Stephen Coonts - Combat

I nodded. “The new model of Islamic warrior,” I accused back, “so all you know is plastique. Ternary agent. The murder of a million innocents.”

“There are no innocents,” said the man who had been, however briefly, my friend. Why argue with a man who says such things? I just looked at him. “There are many more like me, more than there are of men like you,” he said, the words rekindling something fervid in his eyes. “The new model, you said. Wait for us. We are coming.”

My eyes stung from the tons of flammable liquid around us. When I reached out to help him up, he shook his torso, fumbling in his pockets. “Get away,” he said. “Run.”

Only when I saw that he had pulled a lighter from his pocket did I realize what he meant. I scrambled away. An instant later, the whole area was ablaze, and for all I knew the tanks on the trailer might explode. Daud-al-Sadiq, alias Norm Goldman, knelt deeply and prostrated himself in the inferno as though facing east in prayer as the flames climbed toward his warrior’s heaven.

The metro cops got to the scene before anyone else, and after that came the paramedic van. Aside from cuts on my face and arms and the fact that the whistle would remain in my head for hours, I had lucked out. I could even hear ordinary speech, though it sounded thin and lacked resonance.

Captain Hassan al-Nadwi and several of his crew weren’t so lucky in my view but, in their own view, I suppose they found the ultimate good luck. Using automatic weapons, they had tried to prevent a boarding party. One competence the Feds do have is marksmanship. No wonder the remaining crew were so hyperactive that morning; they were going to heaven, and they were going now .

Dana Martin pointed out to me after I handed over her cracked, useless Loc-8 gadget an hour later, that there had probably never been any intention on the part of the holy warriors to sail beyond the Golden Gate again. Their intent was evidently to start up their enormous doomsday machine and, if possible, set it in motion toward San Francisco’s crowded Fisherman’s Wharf. The crew would all be dead by the time the Ras Ormara grounded; dead, and attended by compliant lovelies in Islamic heaven while men, women, kids, pets, and birds in flight died by the millions around San Francisco Bay.

Dana said, “We came to that conclusion after we found that all the Korean crew members but one had reservations of one kind or another to clear out of the area,” she told me. “They knew what was coming. Once we realized how much of the major component they must have to react with all that stuff on the trailer, we knew they were using the ship itself as a tank. An external hull inspection wouldn’t pick that up.”

“You lost me,” I said.

“You know that most ships are double-hulled? Well, the Ras Ormara is triple-hulled, thanks to a rebuild by the Pakistanis. The main component of the ternary agent was brought in using the volume between the hulls as a huge cargo tank. I think Park Soon must have found the transfer pipes, and they couldn’t take a chance on him.”

“Three hulls,” I muttered. “Talk about your basic inside job. You think the entire crew knew?”

“Hard to say, but they wouldn’t have to. It doesn’t take but a few crewman to pull away from the slip. The North Koreans helped set the stage, but most of them don’t believe Allah is going to snatch them up to the highest heaven,” she said wryly.

“I don’t get it. Which one of them did,” I prompted.

“The one who was an Indonesian Moslem,” she said. “He was on the truck crew with the perp who passed himself off as Norman Goldman.”

“Then he’s a clinker over there.” I nodded across the boulevard toward the still smoking ruin. “Really keen of you people, assuring me what a great guy Norm Goldman was. Who did your background checks: Frank and Ernest?”

She didn’t want to talk about that. Journalists had a field day later, second-guessing the Feds who failed to penetrate the “legends,” the false bona fides, of men who had inserted themselves into mythical backgrounds twenty years before. And in twenty years a smart terrorist can make his legend damned near perfect.

Dana Martin preferred to concentrate on what I had done. I had already set her straight on the carnage at the chemical plant. She had it in her noggin that I had started the fire. The truth was, that’s exactly what I would have done first thing off, if I’d had the chance. I didn’t say that.

“I still don’t see exactly how you detonated your bomb,” she said. I responded, a bit tersely, by telling her I didn’t have to detonate the damned thing. Acetylene doesn’t like to be crowded in a dry tank, and when you try, a little bit of pressure makes it disassociate like TNT.

“I’m no chemist,” she said, “but that sounds like you’re, ah, prevaricating.”

“Ask a welder, if the FBI has any. If he doesn’t know, don’t let him do any gas welding. End of discussion.”

Her big beautiful eyes widened, not even remotely friendly. I knew she thought I’d been carrying some kind of incendiary device, which has been a sore point with Feds for many years, ever since the Waco screw-up. She kept looking hard at me. Well, the hell with her — and that’s what I said next.

“You’re under contract to us,” she reminded me.

“You offered to cut me loose early today,” replied. “I accepted, whether you heard me or not. Keep your effing money if you don’t believe me. Oh, don’t worry about sweeping up,” I said into her astonished frown. “I’ll testify in all this; I’ve got nothing to hide.”

And while she was still talking, I walked away from there with as much dignity as a man can muster when his clothes are in tatters and his only vehicle lies in smoking shreds.

Actually I did have something to hide: gratitude. I didn’t want to try explaining to Dana Martin how I felt about the brilliant, savage, personable, murderous Daud. I wasn’t sure I could if I tried.

There was only one reason why he would’ve made me promise to drive the miles to San Rafael for lunch: to make certain I wouldn’t be a victim of that enormous, lethal cloud of nerve gas that would be boiling up from the Ras Ormara. And while he could have grabbed my ankles when he set himself alight, he didn’t. He told me to run for it.

He would kill millions of people he had never seen, yet he felt something special for a guy who had befriended him for only a few hours. I didn’t understand that kind of thinking then, and I still don’t.

I do understand this: A man must never trust his buns to anyone, however intelligent and friendly, who believes there’s a bright future in suicide. And as long as I live, I will be haunted by what Daud said, moments before he died. There are more of us, he said. Wait for us. We are coming.

Well, I believe they’ll come, so I’m waiting. But I’m not waiting in a population center with folded hands. I’m recounting the last words of Daud al-Sadiq to everyone who’ll listen. I’m also erecting a cyclone fence around my acreage, and I’m in the process of obtaining a captive breeding permit. That’s the prerequisite for a guard animal no dog can ever match.

DEAN ING has been an interceptor crew chief, construction worker on high Sierra dams, solid-rocket designer, builder-driver of sports racers — his prototype Magnum was a Road & Track feature — and after a doctorate from the University of Oregon, a professor. For years, as one of the cadre of survival writers, he built and tested backpack hardware on Sierra solos. His technothriller, The Ransom of Black Stealth One , was a New York Times best-seller, and he has been finalist for both the Nebula and Hugo awards. His more humorous works have been characterized as “fast, furious, and funny.” Slower and heavier now with two hip replacements and titanium abutments in his jaw, he pursues his hobbies, which include testing models of his fictional vehicles, fly fishing, ergonomic design, and container gardening. His daughters comprise a minister, a longhorn rancher, an Alaskan tour guide, and an architect. He and his wife, Gina, a fund-raiser for the Eugene Symphony, live in Oregon, where he is currently building a mountainside library/shop.