“Got her!” Knight yelled above the hiss of spray and the roaring motor. Both men fell backward in unison, hauling the sputtering woman over the pontoon and into the chief’s lap, Knight clutching a handful of her hair and the back of her swimsuit.
The two men farthest aft in the RHIB opened up in earnest with their rifles, strafing the side of the sailboat.
A green head peeked around the corner from the cabin hatch, followed by a bright flash. Gitlin had never seen a rocket-propelled grenade coming directly at him, but his instincts said that’s what this was.
“RPG!” he screamed. “Cover! Cover! Cover!”
Rose jerked the RHIB hard to port. They were so close that it wouldn’t have made much difference, but thankfully, the shooter had rushed the trigger under the fusillade of oncoming gunfire. The rocket-propelled grenade hit the waves well to the left, skipping along the surface to explode well in front of the inflatable, throwing up a plume of spray.
When Gitlin looked back, Ridgeway was slumped, chin to his chest, weapon dangling from his single-point sling, arms hanging to the deck.
Chief Knight, ever aware of the men in his charge, pushed the woman away so her back rested against the side of the pontoon. He slid to the back of the speeding RHIB on both knees, lifting Ridgeway’s head. A moment later, he turned and gave Gitlin the harrowed look that all good leaders dread.
“Pirate vessel returning,” Gitlin heard over his radio. “Nineteen knots and accelerating.”
The traffic was followed by the rhythmic thump of the Mk 28 chain gun, firing from Rogue’s foredeck. There hadn’t been time to tell them about the RPG, but they’d obviously seen it. Twenty-five-millimeter high-explosive tracer rounds creased the night air, chewing the fishing skiff into kindling. An instant later a bright flash blossomed up from where the pirate vessel had been. Gitlin and his men jerked their heads away, temporarily blinded in their NVGs.
“Holy shit!” Peavy yelled from his station on the bow of the RHIB. “That’s a hell of an explosion for a twenty-footer.”
“Chief Rose,” Gitlin said, willing his voice to stay calm — and the sailboat not to explode until they’d moved farther away from the RHIB—“put some distance between us and that sailboat!”
Belowdecks on Lucky Strike, Mamat dragged himself forward with his good arm. The other was shot away, the elbow joint exposed in a sickening mess of meat and bone. Both legs had taken rounds. He didn’t know how bad, but the pain was nearly unbearable. He was certain to pass out if he chanced a look at the wounds. The sound of the Navy boat’s departure was a knife to his heart. He cursed himself for his mistake. He’d held off detonating the explosive, waiting for the sailors to tie up alongside in order to inflict maximum damage.
None of the Jemaah Islamiyah planners or their Abu Sayyaf financiers had thought it would be possible to get anywhere near the larger ship. The ammonium nitrate in the fishing vessel had been put in place on the off chance the captain of the USS Rogue had been lax or inexperienced. He turned out to be neither. But the deaths of six sailors in the inflatable would have been a mighty blow to the Great Satan — if Mamat had not been so stupid.
He should never have allowed the boy to tie the woman at the bow. She’d gotten loose at the worst possible time, warning the boarding party. The boy had panicked at his mistake, shooting through the deck at the women and drawing fire from the U.S. vessel. Mamat was struck in both knees early in the gunfight, causing him to topple sideways and drop the push-button detonator that was hardwired to the explosives. Then the foolish boy chanced a shot with the RPG and took an American bullet through the eye for his trouble. He lost the back of his skull in the process. Even as the sailors ran for their lives, rounds continued to punch holes in both the sailboat and Mamat. He must have lost consciousness for a moment because the sound of the boat motor was dying away when he came to.
At last, he was able to drag himself to the detonator and grasp it in a bloody hand. The Navy boat was gone, but it was much too late to change his mind now. Closing his eyes, Mamat bin Ahmad said a final prayer and pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
Mamat shuddered, flooded with a heady mixture of relief and shame. Then he shifted his weight, moving the wire under his chest. The movement completed the shorted connection and the cabin vaporized in a ball of orange flame.
29
Special Agent Kelsey Callahan could not recall the moment, but she’d seen photographic evidence that her father had broken down and cried when he dropped her off on her first day of kindergarten.
The elder Callahan was a well-respected heart surgeon at Providence St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula. He was also a champion of strong women — forever pushing his only child to “get out front” and “show them how it’s done.” A burly, buffalo-plaid-wearing Montana man who looked more like a logger or mountain guide when he wasn’t dressed in hospital scrubs, he was also the most overprotective father Kelsey had ever heard of.
Big Ben Callahan made it clear to every boy Kelsey dated in a jovial, not-quite-joking way that he was capable not only of saving lives but also of ending them in quiet and undetectable ways.
Kelsey made the mistake of sneaking out of the house late one night during her sophomore year of high school. Somehow her father had known, and he approached the boy’s pickup just as they were about to drive away. He materialized from the shadows of the tall blue spruce in their front yard — nearly causing the poor kids to pee their pants when he knocked on the passenger window. If that wasn’t bad enough, when the boy rolled down the window, Big Ben Callahan leaned in across a mortified Kelsey and asked in a quietly piercing voice if he’d brought a gun with him.
“N-n-no,” the boy stammered.
“A big-ass knife?”
“Of course not!” The boy looked like he was about to cry.
“Some kind of stick or club?”
“No, sir.”
Her father had considered the answer for a moment, then said, “You’d better bring one the next time you come to my house in the middle of the night.” Then he opened the door so Kelsey could get out and follow him back inside.
It turned out that Austin Herbert McKay had been carrying a knife that night. He was just too terrified of Ben Callahan to use it. McKay went on to sexually assault three girls around Missoula — all of them redheads — over the next few months before he was finally arrested. Ben Callahan never once rubbed the incident in her face — though he had, over the years, raised an eyebrow at her questionable taste in men. Sadly, he hadn’t been around to run off her ex-husband before she’d tied the knot.
Her dad had grown misty-eyed when she graduated with honors from Hellgate High School, but he’d broken down completely when she graduated from FBI training at Quantico, admitting that the thought of her strapping on a gun every day terrified him. She reminded him of that night he’d stood under the spruce tree — and pointed out that there were a lot of bad guys in the world. He’d understood with no further explanation, returning to Missoula and his life as a cardiac surgeon while she went hunting for all the Austin Herbert McKays she could find.
Kelsey Callahan inherited her father’s protective nature along with his sense of justice, but she’d gotten a penchant for expensive silk blouses, her red hair, and her defined hourglass shape from her mother. If anyone ever asked what happened to those underwear models in the Sears, Roebuck catalogs, Sue Callahan would point out that some of them married cardiac surgeons and raised promising young FBI agents. Her mom’s previous career wasn’t something Kelsey ever talked about in high school — she didn’t relish the idea of boys knowing there were pictures of her mom in lacy bras floating around out there — especially since Kelsey looked so much like her.