"One of you stay with the civilians," Rubens said. "Help the wounded and keep the rest quiet. The rest need to head for the bridge."
Dean moved up the aisle to the wounded man, easing him down off the seats and onto his back on the floor. He was wearing swim trunks. He had a savage gunshot wound in his stomach, hidden by fast-welling blood, and a second wound higher up, in the right side of his chest, bubbling as he tried to breathe. Dean, the ex-Marine, had seen enough combat wounds in the field to recognize a sucking chest wound.
"I've got him," an older man said, kneeling at Dean's side. "I'm the ship's doctor." The man had his shirt off and was pressing it against the bloody abdominal wound. "Cigarettes!" he yelled. "Anyone here have cellophane cigarette wrappers?"
Several men and women offered the wrappers from their cigarettes. The doctor accepted two and slapped them over the bubbling holes, entry wound and exit wound, in the man's chest and back.
"Listen…," the wounded man said. His voice was weak, and it sounded like he was gargling. "Those two women… He took them… "
"We saw," Dean told him. "We'll get them!"
"Sharon Reilly. Janet Carroll. Please, please… help them… "
"We'll do our best."
Coulter jumped down off the wall of boxes and jogged toward the truck. The terrorist with the firing switch lay in a fetal curl in a spreading pool of blood; emotionlessly Coulter put another 9mm slug into the man's skull, just to make sure. "This one's dead!"
"Four tangos down!" Boone called. "Team member down!"
"I'm okay," David Yancey said, rising unsteadily. He reached up under his harness, probing the heavy weave of his Kevlar combat vest, then pulled a slightly flattened 7.62 slug from the weave. "Gonna have a bruise or two, though"
"Stay put. We'll check the trucks."
He lurched to his feet, still clutching his side. "Fuck that. I'm with you."
Daniels was scrambling down off the crates. He was waving a handheld Geiger qounter in front of him. "It's hot!"
"We're copying the radiation readings here," Rubens' voice said. "Our advisor with the AEC says one man at a time, no more than fifteen minutes' total exposure for any of you. Understand?"
"Roger that," Yancey said. "Coulter! Get away from there! All of you guys, clear out. Set up a defensive position on the other side of the galley door."
Unsteadily he approached the trucks, looking for signs that the explosives were booby-trapped.
While the Islamic militants in Afghanistan and Iraq had acquired a reputation as bad boys with improvised explosive devices — IEDs — their best was rarely very sophisticated. They were proficient at planting mines that could be set off remotely, from a distance, or with trip wires, and they'd been known to pull cute tricks like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and leaving it beneath a dead or injured man, the firing lever compressed and held in place by the weight of the body Elaborate booby traps involving choices between multiple colored wires and which order to cut them in were generally the provenance of Hollywood… and usually bad Hollywood at that.
Yancey had gone through quite a bit of training with the SEALs, in both the creation and the disarming of improvised explosives. He'd also trained for a time with the Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal people, the EOD. He approached the trucks carefully, tracing the electrical wiring by eye. There was the battery, beneath the table, a pair of wires leading up and into the back of the truck. Yanking those wires ought to be all that was needed to safe the bomb.
Ought to be. You didn't make it in the SEALs or the EOD without acquiring a bit of paranoia. He knew radiation was burning him — he couldn't feel it, but it was burning him nonetheless. Every instinct he possessed told him to yank those battery cables and get the hell out of there.
But he followed the two battery wires up onto the back of the nearest truck. The flatbed was piled high with nondescript cardboard boxes, each one holding block upon block upon plastic-wrapped block of C-4 explosives. One of the battery leads was connected to a larger cable, and that ran back through loop after loop to the firing box in the dead tango's hand. A second lead emerged from the firing-box cable and was connected to a solid-pack electrical detonator embedded in a block of C-4. Another wire connected the battery directly with the detonator. So far, so good. Arm the firing box by turning a key, press the red button, the circuit completed, the blasting cap went off, and with it went several tons of plastic explosives.
But a part of the wire directly connecting the battery with the blasting cap was hidden under a large box of C-4. He was reaching for the wire to pull it out when he stopped. In this line of work, paranoia was good.
Shaking his head, he backed off. Returning to the battery on the deck outside, he unscrewed the caps and removed the wires. The blasting cap ought to be harmless, now, its connection to the battery gone.
But he still didn't trust it.
He switched on his radio. "Art Room! This is Cougar Six!"
"Go ahead, David," Rubens' voice replied. "What've you got?"
"It's definitely rigged as an IND," he said. The acronym stood for "Improvised Nuclear Device" and referred to radiological material designed to be spread by a conventional explosion. Quickly Yancey described what he could see of the circuitry and told them what he'd done. "But I don't trust it," he said. "Part of the battery lead is hidden, and I can't get at it. Not without lifting a stack of cardboard boxes as tall as I am."
"Go ahead and get out of there, David," Rubens told him. "The SAS assault lifted off from the Ark Royal twenty minutes ago, and we have more helos inbound from the Eisenhower They should be there in another ten. We have a NEST on the way with the American helicopters."
"NEST" stood for "Nuclear Emergency Support Team," the unit under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Energy tasked with responding to all types of accidents and emergencies involving nuclear material, including bomb threats.
"Roger that," Yancey said. He felt exhausted. He wondered if he was already feeling the effects of the radiation.
Before he left, though, he took another look at the back of the truck. Odd. The boxes of explosives weren't stacked neatly and squarely. Maybe that was what had been tugging at his subconscious… the fact that several boxes were jammed in every which way, carelessly, and several were tipped up on one edge, leaving space beneath. Reaching into the back of the truck, he grabbed one of the tipped boxes and lifted it, dragging it aside.
A hand grenade had been placed underneath the box, its pin already pulled. Yancey saw the metal arming lever pop off, saw the grenade skitter across the flatbed, its three-second fuse already burning…
Chapter 27
Khalid glowered at the night, which was just beginning to show the faintest flush of light in the east. He'd just lost touch with his men in the theater and in the A Deck hold aft. The attackers were moving too fast, too precisely, for his men to manage a coordinated defense. On the chart table he could see the blips of approaching aircraft — helicopters, most likely, from the British and American task forces that had been dogging them.
It was time to give up on the dream of setting off the explosives inside New York Harbor, of spreading death and revenge across Manhattan and much of New England. If Ra'd and the others in the hold were not answering, they must be dead… and Ra'd had failed to press the button on the detonator.
The booby traps set within the trucks might yet set off the entire load of explosives, would set them off if any of the attackers were foolish enough to try to dismantle the battery wires.