Balance of Power: A Novel by James W. Huston Read Free Book Online Page A

his men. He spoke for thirty seconds and set the microphone down. He turned to the captain. “Come here.”
    Bonham looked at him but stayed where he was.
    “Here, Captain,” he said with more intensity.
    “Why?” Bonham asked. “What’s going to happen? Are you afraid the U.S. Navy is going to come get you? They will, you know. Look what happened on the Achille Lauro .”
    Washington dismissed Bonham’s words with a wave of his hand. “Come here. Now .”
    Bonham crossed over to Washington and stood directly in front of him. “What?” he said.
    “Put out hands.” Washington bent down and pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his bag.
    “What are you, some kind of coward?” Bonham said gruffly. “Afraid I’m going to attack you or something?”
    “Shut up.”
    “You shot one of my men like a dog. You’re a spineless murderer ,” Bonham said, his eyes blazing.
    “You not speak!” Washington screamed as he roughly tightened the handcuffs around Bonham’s hands behind his back.
    “Why are you doing this?” Bonham asked.
    “No talk,” he said, inches from Bonham’s face as he brought his gun up.
    “Go ahead and shoot me,” Bonham taunted.
    Washington took a roll of heavy tape out of his bag and tore off a piece six inches long. He taped Bonham’s mouth and looked at him from two inches away.
    Bonham stared at him with contempt.
    Washington spoke to his men on the bridge, who pulled handcuffs from their bags and handcuffed Bacon to the ship’s wheel. He spoke again to one of them, who opened his bag on the deck of the bridge and pulled out a heavy round device.
    Bonham had never seen anything like it.
    The man carried it outside to the port bridge wing and left it there in the open.
    Washington and the others then reached down and unzipped their bags all the way. They pulled out more of the heavy metal devices. They were gray, circular, eighteen inches or so in diameter and five inches thick. They looked like UFOs. Washington reached under his and threw a switch. He carefully placed it on the deck near Bonham. It touched the deck with extra force—more than just gravity.
    Beads of sweat rolled down Bonham’s face as he watched the other terrorists remove identical devices from their bags.
    Washington glanced at his watch to note the time and began moving faster.

    Armstrong checked his op-gear and ordered his chief to inspect that of the other platoon members. They were as trained and ready as anyone could be, but this mission was screwed up from the start. Not enough time, too rough a plan, too much light, too many targets. This could be a disaster, he thought. I could be famous like the SEALs who died in Operation Just Cause in Panama by getting shot up while being forced to push a bad situation. But this was what they had been told to do, so it was what they would do.
    “All set, sir,” said QMC Lee, his chief petty officer.
    “Thanks,” Armstrong said.
    The SEALs and two Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs, wearing their EOD badges, sat quietly on the webbed seats of the Sikorsky CH-53E, a three-engine behemoth of a helicopter. The remainder of the platoon was in the other CH-53E flying equally fast and parallel to Armstrong’s, five hundred feet to the side. The CH-53E could carry more cargo farther than any other helicopter in the Navy or Marine inventory and could refuel in flight. It streaked over the dark blue ocean, less than one hundred feet off the water. Armstrong could smell the JP5 jet fuel from the engines in the humid air pouring into the helicopter through the open hatch.
    The pilots spotted a large ship and leaned forward to see if it was the Pacific Flyer. They thought they had a decent fix on the location of the Flyer from the GPS mark relayed from the F-14, but couldn’t know for sure. They couldn’t approach the ship close enough to check its identity without being seen, but they had no other way of confirming its identity. The helicopters slowed and descended lower as they