Sea Of Terror db-8

by Stephen Coonts

  He knew her address — in upstate New York — and he knew she'd been working as a waitress and as an exotic dancer since college, never quite able to pull her life together. He knew she'd been briefly married, that she was now single, and that she was deep in debt. He'd also learned she had grandparents living in England — Suffolk — and that they were quite well-off, well-off enough to purchase this cruise package for her. His guess was that she'd visited them for the summer after an unhappy divorce and that they'd given her the cruise as an opportunity to "find herself," or some such.

  It was a good thing he'd found her first.

  He looked at the bar overlooking the pool. "May I buy you a drink?"

  Bridge, Atlantis Queen 49deg 21' N, 8deg 13' W

  Saturday, 1010 hours GMT

  "That looks like the plutonium ship there," Vandergrift said, lowering his binoculars. "I see smoke, but I can't see the Ishikari."

  Captain Eric Phillips continued watching through his own binoculars. The Atlantis Queen was approaching from the southeast, slowing now until she was barely making headway. It was possible that the Ishikari was hidden behind the bulk of the freighter, but Phillips feared the Japanese escort ship had already sunk. A pillar of oily black smoke was still boiling off the sea, but as far as he could tell at this distance, still almost half a mile, the smoke was coming off of burning oil on the surface of the ocean itself.

  As soon as the SOS had come in, the Queen's radio room had been in touch both with the other ship, the Pacific Sandpiper, and with her own head office back in Southampton. Phillips had been told that the Sandpiper was carrying "classified cargo" and that approach to the huge vessel normally was restricted… but that the Queen was authorized now to approach and render all possible aid. The Sandpiper's escort, Southampton informed him, was a Japanese destroyer escort of twelve hundred tons, the Ishikari, with a crew of ninety. There'd been an explosion on board the escort — no details beyond that — but the ship was believed to be in danger of sinking. Other ships and aircraft were en route, including military vessels to take over escort duty on the Sandpiper; but in the meantime the Queen was to assist with rescuing survivors and providing emergency medical treatment.

  "Classified cargo" might be any of a number of things, but Phillips knew that the Pacific Sandpiper and her sister vessels — Pacific Teal and Pacific Pintail — were purpose-built ships for carrying radioactive materials in heavy, sealed canisters. Information on the vessels was available on the Internet, and various antinuclear protest groups routinely picketed both the ships' home port at Barrow and their destination at Rokkasho, Honshu, usually with a fair amount of press coverage. That classified cargo would be several tons of processed and highly radioactive plutonium, enough, he'd read in an article about the ships, to construct sixty nuclear weapons.

  The same article had stressed how safe the shipments were — how well shielded the containers were, how comprehensive the safety features of the transports were.

  "What's that on her forward deck?" Vandergrift asked.

  "Helicopter," Phillips replied. "Looks like the one that passed us a while ago. Must be helping with SAR efforts."

  "Doesn't look like they're doing much search and rescue now. Think they've already finished?"

  "I don't know. Please pass the word to Dr. Barnes. I expect we'll have mass casualties coming on board as soon as we reach that other ship."

  "Yes, sir. How are we going to take them aboard?"

  It was an interesting problem in marine logistics. The Atlantis Queen was 964 feet long. The Pacific Sandpiper, if he remembered the article right, was a third of that, about 325 feet long, and her main deck would be about thirty feet above her waterline. The simplest means of getting injured men from the Sandpiper's deck onto the Queen would be to bring the two ships close alongside, securing them together with lines and rigging a gangway across from the Sandpiper's deck into either one of the A Deck cargo doors or, possibly, directly into the quarterdeck access on the First Deck. One of the cargo deck entryways would be best, Phillips decided. The ship's infirmary was on A Deck to begin with, and there'd be no need to haul injured crewmen down one of the ship's ladders.

