Armageddon Conspiracy (31 page)

His understanding of
what
gave him no comfort because the question of
how
still loomed. He was certain Biddle wasn’t the leak. It couldn’t be Biddle’s wife because the skinny beast had been utterly shocked when they burst into her home and dragged her away from her martini and cigarettes. It might have been Wofford, the man he’d killed.

He looked down at the woman. “How did you learn of us?” he demanded.

“It was easy,” she said.

Abu Sayeed struck her harder this time then knelt on her back and ripped off her black tee shirt to expose the bullet proof vest beneath. The stenciled initials “FBI” confirmed what he’d already guessed. He left her and went back to the stern where he stood in the open and tried to gauge the weather. The wind continued to strengthen, and the bay now boiled with whitecaps. When he looked ahead, he could see that the storm was almost on them, blackening the sky and cutting off any sight of Long Island Sound.

A shudder ran though him. He hated the ocean, and this dense, suffocating weather caused an almost unbearable claustrophobia. Even so, he knew that Allah had sent this storm to confuse his enemies.

He went back into the salon and jerked the woman to her feet. He pushed her up the steps to the bridge, wondering again how to make her talk in the shortest time. He slapped her again, hard,
knocking her to her knees, and then he threw her against the bulwark while he rechecked the navigation instruments. There was still nothing unusual on the radar, no large boat bearing toward them.

The woman appeared semiconscious. He grabbed the back of her vest and dragged her from the bridge onto the flybridge. No helicopters hovering low, no searchlights on the water. The temperature was dropping, the wind-blown rain cold and stinging. In only seconds they would plunge into the swirling fog, becoming invisible, one more anonymous blip on radar.

His heart lightened for a moment because his enemies were confused, and he was about to elude them. Allah’s blessings could be as massive as an earthquake, or subtle as fog over a harbor. Either way, they were great. “Allah Akbar,” Abu Sayeed whispered, giving thanks for his delivery.

Finally, he looked down at the woman. She blinked as the rain started to revive her, and he reached down and turned her head toward the two crates that sat under canvas tarps. “There,” he said, reaching with one hand to yank back one of the tarps and reveal a large metal crate. “Is this what you hoped to prevent us from using?” He smiled. “You are too late, but if you want to live, you will tell me what I want to know.”

The woman’s lip was split along the side of her mouth, and when she tried to talk her teeth were stained with blood. “Brent’s going to kill you,” she said.

With a cry of rage, Abu Sayeed struck her with his fist, knocking her to the deck where she lay unmoving. He returned to the bridge. “Anneliës!” he shouted down into the salon. “Take this piece of excrement below!”

BRENT HEARD A RAPID
POP-POP-POP-POP,
followed by a rain of heavy slaps and thumps on the dock, the pilings, the water, before one caught him in the arm. As if a horse had kicked him, it spun him around and off his feet.

When he sat up again his right arm was numb, with a tingling like a limb that had gone to sleep. He felt above the elbow, his fingers finding warm blood and then the indentation where a chunk of muscle as big around as his thumb had been blown out. When he flexed his elbow the pain began.

He climbed to his feet, fighting off the sudden nausea, and squinted at the dark shape of the yacht already becoming indistinct in the storm. A single thought drove him—Maggie! From the opening in the hedge, he’d seen them dragging her up the gangplank. His first instinct was to call the police or FBI, but to what point?
Even if they believed him, the storm already covered Long Island Sound. Boats or helicopters would never arrive in time.

He cast a desperate look toward the floating section of dock to his right. There were several skiffs and jet skis but also a decent sized Boston Whaler. He ran around to its berth, fighting the pain in his arm and holding out a wild hope that the keys were in the ignition. They weren’t.

He remembered the small octagonal building on the shore beside the dock—it had to be where Biddle kept the boat keys. His arm pulsed red waves of agony as he ran to the building, circled to the door, and stopped.

One of Biddle’s security guards lay sprawled inside, face-up, a bullet hole in his forehead. The sight redoubled his fears for Maggie, and he forced his eyes to a pegboard where several keys hung on floating key chains. He grabbed one labeled “Whaler” and raced back along the dock. On the way, he stooped over to snatch the water gun he dropped when he’d been hit.

