Matt Hilton: Blood and Ashes

There was a growl coming from somewhere and it took him a moment to locate where. The sound was in his throat; anger taking shape again in a building curse. He spat it out, turned quickly from the rail and went back into the large cabin. It was pointless dwelling on the failure of others.

The two men that Darley had killed were in the corner where the buckshot had thrown them. Carswell Hicks still sat propped up against the silver lock-box. The smell was overwhelming. Too soon to be putrefaction, the stench was a pungent mix of spilled blood, voided bowels and opened bodies. Gant was familiar with the stench. It had been a constant companion when he’d fought against the Iraqis and the Taliban. Still, he threw a forearm over his nose as he stooped down over Hicks’ body. With the barrel of his gun, he flicked open Hicks’ jacket. Darley had stripped the two minders of their weapons, and because he wouldn’t risk leaving Gant anything larger than the. 22 to shoot at him with, he would have taken them with him. Gant hoped that Darley had forgotten about the Ruger MP9 that Hicks carried concealed in a shoulder rig.

The gun was there and Gant reached for it. He trembled as he neared the body of his friend, expecting Hicks to snap out his hands and go for his throat, seeking vengeance from beyond the grave. It was a fanciful thought. He unsnapped the holding strap and withdrew the Ruger. It was a compact machine pistol that Hicks had adapted for concealment under his suit jacket. The folding stock had been removed, making it not much larger than any other handgun, but the firepower was awesome in comparison to Gant’s weapon. Under Hicks’ other armpit he found three extra magazines of nine mm hollow-point rounds.

Gant studied the gun and smiled for the first time in hours. With this he could take the war to his enemies. But there was something infinitely better.

He placed the weapon and ammunition on the desk and returned to Hicks. His aversion to touching the man had fled, and he grabbed Hicks and dragged him away from the lock-box. A broad smear of blood and urine stained the boards before he was finished, but the lubricant helped him slide the heavy box from concealment. He jostled it over to the centre of the cabin and threw back the lid. Inside were the two flasks that Hicks had shown him earlier. They had been packed into slots in the foam interior. He thought they’d be heavier, but when he lifted one of the flasks free it wasn’t much weightier than a two-litre bottle of Coke. The flasks looked like elongated eggs, nine inches from rounded tip to rounded tip. One end was capped with a screw-down lid. He unscrewed it, peered inside. Some sort of viscous liquid was pooled at the bottom of a glass vial. He was no scientist, but judging by its heaviness the lock-box had to be lead-lined, which assured him these things were the real deal.

Radioactive isotope.

He screwed the lid back on and replaced the flask in its foam enclosure. Then with the lid shut he grasped one end of the box and hauled it off the floor a few inches. He could manage it, but it would be a struggle to cart the entire box off the boat with him. He could take the flasks themselves, but the lead was there for a good reason. Last thing he wanted was to damage the flasks and kill himself before he was through. He stood there a moment before the solution struck him. Why even remove the box from the boat when he could take the boat directly to his target?

‘Pity we missed him, huh? I would’ve liked to kill Carswell Hicks. What about you, brother?’

Rink had to shout over the roar of the engine as he angled the speedboat out into the deep channel between Ellis and Governor’s Islands. He was at the controls while I braced myself in the belly of the craft. Hanging on to the back of Rink’s seat, I squinted through the darkness.

‘We can’t complain,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘Sam Gant might be hard enough to kill for the both of us. I missed him last time, but at least we’re going to get a second chance.’

‘Going to have to do this quick, brother,’ Rink said.

‘Yeah, real quick.’

The news that Darley Adams had run to the police, throwing himself at their mercy with a plea bargain in exchange for leniency, caused a ripple of activity. He swore that he was an innocent dragged into this against his will, and that he’d have come forward much sooner if he hadn’t been terrified for his life. Wide-eyed, with drool pooling in the corner of his mouth, he told his captors how he’d been forced to accompany Samuel Gant and Carswell Hicks. He even swore he’d tried to stop Hicks detonating the bomb in Lincoln Square, his old neighbourhood. He was adamant that he’d only gone to the boat with Gant in the hope that he could snatch the canisters of radioactive waste so he could hand them over safely to the police. He said that Gant had murdered everyone on board, going crazy with a shotgun and an automatic weapon. He tried his hardest to get away with the plutonium but had to abandon it when Gant came after him. He should be treated like a goddamn hero, not a piece of crap!

No one believed a word he said, other than his closing statement. ‘Gant is crazy! He’s going to blow up a target in the city and there’s no way you’ll stop him.’

Although we wanted to interrogate Darley further, we would be the last people allowed to enter a police station and have access to a prisoner. As a sub-division controller of black ops Walter Hayes Conrad’s power was finite, so on this occasion even his influence was swatted aside. The FBI, the NYPD, Homeland Security, every other federal agency drafted in to contain the threat to New York City, had jurisdiction over him when it came to domestic problems like this. The CIA was forbidden from conducting clandestine operations on the mainland and by rights their involvement in the case was restricted to investigating Kwon’s part in the plot to detonate a dirty bomb in Manhattan. Still, with that said, Walter wasn’t the type to let jurisdictional hierarchy impede him. He didn’t get us in to speak to Darley Adams, but he fed us the information bleeding from the interrogation room like a gushing wound. With so many agencies involved, the flow of information was easily tapped, and while orders and instructions were flying up and down the chain of command from the lowliest uniformed officer to Capitol Hill and back, we were already on the speedboat appropriated from a berth near to Battery Park and streaking out into New York Harbor.

Darley had explained about the big old boat that Samuel Gant was aboard. Navy blue, with all its lights extinguished it would be difficult to spot; it would be a dark slice of shadow against the night. It didn’t help that the rain had returned with a vengeance making visibility little more than a few boat spans in any direction.

The likelihood was that a take-down team was being assembled at this very moment. The Coast Guard, the Port Authority, maybe even the US Navy would be on high alert, and launching a flotilla to surround and contain the boat that Samuel Hicks had commandeered. There was even the possibility that gunships were on their way with teams of Navy Seals on board. They’d be under strict orders to stop the boat at all costs. As far as any of them were aware the potential of a cataclysmic strike on the city was imminent. The cadre of nodding men must be rubbing their hands in glee at the effect that Darley’s confession had caused.

Not that I believed we should downplay the threat. In his mental state, Samuel Gant could engineer massive destruction. Even if the effects of the contamination didn’t cause a no-go area for decades afterwards, he had a vessel, fuel, and a means of detonating both. A bomb delivered to the right target could cause massive structural damage and numerous deaths, and that was what we couldn’t allow.