Chapter 22
Instinctively, Jerry turned toward the direction of the shots.
He and Osbourne pushed Judge Osbourne toward the women and stepped in front of them.
A federal Marshal named Stalling emerged from the back corner of the room, pistol drawn, and guided Melissa, Judge Osbourne, Lola, and Sharon toward the back of the room.
When Agent Guthrie reached Cynthia, Rick Norton stepped out of the pew and ran for the door.
Jerry made sure the wedding party was well away from the door before rushing down the aisle. Before he got to the door, it burst open. The Federal Marshal named Black burst through, staggering to the deck.
The gunfire had ceased. The sharp smell of cordite and the metallic smell of blood began to waft into the chapel.
Pena gestured toward the door. He joined Norton, Ibrahim, and Fisher at the door.
Sanders, Waller, Brock, and Pena took up the other side.
Out of long habit, they “stacked” at the doorway, prepared to breach.
At Pena’s signal, Jerry held the pistol ready, holding it directly in front of his face and chest, his arms forming a relaxed triangle prepared to move in any direction in his working space, and Fisher turned the handle.
They moved out, almost moving in unison, covering every corner and angle like a deadly synchronized dance. Jerry slowly approached the man on the deck of the corridor closest to him. The man lay on his back, his lifeless eyes staring up at the awning above. Chinese?
He glanced at the weapon. Not a Soviet AK.
Was that a QBZ-191? He’d trained with one, had fired it even, but months had gone by since that class.
If it wasn’t QBZ-191, it was definitely Chinese.
Not an SKS, perhaps an AK-103. He held out the pistol he carried, and Swanson immediately took it.
Keeping an eye on the four other bodies, he retrieved the rifle, snatched up the muslin bandolier holding six fresh 30-round magazines from around the man’s neck, and slung it around his own neck, then checked for a round in the chamber.
Assured, he held the rifle at the ready. The weight felt comfortable, and Jerry felt more secure with a long gun in his capable hands. He had always found a long gun more to his taste than a pistol, even in close-quarters combat.
“Blessed be the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle,” Jerry murmured, quoting Psalms 144:1. It was as much of a prayer as he could spare at the moment.
They crouched as they walked. They maneuvered above the entire ship, and by crouching, they stayed out of the visual range of any snipers below. Waller, Swanson, and Fisher each retrieved weapons and ammunition. One by one, they replaced spent or partially spent magazines with fresh magazines.
They found three Chinese military QSW-06 pistols, all equipped with built-in suppressors. Why hadn’t the OPFOR used these in their initial assault? They would have taken them completely by surprise. Jerry offered a quick prayer of thanks that they had not.
Chase Anderson, Fisher’s friend, had joined them, and he and Sanders each retrieved the remaining available rifles.
They quickly frisked the bodies, finding radios, phones, and yet more magazines.
Four wore the uniform of the cruise line’s crew.
On their name tags, the home country listed below three of the men’s names read “Haiti.”
The fifth, a Chinese woman, wore black cotton fatigues with many pockets and no markings or patches. Once they confirmed no one remained alive, Norton opened the elevator door and dragged the Chinese woman’s corpse into the opening to block the doors and keep the elevator from getting called down.
Anderson reached up and knocked the lenses out of the security camera. He and Brock, both taller than the rest, circled, disabling the cameras on the deck and in the elevator. Then they met at the elevator, blocked from view below by the elevator wall.
“No one left alive,” Fisher said.
“All clear,” Swanson added.
Sanders rolled his head on his shoulders. “What the actual?”
“Haitian?” Norton shook his head. “Pirates, maybe?”
“Does it matter?” Jerry asked. Impatience clawed at his gut. “Olive never made it to the wedding.”
“You’re right,” Pena said. “Emma looked for her but didn’t see her.”
He wanted to rip open that door and sprint down those stairs and find her. But he resisted the urge. Right now, he considered three possibilities. One, Olive was dead somewhere on the ship. Two, Olive was hiding somewhere on the ship. Three, Olive was captured somewhere on or off the ship.
He could affect nothing if Olive was dead. If she were alive and hiding or held captive, he could not keep her alive by abandoning his team. What he needed to do instead was stay with them, figure out what all this meant, and affect a positive outcome.
He hated it, though. He wanted Olive alive. He needed Olive alive.
“I want to clear the stairs,” Pena said. He motioned at the stair door.