A second later, behind the Whaler’s wheel, he looked over controls that were roughly the same as Harry’s boat. He shoved the key in the ignition, found the tilt button, and lowered the engines into the water then pulled out the choke and engaged the starter. The engines didn’t catch. He cursed. Nothing ever worked in boats! He tried again, but then he remembered the gas lines. He stumbled into the stern, found them, and squeezed the two balls that fed gas to the engines.

When he turned the key again, the engines caught. He let them run hot for several seconds as he untied the lines, and then he pushed in the choke, backed away from the dock, and roared into
the darkness. His eyes watered in the wind, and the black wall of the storm lay straight ahead in the west. With the throttle jammed all the way forward, he prayed he had enough gas in the tanks.

He sped along with whitecaps pounding the hull and just enough ambient light from the shoreline to avoid moored boats. Away from shore the air grew misty and cold, the rain slashed, and he began to shiver. He had no plan and wondered what the hell he was going to do when he caught the yacht, assuming he could find it in the fog. He strained his eyes into the thickening storm knowing that in only a few hundred yards, he’d be running absolutely blind.

He looked down at the control panel, searching for the radio, but found only some screw holes and an empty space. “Shit!” he screamed. It had been pulled out, no doubt for repairs. Two boxy instruments sat atop the console, and he tore off the plastic covers. It was nearly impossible with the slamming waves, but he managed to find the switches. A moment later, he had radar and also a GPS showing his direction and location. The radar indicated a thick cluster of moored boats directly ahead, and he swung well clear of them but kept his heading toward the Sound.

He hit the fog with the engines wide open. He was going insanely fast for the conditions, but if he went slower, he’d never find Maggie. After several tries he located the button that controlled the radar’s viewing area, and he widened it until he spotted an image heading west out of Oyster Bay. It was the nearest thing moving on the water, and he assumed it had to be the yacht. A few minutes later, as he reached the mouth of the bay, he guessed he was about five hundred yards behind.

Given the power of the twin outboards, he’d hoped to catch
the yacht quickly, but as he turned into the Sound three- and four-foot swells were rolling hard from the northwest, causing the boat to pitch wildly. Unable to brace himself with his wounded arm, he backed off the throttle. He stared at the radar screen, monitoring the yacht’s heading as the gap refused to narrow.

What were the terrorists planning? Were the missiles on board? In his guts he knew that they were, that somehow this was all part of their plan. Maggie had guessed it would be an assassination attempt on the President, but that no longer seemed possible. Now, with the Coast Guard and FBI alerted, Biddle’s boat would be an easy target in New York Harbor. But then he thought—maybe the terrorists were simply planning to launch their dirty weapons in the dark then try to escape. Maybe that’s why they’d taken Maggie hostage.

That realization made his heart sink anew. The increasing likelihood of interdiction by the FBI or Coast Guard meant hostages would have zero probability of survival. That in turn meant Maggie’s only hope of rescue depended on him. Once she was safe he’d do his best to stop the terrorists, but she came first. He’d need surprise and perfect timing, and if he blew any part of it, both of them would end up dead. He raised his wounded arm and flexed the joint. The bleeding had slowed, but his elbow had stiffened, making movement even more painful. After a time, the radar showed the yacht change course, turning southwest. It was still around five hundred yards out, but now with the new heading the wind was off his stern, so he was able to increase speed. Over the next twenty minutes, he narrowed the gap and was only about two hundred yards back when the yacht changed course again and began moving almost directly south. The GPS showed the Sound beginning
to narrow as the land squeezed closer from both shores. The seas had subsided slightly, but hard rain still pelted. His teeth chattered uncontrollably.

Minutes later, even though the yacht was only a hundred yards ahead, he realized he had a new problem. The cold had debilitated him. His wounded arm now hung almost immobile at his side, and the fingers on his other hand were nearly too stiff to move. If he tried to leap on the yacht’s stern, he risked falling helplessly into the water.

