Crescent Dawn

engulfing the yacht while creating a ten-foot wave that crashed toward the shoreline, tossing the Ibn Battuta about like a rowboat. The dark, barnacle-encrusted hull of the tanker filled the horizon, its mammoth bronze propeller spinning idly in the morning sky. Muffled bangs from collapsing bulkheads mixed with rushing water echoed throughout the hull as the overturned ship slowly began to settle by the bow.

Celik gripped his binoculars with trembling hands as he watched his sister die beneath the weight of the capsized tanker. Frozen in shock, he stared unblinking before his emotions brimmed over. Heaving the tripod across his office with a wail, he fell to the carpet, then covered his eyes and sobbed uncontrollably.

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Celik wasn’t the only one who watched in horror as the tanker capsized. Giordino was just climbing into the Bullet when he heard a crashing sound behind him and turned to see the Dayan turn turtle atop the yacht. He quickly sealed the rear hatch as the resulting wave barreled into the Ibn Battuta , carrying the submersible up and away from the dredge ship.

Giordino quickly fired up the diesel engines and motored toward the tanker. He thought anxiously of Pitt, who had waved at him from the bridge of the tanker just minutes before. The bridge was now far underwater, and all he could see was the cold, lifeless underbelly of the Israeli tanker.

Ignoring the danger that the tanker might explode at any time, he raced along its near side. Surprisingly little debris had floated away when the ship turned over, and he was able to speed quickly down its length to search for bodies in the channel. He knew that Pitt was like a dolphin in the water. If he had somehow survived the capsizing, there was at least a chance that he had swum clear.

Nearing the submerged bow, Giordino swung around and motored back close to the hull, either not knowing or caring that the timed explosives would detonate in less than two minutes. The waters ahead of him remained empty as he passed the tanker’s midsection and approached the stern. With a heavy heart, he reluctantly considered the notion that his old friend had not made it off alive.

Nudging the throttles higher, he started to turn away when he noticed a pair of ropes stretched over the hull. Oddly, the lines appeared to run from the ship’s submerged port rail up the hull and over the keel, a short distance in front of the propeller. With a glimmer of hope in his eye, Giordino accelerated briskly, sweeping around the tanker’s broad stern, which was now rising high into the air.

Reaching the tanker’s opposite side, he spotted the ropes dangling high from the keel, but the hull was otherwise empty. Then barely fifty yards away in the water he spotted two objects. Turning instantly, he raced closer, seeing with joy that it was Pitt towing an injured Lazlo away from the ship.

Giordino sped in closer, then expertly reversed engines to quickly drift alongside. Pitt hoisted Lazlo onto a pontoon, then shouted at Giordino as the latter moved to open the hatch.

“No time,” Pitt yelled. “Get us out of here.”

Giordino nodded, then waited until Pitt climbed aboard and wrapped an arm around Lazlo before accelerating. The two men were tossed and splashed as the Bullet charged quickly ahead, bounding over the harbor waters. Giordino turned and sped toward the Galata Bridge, determining that it would provide the closest cover.

The Bullet was a hundred yards shy of the bridge when a deep thump sounded across the channel. Though a portion of the explosive material had fallen to the seabed when the Dayan capsized, nearly half of the fuel oil and most of the HMX remained lodged in the two forward storage tanks. But with the ship sinking by the bow, the flooded tanks were almost entirely underwater, greatly diluting the blast’s impact.

A quick series of successive thumps sounded as the timed fuzes detonated, and then a huge explosion ripped open the tanker’s hull. The concussion echoed across the hills and streets of Istanbul like a sonic boom. A fountain of white water blew from the tanker’s underside, spraying chunks of steel and debris a hundred feet into the air. The jagged chunks fell to earth across a quarter-mile swath, raining down in a deadly hail from the heavens.

Yet the terrifying blast proved mostly benign. Due to the angle of the sinking tanker, the main force of the blast was centered ahead of it and toward the Bosphorus. Pitt’s last-second course adjustment had diverted the impact away from shore and toward a wide patch of empty water.

As the steel and debris splashed into the bay, a loud creak echoed from the tanker as the perforated section of hull gave way. The decimated bow broke free and promptly sank quickly to the channel bottom while the remaining hull lingered on the surface a few moments before foundering.

Bobbing beneath a span of the Galata Bridge, Giordino climbed out of the Bullet ’s cabin to check on his passengers.

“Thanks for the lift,” Pitt said as he attended to Lazlo.

“You boys were cutting it a bit close there,” Giordino replied.

“We got lucky. Maria Celik wanted to use us for target practice on the starboard rail, so we hiked up the deck. Happened to find a pair of lines that had been lowered over the port side, and we were scrambling down them as the ship turned turtle. We managed to make it over the keel, then slid down the other side to avoid the yacht.”

“You needn’t have worried,” Giordino said with a grin. “It got flattened like a pancake.”

“Any survivors?”

Giordino shook his head.

“Lazlo needs medical attention,” Pitt said. “We better get him to shore.”

He and Giordino helped him inside the submersible, then they motored toward the southern shoreline.

“That was some blast,” Giordino said to Pitt. “Could have been a lot worse.”

Pitt simply nodded quietly, staring out the cockpit window.

Ahead of them, the massive remains of the Israeli tanker rose up high by its stern. The vessel stood near vertical in an almost defiant manner before plunging beneath the waves with a rush. Somewhere not far across the strait, the twisted dreams of a renewed Ottoman dynasty sank with it.

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The tanker explosion rattled Istanbul more politically than physically. The confirmed loss of the police boat and Coast Guard vessel in conjunction with the attack put the country’s military forces on high alert. When the tanker was identified as the Dayan , a flurry of high-level accusations between Turkey and Israel went flying across diplomatic channels. Protests by panic-stricken residents of the city nearly led to a military response. But fears of a Turkish/Israeli conflict were assuaged when the authorities found the Dayan ’s rescued crewmen.

Interviewed publicly, the crewmen detailed their hijacking and captivity at the hands of the unknown gunmen. Turkish sentiment quickly turned when the men described loading the explosives at gunpoint and almost dying aboard the ship but for their last-minute rescue. Privately, after checking Lazlo into a hospital, Pitt and Giordino had informed Turkish authorities of their role in sinking the tanker.

When U.S. intelligence secretly provided evidence that the same HMX explosives were used in the mosque attacks in Bursa, Cairo, and Jerusalem, the Turkish forces were quick to act. Secret raids were immediately carried out against Celik’s home, office, and port facilities, while the Ottoman Star was located in Greek waters and seized. As public pressure mounted to identify who committed the attack and why, the official investigation wasn’t kept quiet for long.

With the release of their names, Ozden and Maria Celik became public pariahs and a source of national embarrassment. When it was later discovered that they had orchestrated the break-in at Topkapi, the national embarrassment and anger turned to outright rage. Investigators and journalists alike dove into the pair’s concealed