Читать книгу The Angry Sea - James Deegan - Страница 27

14.

FAR ABOVE, CAPTAIN Carlo Abandonato had known that the engines had stopped – he’d felt the slight change in vibration, and had seen the momentary dimming of the lights – but he was not terribly concerned.

They were not scheduled to shut down, but things cropped up now and then.

He assumed that Phil Clarke and his team had noticed something – almost certainly nothing major, the damned things had under 6,000 hours in them since a complete rebuild – and had taken them off for a short while to sort it out.

Clarke had done twenty-two years in destroyers in the British navy, and was fresh from a three-day manufacturer’s refresher course at Rolls-Royce Marine; it couldn’t be anything that he couldn’t fix.

Still, Abandonato had been keen to get back up to the bridge, and his unease had doubled or trebled with the radio message from the staff captain.

So now – careful to look smooth and unflustered – he took his leave of the tables full of family diners and walked out of the burger restaurant.

It was as he was starting upwards in the elevator that he heard the first shots.

And then the human sounds of fear and horror.

Outside, unseen by the captain, the Yemeni security guard, called by Argun Shishani from the yacht along the coast at Marbella, was standing on the sun deck with an AK47, taking aimed shots at the sunbathers and swimmers in and around the pool.

Several people were already floating in red-tinted water, and others were scrambling to get away.

The Yemeni had been chosen for this operation precisely because he was battle-hardened; he had cut his teeth on the US Marines in the Second Battle of Fallujah, during the insurgency in Iraq, and had travelled the Middle East and Africa throughout the years that followed, fighting the kuffar in the name of Allah.

He’d spent most of the recent past fighting the Pesh and the al-Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq, and the YPG and others in Syria.

He was remorseless and dedicated: he accepted that death would embrace him today, and he welcomed the fact.

He thought of his friends, men who had gone before him and died in the same glorious cause, and he smiled.

This was for them: he would see them soon.

He had ten magazines of thirty rounds each on his chest rig, and he intended to make as many of those rounds count as possible.

He took aim at a young child, standing by a gangplank on the deck below, screaming in frozen fear next to its dead mother, and heard the click as the hammer of his weapon struck an empty chamber.

His magazine empty, he allowed it to hang free on its sling, and took a grenade – a Swiss-manufactured L109A1, liberated from a British Army stores in Germany, on a four-second fuse – from his bag.

Leaned against the guard rail.

Pulled the pin.

Almost casually, he threw the grenade over the side at the child, and the panicking stream of humanity – if you could use that term to describe the dogs who were running like cowards down the nearest gangplank.

The grenade detonated with a dull crump, killing the child and two others outright and wounding many more.

Smiling, he reloaded the AK, fired a dozen rounds into the survivors and then turned and walked in the direction of the cabins in search of more victims.

It was a good day to die, here in the land of the infidel, bringing terror to the enemy, and his womenfolk, and his young.