Sea Of Terror (2010)

by Stephen - Deep Black 08 Coonts

  So far as Phillips was concerned, the blood of two men, now--Security Specialist Kelly and Radio Operator Farnham--was on Ghailiani's hands.

  And Phillips was determined that there would be a reckoning.

  The question was how best to fight back. Khalid seemed utterly confident of his control of the ship. He held the bridge, obviously, as well as the radio room, Security, the IT department--the entire suite of departments and rooms on Deck Twelve, and in the forward portion of Deck Eleven, just below. From comments Phillips had heard, they had at least one man watching over the engineering crew on D Deck, and someone watching the catering staff in the forward galley.

  That left a very great deal of ship and about three thousand passengers and crew unaccounted for, and from the sound of it most of them weren't even aware yet that the ship had been hijacked.

  If those three thousand could be warned somehow ... a handful of terrorists might kill some of them, but not all. Maybe he could arrange some sort of uprising ... a mutiny, of sorts.

  Except hundreds might be killed in such an attempt.

  And if he did nothing, how many would die in New York City? Phillips was convinced, now, beyond any shred of doubt, that Khalid planned more than a simple shakedown of the American and British governments with these ships as hostage. The presence of the Sandpiper alongside suggested a scenario so dark that Phillips could scarcely bring himself to think about it.

  His passengers and crew, or the life of a major city.

  Whatever he did would have to be more subtle than an uprising among the prisoners. And there just might be a way. . ..

  Casually he walked over to the chart table and checked the ship's course. .. still on a bearing of two-six-zero, still at twenty knots. Turning, he walked over to the ship's compass binnacle, checked the heading, then began punching some numbers into the keyboard mounted on the binnacle's face.

  Khalid might be in control, but he was not a sailor. Phillips remembered their conversation on the bridge yesterday, where Khalid had committed the landlubberly mistake of calling the lines securing the Sandpiper alongside ropes. On board ship, the only rope was wire rope, the steel cable used for specific tasks such as lifting heavy cargo from a hold--or to secure the two ships together as they now were. But the lines first passed between the two ships had been "lines," and a sailor, someone with naval or merchant marine training, would have known that.

  Phillips thought he saw a way to use that.

  "What are you doing?" Khalid asked.

  "Checking the compass," he replied. He kept his voice even, though his heart was pounding in his chest. "Recalibrating it. The navigator usually performs the task, but he seems to have disappeared."

  Khalid walked closer and looked at the compass heading. It read 250.

  "According to this," the man said slowly, "we are off-course."

  "By ten degrees, yes. The navigation officer checks the compass with our GPS twice daily, to make certain this sort of thing doesn't happen. We've been having some trouble with it."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  Phillips shrugged. "Nothing serious. We just need to recalibrate for the currents, the tides, the wind, for the changing angle on magnetic north. That's what I just did."

  "But this means we're headed too far south, yes?"

  "Then I would suggest that you bring the ship ten degrees north."

  "Order it."

  "Helm!" Phillips said. "Come right ten degrees."

  "Come right ten degrees," Miller replied. Phillips saw the sweat on the young man's face. "Aye, aye."

  Gently the Atlantis Queen edged onto her new, more northerly course. As minute followed agonizing minute, Khalid said nothing more, content with staring out the bridge windows forward at the bright blue sky above the endless violet-gray ,blue of the horizon.

  They might just be able to get away with this Neptune Theater, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic 47deg 12' N, 14deg 58' W Sunday, 1020 hours GMT

  David Llewellyn paced up the aisle of the theater, deliberately testing the bounds set on the prisoners. Halfway up the aisle, a bearded man in khaki had stepped out of the shadows, pointing an AK at Llewellyn, barking something in Arabic. He raised his hands and took a step back. "Easy, man, easy!"

  The guard barked again, and a second armed man appeared. "You need piss?" the man demanded. "Uh, yeah," Llewellyn said. "Come."

