With desperate urgency, he swung the yacht hard side to side, slapping against the side of the tanker before pulling wide. But the stubborn platform refused to break free. The Dayan’s bow was now abreast of the dredger, but he could see that there was a narrow gap between the vessels, although a boom hung low in the water.
With Maria still staring him down, he nodded toward the dredger.
“The boom will break our tie to the ramp,” he said. “We will be free shortly.”
79
PITT’S ALIGNMENT WAS LESS THAN PERFECT, BUT NOT by much.
The Dayan’s bow grazed several feet past the cutter head before the rotating teeth made contact with the tanker’s hull. Though muffled somewhat by the water, the cutter emitted a screeching wail as its teeth ground against the steel hull plates. For several feet, the head simply forged a deep indentation into the tanker’s side. Then the endless line of teeth caught a hull plate seam and ripped open a gaping hole.
Once breached, there was no going back. The rotating cutter ball ate through the hull like a hungry beaver, fed by the forward momentum of the 8,000-ton tanker. The tungsten teeth chewed past the hull and into the stainless steel tanks that held fresh water when the ship was under load. But instead of being fresh, it was now murky green, as the waters of the Bosphorus rapidly began filling the tanks.
From his high perch, Pitt could see water swirling around the bottom of the forward starboard tank. He could only hope that rising waters would spill over into the port tank and dilute the explosive force of both stockpiles. But time was not on his side.
Scanning the deck of the Ibn Battuta, he spotted Giordino already sneaking back to the NUMA submersible. He had been replaced at the stern rail by a handful of the dredger’s crew. Awakened by the racket, they stood staring dumbfounded at the physical carnage their ship was inflicting on the huge tanker just a few feet in front of them.
As the cutter head bore even with the bridge, Pitt stepped to the helm and as a final gesture cut the rudder fifteen degrees to port. Already slowed by the incoming water, the tanker might travel another half mile, Pitt guessed, before exploding, and he wanted to ensure that she was headed to the center of the channel. The head was still grinding across the hull with a metallic din when Pitt abandoned the bridge, hurrying down the stairwell to grab Lazlo and get off the ship.
He didn’t wait around to watch the fate of the yacht. With Maria still screaming in the Sultana captain’s ear, the captain tucked the yacht up against the tanker’s hull, hoping to avoid a direct collision with the dredger. He quickly noticed the subtle bank of the tanker as it eased to port, giving him a slim hope of escape. The turn allowed the yacht to pass just clear of the dredger’s boom, as the cutter head was pulled free of the Dayan. But there was no room to escape the head itself.
The masticating ball reached the bow of the yacht, striking the starboard hull. Still being dragged like a rag doll, the yacht was pulled up and across the top of the cutter head. The cutter easily chewed a six-foot swath across the underside of the yacht’s fiberglass hull before decapitating its whirling twin propellers. The yacht’s thumping motors fell silent as the engine compartment flooded, and the yacht began settling by its stern.
The captain stood frozen in shock, his hands still glued to the wheel. But Maria showed no such restraint. Retrieving a Beretta pistol from her purse, she stepped close to the captain, pressed the muzzle against his ear, and pulled the trigger.
Not waiting for his body to hit the floor, she scurried to the yacht’s bow to free them from the tanker once and for all.
80
BY THE TIME THAT PITT REACHED THE MAIN DECK, THE tanker had already developed a noticeable list. The cutter head had ripped a two-hundred-foot gouge down its length, slashing into every one of the starboard storage tanks. A full crew of men with pumps couldn’t have staved off the flooding for long. It was exactly the effect Pitt had hoped for, but now he had to find a way off for Lazlo and himself.
As the tanker rapidly leaned to starboard, Pitt figured it would be either a short hop down the stairway or, if necessary, a jump from the rail. As he approached Lazlo, he was surprised to see the yacht still clinging alongside. From the angled position of the tanker’s deck, he was able to peer right down onto the yacht and see the entangled stairway impaled in it. Of greater interest was the figure of Maria standing on the bow, wielding a pistol. She fired several shots into the twisted link of steel that held the ramp together, then spotted Pitt a short distance above her.