  The touchy part would be doing all of this at sea. They would put out fenders, of course, to keep the hulls of the two vessels from grinding together… but the seas were rough enough and high enough that there would be a certain amount of danger involved. Not enough to hole one of the ships, certainly, unless someone did something incredibly stupid, but there would be a considerable risk of injury, or of someone falling over the side.

  He picked up an intercom handset. "Sparks!" he called.

  "Yes, Captain?" The Queen's chief radio officer was Peter Jablonsky, the radio shack just aft of the bridge.

  "Raise the Pacific Sandpiper, please. Tell them I intend to come alongside their starboard side. Ask them if they have injured on board.. and ask them if we should lower boats to help look for survivors."

  "Very well, Captain."

  "To answer your question, Number One," Phillips continued, "I'm not sure. I think the best thing to do would be to rig a gangway from their forward deck up to our port side A Deck cargo access and bring people on board that way."

  "Seas are kind of high for that, Captain."

  "But not that high. Not if we're both bow-on into the sea. And it'll save time over trying to rig a boatswain's chair, or lower people down one at a time from the helicopter."

  "Yes, sir."

  Cruise ships like the Atlantis Queen numbered their passenger decks First, Second, Third, and so on, going from bottom to top, with the First Deck generally being the level at which passengers entered from the dock. The crew decks, however, were given alphabetical identifiers, starting immediately under the First Deck with A Deck and going down to B, C, and D Decks below. On the Queen, A Deck was the lowest deck with portholes — though these were permanently closed — and the level for the cargo hold entry doors, while B Deck was just above the waterline. That meant that the Pacific Sandpiper's forward deck would be at roughly the same level, the same distance above the water, as the Queen's A Deck.

  "Captain?" Jablonsky called. "They say to come on in, port to starboard."

  "Let's do it," Phillips said. "Helm, bring us two points to starboard."

  And the Atlantic Queen began closing with the smaller freighter.

  Radio Room, Pacific Sandpiper 49deg 2V N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 1012 hours GMT

  Fuchida leaned back from the console, removing the headset. Abdel Ramid was standing behind him. "What did they say?" he asked in Arabic.

  "They will come alongside," Fuchida replied in the same language, "their left side to our right. They will rig a kind of bridge to cross from our deck to their cargo hold."

  Ramid grinned. "They're making it easy for us."

  "It's happening as we planned it," Fuchida said, shrugging. "They have to respond to an emergency at sea, and they have much better emergency medical services on board… to take care of all of those rich, pampered tourists. Do you have everyone, all of the prisoners, off the deck and out of sight?"

  Ramid nodded. "The prisoners from outside all have been moved to the crew's recreation area, their hands and feet have been tied, and they are under heavy guard. The ship's crew has also retrieved the small boat, with two more of your people on board."

  "Inui and Yano," Fuchida said. "Are they okay?"

  "Half-drowned and suffering from immersion in cold water, but they seem to be recovering," Ramid said. "They were well enough to hold the two crewmen in the boat at gunpoint until we could bring them aboard."

  Fuchida could only imagine the thoughts of the Ishikari crewmen still out there in the water, clinging to rafts and wreckage as they watched the Sandpiper take her small boat back on board and begin to move off toward the horizon. The ship was almost a mile, now, from where the Ishikari had gone down.

  "And the crewmen on board this ship?" Fuchida asked.

  Ramid jerked his head, indicati
ng the bridge behind him. "The bridge personnel are cooperating. They don't like it — I think the captain is trying to kill us with the evil eye — but they are cooperating."

  "He can glare all he wants. So long as he does what we tell him."

  "We have men now in the engineering section, watching the crew there, holding them at gunpoint. And after the captain made his announcement over the intercom, several more crewmen have come out of hiding… including the security people in the aft gun position."

  "Excellent."