  The man led Llewellyn through the double doors at the top of the aisle and down a short passageway toward the mall. Several men's and ladies' rooms were located here. The guard led Llewellyn inside but let him use one of the stalls in privacy.

  At least, he thought, their captors had seen fit to come in last night and cut those damned plastic strips off their wrists and ankles. As each man or woman was cut loose and their gag removed, they'd been led away, and at first Llewellyn had thought they were being taken away to be killed. Some of the captives had thought the same and began screaming and struggling. When that happened, they would be released, and the guards would choose another to release. And those who were led away were brought back safely after a few minutes.

  As each prisoner was returned, as they rejoined the others and began talking in hushed, urgent whispers, Llewellyn had realized that they were being taken, one by one, to one of the restrooms just outside the theater. The process had taken a long time; there were almost a hundred people being held in the theater, now, and only a handful of guards.

  Eventually, it had been his turn. He'd scarcely been able to walk after hours of being tied, and he'd been afraid that they would be tied once more afterward, but when the guard had brought him back from the head, he'd been released. Later, a couple of catering staff people had brought box dinners in--sandwiches, fruit cups, and small cartons of juice--not quite the usual sumptuous fare on board the Queen, but at least the hijackers didn't intend to starve them all.

  He finished up, flushed, and washed his hands at one of the sinks as the guard watched impassively. "So, what's your name?" Llewellyn asked brightly.

  "No talk."

  "Not very friendly, are you?"

  "No talk.

  The guard had led Llewellyn back to the theater, then, and he took the opportunity to look around. There didn't appear to be anyone in the bit of the ship's mall area visible down the passageway. Two men in Ship's Security uniforms stood to either side of the doors into the theater.

  Inside, he took a moment to study the situation from the top of the aisle. Only the overhead lights illuminating the stage were on, and the prisoners were huddled together there, lying or sitting on mattresses.

  At around ten the night before, a dozen crew members had been led away at gunpoint. Again the prisoners left behind had begun talking among themselves, wondering what was happening. The chosen prisoners had returned twenty minutes later dragging mattresses from the ship's housekeeping stores. Llewellyn and a number of other men had volunteered to help, then, and they'd spent the next hour and a half making trips down to B Deck Forward, dragging out blankets and more mattresses and hauling them up in the main forward service lift. The mattresses were laid out side by side across the theater's stage, with more on the deck between the front-row seats and the stage, and others in the side aisles.

  At the time, Staff Captain Vandergrift had first suggested that the men and women take opposite sides of the theater for sleeping. Llewellyn had looked at Tricia and Sharon Reilly, who were huddled together now side by side in the front-row seats, and shaken his head. "I think a better idea, sir," he'd said, "would be to put the women in the middle, the men around the outside."

  Several of their captors--the ugly, leering one especially--seemed to be eagerly anticipating a chance to rape some of the women.

  Vandergrift had thought about it and agreed. The prisoners had passed an uncomfortable night on the mattresses, many of them clinging together for warmth and for at least an illusion of security. Their guards had watched impassively from the balconies, their shifts changing once in the twelve hours th
at had passed since.

  There were, as near as Llewellyn could tell, four guards in the balconies--one on the left above the stage, one on the right, and two in the rear balconies above the door--as well as the two at the top of the aisle. One of those, his escort to the restroom, now nudged Llewellyn with the muzzle of his rifle. "You go!"

  "Okay, sunshine," Llewellyn said. "Don't get your camel in a twist."

  He walked back down to the mattresses. Vandergrift sat on the stage, his legs dangling over the edge as he ate a banana. More food had been brought in that morning, and prisoners who needed to use the restroom facilities could do so by asking one of the guards to walk them out and back. Llewellyn joined him.

  "Guards outside?" Vandergrift asked, his voice low.

  "Two that I could see just outside the doors," Llewellyn told him. "Not good."

  "No.. .."

  Arnold Bernstein picked his way over the mattresses on the deck and joined them. He was an older man--in his early sixties, Llewellyn guessed--and was the manager of a minor celebrity among the passengers. "You fellows still talking about how to break out of here?" he asked.

