Tom Clancy's Op-center Balance of Power - Tom Clancy [23]
The moon had slid behind a narrow bank of clouds. That was good. The crew of the yacht probably wouldn't pay attention anyway to a fishing boat over six hundred feet off their portside stern. In these waters, fishermen often trolled for night-feeders. But the men on the yacht would be less likely even to see him if the moon were hidden. Adolfo looked at the boat. It was dark save for its navigation lights and a glow from behind the drawn curtain of the midcabin porthole.
After several minutes Adolfo heard the muffled growl of a small boat. The sound was coming from behind him, from the direction of the shore. He turned completely around and watched a small, dark shape head toward the yacht. It was traveling about forty miles an hour. From the light slap of the hull upon the water Adolfo judged it to be a small, two-person runabout. He watched as it pulled up to the near side of the yacht. A rope ladder was unrolled from the deck. A man stood unsteadily in the passenger's seat of the rocking vessel.
That had to be the assassin.
The detonator felt slick in Adolfo's perspiring hand. He gripped it tightly, his finger hovering above the lower button.
The seas were unusually active. They seemed to be reflecting the times themselves, uneasy and roiling below the surface. There were only four or five seconds from the peak of one uproll to the peak of the next. But Adolfo stood at the edge of the rolling deck with the sure poise of a lifelong fisherman. According to the General, he needed to be in a direct and unobstructed line with the plastique. Though they could have given him a more sophisticated trigger than the line-of-sight transmitter, these were more commonly available and less easy to trace.
Adolfo watched as the yacht rocked gently from side to side. The assassin started uncertainly up the short ladder and the runabout moved away to keep from being rocked by the yacht's swells. A man appeared on deck. He was a fat man smoking a cigar-clearly not one of the crewmen. Adolfo waited. He knew exactly where he'd placed the explosives and he also knew the precise moment when they'd be exposed by the roll of the boat.
The yacht tilted to port, toward him. Then it rolled away. Adolfo lowered the side of his thumb onto the bottom button. One more roll, he told himself. The ship was inclined toward the starboard for just a moment. Then gently, gracefully, it righted itself for a moment before angling back to port. The hull of the yacht rose, revealing the area just below the waterline. It was dark and Adolfo couldn't see it, but he knew that the package he'd left was there. He pushed hard with his thumb. The green light on the box went off and the red light ignited.
The portside bottom of the hull exploded with a white-yellow flash. The man on the ladder evaporated as the blast followed a nearly straight line from prow to stern. The fat man flew away from the blast into the darkness and the deck crumpled inward as the entire vessel shuddered. Splinters of wood, shards of fiberglass, and torn, jagged pieces of metal from the midcabin rode the blast into air. Burning chunks arced brightly against the sky while broken fragments, which had been blown straight along the sea, plopped and sizzled in the water just yards from Adolfo's fishing boat. Smoke rose in thick sheets from the opening in the hull until the yacht listed to port. Then it became steam. The yacht seemed to stop there for a moment, holding at an angle as water rushed through the huge breach; Adolfo could hear the distinctive, hollow roar of the sea as it poured in. Then the yacht slowly rolled onto its side. Less than half a minute after the capsizing, the wake caused the fishing boat to rock quickly from side to side. Adolfo easily retained his balance. The moon returned from behind the clouds then, its bright image jiggling on the waves with giddy agitation.
Dropping the detonator into the water, the young man turned from the sea and hurried back into the cabin. He radioed