Soldier of God Read online

  Kirk McGarvey got out of the cab into the cold drizzle at the cruise ship dock, and paused for a moment to unlimber his tall, husky body and look up at the bulk of the 192-foot pocket cruise ship Spirit of ’98 that would be his and Katy’s home for the next seven days.

  He was a man of about fifty, in superb physical condition because of a daily regimen of hard physical exercise overseen by Jim Grassinger, his bodyguard, and the physical trainers and docs at the Central Intelligence Agency. It didn’t do to allow the director to get flabby, especially not this director. He wasn’t overly handsome, but his face was pleasant, his gray-green eyes honest and direct, and he exuded the quiet self-confidence of a man who was supremely capable of taking care of himself no matter what the situation was. People who got close to him, and who were perceptive enough to understand who he was, felt protected, as if they were under an umbrella where the rain could never reach them.

  He had more than twenty-five years’ experience working for the government, first in the Air Force as an intelligence and Special Ops officer; next with the CIA as a case officer with assignments everywhere from Vietnam to Berlin and back; then as a freelance working what in those days were called “black operations,” which more often than not resulted in the death of one or more bad guys; and finally, reluctantly, back to Langley as the Company’s director.

  Whenever he had a choice, he opted for a field assignment over a desk job, which was a curious contradiction to his main passion, besides his family: the study of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French philosopher whose thoughts on everything from religion to government to science he found fascinating.

  Otto Rencke, the best friend he’d ever had, who worked for him as special projects director, was fond of telling anyone who’d listen that Voltaire was okay for a Frog, except that he’d never known when to keep his opinions to himself. Which was the same criticism usually thrown at McGarvey. Common sense is not so common, Voltaire wrote in 1764, and as far as Mac was concerned, nothing had changed in the intervening two and a half centuries.

  The sign on Truman’s desk had read that the buck stopped there, but the sign on McGarvey’s desk should have warned The Bullshit Stops Here. He hated nothing worse than liars, cheats, and bullies. Tell it like it is, or keep your mouth shut. Don’t blow smoke up my ass. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, but don’t whine about it. Anything but that.

  A knight in shining armor, his wife Katy called him, but almost never to his face, and certainly not in public. He would have been embarrassed.

  “Hey, how long are you going to keep me locked up?” Kathleen asked from inside the cab.

  McGarvey, realizing he had been wool gathering, took her hand and helped her out. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  She laughed, the sound light, almost musical. It was her happy, if not contented, noise, a mood he was finally beginning to recognize and understand without having to ask. She was tall for a woman, and slender, with short blond hair that framed a perfectly oval face, high cheekbones, full lips, finely formed nose, and a Nefertiti neck. She was fifty, but it was impossible to tell her age by looking at her, because her complexion was nearly flawless, and she was in almost as good physical shape as her husband, and for some of the same reasons—a lot of exercise and a strict attention to diet. In addition, though she would never admit it, she’d had a couple of brief, but expensive sessions with a plastic surgeon. Katy wasn’t denying her age, but she wasn’t letting it get the better of her. Not just yet.

  “What a beautiful boat,” she said with pleasure.

  “Ship,” McGarvey corrected, automatically. They weren’t the first of the ninety-six passengers aboard, but they were not the last, and the dock was busy with cabs, a couple of Cruise West courtesy buses, and people pushing carts with their luggage. No one seemed to mind that it was dark, raining, and in the low forties. The scenery on Alaska’s Inside Passage—hundreds if not thousands of islands, mountains, glaciers, and dense, almost primeval, forests—and the wildlife, including whales, would make the holiday worth just about any discomfort. The Spirit of ’98, a magnificent four-deck cruise ship built in the style of a turn-of-the-century steamer, had actually been used in the Kevin Costner movie Wyatt Earp. She had all the modern amenities including diesel engines, a full suite of electronics, lifeboats, a first-class gourmet kitchen and staff, plush upholstery, carved wooden cabinetry, and a player piano in the Grand Salon, but she looked like a gold rush ship. She had a single funnel just aft of the sweeping bridge, sharply vertical bows complete with pennant staff, and fine, old-fashioned lines.

