To The Death

Sleepy West Cork was the perfect spot for a mass murderer to slink into Europe ’s most westerly outpost. Ravi chugged on, sliding between the yachts, aiming for a little beach at the edge of the village. He knew there would be little shelving of the seabed in this deep harbor. So he just ran directly inshore, cut the engine, and planted the rubber bow of the Zodiac straight onto the sand.

He grabbed the painter, jumped forward onto dry land, and hauled the boat after him. Swiftly, he dropped his bag onto the sand, took off his shoes, socks, pants, T-shirt, and jacket, and stepped into the water in his boxer shorts. It was freezing, and he leaned over the gunwales to restart the motor. He dragged the boat around so that it faced back down the harbor, and then he leaned over some more and grabbed a tiny clock that had been lying on the deck, with several electric wires holding it in place.

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 unma

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 sca

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

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 i

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, Co

Ravi ’s engine altered the air around the sleeping Bill Sta

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 pla

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.

He set off resolutely, striding alone up the hill. In the half-light of the Irish dawn, he had seen no one, and now in broad daylight he still could see no one. Bill Sta

Somewhere out there, the Iranian Kilo was moving away from the dropoff point. Ravi found himself thinking wistfully of those pleasant breakfast meetings with the captain and the navigation officer, the warm secure feeling, the hot coffee and pastries. Now he did not even have a bottle of water, and he needed to avoid all shops and stores. In rural areas like this, a stranger stands out, is remembered, and should accept human contact only with the greatest reluctance.

The ruggedness of the country was a surprise to him as he left Crookhaven behind. The hills rolled out before him, and the bends in the road came quickly, like a green-lined version of the Yellow Brick Road. Ravi did not think he was in Kansas any more, nor in Damascus, nor Tehran.

This Irish cliff top was like nowhere he had ever been. It could have been two centuries ago, for there was no sign of anything modern. So he just strode along, on his regular 4-mph pace, the same speed Napoleon’s army made on flat ground, under full packs, on the march to Moscow.

In West Cork, there is a code about transportation. With no trains, hardly any buses, and, for a hundred years, a shortage of cars among the residents, it was customary to stop for anyone on the road and offer a ride to the nearest village.

City folk were always amused at the way local farmers tipped their hats and smiled, offering an unspoken Top o’ the mornin’ to you, as cars went by. None of this had yet happened to Ravi, until around 0630 when an old Ford truck, driven by Jerry O’Co

Jerry was an Irish farmer, fiftyish in years, and the ninth generation of his family to run a dairy farm down here on the Mizen Peninsula. Most of it was not perfect grazing land, but there were pockets of good grass, nurtured by a lot of rain and summer sunshine, with no frost or harsh weather. The warm air above the Gulf Stream washed around here, and men like Jerry knew precisely where cattle would thrive.