The can never hit the water. It disappeared in a puff of smoke as soon as it left his hand.
It happened so fast, Fahim Shabazz wasn’t even sure it happened at all. One moment the can was there—the next it wasn’t.
He immediately wondered if the Adrenalin was making him see things. Or was it exhaustion? He hadn’t slept in nearly four days, and while the Adrenalin was keeping him feeling strong, the energy drinks did contain a lot of caffeine. Maybe this wasn’t the best combination.
But when he factored in the excitement of his pending martyrdom, Fahim Shabazz decided the incident with the can was probably just a slight figment of his imagination.
And that’s how it stayed—for about a minute.
That’s when he heard an odd crackling sound and saw one of the LED screens on his control panel disappear in a cloud of smoke. It was strange because, at eighty-five miles an hour, this smoke hung in the air for what seemed like a long time, before finally blowing away with the wind.
Once again, Fahim Shabazz wondered if he was seeing things. But unlike the vanishing Red Bull can, when he looked down at the computer screen there was no doubt that it had been shattered. In fact, there was nothing left of it, the glass or any of the gear behind it.
Now Shabazz was very worried. It appeared to him the panel had exploded from within, and this meant something was going wrong with the heretofore-perfect racing vessel.
The blown-away panel was their weather service screen—something that was important but not crucial. But still, Fahim Shabazz was concerned about the boat’s overall condition.
He called for Abdul, screaming to be heard over the never-ending roar of the turbine. The engineer climbed out of the engine compartment, looked at Shabazz, as if to say: What do you want?
But before he could open his mouth to speak, a piece of Abdul’s left shoulder suddenly flew off in an explosion of blood and skin.
Abdul stood there in shock. Shabazz was equally stunned.
It was only then that Shabazz realized someone was shooting at them.
* * *
BOBBY MURPHY WAS not a soldier.
His best weapon was his intellect. He killed terrorists by outsmarting them. By fooling them. By scamming them.
But unfortunately not by shooting them.
He had fired four shots at the Smoke-Lar. The one that hit the energy drink can and the one that took a chunk out of Abdul’s shoulder were pure luck. The round that went into the Smoke-Lar’s weather display panel had come within inches of destroying the boat’s autopilot, exactly the opposite of what Whiskey was trying to do. A fourth shot came dangerously close to hitting the boat’s fuel supply before falling into the sea. It was only that the Smoke-Lar was going up one wave while the Numero Two was coming down another that the Dutch boat didn’t blow up in a million pieces.
A lot of factors had worked against Murphy. The recoil of the massive M107 was enough to crack the shoulder of the most muscular rifleman; it was brutal on the bones of a sixty-five-year-old man. Then there was the noise. The M107 was basically a .50-caliber machine gun that fired one round at a time—and the noise that one round made going out the barrel was deafening, even drowning out the clamor made by the boat’s turbine engine. The standard operating procedure for deploying the M107 called for mandatory earplugs on the shooter. There were no such luxuries aboard the Numero Two.
After the four shots Murphy was essentially deaf and, for a few moments, thought he had a dislocated shoulder.
After that, he knew it was best to leave the shooting to someone else.
So the job fell back to Nolan.
* * *
WHEN HE TOOK over, Nolan was just praying the cosmos would finally take pity on them and steer any round he fired into the head or the heart or the backside of the terrorist driving the Smoke-Lar.
But it didn’t happen. There was just too much physics involved. The functions of wave motion, the combined speed of both racing boats and the constantly changing distance between them, the vicious recoil of the sniper rifle and the auditory disruption caused by the shooting of the gun. Bottom line, the physical act of firing the M107 had turned into a huge pain in the ass.
Worst of all, by this time, it was obvious the terrorists on the Smoke-Lar knew someone was shooting at them—so the idea of a quick kill was