  "Maybe," Vandergrift said. "You have any ideas?"

  "I have an idea," Bernstein replied, "that these people are going to kill us if we don't do something."

  "We're open to suggestions, Mr. Bernstein," Llewellyn said. "But right now I don't think there's much we can do."

  During the long night, Llewellyn, Vandergrift, and a few other men had discussed the possibility of trying to overpower the guards and break free. The numbers, certainly, were in the prisoners' favor--a hundred of them against six guards inside the theater.

  But even if the prisoners could find a way to take out all six simultaneously, there would be noise, there would be gunfire, and the two outside would alert the bridge.

  "We outnumber them," Vandergrift said, "but eight automatic weapons against a hundred unarmed men and women are no odds at all. The way I see it, we might, might, be able to take out two of the guards, maybe three, and turn their weapons against the others, but the end result is sure to be a bloodbath. The rest of the hijackers will fire into the crowd before we can get close to them."

  "There's also the possibility that the terrorists have rigged explosives around the theater," Bernstein added.

  "Have you seen any sign of that?" Llewellyn asked.

  "No. But that's what they did at Entebbe."

  Llewellyn nodded. Entebbe was the Ugandan airport where 250 crew and passengers off of Air France Flight 139 had been imprisoned by terrorists and Ugandan soldiers after their plane had been hijacked in 1976. The prisoners had been locked up in an old airport terminal, given mattresses, and held under guard... just as was being done here. Explosives had been prominently placed around the terminal as an added threat.

  As he looked at Bernstein, Llewellyn was forcibly reminded of another aspect of the Entebbe hijacking. At one point, the terrorists had gone through the prisoners' passports and separated out the ones with Jewish-sounding names. Those had been led to another room in a selection process eerily and nightmarishly reminiscent of the selection lines at Nazi death camps.

  And there'd been the Jewish passenger on board another hijacked cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, an elderly man in a wheelchair shot by the hijackers and tossed overboard.

  Llewellyn wondered if Bernstein was thinking about those incidents now.

  "There's been no sign that they're wiring us with explosives," Vandergrift said. "The way I see it, they figure they can keep us under control just with the threat of those rifles."

  "Unfortunately, they're right," Llewellyn said. The doors leading to the balcony stairways from inside the theater had been locked. Llewellyn could see no way to get at the men in the balconies other than swarming up the outside, using curtain ropes or the Baroque decorations covering the walls as climbing aids. "If we rush them, it'll be a slaughter. We can't risk it."

  "If we take down the two up there by the doors," Bernstein pointed out, "we'll have their guns. We could shoot the ones in the balconies, then."

  Vandergrift shook his head. "We wouldn't make it halfway up the aisles before the people in the balconies started shooting into the crowd. Damn it, we can't risk it!"

  "The passengers on Flight Ninety-three risked it!" Bernstein said, angry, his voice rising.

  "Please!" Vandergrift said, putting a cautioning hand on the man's shoulder. "Keep your voice down!"

  "Flight Ninety-three," Bernstein said, more quietly. "Nine-eleven? Does that ring any bells? I say we should roll.

  "The hijackers on Flight Ninety-three were armed with box cutters and knives," Llewellyn pointed out, "not AK-47 assault rifles. They were also in close quarters, with the terrorists locked inside the cockpit." He shook his head. "We try that kind of hero stunt and we'll be cut to bits!"

  "Bernie!" A piercing female voice echoed through the theater. Llewellyn turned and saw a tall, slender, big-breasted woman in a bare excuse for a bikini standing on the other side of the theater seats, hands on her hips. "Bernie! Where are you!"

  Bernstein sighed. "The mistress calls," he said. "Look, if you guys decide to actually do something other than waiting to get shot or beheaded or whatever these clowns decide to do to us, count me in! And I suggest you hurry!" Turning, he tiptoed across mattresses and over passengers to rejoin the woman.

  "Who is that?" Vandergrift asked.

