Sea Of Terror db-8

by Stephen Coonts

  "Yes, sir."

  "Keep listening, then." But the North Sea was a long way from here. It didn't make sense. Perhaps Hallig was the name of a German ship?

  "Captain!" came over the bridge intercom system.

  Phillips picked up the intercom handset. "This is the captain."

  "Sir! This is Carter, Security Department. We may have a situation, here."

  "What kind of a situation?"

  "We're picking up crewmen on our security cams.

  They're moving — "

  "Damn it, Carter, of course they're moving! I just gave orders to stand by to pass lines to that other ship!"

  "No, sir! Not that! We have… looks like eight or ten men coming up the passageway toward Security. They… my God!"

  "What? What is it?"

  "Captain! They're armed Automatic rifles! Eight of them outside Security! Eight more on their way to the bridge! I don't know how they got past the secure doors, but — "

  Carter's voice cut off, and Phillips heard a loud, hammering sound, followed a moment later by the unmistakable flat and chattering crack of automatic fire.

  "Seal all security doors!" Phillips snapped, and Kelly, the security man assigned to the bridge, moved to comply.

  And then the aft door to the bridge banged open, and men were storming in, some with semiautomatic handguns, some with assault rifles. "Get away from the console!" one of the intruders barked.

  Kelly continued to type on a console keyboard, entering his password, and the leader of the attackers raised his pistol with a long sound suppressor screwed onto the muzzle and fired once… a sharp, hissing exclamation. Kelly jerked, back arching away from the shots, then collapsed on the deck, leaving a smear of blood on the console.

  The leader of the attackers wore the dark blue uniform and badge of the Atlantis Queen's Security Department. Turning, he leveled the pistol at Phillips' head.

  "Captain," the man said calmly, "I am Yusef Khalid of the Islamic Jihad International Brigade of al-Qaeda. Your ship now belongs to us! All of you, down on the deck! I will shoot anyone who disobeys, or who doesn't carry out my orders instantly!"

  Automatic gunfire barked from the radio room, and Phillips heard a man scream.

  Chapter 11

  Lost Continent Restaurant, Atlantis Queen North Atlantic Ocean 49deg 21' N, 8deg 13' W Saturday, 1018 hours GMT

  Donald Myers looked up from the menu as Ms. Caruthers and Ms. Jordan hurried up to join them. Myers and the rest of the tour group were already seated at the large table along the port side windows, looking down on the merchant vessel close alongside.

  The Lost Continent Restaurant was the second-largest dining area on the Atlantis Queen, luxuriously furnished and appointed, with large windows, crystal chandeliers, imitation Mayan walls and columns, and a small rain forest's worth of potted trees and vines giving the place the romantic atmosphere of a fantasy-adventure novel. It was located on the Tenth Deck, aft, overlooking the Atlas Pool on the Deck Nine fantail and, at the moment, offering an unparalleled view of the Queen's docking with the other ship.

  The group had decided to come here when the announcement had sounded over the PA system perhaps forty-five minutes ago, planning on having some breakfast while watching the drama unfold outside. A good way to keep the women out of the way of the rescue, Myers thought. Lots of other passengers evidently had thought the same, that it would let them watch without getting stepped on. The Lost Continent was crowded with people. They'd been lucky to get here early enough to beat the rush and get seats.

  "Oh, good," Ms. Jones said. "Elsie! Anne! You're just in time! They're starting to toss ropes across to the other ship!"

  "It's all so perfectly excitingl" Ms. Dunne added.

  "Never mind that," Ms. Caruthers said. "Donald! There's something wrong aboard this ship!"

  Myers sighed, looking up. Both of the women appeared slightly flushed, perhaps a bit out of breath. "Such as what, Ms. Caruthers?" he asked.

  "Elsie and I were just coming out of our cabin, up on the Hera Deck," Ms. Jordan said. "We were in a hurry because we wanted to come down and join you all for breakfast and — "

  "I believe there are terrorists on board, Mr. Myers," Caruthers interrupted.

  "Terrorists?" Myers said. He managed not to laugh out loud. Since they'd come aboard Thursday, he'd been playing with the thought he'd had about the women's terrorist and sewing circle and wishing he could share it with someone. Caruthers' blunt statement brought the humorous image back to mind.

  "Terrorists," Caruthers said firmly as the two women sat down at the places left for them. "Men with guns!"

  "Slow down, Elsie," Roger Galsworthy said. "What men with what guns?"

  "There were three of them," Jordan said, "and they were coming down the hallway as we were leaving our stateroom, bold as you please, and one of them bumped against me and almost — "

  "They were wearing ship's crew uniforms," Caruthers said, interrupting again. "And they were carrying machine guns!"

  "Machine guns?" Abe Klein said, chuckling. "Seems a little unlikely."

