He was almost to it when someone stepped out of the dark and slugged him in the back with what felt like a two-by-four. The flash tumbled away. The Mossberg blasted a red tongue of flame. Then he was on his knees, scrabbling to get up again as the board or bat or whatever it was slammed into his ass, then boomed hollowly, missing him and hitting steel.
Five sharp explosions loud as close lightning filled the hold with sound and light and powder smoke. In their intermittent flash he saw a boy in a white shirt jerking his hands up to grab his chest.
Marchetti got his hands on the Maglite again and pointed it to find the guy on the deck, crawling for the box. The pistol cracked again and the kid sank down, hand stretched out. His legs kicked.
Wilson came out of the black, pistol extended, ready to fire again. Her extended arms were locked, shaking. Marchetti spoke softly to her. Took the pistol away and let the hammer down. Held her for a few seconds, feeling her shudder and breathe, shudder and breathe.
To his surprise, she didn’t show the first sign of wanting to cry.
Aisha finally got aboard hours later, after the local bomb squad had removed the detonators and made sure what was left was safe. The dhow lay tied up to the outer seawall, far from other craft, apparently sitting on the shallow bottom there. An assault trooper guarded the gangplank.
Yousif was standing on top of the pilothouse as she and Pete and Bob came aboard. He welcomed them with a nod, gestured them on; she took it they were free to look around, to go below.
The place was littered with glass and cartridge cases and foot-printed all over with bloody boot marks. The bodies were still in place, being photographed and searched. She hesitated over one in a blue shirt. Its arm dangled over the gunwale. Techs were picking up the weapons, bagging them and carrying them ashore. She hesitated, look ing at the body. Then followed Diehl below, stepping cautiously on glass-strewn ladder treads.
Work lights illuminated the hold like a stage. A chalked square showed where the explosive had been. Beside it, hand extended as if pointing, lay the crumpled body of a small dark man of about twenty.
A crunch behind them. She turned to see Yousif bend, straighten. Wait.
“Identify any of them?” Diehl asked him.
“They’re all ours, Bob.”
“Bahraini nationals?”
“Right. But the guns, of course, not from here. Russian manufacture, but they’ve passed through many hands. The grenades are yours. The plastic’s yours. The blocks are still in the original wrapping. We will make some arrangement presently to return it, with the proper paperwork of course.”
“And this stuff?” Diehl thumbed the blue drums.
“The main charge. Fertilizer and diesel oil. We were lucky today.”
Aisha said, “What about this doctor? The one bin Jun’ad mentioned. The foreigner. Where’s he?”
Yousif shrugged, looking as if someone else had asked him that recently, and hadn’t liked his answer. They looked at the body, as if the brightness that spotlighted it meant it was worthy of their attention. But she didn’t see anything else. Men carrying a stretcher worked their way between the drums. They glanced at Yousif, and when he nodded, began rolling the corpse onto the stretcher, to take it away.
The peach-colored Mercedes could make two hundred and forty kilometers an hour. But the man with the drooping eyelid lifted the toe of his polished oxford from the accelerator when it reached a hundred. To drive at less, on this long stretch of perfectly straight causeway, would attract attention.
Above all he didn’t want to do that. Though, as always, his paperwork was in order. The passport and visa he’d used to enter Bahrain were now only stirrings of powdery ash in the tide. First shredded, then burned, then scattered into the harbor while the third team, the local boys, finished their preparations for today’s action.
Doctor Fasil Tariq al-Ulam no longer existed.
He watched the sparkling towers dwindle to distant white specks in the rearview mirror. Watched another coastline push up ahead, though its outlines were flat and undetailed through miles of dusty air. A taupe horizon toward which the highway arrowed, propped above the shining sea on concrete pilings that went on and on, rising only once, in a graceful arching stride, to let ships pass beneath.
The King Fahad Causeway linked Bahrain to the mainland of Saudi Arabia. The dun distance was Al-Khubar, in Saudi’s Eastern Province. But before he got there, in not too many minutes at the speed he was making, he’d have to stop.
A basement of riprap, a verdant icing of foliage; then, soaring, what looked like spaceships impaled on bayonets. The artificial island lay midway between the two countries. He’d have to go through immigration. That didn’t worry him. His new papers weren’t forgeries. They were real, with the proper stamps and clearances. He was a reporter with a new Internet news agency.
