Warren Murphy: The Final Crusade

Another tanker had made it through the perilous Strait of Hormuz. It was the second in two days. That was good, Rashid thought. Iran would need all the foreign currency its oil could generate.

But as Rashid trained his eyes on the wallowing black tanker, a furrow of perplexity appeared between his heavy eyebrows.

There was something odd about the tanker. Something wrong. He raked the stern with his glasses. Seamen busily made ready to lash the tanker to the loading facility. All seemed normal on deck.

Rashid examined the hull through his glasses, although he did not know why. He was a member of the Pasdaran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. It was his job to guard Kharg Island from aggression-although he sometimes wondered what the clerics in Tehran expected his unit to do if an enemy rocket came down on Kharg. Or if an American warship heaved to and issued that dreaded warning to abandon the facility.

A vertical line of white numerals showed at the bow of the Seawise Behemoth. The furrow between Rashid Shiraz' thick eyebrows became a knife slice.

"This is wrong," he muttered. "This is very wrong." He hurried to the manager in charge of the facility. "There is a danger from that tanker."

The manager had been in charge of Kharg Island since the days of the Shah. He was politically suspect, but the Revolution needed his expertise more than it lusted for his blood, so he was allowed to remain on the job.

He looked at Rashid with no fear. Just a veiled contempt.

"What you say?" he demanded.

"Look," Rashid said, handing him the field glasses. "At the bow. See the waterline?"

Reluctantly the man did as he was bidden. He fixed the glasses on the bow of the ship.

"You see it? The numbers?" Rashid demanded. "It is too low to the water."

The manager saw the column of white numerals above the waterline. They were the plimsoll marks, and indicated the tanker's draft in feet. When the tanker was full of oil, only numbers in the high sixties or seventies would show. When it was empty it would ride very high above the water, and it would be possible to see numbers as low as twenty-five. But on this craft the number forty-seven was visible above the Gulf's turquoise waters.

"What could they be carrying?" The manager's voice was puzzled.

"Then I am right! They do not come with empty holds."

"No," the manager said, taking the glasses from his eyes.

"No sane tanker captain would bring oil into the Gulf."

"A leak perhaps," the manager muttered. "They are taking on water."

"They would have sunk with such a leak, am I right? Tell me. Say that I am right."

The manager said nothing. He would not admit that Rashid was right, he hated the man so.

"What can it mean?" the manager asked at last. He might as well have asked the wind, because Rashid was no longer there. He was running down to the docks where the tugs were easing the black monster into position. He was shouting.

"No one comes off that ship! That ship is quarantined! I decree it in the name of the Revolution!"

The Seaurise Behemoth lay just off the terminal. Within a matter of minutes it was surrounded by the speedy attack boats of the Revolutionary Guard. One boat pulled up to the terminal to pickup Rashid. He ordered it alongside the Seawise Behemoth.

An aluminum ladder was lowered from the side of the big oil tanker. Rashid was the first to go up. His AK-47 was slung across his back. He unshipped it the moment his boots touched the deck plates. He pointed it at the captain.

"What means this?" the captain, who was Norwegian, demanded hotly.

"I am Rashid Shiraz, of the Iranian Pasdaran-e Engelab. I intend to search your ship for contraband."

"Nonsense. I come for oil."

"You have nothing to fear if you are not engaging in counterrevolutionary activities," Rashid said as his fellow Revolutionary Guards slipped over the deck.

"Two teams," Rashid called. "Hamid, you take one. The others will come with me. Quickly. Search everywhere!"

"For what?" Hamid asked doubtfully.

"For a bad thing," Rashid said, leading his team off. Hamid's team went in the other direction, not knowing what bad thing Rashid meant, but certain that they would know it when they saw it.

Rashid was tearing the captain's personal quarters to pieces, despite the captain's strenuous protest, when, somewhere deep within the ship, a machine gun burped. It was so brief a sound that Rashid called for his Pasdaran to cease smashing the captain's desk with axes so he could listen for it again.

The next burst was long. There were answering shots. Pistols. Then more automatic-weapons fire.

"Follow me!" Rashid cried, throwing himself up a companionway.

On deck, the sounds were louder. They came from amidships. It was a long run to amidships, for although not a supertanker, the Seawise Behemoth was not small. Rashid was out of breath when he came to the companionway from which the sounds of conflict crackled.

A man stumbled up from the hold. His mouth bled. He was Iranian. His stomach suddenly blew out like a bad tire. Viscera splattered Rashid, who recoiled from the spray. Bullets coming through the man's stomach knocked one of his own men down.

Rashid recognized the gut-shot man as belonging to Hamid's team. With hand motions, he signaled his men to stay clear of the opening. They huddled behind bulkheads, under pipes, and around the mouth of the companionway, and they waited.

The gunfire was less frequent now. It snapped and spit. There were screams in Farsi. And in another language, a curious word:

"Hallelujah!"

Every time a man screamed, a chorus of voices shouted," Hallelujah!" What did it mean?

Then there was silence and Rashid waited, wiping sweat off his upper lip, where the hair was sparse and straggly.

A man stepped out of the darkness of the ship. He was unarmed except for a long pole. He wore a shapeless white garment over ordinary Western trousers. From his vantage point, Rashid caught a glimpse of gold stitching across his chest. He could not make out the design.

But when the man set the pole on the deck and shook it once, sharply, so that a white flag unfurled, Rashid understood as much as he could about this sudden madness.

For in the upper corner of the white flag was a gold cross, and it was the cross, Rashid realized, that was stitched onto the man's chest--the symbol of Christendom.

Rashid moved in. He knocked the man in the temple with the butt of his rifle and dragged him off to one side. He was just in time.

Others, also attired in white tunics emblazoned with the cross, surged out of the hold. But these infidels carried automatic weapons.

Rashid cut the first man down. His fellow Pasdarans joined in. Soon a pile of bodies choked the stairwell. There were shouts of confusion from below. From men blocked by their own dead.

Rashid pulled the pin on a grenade, and reaching around, tossed it below. A flash of fire made a momentary appearance; then there was smoke and high-pitched screaming.

"You, you, and you," Rashid called, pointing to three of his bravest men. "Go down there."

They ran down the hatch. One was blown back by a wall of concentrated fire. He fell in two sections, an upper half and a lower half.

But the others got through. The sounds of a close-quarters firefight came from below.

"Now, all together, charge them!"

Rashid's men piled down into the hold. The fire was terrific. Rashid hunkered down in case stray bullets punched through the thick deck plating. He squatted on his prisoner. When this was over, Rashid's superiors would demand answers. This unarmed infidel would be the one to provide those answers.

Seven Pasdarans had descended into the bowels of the tanker.

Four returned. They looked at Rashid with surly blood-splattered expressions.