  McGarvey paid the cabby for the lift from Juneau’s airport as his bodyguard Jim Grassinger took the bags from the trunk. Needing a bodyguard was one of the downsides of the job as DCI. He had been used to taking care of himself for most of his life. But having a bodyguard was in his charter, and he’d already had one killed out from under him, proving the necessity. But he still didn’t like it, though he had developed a great deal of respect and trust in Grassinger over the past year.

  “I hope it stops raining sometime this week, Jim,” McGarvey said. “I’d like to see you work on your tan.”

  “We’re in the wrong part of the world for that, boss,” Grassinger replied. He was not a very large man, and almost no one would take a second look at him. He had a round face, pale blue eyes, thinning, sand-colored hair—his mother was Swedish—and in a suit, the jacket always cut large to accommodate his hardware, he could easily pass for the manager of the appliance section at Sears. But behind his bland, pleasant demeanor was a body of hard bar steel and the determination to match. First in hand-to-hand combat at the CIA’s training facility in Virginia; first in marksmanship with a whole host of weapons including handguns, foreign and domestic, assault rifles, riot guns, submachineguns, RPGs, and handheld missile launchers such as the Stinger, the Russian Grail, and the LAW; and first in surveillance and countersurveillance methods, he repeatedly turned down offers from the Secret Service to protect the president. He liked working for the CIA. And as far as bosses went, McGarvey was the best in his book.

  He never stopped scanning the dock, and his jacket, beneath which he carried a 9mm Glock 17 with a nineteen-round box magazine, was loose as usual. He was doing a job that he would not quit until he was fired, retired, or killed, none of which he figured was going to happen anytime soon.

  McGarvey and Katy each took a bag and walked across the covered boarding ramp into the ship. It had begun this cruise last week in Fairbanks, and would head down to Seattle in a few hours.

  Normally, Grassinger would have gone ahead to check out the ship, but this time the crew and all the passengers had been vetted by the CIA and by the DoD because the former secretary of defense Donald Shaw and his wife, Karen, were also on board. Both he and McGarvey were significant targets for groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Quaida, but they both traveled with bodyguards, the Coast Guard was nearby, the ship would be under almost constant satellite surveillance, and Shaw’s and McGarvey’s names had not been made public. Even their travel arrangements from Washington had been kept strictly under wraps.

  Both couples needed the time off, the Shaws because of the continuing strife in Iraq, for which the former SecDef was working in an advisory capacity for State, and the McGarveys because of the horrible ordeal they had gone through less than a year ago in which Katy had been brainwashed into actually attempting to assassinate her husband.

  Their only daughter, Elizabeth, who worked for the CIA as a field officer and instructor, had suffered too. She’d been four months pregnant but had lost the baby in an arranged accident. Now she and her husband, CIA combat instructor Todd Van Buren, could not have children. They were in their twenties, head over heels in love with each other, and Elizabeth’s hysterectomy had devastated them.

  The Shaws and McGarveys were greeted in a receiving line by four ship’s officers, including the captain, the purser, the concierge, and the chief steward, who assigned them their accommodations
and dinner seatings.

  “Mr. and Mrs. James Garwood,” the concierge announced.

  “Welcome aboard the Spirit,” Captain Bruce Darling said, shaking hands. “If there’s anything I can personally do to make your trip more enjoyable, please, don’t stand on ceremony. Just ask.”

  “Good scenery, good food, and good weather, Captain,” Kathleen said, smiling.

  Darling chuckled. “How about two out of three, ma’am?”

  “Fair enough,” she told him, and she and Kirk moved off with a steward’s assistant to their first-class cabin, as Grassinger went through the same routine. He would be bunking in a cabin adjacent to the McGarveys’.

  The cabins were relatively Spartan compared to those aboard larger cruise ships. But the McGarveys’ cabin was equipped with a television, a reasonably sized bathroom, a queen bed, and a killer view from a very large window.

  “Just leave the bags,” McGarvey told the steward.

