To the Death

Ravi turned the dial to the sixty-second mark, pressed a small button on the side of the clock, and then marginally opened the throttle of the Yamaha. Then he let it go, and the unmanned Zodiac chugged out into deep water, heading east, at around eight knots, down toward Streek Head. Ravi turned away and pulled on his T-shirt. He was only wet to his thighs, and he put on his pants and his socks and shoes.

But before he had time to pull on his jacket, there was a short dull thump in the water, the thud of explosives. And immediately the Zodiac began to sink, the bottom of its hull blown out with an expertly set hunk of TNT. Ravi had attended to this personally, inside the submarine. The hole in the Zodiac’s bottom was perfect, four feet across. It took precisely fifteen more seconds to vanish completely, below the fifty-foot-deep outer harbor waters.

It was not yet six o’clock. And Ravi scanned the land around him. There was no sign of life. He looked out to the moored yachts and there was neither sight nor sound of anyone. Excellent, he thought, I’ve landed in Ireland, and not one person knows I’m here. But he was wrong. Someone did.

Up on the foredeck of the 54-foot American-built sloop Yonder

was Bill Stannard, the skipper and helmsman. He had elected to sleep on deck after a four-hour alcoholic binge at the Crookhaven Inn, right next to the sailing club. Right now, in the early hours of the morning, he was very cold, and he was nursing the opening symptoms of a monumental hangover.

Bill, at thirty-eight, had sailed Yonder across the Atlantic from Rock-port, Maine, with only two crew members. He was meeting the owner, a member of Boston’s Cabot family, right here in Crookhaven two days from now. The previous evening’s blowout at the inn was his last throw. He would not have another drink for a month, while the owner and guests were aboard. But this did not, of course, diminish his own plight right here on the foredeck, with a head that felt as if it had been hit by a guided missile.

The very slight chug-chug of Ravi’s motor had awakened him. It was not so much the noise, but a change in the vibrations in the air. Bill was a former U.S. Navy submariner, a petty officer, stationed at New London, Connecticut. And like all submariners, listening was second nature to him: listening for the slightest change in the regular beat of the submarine’s engines, for any alteration in the air pressure, for the merest vibration on the shaft, the distant rattle of a carelessly stowed toolbox.

Ravi’s engine altered the air around the sleeping Bill Stannard, and in a flash his eyes opened and his senses came alert. It took a few more seconds for him to work out where he was, and indeed whether he was still genuinely alive. But he raised his throbbing head and looked out over the port bow, where he saw a slow-moving Zodiac making its way across the harbor.

At the helm was a heavyset man wearing a suede jacket, which was unusual in a seagoing community. Suede jackets belonged in London’s Knightsbridge, Dublin’s Grafton Street, or New York. Out here, seamen wore seamen’s clothes, foul-weather jackets, not suede.

Bill was puzzled, but he was also feeling so acutely godawful that he closed his eyes again. And he debated whether he was sufficiently strong to raise himself up, go below for a cup of coffee, and then get into his bunk. He decided not, which was why the Hamas terrorist had seen no movement on the decks of any of the moored yachts in Crookhaven Harbor.

Ravi walked up to the village, holding his leather bag. He passed O’Sullivan’s Bar and began to walk toward the road which he knew led to the main coast road, back to Goleen, Schull, Ballydehob at the head of Roaring Water Bay, and, finally, Skibbereen.

That was his direction, and the Hamas planners had made it clear that he should walk to Skibbereen, fourteen miles from Crookhaven, because there he could pick up a bus without attracting too much attention and without wasting much time waiting. They had pinpointed a bus from Schull to Skibbereen, but it ran only twice daily. Service from Skibbereen to the east was far more frequent.

Ravi would walk the fourteen miles at approximately four miles an hour, which was three and half hours. His schedule was to get on the bus and make for Waterford, using bus and train all the way, but not staying on any of them for long periods. He had accepted the fourteen-mile walk, but staring at the long uphill road to the top of the cliffs where a few days ago Shakira had stood was a fairly daunting sight, even for a man as fit and hard-trained as General Rashood had always been.