“Die with the ship!” she yelled, aiming the gun at Pitt and pulling the trigger.
Pitt was a hair faster, diving to the deck alongside Lazlo as the bullet whizzed over his head.
“Come on, Lieutenant, it’s time we find another exit,” he said to the commando.
Lazlo struggled to turn his way, looking at Pitt with glassy eyes that were barely open. Pitt suddenly realized the severity of his wound, seeing the bloody shoulder that Lazlo had managed to patch with a bandage. Every second counted now, though, so Pitt reached over and took a firm grip of the back of Lazlo’s collar.
“Hang on, partner,” he said.
Ignoring Maria, Pitt sprang to a crouch, then backpedaled up the inclined deck, dragging Lazlo behind him. Maria immediately fired, peppering a handful of shots in their direction. Her shots struck close but missed both men before Pitt had them safely out of sight. Regaining a touch of strength, Lazlo had Pitt pull him to his feet. The commando’s jacket was soaked red, and a trail of blood had followed him across the deck.
The tanker suddenly lurched beneath their feet, listing almost thirty degrees to starboard. Pitt quickly realized that their most immediate danger wasn’t from the pending explosives.
“Can you climb with me?” Pitt asked Lazlo.
The tough commando nodded, and with an arm around Pitt for support he took shaky steps up the deck.
Behind them, Maria continued shooting, her target again the battered stairway. Several more well-aimed shots at the ramp’s joint finally weakened the metal, which had bent sharply with the sinking tanker. Stomping the ramp with her foot, its joint finally broke free, releasing the upper stairway to swing hard against the ship.
Free at last, Maria sneered at the tanker from the bow of the slowly sinking yacht. The tanker would drift well clear before exploding, and she might have time to make it back to the bridge for safety. At the very least, she thought, Pitt and Lazlo would die with the ship.
She might have been right, only she failed to account for the Dayan’s own bit of vindictive wrath.
81
FROM THE TWENTIETH FLOOR OF HIS HIGH-RISE OFFICE situated on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus, Ozden Celik watched the events unfold with increasing dread. He had barely been able to make out the shadow of the tanker when it first approached Istanbul under the faint light of dawn. But the slowly graying sky had expanded his panoramic view until the towering minarets of Süleymaniye Mosque were clearly visible across the waters of the strait.
With a tripod-mounted pair of high-magnification binoculars, he focused on the Dayan just as its emergency lifeboat was released off the stern. He watched in dismay as the tanker crossed under the Galata Bridge while the Sultana appeared alongside in an apparent gun battle. Celik could feel his heart pounding when he saw the tanker complete a wide turn and reemerge beneath the far end of the bridge.
“No, you are supposed to run ashore by the mosque!” he cursed aloud at the sluggish tanker.
His frustration mounted when repeated phone calls to Maria went unanswered. He lost sight of the yacht when the tanker turned, its high profile obscuring the smaller vessel. Holding his breath, Celik hoped that the yacht had turned and fled up the Golden Horn to escape the blast, which he knew was now imminent. But his eyes bulged in horror when the Dayan passed close to the dredge ship, then turned toward the channel, revealing that the yacht was still alongside its starboard flank.
Focusing the binoculars, he saw his sister on the yac
ht’s bow, shooting a gun first at the tanker, then at the metal stairway. Celik couldn’t help but notice the tanker listing precariously above her.
“Get away! Get away!” Celik shouted to his sister from two miles away.
The eyepieces dug into his brow as he watched the scene with horror. Maria at last succeeded in freeing the yacht from the stairway’s clasp, but it didn’t move far. Celik had no idea that the yacht had been stripped of its propellers and was itself sinking. Baffled by the sight, he couldn’t understand why the yacht hung close to the heavily listing tanker.
From his vantage point across the strait, Celik could not hear the symphony of creaks and groans that emanated from the bowels of the tanker as its center of gravity was upset. The massive flooding across the Dayan’s entire length augmented the starboard list until the deck rose like a steep mountain. Crashing sounds erupted throughout the tanker as dishes, furniture, and equipment lost their fight with gravity and tumbled against the starboard bulkheads.