  “Yes, sir. We sail at five, and there will be a welcoming cocktail party in the Grand Salon at six.”

  Katy went to the window and looked across the channel at the docks and the processing buildings for the fishing fleet.

  “Should we dress?” McGarvey asked.

  “No, sir. Casual will be fine,” the steward said. He was a slight man with an olive complexion and a ready smile. “There will be a lifeboat drill first.”

  “Fine,” McGarvey said. When the steward was gone, he took off his jacket and tossed it on the bed, revealing a quick-draw holster at the small of his back that contained the 9mm version of the Walther PPK. He seldom went anywhere without the pistol. The German handgun was an old friend that had saved his life on more than one occasion.

  “Well, we finally made it,” Kathleen said, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

  McGarvey went to her and took her in his arms. She leaned her head back against his shoulder. “How do you feel, Katy?”

  She chuckled at the back of her throat. “Pregnant, happy as hell, content, frightened out of my wits, fat, hungry, thirsty.” She turned her face up to his.

  He kissed her for a long time. “A penny for the laugh.”

  “You said Katy. I almost corrected you.”

  “Kathleen. Old habits die hard,” McGarvey said.

  They watched out the window, in each other’s arms, for a few minutes content with the peace and quiet after an extremely contentious year. Of all the places in the world they could have picked for a week’s vacation—the Caribbean, Greece, Wales to look up her relatives, Ireland to look up his—they had chosen an Alaskan cruise because of the isolation. They were both peopled out. If truth were to be told, they would almost have preferred a desert island somewhere.

  She snuggled a little closer to him, pressing her breasts against his chest. “Hmm.”

  “Tender?” he asked.

  “A little,” she answered.

  McGarvey felt a sudden surge of doubt. “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we?”

  She chuckled again. Her everything’s-really-okay sound. “If you mean being fifty and getting pregnant, no, we’re being reckless. But if you mean getting pregnant with our daughter and son-in-law’s fertilized egg because they can no longer have children, we’re being foolish, but loving.” She looked up at him again, her face open and vulnerable. “Is my knight a little frightened?”

  “Yup.”

  Her eyes filled. “It’s okay, because it’s you and me, darling. Nothing else counts.”

  Someone knocked at the door. Kathleen stiffened for a moment, but then settled back. Life went on.

  McGarvey gave her a brief kiss, then went to the door. It was Grassinger. McGarvey let him in.

  “What’s the drill tonight, boss?”

  “We’re going to the cocktail party, then dinner, and we’ll be turning in early,” McGarvey said.

  “And sleeping in,” Katy added.

  “What about Shaw’s bodyguard?” McGarvey asked.

  Grassinger nodded. “Tony Battaglia. He’s good man. Ex-Army Special Ops. He’s up on the bridge deck in the captain’s sea cabin.” The Shaws occupied the owner’s suite, the only accommodation on that deck, except for the captain’s on-duty quarters, which he used only in an emergency when his presence on the bridge was required 24/7.

  “I’ll talk to him, see if we can coordinate our activities so that you and Battaglia can have a little slack time,” McGarvey promised, but he gave Grassinger a stern look. “Let’s get something straight from the get-go. I’m here on vacation, which means I’m not going to jump through a lot of security hoops. The ship is secure, the passengers and crew have been vetted—twice—and I’d just as soon not see you until we get to Seattle.”

  “The passengers and crew have been cleared, but I don’t trust anybody, boss.”

  “Neither do I. But we’re here to relax.”

  “Maybe you are, but I’m not,” Grassinger mumbled.

  “None of the passengers are going to relax either,” Katy said. “Not unless both of you keep your jackets on all the time to cover up your arsenals. Guns make most people twitchy.”

  McGarvey grinned. “You’re right, Katy,” he said. He took off his holster and stuffed it and a spare magazine in a side pocket of one of his bags.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Grassinger asked, skeptically.

  “I’m a tourist on vacation,” McGarvey said, though he did feel somewhat naked.

