Dean was fully illuminated by light spilling from the bridge behind him, a perfect target.
Khalid reached an open platform on Deck Ten; according to the plans he'd studied, there was a door there leading into Kleito's Temple.
A bullet struck Dean's vest, slamming him painfully back a step. In a second or two, Khalid would be back inside the ship, and if he discarded his passkey, it would be easy to lose him.
A bullet grazed Dean's left arm, a fierce burn; Dean vaulted the railing and fell…
David Yancey lay on his back, fighting back the pain. The bruise where the tango had hit Yancey's vest was throbbing, and he thought there might be a broken rib there. Kevlar vests were lifesavers, but they weren't perfect.
More serious were the wounds in his side and leg, where shrapnel from the grenade had missed the vest and punctured him. His fingertips came away wet with blood when he touched those spots.
Oh… and there remained the little matter of radiation from the opened MOX canisters in the trucks. He'd been here… how long? Ten minutes, maybe.
'How are you doing, David?' Rubens' voice said over his helmet radio.
'Okay, sir. Listen… I think I have it doped out.'
'David, you need to crawl away from those trucks. The farther you are from the MOX canisters, the better.'
He tried to move, and gasped as the pain hit him. He shook his head, trying to clear it. 'Listen… don't want to pass out. They have those crates of C-4 just tumbled inside the trucks every which way, y'know?'
'The EOD and NEST people will be there soon. They'll take care of it.'
'That grenade popped out from under a box. I think they have a lot of grenades inside all three trucks, sir. It would be a simple way to booby-trap them… put eight or ten grenades under those boxes and between boxes and tucked in everywhere, all of them with the pins pulled… '
'The EOD people will take care of it, son. You just try to get away from those trucks.'
'The thing I can't figure is… I can feel the ship rolling a little right now, the deck moving under my back. If the weather got rough, like it was the other night, some of those boxes could shift. All it would take would be one armed hand grenade to set off all the grenades, all the blasting caps… and the whole mountain of C-4 would go up'
Chapter 28
Dean plummeted through the night, feetfirst, his H&K in his right hand, his left outstretched for balance and to grab at Khalid if he missed.
He almost missed, coming down immediately behind the Saudi terrorist, grabbing as he fell, crashing against the man and slamming both of them sideways against a railing. White pain shot up Dean's leg with the impact. The H&K went spinning into the night. Khalid snarled and twisted and tried to turn, bringing his AK up; Dean slammed the heel of his palm against Khalid's nose, slammed it as hard as he could, and felt cartilage snap with the blow.
Khalid yelped and tried to pull away. Dean held tight with one arm and slammed Khalid's face and jaw again and again until the terrorist finally managed to hit Dean hard in the chest with the muzzle of his AK and break free.
Dean felt the pain screaming up from his left ankle; he must have broken it in the fall. Khalid took an unsteady couple of steps backward, his face a mask of blood, his teeth showing bright through the blood as he raised his AK-47.
The gunshot was startling and unexpected…
Kellerman signaled to Podesta and Vance, counting down the seconds, three… two… one… got Jakowski tossed a flash-bang in through the open door, and Podesta and Vance rolled through into the darkened room filled with smoke and screaming. Kellerman and Jakowski were next, with Herrera bringing up the rear.
Sound-suppressed gunfire snapped and hissed. A tango at the helm crumpled and collapsed; another lying on the deck, covering his ears, jumped and twisted and lay still; a third fired blindly with his AK, spraying high until two 9mm rounds punctured his skull. Two more tried to run out onto the port side wing of the bridge and were cut down at the door.
'Cold Steel!' Kellerman called over the combat channel. 'Bridge clear! Bridge secure!'
Herrera was at the ship's wheel, his eyes startlingly wide against the blacking on his face. 'Madre de Dios!'
Kellerman followed the other SEAL'S stare ahead, across the ship's forward deck to the black water beyond. The Adantis Queen was there, looming huge out of the predawn darkness, lights aglow at her bridge.
And the Pacific Sandpiper was headed straight toward her at twenty knots.
Dean flinched as the first shot rang out. The smile on Khalid's bloodied face froze, then melted as the terrorist leader took a step to the side, half-turning. The man standing in the doorway to Kleito's Temple fired his handgun once again, and Khalid collapsed to the deck.
The man emerging from the bar was wearing a Royal Sky Line security uniform. Tucking the pistol into his waistband, he stooped to help Dean.
'Thanks,' Dean murmured. Reaction was setting in, adrenaline thundering through his body, and he was starting to shake.
'No,' Mohamed Ghailiani told him. 'Thank you.
Yaqub Nehim had been looking for one of the empty staterooms, a place to hide with his two personal hostages until the enemy came for him or the ship was blown to bits. He'd bound both women's wrists at their backs with plastic zip strips and herded them along the passageways with his Russian-made Makarov pistol. There were a number of empty staterooms here, and if the explosives in the hold didn't explode, it would be hours before anyone found the three of them. Plenty of time…
On Deck Four, he'd discovered that his key card no longer worked. None of the doors he'd tried would open.
Something, he knew, was going seriously wrong. For several minutes the radio on his belt had sounded with several sharp calls in Arabic, and once he'd heard the chatter of an automatic weapon. On Deck Five he'd met Ra'id Hijazi, panting and wild-eyed, who'd confirmed that enemy commandos had killed all of the fedayeen brothers in the theater moments after Nehim had left with his captives, that only he had managed to escape.
Nehim's thoughts of venting his lust on the two women melted instantly. 'What should we do?' he cried. A new thought struck him. 'We should kill these two!'
'No!' Hijazi said. 'There are hostages in the gambling place, old people, many of them. We will take these two, gather up the other hostages, and wait. We can use them to bargain for time.'
Hijazi's sanctimonious quoting of the Qur'an had always irritated Nehim. 'What happened to dying the martyr's death?'
'The plan is wrecked. We will never reach New York. But the ship may yet explode at any moment. We need time.
'The children in the hold must be dead by now.'
Hijazi gave him a measuring look. 'Yesterday, at the Amir's orders, Aziz, Al-Shafi, Haqqani, and I went down to the hold. We… arranged things so that the explosives will detonate easily. Very easily.'
'How?'
'Never mind. But if the enemy commandos attempt to tamper with the crates on the trucks, if this ship runs