As the starboard rail touched the water, the hulking tanker wallowed completely up onto its side, holding the awkward position for several seconds. The Dayan could have broken up or simply sank on its side, but it instead held together and resumed its death roll with a flourish.
Still standing on the bow of the yacht, Maria felt the shadow of the tanker cross her body as the ship began to flip over. Drifting just a few yards from the bigger Dayan, the yacht was well within its reach. There would be no escaping its destructive blow.
Maria looked up and raised an arm, as if to ward off the blow of the giant tanker as it rolled over. Instead, she was flattened like an insect. The capsizing Dayan slammed the water’s surface, engulfing the yacht while creating a ten-foot wave that crashed toward the shoreline, tossing the Ibn Battuta about like a rowboat. The dark, barnacle-encrusted hull of the tanker filled the horizon, its mammoth bronze propeller spinning idly in the morning sky. Muffled bangs from collapsing bulkheads mixed with rushing water echoed throughout the hull as the overturned ship slowly began to settle by the bow.
Celik gripped his binoculars with trembling hands as he watched his sister die beneath the weight of the capsized tanker. Frozen in shock, he stared unblinking before his emotions brimmed over. Heaving the tripod across his office with a wail, he fell to the carpet, then covered his eyes and sobbed uncontrollably.
82
CELIK WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO WATCHED IN HORROR as the tanker capsized. Giordino was just climbing into the Bullet when he heard a crashing sound behind him and turned to see the Dayan turn turtle atop the yacht. He quickly sealed the rear hatch as the resulting wave barreled into the Ibn Battuta, carrying the submersible up and away from the dredge ship.
Giordino quickly fired up the diesel engines and motored toward the tanker. He thought anxiously of Pitt, who had waved at him from the bridge of the tanker just minutes before. The bridge was now far underwater, and all he could see was the cold, lifeless underbelly of the Israeli tanker.
Ignoring the danger that the tanker might explode at any time, he raced along its near side. Surprisingly little debris had floated away when the ship turned over, and he was able to speed quickly down its length to search for bodies in the channel. He knew that Pitt was like a dolphin in the water. If he had somehow survived the capsizing, there was at least a chance that he had swum clear.
Nearing the submerged bow, Giordino swung around and motored back close to the hull, either not knowing or caring that the timed explosives would detonate in less than two minutes. The waters ahead of him remained empty as he passed the tanker’s midsection and approached the stern. With a heavy heart, he reluctantly considered the notion that his old friend had not made it off alive.
Nudging the throttles higher, he started to turn away when he noticed a pair of ropes stretched over the hull. Oddly, the lines appeared to run from the ship’s submerged port rail up the hull and over the keel, a short distance in front of the propeller. With a glimmer of hope in his eye, Giordino accelerated briskly, sweeping around the tanker’s broad stern, which was now rising high into the air.
Reaching the tanker’s opposite side, he spotted the ropes dangling high from the keel, but the hull was otherwise empty. Then barely fifty yards away in the water he spotted two objects. Turning instantly, he raced closer, seeing with joy that it was Pitt towing an injured Lazlo away from the ship.
Giordino sped in closer, then expertly reversed engines to quickly drift alongside. Pitt hoisted Lazlo onto a pontoon, then shouted at Giordino as the latter moved to open the hatch.
“No time,” Pitt yelled. “Get us out of here.”
Giordino nodded, then waited until Pitt climbed aboard and wrapped an arm around Lazlo before accelerating. The two men were tossed and splashed as the Bullet charged quickly ahead, bounding over the harbor waters. Giordino turned and sped toward the Galata Bridge, determining that it would provide the closest cover.
The Bullet was a hundred yards shy of the bridge when a deep thump sounded across the channel. Though a portion of the explosive material had fallen to the seabed when the Dayan capsized, nearly half of the fuel oil and most of the HMX remained lodged in the two forward storage tanks. But with the ship sinking by the bow, the flooded tanks were almost entirely underwater, greatly diluting the blast’s impact.
