Lars Guignard
Blown Circuit
He became an infidel hesitating between two mosques.
Chapter 1
Sometimes a bullet is better than a bomb. Mostly because a bullet can miss, a bomb, generally not. And that was pretty much what I was thinking when I saw the red LED counter ticking down. But I also knew that I’d come too far to abandon my mission unless I absolutely had to. And those half-inch-high numbers running down the seconds told me that I still had three minutes. Which meant that all wasn’t lost. Not quite yet. I synchronized my watch with the timer. Then I moved on.
The old ship was musty but warm, even in the middle of the night. I had been told that the country was in the middle of a spring heat wave and so far I believed it. It was half past four in the morning and it still hadn’t cooled down enough for me to stop sweating. And I was sweating buckets now. Not just because of the bomb and the heat. But because I was close to finding my father. I reached the next cabin. The mottled-green iron door opened with a low groan, but I could quickly tell that it wasn’t the place. The cabin overflowed with stuffed cardboard boxes. Nine seconds used up. I moved on.
Once again, the rusting cabin door hesitated before opening. Whoever had set the timers ticking meant business. I had seen proof of that. There was enough plastic explosive to light the old ship up like a firecracker. And I suspected I hadn’t seen the whole load. Anyone who wired a ship to explode would wire more than one charge. I could only hope that the charges were synchronized. If they weren’t, I was in more trouble than I thought.
The inside of the third cabin was more promising than the others. A double berth was wedged against the wall, starched sheets pulled over the beds. I placed my hand on the lower bunk. The pillow was damp. And on the wall behind it, another timer ticked down. Two minutes and forty-one seconds left. I checked my wristwatch GPS. I was still effectively on target. If the waypoint was accurate, this was the place. But other than the bunks, the cabin was empty. I didn’t have time to linger. I moved out and down the gangway.
There was one final door left before the catwalk ended in a steep metal stairwell. I heard a diesel engine turn over somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. Not a good sign. The engine starting up meant they aimed to move the ship. But, more urgently, it meant that there were others aboard. Not asleep in their berths, but conscious. I filed the fact away and grasped the flat door handle firmly, cautiously opening the last cabin door. I didn’t expect much, but I could tell from the moment that the heavy iron door swung open that things were different. The two metal berths had been lived in. In addition, a yellow and red scarf caught my eye.
The scarf looked utterly out of place in the dank cabin. It was silk, Hermès if I were to guess, and it had a big brownish-red bloodstain running down the middle of it, as though the eight-hundred-dollar accessory had been used as a tourniquet. Not only that, but there were scratches on the forward steel post of the lower berth, like notches on a belt. The cabin had been used as a place of confinement. Or worse.
Just over two minutes left. I had to be methodical. I started by snapping pictures. I used a dedicated camera, not a smartphone. I wanted good high-resolution shots. After that, I went through the bedding. First the lower bunk, then the top. There really wasn’t much there. But if my father had been anywhere on the ship, he had been there. There were men’s boots on the floor. I picked one up. His size. An eleven. And there was blood on the top sheet, right next to the pillow. Long gray hair and blood. I compartmentalized the implications and picked up a sample of the bloody hair, stowing it in my daypack.
There had been a fight, that much was clear. A fight and a blow to the head, maybe a torn scalp. The DNA could be tested later. What mattered most was that I concentrate on checking for anything else, anything that might have caused my father to send me the coordinates of this tramp freighter moored in the middle of the Bosphorus. There were no notes, no personal possessions except the boots, no writing on the wall. I flipped open my Swiss Army knife and cut open the bottom bunk’s thin mattress, running my hand through the stuffing. Didn’t feel a thing. Then I did the same for the top mattress. Nothing there either.
Less than two minutes left. I scoured the cabin. All I saw were rusty green iron walls and a lightbulb in a dirty frosted sconce on the wall. That was when I noticed something unusual. It was in the uneven light that the sconce was throwing. The frosted glass rested behind a metal cage, but there was a significant blotch on one side of it. It could have been flies and dirt, or it could have been something else.
A minute and forty seconds to go. I grasped the sconce’s rusty cage with my fingers and swung it open. But the glass shade wouldn’t come out of its housing. I didn’t have the time to fiddle with it so I picked up the leather boot and slammed it on the light shattering it. Then two things happened in quick succession. One, what looked like a ceramic medallion popped out of the shattered sconce and two, a hard fist connected with the side of my face.
It was a good hit — strong and on its mark. And if I hadn’t leaned forward to catch the medallion just as it was thrown, the sheer power behind the punch probably would have knocked me out. I cursed myself for letting my guard down. Then I turned to meet my attacker.
He looked like he was a sailor — a very broad, very strong Turkish sailor who was trying to figure out what I was doing on his ship. He had dark closely cropped hair and a rough, angular face with a waxy crescent-shaped scar under his left eye. And his hands were enormous — somewhere near the span of a dinner plate. I thought he was in his late thirties, and if I were to guess, he outweighed me by forty or fifty pounds, but he hadn’t let himself go to flab. That was evident by the way he held himself. The guy was in shape.
“Hello to you too,” I said.
Either he didn’t speak English, or I had just made him madder because he let go with a straight right. Though he was big and broad, I didn’t think he would be particularly fast. He acted more like a heavy hitter, a knockout punch kind of guy. He pulled back and threw a powerful right. I dodged the blow, but just barely, because he turned out to be a whole lot faster than I had initially reckoned. I heard the snap in his fist as it hit the airspace my head had occupied just an instant earlier.
Ninety seconds down. Ninety to go. The guy was three feet away and acting as if we had all the time in the world. Either he didn’t know that there was a bomb on the boat, or he didn’t mind being blown sky high. Either way, I had no time for subtlety. So I feinted with a left punch followed by a quick right straight punch to his solar plexus. It didn’t connect, because he sprung to the side, but that was exactly where I wanted him. I transferred my weight to my left leg, lowered my center of gravity, and swung my hips around in an explosive roundhouse kick.
With my left foot still firmly anchored on the ground, the ball of my right foot connected with the sailor’s center mass, propelling him into the corner of the cabin. Then, before he could react, I bolted through the cabin door. After that I took the stairs two at a time, sprinting into the night.
Chapter 2
My name is Michael Chase. I’m twenty-six, about six foot three, just under two hundred pounds, and a contract employee of everybody’s favorite intelligence agency, the CIA. Seven months ago, my father went missing, presumed dead. A month after that, the Agency recruited me. It wasn’t your typical recruitment; they wanted me because they had received a message from my missing father. He was their agent and they had an op they needed to run fast. The carrot for me was the fact that the op might just mean a chance to find my missing dad. I signed up and the rest was history. My recruitment was rushed, my training was accelerated, the whole thing was pushed. It could have ended badly for everyone and even worse for me. But I got through the mission, and I got a little closer to finding my lost father.