My father’s next message had come as an NSA intercept. The folks at the National Security Agency passed it on to the CIA and then to me. Like the earlier contact, it was a pair of geographic coordinates. As soon as I’d received the message, I’d hopped on a plane, leaving Vietnam and connecting through Singapore to land at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport. That was two days ago. Now I stood on the deck of an aging freighter, praying to anyone who would listen that my legs were fast enough to outrun a bomb.
Sixty seconds and counting. The mosques of old Istanbul were bathed in the orange glow of the city before me. I needed to get to the rope ladder that I had climbed to get aboard. That ladder hung three hundred feet ahead of me on the port side of the ship. The bridge above me lit up and I heard what sounded like an electric winch. That’s when I saw her.
She was about fifty feet away from the first of three deck cranes, standing in the shadows just beyond the light. I saw no more than her profile in silhouette. She was on the phone, talking, and that conversation clearly took precedence over me. She was slender and of medium height, and her hair, or what I could see of it, was tied up in a tight pony tail. I couldn’t escape the feeling that there was somebody else there with her, in the darkness, but before I could confirm the impression, the ship’s foghorn blasted through the night. It was followed by the crack of a bullet and a loud, guttural scream.
I turned to see a sailor tumble through the air from the bridge above. I didn’t wait to see him land. I just ran. I knew I had a hundred yards ahead of me and if I played it right, most of it would be in the shadows. I slipped my left arm through the other strap of my daypack and zigzagged across the deck. I didn’t know who had the gun, but I had no intention of leaving myself an easy target.
That’s when I saw an object in the middle of the deck. I had missed it coming aboard in the dark, but the thing looked like a tuning fork. A giant titanium tuning fork, approximately twenty feet high, but with three prongs instead of two. It was mounted to a pedestal, atop what resembled a large rubber mat. I didn’t have time to get a picture of it. I could see my ladder now, hanging off the side of the ship. Another bullet cracked through the night.
I glanced behind me, but the pool of light beneath the crane was empty. The woman was gone. I pumped my legs harder as I did the math. The deck of the ship sat maybe fifty feet above the water. The ladder led down, but it also represented a static target. There was a bomb on the boat. There was no need for any kind of complex equation. I needed to get off the ship, and I needed to get off it immediately.
A third shot rang out, even closer than the last. I had done the high jump in school. I knew how to arch my back and the rope ladder was coming up fast. A fourth shot rang out. It missed, but I knew I couldn’t stay lucky forever. So I headed directly for the railing of the ship and jumped. I placed my left hand on the rail and pushed off with my toes, using my momentum to carry me up and over the side of the vessel. As the air billowed my T-shirt, I briefly worried that I had miscalculated, that I would hit more than rough seas. But I didn’t. At least not then.
Chapter 3
Twenty-three seconds left. I hit the water off the side of the freighter more or less where I calculated I would, about five feet off the bow of the boat I had used to get there. I probably went underwater ten or eleven feet. As I kicked my way to the dark surface, I knew that my next challenge was to get the boat untied and out of there, before the guy with the gun could find me. My ride was an eighteen-foot inflatable Zodiac with a rigid hull and dual Yamaha two-fifties on the stern. Lots of power, but not a lot of protection. I reached the Zodiac’s inflatable sponson and pulled myself up and over. The bowline connected to a knotted rope on the ladder by way of a stainless-steel carabiner, so I crawled forward and snapped it open.
Eighteen seconds. Now that the inflatable was free, I already felt it drifting away from the side of the freighter. Moment of truth. I took two steps back to the center console and choked the engines before turning the key. The twin outboards started with a purr and I hit the throttle, turning in a tight, frothy turn away from the ship.
That was when the spotlight lit me up. It didn’t come from the ship, but from a smaller boat, several hundred feet behind me. Clearly, they had been lying in wait. A megaphone called out something in garbled Turkish and I knew they wanted me to stop. Not likely. The Bosphorus was calm and I had a full five-hundred horsepower propelling me forward. If I could make it across the channel to the old city, I could disappear. Easier said than done, of course. The night sky lit up with muzzle flashes behind me and I knew my task had just grown incrementally harder.
They were either lucky, or they knew how to aim a gun. The first shot hit the engine cowling. It shattered the plastic cover, but bounced off the block as far as I could tell. I ducked down low to the console — no need to present a bigger target than necessary. A second shot rang out, but it must have gone wide because there was no discernible impact. I was planing now, traveling quickly over relatively flat seas, but the boat with the spotlights was following and a second boat appeared out of the blackness following as well.
I heard the crack of a large-calibre weapon and I knew that they had brought out the heavy artillery, probably some kind of Gatling gun mounted to the bow of their boat. My throttle was already matted down, so there wasn’t much more I could do to increase my speed, but I could make it harder for them to hit me. I twisted the wheel thirty degrees, putting the Zodiac up on its chines in a good solid turn. Then I twisted it back again. The Bosphorus was flat enough that I didn’t have to worry about hitting any substantial waves, though I couldn’t discount the possibility of debris in the polluted water.
I put my pursuers out of mind and concentrated on reaching the far shore. At that moment, I considered just how far I was from America. Sure there were airbases here and there, but the nearest American ships were probably off Italy where the United States Sixth Fleet was based in Naples. It was then that I saw that the shot that I hadn’t felt had actually hit my starboard sponson. I couldn’t slow, so I ran with it, watching as the inflation tube gradually deflated. I was planing and the Zodiac had a rigid hull, so I knew I was going to stay afloat, but only if I kept her in a straight line. Any more crazy turns and I’d swamp her.
I could see the Atatürk Bridge spanning the Bosphorus and the smaller Galata Bridge crossing the isthmus where I needed to go, but what was really bothering me was the fact that I hadn’t heard a peep out of the freighter. I checked my watch. The countdown was long over. The ship should have blown forty seconds ago. But it hadn’t and it made no sense. Was there a second timer? I didn’t complete the thought, because the crack of my pursuers’ Gatling gun wailed out again. I ducked low and saw that my port sponson had been hit. The Zodiac had three air chambers, but with two of them gone, I knew it was the beginning of the end. I estimated that I had another two minutes before I reached the Galata Bridge. The immediate shore was nearer, but not by a lot. I’d just have to hope I could make it.
Another shot rang out. But it didn’t hit an inflation tube this time. It hit my starboard outboard. Whoever the shooters were, they were equipped. They had to be reading my heat signature. It was the only way to see the engine in the darkness from that far out. Smoke rose from the outboard almost immediately. Then it whined loudly before dying. No doubt they had gotten lucky and hit the oil pan. Putting out the pump would be enough to seize up the pistons really quickly.