The Secret Service agents locked gazes with each other for a second, one of them shrugging before quietly intoning commands into his lip mic. Then the agents held the salon door open while the president and his entourage exited to the yacht’s main deck. Tanner, Liam and the remaining Secret Service men followed.
The door to the barge’s wheelhouse opened and the terrorist was brought outside, literally dragging his feet. An evil grin occupied his face when he looked up and saw the line of people gawking at him from the rail of the Lincoln, but he said nothing.
“I don’t recognize him. Do we know who he is?” Carmichael asked no one in particular.
“Hofstad member,” Tanner said, preempting the Secret Service agent who shot him an irritated look.
“Speak English?” the president asked.
The terrorist said nothing. “Probably Dutch, but maybe English, too,” Tanner explained.
“Anyone speak Dutch here?” Carmichael looked around.
An elderly woman had just raised her hand when the terrorist called up to them.
“You will all die for failing to meet our demands!”
Two agents grabbed the terrorist and began dragging him to a waiting inflatable boat.
“Where will he be taken?” Carmichael asked.
“Your time is up!” The jihadist screamed.
Suddenly a powerful explosion rocked the barge.
FIFTY-ONE
“Down!” Tanner grabbed President Carmichael and flung him flat to the deck, several Secret Service agents dog-piling on top of them. Tanner looked to the side and saw Liam with his eyes open, crouched, watching the barge. He knew he had a lot of demolition experience, having been through BUDS training as a SEAL. If he felt comfortable to be in an upright position already, then he must be anticipating the force of the explosion to be non-lethal.
But with the exception of the Secret Service agents and the terrorist on the barge, the force of the explosion was the least of their problems. Tanner got to his feet and looked down on the terror vessel. A huge hole had been blasted in its middle, amidships. It was taking on water fast. Tanner felt fine droplets rain down on him. He assumed they were seawater from the explosion.
And then he saw with horror the pieces of white plastic floating away from the barge, and he knew.
The STX container!
Jasmijn had described the vat to him that Hofstad had stolen from her. Why else would Hofstad rig this barge to blow if not to trigger another neurotoxin blast? The previous attack — the warm-up act — had operated on essentially the same principle — exploding open a container of STX, but by sheer force of collision rather than incendiary. Tanner watched the slivers of white plastic drift away from the hole in the sinking vessel’s side. The terrorists had gambled everything on the yacht of the president, even more than Tanner had suspected.
He had thought they would be holding on to their precious supply of neuro-agent to milk the fear factor for as long as possible, to let the world know that they were capable of inflicting a deadly strike anywhere, anytime. But instead, they’d put all of their eggs in one ultra-poisonous basket, and now that basket had been dumped on the POTUS and everyone else aboard his yacht. Including Tanner. Including Liam.
No sooner had Tanner gripped Liam’s shoulder to break the news than he heard the first coughs of irritation start among those aboard the yacht.
“Liam. Liam!” The ex-SEAL looked up at his friend. Tanner continued.
“We have to assume that the explosion was an STX bomb using the rest of the stolen vat.”
“Shit.” Liam pulled his shirt collar up over his nose and mouth, but his eyes told Tanner that he knew it wouldn’t matter.
“I’ll see if I can get through to Danielle.” Liam stepped back from the crowd where people were still screaming and talking loudly. He tapped his earbud and waited. Meanwhile, he looked over the rail at the barge and counted the bodies floating away from it. He cringed when he spotted the stump of a leg bobbing by itself, then sighted the body of the man he’d tied up, minus a leg. Got what you wanted, I guess.
And what of his own fate? Liam thought back to the account Tanner had relayed from Jasmijn of how her lab assistant had died from the stuff, of the news-reel footage he’d seen of the victims in Hawaii and Florida clutching their throats…
“Okay! Yes!” He heard Tanner say with excitement into his bone conducting mic. “We are aboard the president’s yacht, the Lincoln, anchored in Boothbay Harbor. Liam—” He turned toward his colleague.
“Yeah?”
“Find out from the Captain if the Lincoln is preparing to move. Tell him we have help on the way but they need to be able to find us right away.”
Liam had questions of his own but he knew better than to stall things by asking them now. He moved to the president, who was kneeling between two Secret Service agents, each of whom had a hand on the back of the POTUS.
“Excuse me Mr. President—”
“Not now!” one of the agents growled.
Liam wasn’t deterred. “I need to know for sure if the ship will be at anchor for the next few minutes. We have a possible solution en route.”
The agent started to wave him down but Carmichael spoke. “You have help on the way? We’ll stay right here. That’s an order!” He turned to the agent who had told Liam to be quiet. “Tell the captain not to move us. Now!”
“Right away, Mr. President.” He picked up a two-way radio and spoke softly into it, used to keeping operational instructions on the lowdown.
Tanner walked over to the group, finished with his conversation with Danielle. “They’ve got an antidote and they’re in the air now to bring it to us.” His expression and manner didn’t seem to carry the same degree of optimism that uttering those words should.
“Is there a catch?” Liam wanted to know.
“Jasmijn’s dead.”
“What? How—”
“Not now. We’re not out of the woods yet ourselves.”
“What’s happening?” President Carmichael demanded.
“Mr. President,” Tanner returned, “it’s likely that the explosion on the barge was a deliberate attempt to expose you — and every one of us onboard this yacht — to the same STX neurotoxin that Hofstad has been using in their latest run of terror attacks.”
The president’s eyes were wide with fear. “Give me some details.”
Tanner laid it out for him, forgoing the use of formal titles for the sake of expediency. “The barge may have been on a timer to detonate so that a remaining tank of STX would blow, becoming aerosolized and disperse wherever it was.”
“And it just so happened to be right next to my yacht.” No one replied, so Carmichael continued. “You mean to say…” He struggled to formulate his words. “…that what happened to those people in Miami, in Honolulu…”
The president seemed to buckle under his own weight and had to be supported by two Secret Service agents, one of whom started into a coughing jag as he did so.
“Unfortunately that is the situation we seem to be facing,” Tanner replied, “but there is hope.”
The president looked up from the deck into Tanner’s eyes. “What hope? Those victims died within minutes.”
“My OUTCAST team has been working in conjunction with a scientist…” Liam looked over at Tanner as he heard his voice catch. The STX taking hold, or something else, something triggered by the mention of Jasmijn? The interruption was brief, however. “…and an antidote to this particular STX formula has been developed in the Netherlands.”
“Netherlands?” Carmichael erupted. “What good does that do us? We’ve got maybe ten or fifteen minutes to live!” At this, a few of the passengers overheard the president’s raised voice and began to panic, telling the others that the air was contaminated with some kind of poison.