Seal team six extra size.., p.164
SEAL Team Six Extra-Sized Holiday Bundle, page 164
The two struggled with the old man’s shirt and pants for a long moment—the cold rain had advanced the onset of rigor and the body was difficult to move.
Flame finally freed the joints with a loud CRACK that raised goose bumps on Kimberly’s arms and legs.
“Don’t mind the noise.” Flame finished pulling the shirt off. “I didn’t really break anything—just freed the joint enough to move it.”
“Whatever.” Kimberly avoided looking at the dead man. “What do we do with his clothing?”
“You put it on.” He handed her the shirt and pants. “They’re better than the ones I gave you in the hole—and the guys still on the boat should recognize them as his clothes,” he said, nodding toward the dead man. “That means they’ll hesitate before they do anything—which will give us that much more time to do what has to be done.” Flame shrugged, “I’d put them on myself but…” He forced a grin. “They’re kind of small for me.”
“Are you going to put on dead man’s clothes too?” She held the shirt and pants in one hand, keeping them as far away from her as she could.
“Yep.” He turned to the front yard. “There should be another one right about…” He nodded. “There. He’s a little bigger—I figure I can get his stuff on without ripping it too badly.” Flame stripped the young man while Kimberly forced herself into the older one’s clothes. A few minutes later, both were wearing cammo shirts and pants and had scarves wound around their faces. In the rain and mist, it would be hard for anyone to tell them apart from the fighters who had left the ship.
“Now.” Flame picked up the old fighter’s rifle, checked it out carefully, and presented it to Kimberly. “This won’t blow up in your face but I’d prefer that you not fire it at all.”
“I have no problem with that.” She took the weapon gingerly, almost afraid to touch it. “None whatsoever.”
“Good, now sling it like this.” Flame showed her how to use the leather sling to fix the weapon over her shoulder in position to be fired quickly while still allowing her to use both hands.
She duplicated his motion—then had to adjust the sling so that it hugged her body a bit more snugly. Finally, she had it adjusted to Flame’s satisfaction.
“Good.” He motioned for her to pirouette in front of him so he could look at her from all sides. “You’re the very picture of a young Arab jihadi.” He smiled as he saw her from the back. “At least you are if no one gets a look at your ass!”
Kimberly stuck her tongue out—and got a mouthful of wool. “Shit.” She pushed the bottom half of the scarf down and spat it out. “This stuff stinks!”
“These guys have been cooped up in that ship under a storm for several days.” He shrugged. “You’d stink too.”
“What do we do now?” She readjusted the scarf so it covered the bottom part of her face.
“We go down there.” He nodded toward the windward beach. “And climb on board the tanker as if we belonged there.”
“Okay.” Kimberly settled the AK more comfortably against her side. “Let’s get this over with.”
Flame nodded and, seconds later, the two were walking side by side toward the final battle of Kimberly Key…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dana, Aesop and Bremby stood alongside the Clark brothers and stared at the road—or what had been the road—in front of them.
“Looks like about ten feet washed away.” Michael Clark, police chief of Cutler Ridge, a tiny community just south of Miami, gestured toward the debris before them.
“It’ll take the state at least a week to fix it,” Marty Clark told them.
“We have to get across.” Andrew Clark—better known to his friends as Aesop—was adamant. “There must be a way.”
“You’ll need a boat.” Michael gestured to the still-stormy sky. “Can’t get a helicopter up in this weather.”
“Is there one we can charter?” Dana felt like a dwarf in this company, but was doing her best to be heard. “Hell, we’ll buy it if there’s no other way.”
“Might be something I can scrounge up on the mainland.” Michael rubbed his chin. “We’ll have to drive back to get it.”
“Let’s go.” Aesop touched his brother’s back. “There’s no time to waste!”
“What’s this all about, anyway?” Michael turned to look into his brother’s eyes. “All Marty told me was that you needed to get to the Keys in a hurry.”
“Yeah and all you told me,” Marty chimed in, “was that it was a matter of life and death.”
“That was the truth.” Aesop looked from brother to brother. “Listen, I’ll explain it all when this is over.”
“Promise?”
“My word.”
“Okay.” Michael shrugged and headed for his car. “Good enough for me.”
“Me too.” Marty headed toward his own vehicle.
“Let’s go.” Aesop gestured Dana and Bremby back toward their own car. “Before they start thinking about what happened the last time I promised to tell them what was going on…”
***
Flame, the pain killers now taking effect, was starting to feel like his old self as he led Kimberly through the brush toward the beach that held the grounded tanker. I have to keep her out of danger, he told himself. She has to stay behind me. He glanced at his companion. I have to protect her, no matter what.
They trudged through the last of the brush, stopping right at the edge of the beach so Flame could get a look at the ship.
As they did so, another squall rolled across the island.
“Good.” Flame smiled as rain thundered down around him. “This’ll give us some cover.” He turned to Kimberly. “See the ladder in the bow of the tanker?”
“How could I miss it?”
“Do you think you can climb it?”
