Ship Of Death td-28 Read online

  The British ship, seeing the Spanish admiral so very exposed on the bridge, lobbed a shell there during intense manifestations of religious oaths, and the Spanish proceeded to decapitate every Englishman on the privateer, leaving the captain for last.

  A similar ceremony was recreated in New York Harbor aboard the massive, remodeled Ship of States while it stuck out into the bay like a gleaming white peninsula. Exactly twelve hours to the minute after some unidentified American security officer had proved at a secret United Nations security meeting that the vessel, considering its size and population, was no more dangerous than most cities in the world, Adm. Dorsey Plough Hunt was forced to his knees on the bridge of the moored goliath and, staring intently at the base of the computer director wheel, felt a sharp sting at the base of his neck and then felt nothing else. The head rolled.

  The neck spurted blood like a red car wash on a sunny Saturday.

  A black gloved hand wrote on the picture of the current secretary general of the United Nations, framed in honor on the bridge, the words: FREE SCYTHIA!

  The chief translator, organizing the very complicated working shifts for the first United Nations cruise, turned around when he heard footsteps in his supposedly locked room. He saw eight men all dressed in black with faces darkened with night paint.

  In English, he asked them what they were doing there. Then in French, then in Russian, then in Arabic, and then, in an international gesture, he threw up his hands and shrugged.

  They forced him to his knees while he tried to explain in Swedish that he had no money and was not political and certainly was not anyone who was important enough to give them anything.

  He didn't even feel the sting at the back of his neck as a blade made his eyes and brain useless. The head nestled under a chair and the body convulsed and again they used blood to write, this time on the charts of work schedules: SCYTHIAN LIBERATION FRONT.

  In the mammoth vessel there were eighteen chapels: mosques serving different Islamic sects, cathedrals for Christians, synagogues for Jewish groups and temples for Buddhists and Hindus. In every area of worship, a head was placed, and on every altar, the word Scythia was written.

  The black-clad men worked and cut until the darkest part of early morning, until the blood made some giddy and made some talk to themselves and made others feel light with triumph, reactions common to men who had killed for the first time and had suddenly discovered it was what they had wanted to do all their lives and they had simply never known it until they tried it.

  Then the leader called "Mr. Scyth" made his first mistake. He entered the Middle East corridor on one of the ship's passenger decks. Despite pledges made formally at the old United Nations building in New York, the corridor was heavily armed.

  The men with machine guns and pistols and small pocket grenades were not called guards but "cultural attachés." The Jordanian cultural attachés had British Webleys and Brens while the Syrian agricultural experts carried Kalishnikovs, the Russian automatic rifle made famous on wall posters where they are held aloft in a fist while the poster proclaims some sort of social improvement to be gained by firing one of the things. Actually, they worked very much like the British and American weapons, hurling pieces of lead into human bodies so voices that might say that cultures had not been improved but merely relabeled could be stilled. If one had enough Kalishnikovs, he could force thousands into the streets to proclaim in marching ranks how happy and free they were.

  An Egyptian cultural attaché spotted three men in black with bloody swords and let loose a burst from his M-16. A Libyan choreographer, hearing the shot, threw a hand grenade into the passageway. The Iraqi singers poked Kalishnikovs from their outer doorway and fired at everything, especially the Syrian doorway. The Saudis stuffed American hundred-dollar bills and large Swedish kroner into wastebaskets and threw that out into the blazing fury of the Middle East corridor.

  Accidentally, the cross fire proved immensely effective against the band of night raiders. It forced them to huddle in a large cleaning closet, their hands over their ears and their heads tucked into their chests in some small attempt to escape injury. Only Mr. Scyth remained calm.

  "We've got to run for it," one said, but Mr. Scyth touched his cheek and said calmly that there was nothing to fear.

  "We'll be trapped here," said the man. "They'll close us in. We're in a closet. There is no escape." And those who had just minutes before taken delight in rolling heads suddenly did not like killing anymore.

  The Lebanese delegation, just arrived from Beirut, slept through the exploding din for it was much like their homeland. It was also the Lebanese delegation that picked up the phone in the morning to get in touch with other Arab delegations in the Middle East corridor.

  "Look, old boy," said Pierre Haloub, deputy consul of the Lebanese mission, "I'm hearing Kalishnikovs down the hallway and heavy Bren action about twenty yards past that and back aways, maybe sixty or sixty-one yards, is M-16 activity, and one of them has a small defect in its recoil that should cause the Egyptian some trouble in about eleven minutes if he continues his firing pace."

  "Holy Allah," said the Syrian at the other end of the telephone. "How can you tell?"

  "The sounds, old boy. Now, are you firing at anything in particular?"

  "We are being attacked and we are firing to defend ourselves."

  "It doesn't sound like it," said the Lebanese. "Too random. Now what you've got to do is phone around, find out who fired the first shot and what he fired at, and give me a buzz back in a few minutes. All right, old boy?"

  Haloub finished his juice and unpacked his shaving kit.

  "Anything?" asked another delegate coming out of the lavish main bathroom.

  Haloub shook his head. When he finished shaving, he telephoned the Syrian again.

  "Well?" he asked.

