Richard Johnson - Deadly Cargo - A Chilling Naval Terrorism Thriller

“That’s right,” Dan said. “I’ve got a little sail repair to do, and I want to scrub the bottom of the boat, and well, we’ll wait for the weather to improve even more than it has.”

“And besides that,” Nicole piped in, “some of us women want to avoid any bad weather that might still be lurking out there. Isn’t that right?” She smiled as she cast an accusatory glance at Dan.

“Well,” Cadee said, “I’m like the weather to be kind of calm and nice.”

“Good for you,” Nicole put her arm around her daughter. “We women will stick together.”

“Yeah, well,” Cadee giggled, “looks to me like you and Dad stick together pretty well, too.”

Dan moved in and threw his arms around Nicole and Cadee. “No man was ever luckier than to have two women like you in his life. We’ll all stick together like this.” He squeezed them in a bear hug and growled. “I love you guys.”

“We’re not guys, dad. We’re girls.”

October 15 – The Desdemonda, two days out of Manila…

As far as Captain Eric Sleagle was concerned, the day could not have been more perfect. Beneath an empty blue sky rolled an equally empty blue ocean. Farther than the eye could see from the height of the bridge deck, there was nothing except slowly rolling liquid azure that flowed in every direction to the distant curve of the horizon. The 48-mile radar showed the shipping lane empty ahead and behind, and the giant Desdemonda stood out like an island on an uninterrupted sea. She was, in fact, larger by far than many of the coral atoll islands that dotted some parts of the vast ocean. From the waterline to the top of her array of antennas above the bridge, she measured 118 feet. From bow to stern she was 887 feet, with a beam of 92 feet at the widest part. Two football stadiums could be built on her deck, with room left over for hot dog stands.

Her size was an advantage for deep ocean passages. With a grid of container cells in the cavernous hold below decks, most of the heavy cargo was carried low in the hull, which added stability to the ship and damped her motion on the water. Even so, once at sea, it didn’t take long for the ship to begin her dance to the rhythm of the swells. Under fair conditions, the motion was gentle; a slow rise and fall of the bow, a peaceful roll to port then starboard; the kind of motion that put sailors to sleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow, like babies being rocked in a cradle.

In spite of her size there were times when typhoons turned the ocean into a nightmare of steep waves that sent green water over the bow of a ship – even one this large. When that happened, life aboard the Desdemonda was pure misery, as she bucked over mountainous waves, slammed into troughs, sending a thunderous shudder through the hull that sounded as if it were about to tear apart. In fact, that was a possibility. Large ships the size of Desdemonda sometimes ended up straddling waves, with nothing but air to support the hull in the area of the trough. More than one cargo ship had broken its back that way, straining the structure past the failure point, splitting the hull open, spilling her guts and then falling like a stone to the ocean floor.

But there was no such possibility today. Captain Sleagle stood at the helm and stared at the horizon ahead. Nothing but blue sky and gentle seas. He glanced at the gauges in the instrument panel, then picked up his pencil and made notes in the ship’s log, indicating that the gauges were showing performance right where it should be, and everything about the Desdemonda felt perfect. He checked the GPS readings for latitude and longitude position, speed over ground, and course made good. He verified the course being maintained by the autopilot then stepped to the nav table to make notations of their position on the paper chart.

On Sleagle’s ship, there was no such thing as depending entirely upon electronic navigation. Every half hour, whoever was on watch was required to annotate the chart, dead reckoning style, so the next man on duty would be able to track the ship’s progress. It was a procedure as old as man’s voyaging over the sea, and it was the best insurance against getting lost if the electronic navigation equipment failed – which it sometimes did.

The captain was satisfied with their progress. In the day and a half since leaving Manila, they had traversed more than 800 miles of the 8,944 nautical miles to Panama. He paused to think. The calculation came to him as easily as a simple sum. “Fourteen days to go,” he mumbled to himself. “I can hardly wait to hit the Papagayo. I’m thirsty already.”

Captain Sleagle looked forward, across the containers stacked and lashed down six high and eight wide on the cargo deck of the Desdemonda . The ship rolled gently on the swells, and the top of the stack swept back and forth in a wide arc across the horizon. The motion was unrelenting, but the captain loved the movement of a ship on the water. He was never more comfortable than when he felt the ship plunge and roll and yaw in ceaseless movement that brought a smile to Sleagle’s face and put his heart at peace.

Sleagle had no clue that his ship was to be the carrier of a deadly virus. But Husam al Din was a man of the desert and mountains. He had no desire to be on a ship any longer than necessary to carry out his mission. He had insisted that the container in which he was concealed be loaded last, so it would be one of the first to be unloaded in Miami. That was the way he wanted it, and covert al-Qaeda operatives working at the dock made sure that it was done. But being loaded last put the container at the top of the stack on the foredeck, the spot farthest from the center of the keel, and that placed him precisely where the greatest movement was felt as the ship pitched and rolled and yawed. It was something he failed to consider.

Inside the blackness of the container, Husam al Din suffered a kind of sickness he had never known before. His mouth was dry as ash, his head spun, his gut cramped and his throat was raw from the continual retching. The smell of vomit hung in what little air there was in the trailer, and gagged him with every breath.

October 16th – Western Waziristan

A bitter wind howled past the entrance to the small cave where Josh sat looking out at the bleak landscape of rock and sparse forest that was just becoming visible in the cold light of dawn. The sky was brown with blown dust, and Josh couldn’t help but think that it looked like a smoggy day in Pasadena – one of those days when you couldn’t see the San Gabriel mountains a mile away. His gaze swept a distant ridge that was only barely visible through a thousand yards of dust-laden air. He and Sorgei had come over a shallow saddle in that ridge the night before, and finally took refuge from the bone-chilling wind in this small cavern among the rocks.

Suddenly, his eyes caught on something moving. A small puff of dirt, then another, rising from the ground behind the ridge, then blowing away in the wind. Strong and steady as the gale was, it would not raise individual puffs of dust like those he was seeing. Josh knew that something other than the wind was disturbing the ground. Then a round, black image topped the ridge, moving slowly with a steady back and forth motion. Then he saw another, and then a third.

“Sorgei.” Josh shook the sleeping Russian’s shoulder. “Sorgei, wake up. We’ve got to move.”

“Whaa?” Sorgei opened his eyes slowly, rubbing the sleep away with his palms. “What is wrong?”

“Trackers.” Josh pointed out the mouth of the cave toward the ridge. “Three men, black turbans. Taliban. They’re hunting us.”