  "Some rock star or singer or something," Llewellyn said. He tried to remember the passenger records he'd seen. He recalled that several staff people had been complaining about the woman, her complaints about her suite, her meals, and the service on board. "Hopper? No, Harper. Gillian Harper. High maintenance. Thinks the world revolves around her."

  "I gather she's learning otherwise."

  She appeared to be telling Bernstein off. "Maybe."

  "So what do you think, David?" Vandergrift asked. "Should we ... 'roll'?"

  He shook his head. "Whatever these people are planning on doing, they're ready for the long haul."

  "What makes you say that?"

  Llewellyn raised his hands, exposing his wrists. "They untied us. They let us use the loo ... and gave us mattresses to sleep on. Not the Queen's usual luxurious accommodations, certainly, but it shows they're going to keep us for a while."

  "How long, I wonder?"

  "Depends on where we're headed, I guess. America? The Med? Maybe back to England?"

  "We were on a westerly heading," Vandergrift said. "I got a glimpse of the sun when they brought me down here. America."

  "So that's five days to a week, depending on our speed."

  "You think they're going to hold us down here that long?"

  "I think they're prepared to. I think we're here to guarantee the good behavior of the skipper and maybe the rest of the passengers."

  "Which suggests we need to make a break somehow. . . ."

  "Not if it gets us all killed, Charles," Llewellyn said, shaking his head. "Anyway, before too long, somebody's going to notice that we're not on-course for the Med anymore. They may stage a rescue mission."

  "You think so?"

  "I hope so. I think this is one we need to leave to the professionals."

  Vandergrift looked again at the guards watching from the balconies. They seemed to be interested in an argument developing between Bernstein and the Harper woman.

  "That could still get bloody," Vandergrift said. "Commandos storming in here? The terrorists might open fire on the crowd."

  "We'll need to think about ways we can minimize casualties," Llewellyn said, thoughtful. "Maybe try to disperse everyone in small groups, as much as they'll let us. Warn them not to jump up in the line of fire if shooting starts."

  "We could do that, yeah," Vandergrift said. "Make a list of things to do and not do. Pass the word on a few people at a time."

  "And we can think about grabbing weapons when the time comes," Llewellyn added. "It's all a question of being ready when things go down."


  "I agree."

  Llewellyn found himself looking across the theater, halfway up the ranks of seats. Tricia was up there, sitting in an aisle seat, and one of the terrorists was talking with her. The man said something ... and Tricia smiled, the expression startling Llewellyn. What the hell?...

  The terrorist, he saw now, was not one of the two who'd broken in on the two of them in her stateroom yesterday. This one was young, with little more than fuzz on his cheeks instead of the beards or heavy mustaches sported by most of the others.

  It was tough to see their captors as individuals. The guns, the attitudes, the broken English all combined to turn them into faceless, threatening shadows.

  But there were differences. That one, for instance, was almost painfully young, and he seemed to be treating Tricia with a measure of deference. The two who'd captured them--especially the leering one--had been quite different. There was an interesting difference. The leering terrorist had been all but drooling over the attractive women; that kid looked like he was almost afraid of them. From what Llewellyn knew of Arab, cultures, there was a tendency to treat women as second-class citizens ... but the teachings of their Qur'an, he'd heard, tended to stress women's equality. Most of the Muslim men he'd known in England seemed to think of women as almost their equals; he suspected that the real difference lay not in the religion but in the myriad native cultures beneath the Islamic overlay, in peoples as mutually alien as Moroccans, Egyptians, Syrians, and Afghans.

  This lot seemed pretty diverse. Ghailiani was Moroccan. He thought Khalid might be Egyptian ... or possibly Saudi. Was there a way to use that, to drive wedges between their individual captors?

  Was that what Tricia was doing?

  She glanced his way and caught his gaze. He saw again the anger flash in her eyes.

  Maybe, he thought, they should be thinking about the wedges driven in between the individual captives instead. He didn't like to think it, but it might be necessary to be careful when it came time to sharing escape plans with the others.