  They'd had to ignore the aft gun, number 3, in the initial attack. Moritomi had taken out number 2, and the men on board the helicopter had killed the gunners at number 1 from the air. That had been a close thing; any one of the rapid-fire cannons mounted on the Sandpiper could have swatted the helicopter from the sky as easily as a mosquito. The assault force had been gambling on the fact that the civilian crew of the plutonium ship would be confused, that even the former military men within the onboard security force would have been unsure of what was happening and hold their fire for that reason. Their delay had made it possible for Ramid's helicopter to get close to the number 1 gun before the ship's defenders had fully realized that the ship was under attack and kill them from the air with machine-gun fire.

  "Perform a careful check," Fuchida went on. "There were a total of thirty security guards. We want to be especially certain that they are all accounted for."

  "You do not need to tell me my business, Fuchida," Ramid said, his voice crisp. "You are not in command here."

  Fuchida started to reply, then thought better of it, turning away. "As you say."

  Technically, Ramid was in command of the Pacific Sandpiper assault group. Lines of command had been only lightly and informally sketched in, however, as the operation planning had come together. The Islamist Jihad International — an operational arm of al-Qaeda — and the Kokusaiteki Kakumei Domei had been forced to work together, but despite the pretensions of international revolution, neither organization was fully comfortable with the other. The KKD had needed al-Qaeda for the resources to hit a target as large and as formidable as the Pacific Sandpiper, the Islamists had needed the KKD in order to infiltrate the crew of the Ishikari, destroy the military escort, and create the diversion necessary for the taking of the plutonium ship.

  The goals of the two groups, however, remained quite different from each other, and neither fully trusted the other, even yet.

  "Then I respectfully suggest, sir," Fuchida said, his voice biting as he replaced the headset over his ears, "that you put the helicopter back in the air. Our next target will be alongside within a few minutes."

  Ramid said nothing, but he turned away to comply.

  With the Arab's sour attitude, however, Fuchida knew there would be trouble.

  Bridge, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 49deg 2V N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 1016 hours GMT

  "The helicopter's taking off," Vandergrift noted. "Why are they so far from the fire, though?"

  "Probably don't want to risk the ship," Captain Phillips said. He gave a grim chuckle. "With their cargo, I can't say I blame them!"

  "Yeah. I'm still not sure it's a good idea going close aboard, sir."

  "Your reservations are noted, Number One. Give me an alternative and I'll consider it."

  "We hold back, lower boats to assist with the rescue operations, and wait for the Campbeltown, the Ark Royal, or La Motte-Picquet to arrive."

  The Campbeltown, the frigate that had escorted the Pacific Sandpiper clear of British waters the day before, was reportedly now on her way here from the vicinity of the Gornish coast. The Ark Royal was one of Britain's aircraft carriers, with a Sea Harrier squadron embarked on board, an escort of several smaller warships, and a shipboard medical facility as good as or better than the Queen's. She was coming out of the Channel from Portsmouth. And La Motte-Picquet was a French guided missile destroyer out of Brest. All three vessels were on their way at flank, but none would be on the scene in less than an hour and a half to two hours.

  "Ninety minutes before any of them arrive," Phillips said. "The sooner we get the injured to medical care, the better their chances. Especially burn victims."

  "I know, sir."

  "And I know what you're feeling. But it's safe enough. The radioactive material is stored inside special ninety-eight-ton flasks. Each flask has shock absorbers, massively thick walls, and it has built-in neutron shielding, gamma shielding, and heat conductors to keep the contents cool. One flask holds up to twenty-eight separate containers of plutonium, but the total in one flask is only about two hundred kilos. It's stored in separate packages, though, to prevent the possibility of the whole thing going to critical mass and exploding."

  "How reassuring."

  There was a sharply sarcastic edge to Vandergrift's voice, but Phillips ignored it. "They do extensive radiation monitoring on those ships," he continued. "The actual radiation exposure for the crew… I forget the specifics, but it's less than ordinary people onshore get just from background radiation."

  "Less than you get ashore? What does that mean?"