He shook his head, refusing to focus on failure. He was staring at the radar screen, watching what was now a second radar blip converging with the first, when the rain ceased abruptly. He tore his eyes off the screen and looked overhead. Almost immediately, the absence of driving rain allowed warmth to begin flooding back into his limbs. It took several seconds to comprehend that he was passing beneath what had to be the Throgs Neck Bridge. Low clouds obscured the structure, but from overhead came the unmistakable thump of car tires crossing expansion joints.

Seconds later, he roared back into the cold rain, but the shelter of the bridge had bought him a little extra time. Now his fingers would move again and the uncontrollable shivering had diminished.

He looked back at the radar and struggled to pick the yacht out of the two convergent blips. One of the blips was moving directly toward the shore, so he decided the yacht had to be the other one. From here, his lead narrowed quickly. He drew to within fifty yards, then forty, thirty. He stared at the screen but snatched quick glances at the fog, trying to perceive a shape, something solid against the shifting whiteness. He continued to close the gap, backing off the
throttles as he suddenly noticed that he was in the smooth wake of the other boat. He looked down at the water, thinking it seemed oddly calm, given the churning screws of the yacht’s engines. He inched closer and closer until a shape materialized. Panic hit him then. It was no yacht, but a tug pushing a barge!

ANN JENKINS CHEWED HER CUTICLES
bloody as she peered out the window of the Coast Guard chopper and thought how the past forty-five minutes had probably turned her career to toast, and about how not long ago she’d been standing in the parking lot behind the Oyster Bay Cove Police Department going over the satellite photos with her team of FBI agents and Nassau County Police S.W.A.T. officers.

She’d been expecting a radio call any second from the Nassau County Police helo announcing that they were on station offshore of Biddle’s dock, positioned to prevent an escape by boat and otherwise provide general backup and assistance. The call had come all right, only the Nassau County PD said the weather was deteriorating too rapidly for their chopper to fly. Sorry, they told her, but she’d need to call the Coast Guard.

Just then the black kid showed up, almost hysterical, babbling about a fire at Biddle’s estate, shots fired, and a wounded cop. That was also when she’d learned that the Oyster Bay Fire Department had been notified first and was already rolling. She’d blown off the planning and raced everyone out to Biddle’s estate where they spent fifteen precious minutes arguing with the fire chief and EMT’s about who would go in first. Finding the dead security man behind the guardhouse won the argument for her, but they’d gone into Biddle’s property a full hour before the Coast Guard chopper’s scheduled arrival.

Then, of course, there was the situation they’d found: Kosinsky wounded and being tended by a retired fireman, Maggie DeVito missing along with Brent Lucas, three dead security guards, no sign of the terrorists, a blown-up cottage with some bloody human remains and another body in the courtyard. Also, Prescott Biddle and his wife were missing, along with Biddle’s yacht.

The chopper finally circled in just as the weather was completely shutting down, but Jenkins had ordered them to land anyway so she could jump aboard. Now she stared out fogged-up windows that showed only the reflection of their flying lights against the dense clouds, while trying to hold down the contents of her stomach in the buffeting.

Initially, thinking the terrorists might have run for the open ocean, they’d made an easterly sweep out of Oyster Bay, where they found three ships. They’d gone in low over each one, and the co-pilot had adjusted the radar to give them a good idea of length and size. There’d been two towed barges and a small commercial boat, but nothing remotely the shape of a hundred-foot yacht.

From there they circled west, and in the past few minutes, they’d
checked out several more blips—all barges—between Oyster Bay and the Throgs Neck Bridge. They were following a fresh blip and gaining altitude to go over the bridge when she noticed the co-pilot stiffen and sit forward.

She tapped his shoulder. “Got anything?” she shouted over the roar of the rotors.

He shrugged, pointing to the screen. “A second ago, I thought I saw something along the western shore, but it disappeared.” They came over the bridge, closed on the first target, and as the pilot sharpened the resolution, Jenkins saw the signal split into two parts.

The co-pilot shook his head. “That’s weird,” he shouted. “Looks like a small boat, maybe twenty-five feet, almost on top of a tug.”