“Of course.” She touched his side, looking for blood. “Can you?”
“When we get to the top,” Flame said, ignoring her question, “I want you to lean on me and limp a little—act like you’re injured.”
“Why?”
“It’ll save you reporting to whoever is in charge—let us get below decks where we’ll have more cover.”
“Okay,” Kimberly smiled. “Up the ladder, limp and hang on to you.” She nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
“The only one we have.” Flame stepped out into the open. “Let’s go.”
***
Madani was surprised to see two of his fighters climb onto the bow of the ship. Is that Ghafur? he wondered, squinting to watch as the first man aboard helped a second smaller figure onto the deck and supported him as he limped to one of the forward access hatches before disappearing below decks. I can’t be sure in all this rain!
Madani had written off Ghafur and his fighters when they failed to reappear after their search for the lone American. The Saudi presumed that all had fallen in the fight—either dead or wounded—and planned to send a party to retrieve their bodies if the storm allowed such niceties before Alfarsi and his boats arrived.
Now he didn’t have to worry about such trifles.
He should have reported to me as soon as he came aboard. Madani thought about how badly the old man had been limping. He must have been wounded during the battle. Madani nodded. He has to care for himself before he comes to see me. A crooked smile crossed his lips. I wonder if the other survivor is his daughter’s son? Madani had been against bringing the untested boy along but perhaps the youngster had done well. I will find out when Ghafur sees fit to report. He turned to the radio. It will certainly wait until we are afloat and ready to strike against our enemies.
He picked up the microphone. Alfarsi and the others had to be close by now—he wanted to know just how close.
***
“It’s bigger than I expected,” Kimberly said as they climbed below the ship’s deck. “Much bigger.”
“As tankers go,” Flame whispered, “this one is kind of small.” He gestured. “Come on—we need to go this way.” He led her down a corridor to a hatch that took them deeper into the hull. “I need to know what this thing is carrying,” he told her. “And to do that, I’ve got to get a look at the tanks.” He opened the door and nodded. “The inert gas system should be somewhere around here.”
“The what?”
“A tanker's inert gas system is one of the most important parts of its design,” he told her. “Fuel oil is flammable but very difficult to ignite, but hydrocarbon vapors are explosive when mixed with air in certain concentrations.” He pointed to a series of pumps and color-coded pipes that ran across the decking. “The purpose of this system is to create an atmosphere inside tanks in which the hydrocarbon oil vapors cannot burn.” He stepped to the pumps and checked the indicators. “These, however, are turned off.”
“They want them to blow up?” Kimberly looked at the controls. “Shouldn’t we start the pumps up again?”
“I’d do that if I thought we had any chance of getting the Coast Guard or Navy to stop them.” Flame shrugged. “But with the damage this storm is bound to have caused, that’s just not going to happen.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stop them from getting to wherever it is they’re planning to go.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“Easiest way is to use their own plan against them—blow them up before they can get near a populated area.” Flame grinned as he saw her face. “Hey, I’ve done this kind of thing before. Just stay close—engineering should be back there.”
They hurried down the passageway, Flame in the lead with his AK at the ready.
***
“What do you mean you are still ten to twenty minutes away! You told me that nearly an hour ago!”
“The weather has been more difficult than I’d imagined.” Alfarsi’s voice was quite clear now, not a touch of static or interference. “That last squall line swept over us before we could do take any action—two of my smaller boats were capsized…”
“You know how important it is that we reach our destination at the proper moment!” Madani wanted to shout into the microphone and only kept his voice down through sheer will power. “We must be in the port no later than 4 p.m. on Thursday, otherwise our targets will no longer be there.”
“We have nearly two days to get you to Port Canaveral,” Alfarsi’s voice stayed calm and clear. “Plenty of time now that the storm has blown out into the Atlantic.”
“Assuming we can get off this damned island!” Madani shook his head. “I keep hearing about the ‘storm tide’ and how it’s going to…”
There was a rumbling, scraping sound—and the tanker moved—not much, but enough to cause Madani to stumble a little as he stood over the radio.
“Madani?” The voice was a bit less calm now. “Madani! What has happened?”
“Hurry here, my friend.” The Saudi smiled. “The storm tide has come—it is finally time to leave this place.”
***
Below decks, Flame and Kimberly were nearly to the engineering office in the stern when a crewman stepped out of a cross-corridor.
“Fighter’s quarters are on the upper deck. What are you doing here?” the man asked in Yemeni-accented Arabic.
Flame answered by butt-stroking the man in the head. The man went down, skull fractured in two places—but so did Flame as the move tore open one of his wounds.
“Flame?” Kimberly knelt next to him. “Are you all right?”
“Give me a minute.” Flame took a couple of careful breaths.
“You tore something open, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.” Flame allowed himself to sit back against the corridor wall. “Looks like I did.”
“Good thing I brought these.” Kimberly reached under the cammo pants into her own shorts and withdrew a handful of tampons. “Pull up your shirt.”