  "Ordinary rock has uranium in it. It gives off background radiation, just a tiny, tiny bit. We don't even have that when we're at sea." He waved his arm, taking in the blue-gray ocean. "No rocks. And what we'll get from those flasks on board the Sandpiper is less than what we get when we're ashore. So don't worry about it. We're not about to start glowing if we come alongside that vessel!"

  "I was just concerned about our passengers and crew, sir."

  "Of course you were, Number One." Eric Phillips was watching the ship ahead as he spoke. The Sandpiper was off the Atlantis Queen's port bow, now, and about three hundred yards ahead. The cruise ship was so much larger than the freighter that, from the bridge, Phillips could actually look down on the other vessel, and he was puzzled by a couple of inconsistencies.

  For one thing, he'd been expecting to see a lot of injured crewmen off the Ishikari on the forward deck. As the silver-painted helicopter lifted off the Sandpiper's forward deck, he could see that the deck was empty. For another, there appeared to be some damage forward. It was tough to tell from this distance even through binoculars, but there was something not quite right forward. It looked as though several of the stanchions holding the deck safety railing had been snapped off. He could see one dangling from a length of cable over the side of the ship, up toward the ship's raised forecastle. And there was some scarring or minor damage to the deck up there, too.

  He lowered his binoculars, thoughtful. Possibly they'd ripped up the stanchions and railing in order to facilitate bringing injured people on board. Or maybe that helicopter had caused the damage. Landing a helicopter on a ship at sea was tricky business at best. That helicopter was a civilian aircraft — he could tell that from the markings — and the pilot might simply not have the experience necessary to touch down on a moving deck without clipping a railing with his landing gear, say.

  There were other questions, too. The plutonium ship's gun ports had been opened; he could see two of the guns exposed, one over the fantail, the other at the starboard-forward corner of the bridge house. Was that standard procedure for armed PNTL ships during rescue efforts? Phillips didn't know.

  And why were they steadily cruising away from the disaster area? Were they that certain they'd rescued everybody in the water? Phillips knew from experience just how big the ocean actually was, when there were men in the water after the sinking of a ship. Typically, SAR efforts continued for hours, even days, after a ship went down, until the rescuers were absolutely certain that every survivor had been recovered.

  As Phillips watched, however, and as the Queen drew closer, he could see a number of crewmen on the Sandpiper's decks. Several of them were waving as they waited to take lines aboard from the Queen.

  "Pass the word for line-handling parties to stand by, port side," he said.

  "Aye, aye, sir." Vandergrift began speaking into a handset.

  "Sparks! Tell t
he Sandpiper to come to a full stop. This is going to be tough enough without them charging across the ocean at five knots."

  Phillips turned from the forward windows and walked to the starboard wing, using the, binoculars to look at the smoke plume still rising from the sea. The fire appeared to be dying out, though thick smoke continued feeding the black, roiling column ascending into the sky. At this distance, it was impossible to see if there were any people still in the water, but he could make out a lot of debris on the surface.

  Damn it, there could easily be survivors there still, clinging to wreckage or buoyed on life jackets. He intended to have a long talk with the Sandpiper's skipper in a few moments. There was no reason for the transport ship to leave the scene and every reason for her to stay.

  "Captain?" the radio operator called. "Got something funny here."

  He walked away from the bridge wing to the radio shack door. Inside, three operators sat at a bank of consoles. "What do you have?"

  "We have a frequency scanner going, to keep track of local traffic, right? It just jumped to a military frequency. I think it's a military radio."

  "What did they say?"

  "I don't know, sir. It wasn't in English."

  "French?"

  "No, sir. This was… not sure. Kind of guttural? Sounded like 'hellick.'"

  " 'Hellick'? Just that?"

  "Yes, sir. Repeated three times, 'hellick, hellick, hellick,' like that… and then there was a pause, maybe a few seconds, and it repeated three more times."

  "Maybe the Germans have a ship in the area."

  "Maybe, sir." The radio operator didn't sound convinced.

  " 'Hallig' is the name of a German island in the North Sea," one of the other operators suggested.

  "You speak German?"