A quick series of successive thumps sounded as the timed fuzes detonated, and then a huge explosion ripped open the tanker’s hull. The concussion echoed across the hills and streets of Istanbul like a sonic boom. A fountain of white water blew from the tanker’s underside, spraying chunks of steel and debris a hundred feet into the air. The jagged chunks fell to earth across a quarter-mile swath, raining down in a deadly hail from the heavens.
Yet the terrifying blast proved mostly benign. Due to the angle of the sinking tanker, the main force of the blast was centered ahead of it and toward the Bosphorus. Pitt’s last-second course adjustment had diverted the impact away from shore and toward a wide patch of empty water.
As the steel and debris splashed into the bay, a loud creak echoed from the tanker as the perforated section of hull gave way. The decimated bow broke free and promptly sank quickly to the channel bottom while the remaining hull lingered on the surface a few moments before foundering.
Bobbing beneath a span of the Galata Bridge, Giordino climbed out of the Bullet ’s cabin to check on his passengers.
“Thanks for the lift,” Pitt said as he attended to Lazlo.
“You boys were cutting it a bit close there,” Giordino replied.
“We got lucky. Maria Celik wanted to use us for target practice on the starboard rail, so we hiked up the deck. Happened to find a pair of lines that had been lowered over the port side, and we were scrambling down them as the ship turned turtle. We managed to make it over the keel, then slid down the other side to avoid the yacht.”
“You needn’t have worried,” Giordino said with a grin. “It got flattened like a pancake.”
“Any survivors?”
Giordino shook his head.
“Lazlo needs medical attention,” Pitt said. “We better get him to shore.”
He and Giordino helped him inside the submersible, then they motored toward the southern shoreline.
“That was some blast,” Giordino said to Pitt. “Could have been a lot worse.”
Pitt simply nodded quietly, staring out the cockpit window.
Ahead of them, the massive remains of the Israeli tanker rose up high by its stern. The vessel stood near vertical in an almost defiant manner before plunging beneath the waves with a rush. Somewhere not far across the strait, the twisted dreams of a renewed Ottoman dynasty sank with it.
83
THE TANKER EXPLOSION RATTLED ISTANBUL MORE POlitically than physically. The confirmed loss of the police boat and Coast Guard vessel in conjunction with the attack put the country’s military forces on high alert. When the tanker was identified as the Dayan, a flurry of high-level accusations between Turkey and Israel went fl
ying across diplomatic channels. Protests by panic-stricken residents of the city nearly led to a military response. But fears of a Turkish/Israeli conflict were assuaged when the authorities found the Dayan’s rescued crewmen.
Interviewed publicly, the crewmen detailed their hijacking and captivity at the hands of the unknown gunmen. Turkish sentiment quickly turned when the men described loading the explosives at gunpoint and almost dying aboard the ship but for their last-minute rescue. Privately, after checking Lazlo into a hospital, Pitt and Giordino had informed Turkish authorities of their role in sinking the tanker.
When U.S. intelligence secretly provided evidence that the same HMX explosives were used in the mosque attacks in Bursa, Cairo, and Jerusalem, the Turkish forces were quick to act. Secret raids were immediately carried out against Celik’s home, office, and port facilities, while the Ottoman Star was located in Greek waters and seized. As public pressure mounted to identify who committed the attack and why, the official investigation wasn’t kept quiet for long.
With the release of their names, Ozden and Maria Celik became public pariahs and a source of national embarrassment. When it was later discovered that they had orchestrated the break-in at Topkapi, the national embarrassment and anger turned to outright rage. Investigators and journalists alike dove into the pair’s concealed pasts, revealing their ties to the last Ottoman ruling family, as well as to underworld mobsters and drug runners who had kick-started Celik business holdings.
Inevitably, the Celiks’ financial dealings with Arab royalty were uncovered, leading to the revelation that millions of dollars had been funneled to Mufti Battal. The objective of the Celiks’ attacks became readily apparent, and public furor was directed to the Mufti and his Felicity Party. Although no evidence was found that the Mufti was involved or even aware of the terrorist attacks, the damage was done.