton, and Sir Charles Mayhew had arranged to fax them out to the Eisenhower. Since Llewellyn's thumbprint was the default print for all print readers on the ship, it gave them access to all doors with print readers.
What Dean had never known before was that a print reader could be spoofed by a photocopy; so much for Hollywood and its use of bad men's fingertips to access the things.
The machine hummed, a band of light moved along the touch screen, and the door clicked open. Dean stood aside as Henderson and Morgan rolled through. Forward was a short passageway leading past the radio room on the left, with the bridge itself just beyond. The radio room door was open, and Morgan opened up with his CAR-15, firing short, precise bursts that cut down two terrorists seated at the console side by side. A second door was open, leading onto the bridge; Morgan pulled a flash-bang from his combat vest, pulled the pin, and tossed it through. Brisard, meanwhile, went up to the first bridge door, still closed, and braced against the bulkhead.
The flash-bang went off with a shrill explosion of sound and a literally blinding chain of dazzling flashes, the charge designed to stun, blind, deafen, and disorient anyone within range. Henderson rushed through the radio room door, followed closely by Morgan, as Brisard and Dean went through the other. Explosive shotgun blasts shredded one terrorist near the chart table, who was fumbling with his AK; Morgan cut down the tango at the helm.
Dean caught a flash of movement at the door leading out onto the port wing of the bridge. 'I've got him!' he yelled.
'Radio room, two tangos down!' Morgan snapped over the combat frequency. 'Bridge, two tangos down. One runner. Bridge secure!'
Dean rushed out into the night, looking around. A ladder led down.
Khalid was below, descending.
Kellerman led the way to the Sandpiper's bridge. Five SEALs followed him as Lieutenant Rogers led the rest down into the bowels of the ship, splitting into three fire teams to hit the engine room, the crew's quarters, and the common room — the largest compartment on the ship save for the holds forward, and the likeliest place for the Sandpiper's crew to be held.
Kellerman pounded up a ship's ladder, reaching the top just as two men burst from a cabin farther down the passageway. One threw a hand grenade, which flew past Kellerman's head and clanged off the deck below. 'Cover!' QMI John Podesta yelled as the other four SEALs crouched and turned away to minimize the effects of the blast. Kellerman opened up full auto on the two tangos in front of him, the sound-suppressed rounds snapping as they slammed through both men and took them down.
Both, Kellerman noted as he passed, were Asians, Japanese, he thought. Odd. His briefing had said they'd be facing Islamic fundamentalists, not Japanese. Where the hell had they come from?
He would photograph them later, after the ship was secure. If there was a later.
Cold Steel had been sent in with the assumption that the tangos would not have explosives set around the remaining radioactive material forward. Those one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the hold's deck were simply too huge, too thick-walled, too well cushioned, to breach with anything less than a few hundred tons of explosives. The VBSS team was concentrating, then, on securing the bridge, engineering, and the crew.
But there were never any guarantees in this line of work, and the tangos were perfectly capable of pulling off an unexpected and last-second kick to the nuts.
There was nobody else in the room from which the two Japanese had emerged. Kevin Smith was injured, his ears bleeding from the grenade blast. He sat on the lower step of the ladder while the rest of the SEALs continued their climb.
The bridge was just ahead, and two decks up.
Khalid was ten feet below the port side bridge wing, swiftly descending the vertical ladder past Deck Eleven. Dean leaned over the railing and fired, but the ladder had safety hoops encircling it every few feet, and the bullets ricocheted into the night. An instant later, more bullets snapped in, these coming from somewhere aft. Dean looked up and saw the muzzle flashes — gunmen hidden on Deck Eleven, just in front of the ship's smokestack, which was just barely visible in the darkness.