  "No one started it," said the Syrian.

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Zionists," said the Syrian.

  "This isn't a UN debate so stop the nonsense. We've got to get the shooting stopped so we can all go out this morning. Now who defended himself first?"

  In two minutes an Egyptian was on the phone. He said he had seen men clothed in black with bloody blades and shot at them.

  "What sort of weapons did they have?"

  "Bloody knives for murder."

  "What sort of guns?"

  "I didn't see any."

  "Aha. All right. You stop shooting and I'll phone the other delegations. I think we may have just gotten ourselves something."

  The ensuing symphony of silence woke up the rest of the Lebanese delegation.

  "What? What? What?" they said, stumbling sleepy eyed into the main chamber of their UN consulate.

  "Nothing. A cease-fire," said Haloub.

  "I can't sleep with all this quiet," said one of the Lebanese. "I never should have left Beirut."

  Haloub, who really was a cultural attaché but had picked up a fine knowledge of firearms and street warfare just by growing up in Lebanon, unpacked his .357 Magnum, a very large pistol that made very large holes in people, and an ashtray. He opened the outer door into the corridor and threw the ashtray out onto the thick carpet. No one fired, so he stepped out into the hallway. He had seen walls like this before after intense cross fire. It looked as if someone had gone through the hallway with a McCormick reaper, whipping away chunks of the walls and ceilings, gouging out large pieces of the carpets.

  "Take your hands off your triggers and everyone come out into the hallway. C'mon," he coaxed. A door opened. Someone poked out his head. Another door opened. Finally all the embassies along the broad hallway had people out in the middle of the corridor, with guns and silly grins.

  "All right, everybody," said Halouh, "we're going to find the men in dark suits with bloody blades. I don't see any bodies so they must be in a room somewhere. Where's the Egyptian who saw them first? Don't be afraid. Come to the front. It's just the cease-fire of the morning. I'm sure we'll have hundreds bef
ore this cruise is over."

  A dark man in a white silk bathrobe with an M-16 pointed up the hallway, behind a mass of Syrians in long nightgowns who carried Russian Kalishnikovs.

  Haloub calculated what the cross fire had been and knew he had not seen a body, and therefore the only living place the intruders could be was behind some closed door.

  "Find a door that's closed and don't open it."

  The door was found immediately and identified as a large cleaning storage area, checked out the day before by Syrian security. The Egyptians said that was a lie; it had been checked out by Egyptian security.

  A Libyan accused both of lying and said the closet had never been checked out by anyone and was probably part of a CIA, American-racist and Zionist plot. By saying it was checked out, the Egyptians and Syrians were now in collusion to sell out the revolution of the Arab peoples.

  "Quiet," yelled Haloub.

  "Racist," screamed the Libyan.

  "We can all be killed if we don't do this right," Haloub said.

  The Libyan was quiet. Haloub went to the closet door. He made everyone get on either side of the door and keep quiet. He pointed to the carpeting. There was fresh wet blood at the door. Obviously one of the intruders had been wounded.

  Haloub stepped to the side of the door. With his back pressed against the wall and all the delegates out of danger, he scraped the barrel of his Magnum against the door. Often in cases like that, the occupants would start shooting. No one shot.

  "All right. We know you're in there. Throw out your weapons and you'll be all right," said Haloub.

  "You have the word of an Arab," yelled the Iraqi.

  The Egyptian giggled.

  The Iraqi said he didn't think that was funny.

  "I don't think there's anyone in there," said Haloub.

  "There's got to be. There's no exit," said a Syrian security man, listed as a linguist.

  "I don't think so. I've been through this before. I just have a feeling."

  "But I have the plans to the ship," said the Syrian.

  "He's right," said the Egyptian, and everyone agreed. Everyone except Haloub, who for the last two years had lived in Lebanon, where you had to shoot your way to Sunday mass.

  Someone returned to his consulate and brought back one of the eighteen volumes of the ship's plans. It was a gigantic condensed blueprint. They found the corridor and Haloub isolated the large closet. It was more like a small storage room.

  "What's the material of the closet's walls and ceiling?" Haloub asked.

  "Reinforced steel."

  "Then there is absolutely no theoretical way in which that band is not trapped inside the closet," said Haloub.

  Everyone agreed.

  From a far corridor, several guards clad in United Nations blue ran up asking what had happened. Was everyone all right? Yes, they were, Haloub said. The guards told them they were lucky. Some madmen had gotten aboard the ship and were cutting off heads.

  "We have them trapped in that closet," said someone.

  The United Nations force asked to take over. But Haloub refused. Of all the men in the corridor, he had the most battle hours. He simply turned the handle of the closet door and opened it as everyone else ducked for cover.

  The closet was empty. There was some blood on the floor but it was empty. The hallway became a din of charges and countercharges. Haloub retreated from the center of the crowd and returned to his consulate aboard the great ship.

  He let the Lebanese press aide leave to join the others lest the American press run "another lopsided story about trigger-happy Arabs."

  Haloub called a meeting of the Lebanese delegation. Back home, many of them would have shot each other on sight. But here, away from their homeland, each who had tasted civil war and who had learned in their grief that dead bodies solved very little and who understood better than most what killing was about listened intently to Haloub, a Maronite Christian.

