Richard Johnson - Deadly Cargo - A Chilling Naval Terrorism Thriller

The boat rolled gently on long, low swells, and Buzz hummed as it turned the wheel to keep the boat angled properly to the wind. Dan leaned toward the table, ducked under and reached. Buzz hummed, and the sails slatted in a wind shift, then tightened again and were quiet. Only a foot to go. Then suddenly, his hand tightened around the handle loops and he lifted the bag just high enough to clear the floor.

Quietly, an inch at a time, Dan pulled the bag to him. Like a shadow, he moved back into the cockpit and placed the duffel on the captain’s chair. Over his shoulder, he glanced again at the man sleeping on the dinette seat, then turned his attention to the bag. He wrapped one hand across the zipper to muffle the sound of its opening and with the other he pulled the tab slowly.

Without turning on the cockpit light, for fear it would awaken his captor, Dan reached into the bag to feel what was there. Soft cloth met his touch. Clothing. He dug down through the gauzy material and his fingers touched something hard. With fingers trained to Braille, he felt the length of the hard, metal tube. Most of it was textured in a crosshatch pattern. Near one end, he felt a groove that ran all the way around the tube, as if it were a place of joining two pieces together. In his mind he was drawing a picture of what his hands felt. Beyond the groove, the tube was closed off. An end cap.

His fingers explored the surface of the cap and he detected a tiny circle, then another. He felt around the end cap and found seven identical circles that felt like small holes. Satisfied with his examination of that end of the tube, he moved his hand along its length to the other end, where he discovered a flared bell-shape. Across the face of the bell, the surface was smooth as glass, and the picture was clear in his mind. A flashlight.

His fingers moved back down the barrel and found a soft rubber button. The switch. He paused at the switch and ran his fingers across it, pressing lightly.

Josh Adams rolled out of the bunk and pulled his clothes on, then followed the crewman topside. When Josh came through the door to the bridge, the coxswain was scanning the island through a binocular. In the light of the moon, the silhouette of the island stood off the port bow, perhaps a half mile away and downwind. Without revealing details of his mission, Josh had advised an upwind position, but was careful not to say that it was to avoid the chance of contamination from a wind-borne toxin. To Josh, the container bearing the serial number BA11M was a toxic zone and was to be treated with the same respect that a nuclear site would receive. But he was not to make any of this known to the men on the ship. Until he determined otherwise, the container was one of the most dangerous places on earth. But it was also one of the most important secrets, from a national security standpoint.

“What do you see?” Josh asked the coxswain.

“See for yourself, sir.” The coxswain handed him the binocular and he pressed it to his eyes.

“There’s the river,” Josh said. “Leads back into the overgrowth like a dark tunnel. No lights anywhere, and nobody moving around.”

“No, sir.” The coxswain took the binocular back and continued his watch.

“I must go ashore alone,” Josh said. “I’ll need night vision, one of your hazmat suits and a Zodiac.”

“Carter,” the coxswain said, and a young crewman stepped forward.

“Aye, sir.”

“Take Mr Adams down to the small boat launch platform.”

“Aye, sir,”

Without looking away from the binocular, the coxswain said, “Everything is ready for you. Captain Pfister gave us our orders.”

Seven minutes later, Josh stepped aboard the waiting Zodiac, adjusted the headband for the night vision scope, pulled the hood down and sealed his hazmat suit, and cracked the throttle only slightly so he could pass quietly into the night toward the mouth of the river. Several minutes later, with a hundred yards to go, he cut off the ignition and the Honda outboard fell silent.

Standard issue with every Coast Guard inflatable boat is a set of oars, and Josh swung the oars around, dipped the blades quietly into the water and pushed, allowing him to face forward as he guided the boat silently into the calm river. Jungle trees formed a thick canopy at a height he estimated to be at least sixty feet overhead, and soon he was deep in the black, moonless cavern beneath the ceiling of branches. Ahead, on the left, he spotted the dock. The barge was there, and the container was on the barge. He rowed silently to the side of the container, looked up and saw the serial number he was searching for. With the small inflatable boat tied to the river side of the barge, he figured he was shielded from view of anyone ashore. But the bright view of the landscape through the night vision scope revealed no one anywhere around.

Very slowly, he pressed down on the edge of the barge with his hands and eased the weight of his body onto the floating platform to prevent it from reacting abruptly to his climbing aboard. He shielded himself along the container’s end wall until he could see around the corner and scan the full length of the dock. Cardboard boxes and plastic totes were scattered and a mattress lay half on the barge and half on the dock. Blankets were piled as if they had been thrown without care of where they landed. Amid the junk strewn on the dock, Josh saw something that took his breath. Sprawled along the wooden platform were the bodies of four men. It looked as if they had fallen clumsily, with legs and arms in awkward positions, as though they had died on their feet and dropped suddenly.

“Whoa,” he whispered.

He drew his 9mm short-barreled Glock 26 from the pocket of the hazmat suit, stepped onto the dock and walked toward the bodies. Even in the darkness, the night vision scope gave him a daylight view of the scene. He bent over the first man he came to, and jumped away as maggots flooded out of the mouth of the corpse. The dead man’s blotchy black flesh was a mass of large red boils oozing dark yellow pus.

In the man’s hand was a metal flashlight, and Josh pocketed his pistol then pried the flashlight from the man’s stiff fingers. His rubber gloves picked up a smear of pus as he thumbed the switch and noted that the light did not turn on. He rolled it over, examining both ends, and noticed a pattern of holes in the bottom cap. Something about this is not right. This isn’t the real thing. Then it dawned on him. This is the delivery mechanism. He set the flashlight on the dock, standing upright so it would be easy for the forensic hazmat team to see when they arrived.

He moved along the dock from body to body, and found each of the men in the same condition. At the far end of the container, he saw that the doors were open and the trailer was halfway out, hanging at an angle with the wheels still inside the container and the tongue jammed down onto the barge platform. He stepped around to the side of the trailer and saw another dead body just inside the open door.

Josh shoved the dead body out of the way and climbed into the trailer. The chaos inside revealed nothing of the missing terrorist. He was not there. None of the men he had seen so far was Husam al Din. So where was he?

Back on the dock, Josh walked toward a break in the trees that he saw ahead. The trail led onto a bright moonlit clearing where there were two small shacks. He pushed open the door to the first and inspected the interior. Nobody. The second hut held the bodies of three men, each shot once in the head. Beyond the second shack stood a larger building with a single window. It was dark inside. Josh moved cautiously across the clearing toward the building, but suddenly drew to a stop. There on the beach grass lay the body of another man, and closer inspection showed that this one had been shot in the chest. Nine, so far, four dead of gunshots and all the others from something else. And no Husam al Din.