Flame did as ordered, then bit into the scarf that hid his face as the girl used her fingernails to worry out the blood-soaked mass of cotton and paper in the leaking wound.
“Hold on.” She tossed the compromised tampon aside and replaced it with one of the new ones she had brought along. It almost immediately turned red with blood—but the flow slowed and, a few moments later, stopped. “Try not to do that again.” Kimberly stood and took Flame’s hand to help him up. “Just shoot the bastard next time.”
“I didn’t want to make that much noise.” He checked the wound, nodded at what he saw. “I guess it was good that I brought you along.”
“Yup.” She grinned—then realized that he couldn’t see her face under the scarf. “Now where’s the engineering office?”
He gestured sternward and, after checking his weapon to make sure that he hadn’t damaged it, once again led the way.
***
Madani paced back and forth across the bridge, his eyes sweeping the water behind the tanker. He should have been here by now! The Saudi kept expecting to see a fleet of small boats—instead he saw nothing but wind-blown waves. Where is he?
Everything else was ready. The engines had been started although the propeller hadn’t yet been engaged. He’d ordered the engineer to the bridge to handle the operational chores—Madani himself had no idea how to handle the ship. That’s a job for hirelings, he told himself. He had more important things to do.
The engineer arrived just as he was about to turn back to the radio. Before either man could move, there was another loud scraping sound underneath them—followed by more noises as the ship lurched to starboard.
***
“Shit!” Flame was caught by surprise as the ship shifted again. Fortunately, he was close to the starboard bulkhead and used it to steady himself while he grabbed for Kimberly. “The ship is going to pull free soon.” He released her, and got his feet back under him. “We’ve got to be done and off before that happens.”
“Let’s hurry up.” She gestured for him to begin moving. “Wherever it is we’re going.”
They were going to the engineering space, located at the stern of the vessel. Flame, ready for anything, pushed his way through the hatch and swept his AK over the entire space thus revealed.
There was no one there—all the controls had been set to remote, allowing the engineer to run everything from the bridge.
“Okay.” He let Kimberly into the area, then closed and dogged the hatch behind them. “There should be a timer of some kind…”
“Over here.” Kimberly had found something that had clearly not been part of the ship when it was built—an old-fashioned clock with a number of wires running into it.
“That’s it.” Flame hurried to her side, checked out the timer’s construction. “This sets the clock…” He touched a control on the clock face. “There’s a remote that goes to the bridge…” He touched a wire. “Everything else is just wiring that goes to whatever they’re planning to use to touch off the vapor.”
“Do we cut the wires?”
“Only this one.” He produced the knife he’d taken from the second guard and used it to disconnect the bridge’s control over the timer. “Now,” he said, and raised an eyebrow at his companion. “How long to you figure it’ll take us to get out of here?”
“Couple of minutes.” Kimberly shrugged. “Five maybe.”
“I’ll give us ten.” He set the clock, started a timer on his own watch and straightened up. “There.” He turned to the hatch. “We’d better get on our horse.”
They left the engineering space, carefully leaving everything the way they found it. Flame even tied the control wire he’d cut behind the clock face so it appeared to still be connected.
“This way.” Flame pointed to the passageway they’d just come from—but before they could move, there was a jolt that was far more powerful than the ones they had experienced so far. The ship moved around them, the hull flexing as it did so…
Flame and Kimberly were rocked back, grabbing whatever they could reach to save themselves from falling.
The ship rocked back and forth, making more terrible scraping noises…
And was still once again.
“It didn’t quite pull free.” Flame got back to his feet, adjusted his scarf. “Next time, it will.” He looked at the girl. “We’ve got to hurry.”
“We’ll have to find another way to get to the deck,” Kimberly pointed to the passageway forward. “Look!”
The passageway was no longer clear. One of the bulkheads had bent in on itself, blocking the way just a few feet forward.
“There’s a ladder over here.” Flame nodded toward a stairway that went upwards. “It’ll take us to the bridge, I think.”
“Won’t there be somebody there?”
“What if there is?” Flame patted his rifle. “Come on, we’ve only got seven or eight minutes left.”
He pushed Kimberly onto the stairs, then followed her as she moved upwards as fast as she could.
***
Where the hell is Alfarsi! Madani’s pacing had become fevered, tiger-like. His eyes swept over the sea, searching for that singular dot that would represent the first arrival of the expected boats.
A dot that had not yet appeared.
It can’t be the weather. Madani looked up at a clearing sky from which only a light drizzle was falling. He must have abandoned the mission. That’s it. The Saudi started for the radio. He’s abandoned the mission. He’s fearful…
The ship lurched hard to one side, knocking Madani to the deck.
We moved! He pushed himself to his feet, looked out the starboard window. The ship had definitely moved—there was a long mark on the sand showing where the tanker had shifted its weight—and there was water under most of the bow now. If only Alfarsi was here! Madani turned to the radio. He has to come. He must!
He grabbed the microphone and prepared to begin talking; he would order, beg, plead with the Persian to hurry to his side…