  "Gentlemen," said Pierre Haloub, "this ship is a coffin."

  There were no charges of conspiracy, just serious listening by serious men.

  "There were murders on this ship last night. It is a big ship with thousands of people. Yet these murders look like the work of terrorists. Now terrorists can strike anyplace. They do not bother me much. That is not why I call this Goliath a coffin. No. This ship is a coffin because it has secret passages not known to us, but known to the people who committed the murders."

  There were questions about how Pierre Haloub knew this thing. And he explained about the cross fire and the trail of blood to the closet door, and the absence of anyone from inside the supposedly sealed closet.

  "I think this ship was designed to kill many people."

  "Arabs?"

  "No. All. Everyone," said Pierre Haloub on the last day of his life.

  In Washington, the president of the United States assured the National Security Council, two visiting ambassadors, eight United States senators and an interviewer that he had great faith in the safety of the vessel called Ship of States.

  "While of course we regret the decision of the United Nations to leave New York—particularly coming, as it did, as a result of a dispute over free parking and the veto by our representative of the UN resolution demanding an additional fifty-percent income tax on Americans to help the emerging nations 'find themselves'—we still look to the UN as the hope for peace through negotiation, progress through reason, and change through love and mutual respect."

  "What about the beheadings, the gun battle and the horror in the Lebanese consulate section?"

  "I'm glad you asked me that," the president told the interviewer. "It just shows how badly we need peace." He excused himself and raged into the office of his top assistant. Why hadn't he been told about the horrors on the Ship of States? And what happened at the Lebanese consulate section aboard the ship?

  "Burned alive, sir. The entire consulate turned into flames. They were cooked. Apparently fire bombs."

  "Oh, that's great. That's really great. We needed that. We really needed that. I wish those bastards, if they want to start frying each other, would wait until they get the hell out of New York Harbor so we don't get blamed for it."

  "What's our position, sir? For the press."

  "We're against frying as a way of solving international disputes. I'm going to my bedroom."

  He had a half hour to wait in the bedroom and every ten minutes he looked toward the top drawer of a bureau. He drummed his fingers on the arm of a Chippendale. At precisely 6:15 P.M., he dialed a red telephone secreted in the top drawer of the bureau he had been staring at.

  "You assured me," said the president coldly, "that those two would be assigned to that ship. You gave me your word on it. Today I hear about massacres aboard that ship. We and every nation I can think of are committed to the safety of that ship. Who, what and why went wrong? I want to know."

  "Hello, hello," came a voice through the receiver, a voice fatty with the thick consonants of the Bronx in New York. "Is that you, Selma? Selma? Selma?"

  "Who is this?" demanded the president.

  "Who are you? I'm trying to get Selma Wachsberg. Who are you?"

  "I'm the president of the United States."

  "A great imitation, Mel. Really great. Get Selma for me, will you, please?"

  "There's no Selma here."

  "Look, Mr. Smarty-pants. I'm not looking for an impersonations single. Get me Selma."

  "This is the White House. There's no Selma here."

  "C'mon, already."

  "I am the president of the United States and I want you to get off this line."

  "Give me Selma and I'll get off the line."

  Another voice came on and this one was taut and lemony. He explained there was a mix-up.

  "You bet there is," said the woman in the Bronx. "I want Selma Wachsberg."

  "I want an explanation," said the president.

  "Madame," said the man with the lemony voice, "this is a government line. There has been
a mix-up. I need privacy. It is important."

  "My call's important too. What's yours about?" said the Bronx woman,

  "The possible survival of the world," said the lemony voice.

  "Mine's more important. Get off."

  "Madame, this is your president and he is asking for your help. Not only on behalf of your country do I ask this but on behalf of the world."

  "Hello, hello?" It was a new woman's voice, younger than the first.

  "Selma. Is that you?"

  "What I want to know is what went wrong in New York Harbor?" said the president. It was a chance, to be sure. But he knew he could not reach this man again until early morning and he could not wait until then to find out what had happened. The telephone lines worked in such a way that their two home numbers only existed during specific times. Moreover, if he were not too specific, the two women wouldn't know what they were talking about anyway. Nothing went right in America anymore, he thought.

  "Ruth, Ruth, is that you?"

  "It's me, Selma. Who is that jerk on your line?"

  "We didn't have our people there," said Dr. Harold W. Smith, the only director the secret agency CURE had ever had.

  "What people there?" asked Selma Wachsberg, thinking there might have been a party to which she had not been invited.

  "Why not? You had given me assurances," said the president of the United States who, the previous week, had been assured by Smith that his two-man special unit would be launched as a floating security team, unidentified to other security agencies.

  "Will you two get off this line? I've got something important to talk about," said Ruth Rosenstein of 2720 Grand Concourse, the Bronx, who had found an unmarried accountant who said he might be interested in meeting a lovely charming young girl named Selma, who was, of course, a fantastic cook.

  "Small disorder. Unit doesn't want to work for us anymore." Smith knew two women on an accidentally open line could not possibly perform a trace, nor even understand what was being talked about.