Crescent Dawn (Dirk Pitt 21)

“Feeling the heat, is he?” Gutzman said with a chuckle. “No matter. You tell him not to worry, the job won’t be in Israel. It’s Cyprus where he’ll have to earn his pay.”

55

HAMMET WINCED UNDER THE GLARE OF THE BRIGHT fluorescent lights that welcomed his first efforts at opening his eyes. The discomfort was nothing in comparison to the searing pain that throbbed from the back of his head. Forcing his lids open once more, he fought to identify where he was. The first answer was: Flat on his back, staring into a bank of overhead lights.

“Captain, how are you feeling?” came the familiar voice of the Dayan’s executive officer.

“Like I was leveled by a locomotive,” Hammet replied, raising his head to take in his surroundings.

As his vision cleared, he could see he was lying on a dining table in the ship’s mess, a stack of linen napkins serving as a makeshift pillow beneath his head. Members of his crew circled around him, concern and fear evident in their faces. Suddenly feeling self-conscious at his position, he raised himself to his elbows and slid off the table, the executive officer helping him slump into a chair. Overcoming a wave of nausea, he peered at the exec and nodded in thanks.

For the first time, he noticed that the executive officer wore a bloodied bandage around his head and that his skin was two shades paler than normal.

“I feared you were dead,” Hammet said.

“Lost a bit of blood, but I’ll manage. You had us more worried, as you slept the night away.”

The tanker captain gazed toward a nearby porthole, seeing the rays of the early-morning sun streaming in. He suddenly realized that the ship’s engine was silent and that the ship was obviously moored in place. A few feet along the bulkhead, he was startled to see a pair of black-clad men sitting on either side of the entry door. They cradled automatic rifles on their laps while staring back at him with menacing glares.

“How’d they get aboard?” Hammet asked quietly.

“Not sure,” the exec replied. “Must have been by small boat from that freighter. A group of armed men burst onto the bridge before we knew what was happening.”

“Did you get off a distress call?”

The exec shook his head grimly. “No time.”

Hammet took a headcount of his crew seated around him, noticing his third officer was absent.

“Where’s Cook?”

“He was taken to the bridge early on. My guess is, they had him piloting the ship.”

A short time later, the door to the mess was thrown open, and the third officer brusquely shoved inside by another gunman. Sporting a large bruise on his cheek, the young officer stepped to the table and approached Hammet.

“Glad to see you’re okay, Captain,” he said.

“What can you report?” Hammet asked.

“Sir, they had me pilot the ship at gunpoint. We tracked north at full speed all night, following a black freighter named the Ottoman Star. At around dawn, we docked alongside her in a small protected cove. We’re still in Turkish waters, about ten miles north of the Dardanelles.”

“Any idea who these people are?”

“No, sir. They spoke Turkish but made no demands. Can’t imagine why someone would hijack an empty water tanker.”

Hammet nodded in response, quietly wondering the same thing.

THE ISRAELI TANKER CREW was held aboard the ship for another twenty-four hours, given access to the galley but little else. Several times Hammet approached the guards with questions or requests but each time was silently rebuked with the muzzle of a gun. Throughout the day and night, they could hear the sound of workers and machinery echoing from the forward deck. Sneaking a peek out the porthole, Hammet could glimpse a crane swinging crates from the freighter to the tanker.

They were finally taken off the ship late in the day when some additional guards arrived and they were ordered to help load the ship. Marched down the pier, Hammet was shocked to see what had been done to his vessel. The assailants had cut away a pair of huge holes in the forward deck. The tanker’s twin forward storage tanks, which each held 150,000 gallons of water, were now exposed like a half-open can of sardines. The captain could see that the crates he had witnessed being off-loaded from the freighter now lined the perimeter bulkheads of each exposed tank.

“The idiots have converted our tanker to a cargo carrier,” he cursed as they were led ashore.

His dismay only grew when the crew was marched into the south warehouse and directed to transport the small boxes of plastic explosives from the Army container. They were guided back to the tanker, where they deposited the explosives in the center of the two open tanks. Hammet took a second to study the crates already loaded aboard, seeing they were filled with fifty-pound bags marked “Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil.”

“They mean to blow up the ship,” he whispered to his exec as they were marched back for a second load of HMX.

“With us in it, I imagine,” the exec replied.