Jerry nodded and, weapon ready, stacked on Pena.
Pena held the handle with his finger and thumb, then raised the remaining three fingers.
He dropped one finger at a time, and when he had made a fist on three, he opened the door.
Jerry did a quick look, confirmed no one hid inside, then slipped into the stairwell and cleared the corners, Ibrahim and Swanson close behind.
They silently maneuvered down the single flight to the deck below and looked through the porthole. Nothing and no one moved.
They made their way back up the stairs. Anderson disabled the cameras in the stairwell while they thoroughly cleared the bodies, grabbing phones, radios, knives, and anything that might prove useful.
At Agent Lewis’s body, Jerry pulled out the satellite phone and held it up to Fisher. He frowned at the bullet hole in it.
They returned slowly back into the chapel, crouching the entire way, leaving Waller and Brock guarding the open door.
Osbourne had the agent’s shirt and vest off and examined the bullet wound under his arm. He looked over at the ship’s Captain, a man named Ege, who hovered near the judge and the Marshal. “Is there a first aid kit here?”
Captain Ege ran his hand over his smooth head. He spoke with a shaky, weak voice. “Uh, yeah, yeah,” he said, his Norwegian accent more pronounced than before.
The chaplain’s assistant, Sergeant Blackwell, stepped forward. “Think I saw it in the back.”
Osbourne pressed the agent’s shirt to the wound. “Is there a table back there?”
“Yeah. A table and counters all around. A sink and a small fridge, too.”
Osbourne looked at Melissa’s uncle. “It’s not good. Help us get him back there. I can work better on a table.”
“Any other entrances to this room?” Norton asked Captain Ege.
Ege shook his head. “No. Just those double doors. What is it? Pirates?”
“Maybe,” Pena said.
Emma looked out the window and waved Pena forward. “Jorge, look.”
They risked going to the wall of windows to look out. A large nondescript cargo vessel had navigated next to the cruise ship and appeared to have rafted up alongside on the cruise ship’s port side out of view of the island. Pena turned to Ege. “Can you get us to the bridge?”
Captain Ege shook his head. “Protocol would have the bridge locked down. There’s no way we can get in there until the threat is over.” He gestured at the foreign ship. “Until that is no longer attached to my ship.”
Jerry forced his mind to focus on the situation.
“Chinese and Haitian. Could be a false flag, but doesn’t feel like it.
Their weapons are all PRC manufacture.” He quickly inspected his procured rifle.
On a hunch, he pulled a magazine from the bandolier and examined the case head of the topmost round.
“No serial numbers or identifying marks on the weapons. No manufacturer engravings on the rounds. Ghost guns. Ideas?”
While they spoke, two men on the deck of the cargo ship took a crowbar to a wooden crate. They reached inside and each pulled out what looked like QBZ-191 rifles.
Norton whistled under his breath. “If all of those crates on that cargo ship are filled with weapons, that’s a heck of a lot of firepower.”
Lynda, an FBI analyst with a hyper-organized brain, got to work.
She rubbed the back of her neck and kicked her heels off.
She paced from the window to the pew and turned, then came back.
“There’s buzz about China funding Haitian militants.
These weapons are new and as untraceable as they come.
Without anything to go on, I’m going to guess some sort of collaboration with the two nations.
But what’s the point of this? Like, here, now? ”
Cynthia came out of the back with her arms full of water bottles. “Hydrate. Everyone.”
Rick snorted but took the water. Jerry absently drank while he studied the foreign vessel. “We’re docking in Haiti tomorrow.”
“Yes.” Lynda snapped her fingers. “They’re using the cruise ship as a Trojan horse to transport weapons onto the island, maybe?”
Pena shook his head. “Why go through all this?”
Lynda paced back and forth again, then answered her own question instead of Pena’s.
“That’s probably it. If they load the ship here and unload it there, no one is the wiser until it’s all done.
Too much security at the cargo ports. There’s been a weapons embargo on Haiti for years.
” She pivoted, paced, not even looking at them.
“Before any word about today gets out, those weapons are already in Haiti.”
“To feed an uprising?” Bill asked.
“Exactly.” She turned and put her hands on her hips. “Then China has the gratitude of the new regime and is that much closer to American sovereign soil.”
“Think this was just the first wave of a larger ongoing attack?” Jerry asked.