  “No, sir, you’re the director of Central Intelligence, and fair game for a good number of people who would like to see you become a permanent resident of Arlington National,” Grassinger said bluntly. He glanced at Katy. “Sorry, Mrs. M., I didn’t mean any offense, just doing my job.”

  “None taken, Jim,” Katy said graciously. “And I would like it very much if you continued to do you job.”

  McGarvey had been staring intently at his bodyguard. “What’s up, Jim, rats in the attic?” Every intelligence officer who survived long enough understood that it was wise to listen to hunches, gut feelings.

  Grassinger took a moment to answer. “Not really. It’s just that we’ll be fairly well isolated for the next few days.”

  “We’ll keep our eyes open,” McGarvey said. “What else is new?”

  “Part of the business, boss.”

  THREE

  Twenty-nine hours later, a few minutes after eight, the forty-foot flybridge sportfisherman Nancy N. under the command of Khalil’s number two, Zahir al Majid, came out of the lee of Kuiu Island’s north bay into the teeth of a strong northwest wind that funneled between Admiralty and Entrance islands. The rain clouds had cleared, and the distant mountains and stark blacks and whites of the glaciers toward Mount Burkett on the mainland stood out in a beauty that was as harsh as the open deserts of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. This time of year, this far north, night came late, but it was twilight, and combined with the fantastic scenery, accurate depth perception beyond a couple of hundred yards was difficult at best. Almost nothing seemed to be in proportion out here.

  Khalil’s seven soldiers were excited to finally be going into battle. They had been anxious all day. But Khalil appeared indifferent. He had been in battle before, and he expected that he would be in other battles in the coming months and years. He would continue the holy struggle until he was dead, a thought about which he was totally philosophical. His death would be of no more consequence than the death of a common soldier or a president or even an imam. Each man would either get to Paradise or not, according to the earthly life he had led.

  Frankly, he was indifferent about any thoughts of an afterlife. His time was here and now. He made meticulous plans for the future, but he lived for the present. Whatever money and worldly goods he could possibly want were his merely for the asking. On the rare occasions he found that he desired female companionship, or a male friend, or even the services of a young boy, he had those pleasures as well.

  His only real interest was in the game, what Western intelligenc
e analysts called the jihad, which Muslims took to mean holy war, or the struggle, and in the fatwahs, or decrees, issued by religious leaders or scholars, who for years had been telling the faithful to kill all Christians and Jews—men, women, and children—whenever and wherever they were found. He had visions of swimming in rivers of blood wider than the Tigris or Euphrates, wider even than the Jordan or the Mississippi.

  Kidnapping the war criminal Donald Shaw, whisking him to a cargo ship one hundred miles offshore, and transporting him eventually to Pakistan, where he would stand trial for crimes against Islam, would be the perfect counterpoint to the supremely arrogant religious war in Iraq.

  It would be doubly satisfying to the jihad, because Shaw had repeatedly made public his disdain for the cause, calling al-Quaida’s soldiers of God “criminals.” The former secretary of defense had been a combat pilot in Vietnam, flying more than one hundred missions before his plane was shot down. He spent the next two and a half years as a POW at the Hanoi Hilton. But the enemy never broke him. He was a genuine American hero. But all that would change when he stood trial and his crimes against humanity were exposed to the world.

  No important westerner would ever consider himself safe after this mission, Khalil reflected. Presidents, prime ministers, even kings and queens would not be immune from accounting for their transgressions. Ultimately the effect of such kidnappings and trials would make every leader in the West think twice about supporting Israel or continuing the war against Dar el Islam. The world would become a safer place in which to live.

  He braced himself against the control console and raised the motiondamping Steiner mil specs binoculars to study the green-and-white rotating beacon of the small airport at Kake on the big island of Kupreanof a few miles to the northeast. There was no activity over there at this time of the evening, nor would there be any scheduled flights in or out until morning, except for the twin Otter, parked at this moment in the Air West hangar on the south end of the field; it would leave and fly west sometime after midnight tonight. No one at the field would know about the unauthorized flight until it was too late. Nor would the tower be manned, so there would be no one to track the flight on radar out into the ocean where the airplane would be scuttled in water that was a half-mile deep.