At six-forty-five all the terrorists but two climbed down into the larger of the inflatable speedboats. One of them, the Ukrainian-American, jumped into the old fishing launch that had brought them to the middle of the North Sea, and glanced upward.
From the rail above him, Andrew Drake nodded. The man pushed the starter button, and the sturdy engine coughed into life. The prow of the launch was pointed due west, her wheel lashed with cord to hold her steady on course. The terrorist gradually increased the power of the engine, holding her in neutral gear.
Across the water, keen ears, human and electronic, had caught the sound of the motor; urgent commands and questions flashed among the warships, and from the Argyll to the circling Nimrod overhead. The spotter plane looked to its radar but detected no movement on the sea below.
Drake spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, and far up on the bridge, Azamat Krim hit the Freya’s siren button.
The air filled with a booming roar of sound as the siren blew away the silence of the surrounding fog and the lapping water.
On his bridge on the Argyll, Captain Preston snorted with impatience.
“They’re trying to drown the sound of the launch engine,” he observed. “No matter; we’ll have it on radar as soon as it leaves the Freya’s side.”
Seconds later the terrorist in the launch slammed the gear into forward, and the fishing boat, its engine revving high, pulled violently away from the Freya’s stern. The terrorist leaped for the swinging rope above him, lifted his feet, and let the empty boat churn out from under him. In two seconds it was lost in the fog, plowing its way strongly toward the warships to the west.
The terrorist swung on the end of his rope, then lowered himself into the speedboat where his four companions waited. One of them jerked at the engine’s lanyard: the outboard coughed and roared. The five men in it gripped the handholds, and the helmsman pushed on the power. The inflatable dug its motor into the water, cleared the stern of the Freya, lifted its blunt nose high, and tore away across the calm water toward Holland.
The radar operator in the Nimrod high above spotted the steel hull of the fishing launch instantly; the rubber-compound speedboat gave no reflector signal.
“The launch is moving,” he told the Argyll below him. “Hell, they’re coming straight at you.”
Captain Preston glanced at the radar display on his own bridge.
“Got ’em,” he said, and watched the blip separating itself from the great white blob that represented the Freya herself.
“He’s right, she’s boring straight at us. What the hell are they trying to do?”
On full power and empty, the fishing launch was making fifteen knots. In twenty minutes it would be among the Navy ships, then through them and into the flotilla of tugs behind them.
“They must think they can get through the screen of warships unharmed, and then lose themselves among the tugs in the fog,” suggested the first officer, beside Captain Preston. “Shall we send the Cutlass to intercept?”
“I’m not risking good men, however much Major Fallon may want his personal fight,” said Preston. “Those bastards have already shot one seaman on the Freya, and orders from the Admiralty are quite specific. Use the guns.”
The procedure that was put into effect on the Argyll was smooth and practiced. The four other NATO warships were politely asked not to open fire, but to leave the job to the Argyll. Her fore and aft five-inch guns swung smoothly onto target and opened fire.
Even at two miles, the target was small. Somehow it survived the first salvo, though the sea around it erupted in spouts of rising water when the shells dropped. There was no spectacle for the watchers on the Argyll, nor for those crouched on the three patrol boats beside her. Whatever was happening out there in the fog was invisible; only the radar could see every drop of every shell, and the target boat rearing and plunging in the maddened water. But the radar could not tell its masters that no figure stood at the helm, no men crouched terrified in her stern.
Andrew Drake and Azamat Krim sat quietly in their two-man speedboat close by the Freya and waited. Drake held onto the ro
pe that hung from her rail high above. Through the fog they both heard the first muffled boom of the Argyll’s guns. Drake nodded at Krim, who started the outboard engine. Drake released the rope, and the inflatable sped away, light as a feather, skimming the sea as the speed built up, its engine noise drowned by the roar of the Freya’s siren.
Krim looked at his left wrist, where a waterproof compass was strapped, and altered course a few points to south. He had calculated forty-five minutes at top speed from the Freya to the maze of islands that make up North and South Beveland.
At five minutes to seven, the fishing launch stopped the Argyll’s sixth shell, a direct hit. The explosive tore the launch apart, lifting it half out of the water and rolling both stern and aft sections over. The fuel tank blew up, and the steel-hulled boat sank like a stone.
“Direct hit,” reported the gunnery officer from deep inside the Argyll where he and his gunners had watched the uneven duel on radar. “She’s gone.”
The blip faded from the screen; the illuminated sweep arm went around and around but showed only the Freya at five miles. On the bridge, four officers watched the same display, and there were a few moments of silence. It was the first time for any of them that their ship had actually killed anybody.
“Let the Sabre go,” said Captain Preston quietly. “They can board and liberate the Freya now.”
The radar operator in the darkened hull of the Nimrod peered closely at his screen. He could see all the warships, all the tugs, and the Freya to the east of them. But somewhere beyond the Freya, shielded by the tanker’s bulk from the Navy vessels, a tiny speck seemed to be moving away to the southeast; it was so small it could almost have been missed; it was no bigger than the blip that would have been made by a medium-size tin can; in fact it was the metallic cover to the outboard engine of a speeding inflatable. Tin cans do not move across the face of the ocean at thirty knots.
“Nimrod to Argyll, Nimrod to Argyll ...”
The officers on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser listened to the news from the circling aircraft with shock. One of them ran to the wing of the bridge and shouted the information down to the sailors from Portland who waited on their patrol launches.
Two seconds later the Cutlass and Scimitar were away, the booming roar of their twin diesel marine engines filling the fog around them. Long white plumes of spray rose from their bows; the noses rose higher and higher, the sterns deeper in the wake, as the bronze screws whipped through the foaming water.