  "They were those Russian guns, like in that movie Russian Dawn back in the eighties," Ms. Jordan said. "Where a bunch of high school kids fight a Russian invasion of the U. S.?"

  "I think you mean Red Dawn, Anne," Caruthers said.

  "Red Dawn, that's right. The rifles were this long," Jordan continued, holding her hands apart, "and black, except for orange wood underneath the barrel, and back on the stock. And the… the thing where they keep the bullets? It was this long and curved. And one of the men said something to the others when the one bumped into me, and another looked like he was going to hit me, but another one snapped at him and they just kept on going."

  "What did they say?" Myers asked.

  "I don't know," Caruthers said. "It wasn't English or French."

  "It sounded foreign" Jordan added.

  Myers frowned. "Foreign languages often do."

  "One of them," Jordan continued, "the one who'd snapped at the other one, just kind of looked at us and said, 'Ship's Security, go back to your stateroom.' And they kept on going down the hall. Running, almost."

  "So what did you do?" Ms, Dunne asked.

  "Came right down here to find you, of course," Caruthers said. Her mouth was set in a hard-lined expression of disapproval.

  "Look… you said they were wearing crew uniforms?" Myers asked.

  "That's right," Caruthers said. "White slacks, dark blue shirts, ship's logo on the left chest, where a shirt pocket would be if it had one. But they had dark skin. Not like coloreds, but dark, Mediterranean-looking. And they all had beards. Have you seen anyone in the Atlantis Queen's crew with beards?"

  "Yes, actually," Myers said, trying to ignore the unpleasantly racist comment. Caruthers was old and had grown up in the South of the 1940s. "Some of the line handlers when we left the dock yesterday had beards."

  "I am not crazy, young man," Caruthers told him. "I know what we saw!"

  "I'm sure you do." Myers was continually bemused by Anne Jordan's taste in movies. Schwarznegger action films… and now Red Dawn. Her description of the rifle, though, sounded very much like an AK-47, or something just like it — an AKM, perhaps. Orange stock and fore-grip, banana clip magazine… not a machine gun, but an assault rifle, certainly.

  "We need to tell the captain!" Caruthers said.

  "Ms. Caruthers, I'm sure you saw what you say you did. But I feel very sure that there's a logical explanation."

  "Such as?" Caruthers said, staring him in the eye and lifting her chin. "In my world people don't run around with guns, bumping into decent people and talking in foreign languages!"

  "These people," Myers said carefully, "take security very seriously on this ship. You all saw that at the security checkpoint the other day, right?"

  "Up to a point," Caruthers said. She almost smiled at the memory.

  Myers was still embarrassed about that scene. In the end, the security guards had settl
ed for using a handheld metal detector to check Caruthers and the others who'd refused to submit to the X-ray scan head to toe, then waved them on through. Caruthers clearly considered that to have been a victory for moral and upstanding people everywhere.

  Myers pointed out the window. "We're coming alongside another ship. I would be willing to bet any money you like that if this ship has to get close to another ship, the rules say that armed security guards take up stations where they can keep an eye on things."

  "Makes sense," Abe Klein said, nodding.

  "Of course it does," Galsworthy added. "Us former-military types have seen this sort of thing before, right, Donald?"

  "Uh, right. Yeah." Galsworthy, he remembered, was ex-Air Force from the Vietnam era, and made a lot of the fact when given half a chance.

  The conversation wandered on, moving on to the fine points of twentieth-century piracy and the security systems in place on board the Atlantis Queen — key cards to keep unauthorized personnel out of secure areas, for instance, and scanners to make sure people weren't wandering off where they shouldn't. Bored, Myers turned away and watched the docking taking place outside. Crewmen — and many of them were bearded, he noted — had tossed massive hawsers out and down to the far smaller ship alongside. Crewmen on the other ship had made the hawsers fast to cleats in the deck.

  He could see the name of the other ship across her transom — Pacific Sandpiper She looked like an oil tanker, with her superstructure all the way aft behind a long, long forward deck, but she was a lot smaller than he would have expected for a tanker. He'd seen photos of ships like this one designed for carrying grain on the Great Lakes. Maybe that's what she was… a grain ship.

  A helicopter was circling both ships in the distance — part of the rescue operation, no doubt.

  Terrorists. He shook his head and, again, suppressed a laugh. The only terrorists on board were at this table.

  Turkish Interpol National Central Bureau

  Ataturk Bulvari

  Ankara, Turkey

  Saturday, 1235 hours GMT+ 2

  "Lutfin, Komutanim!" Lia DeFrancesca said. "Please, sir! We really need your help on this!"

  Colonel Tarhan looked up at Lia from behind his desk and rubbed at his luxuriant mustache with a nicotine-stained finger. "Well..

  "Everywhere I go," she told him, "the bureaucracy stands in the way. And we must have this information before the British have to release the suspect."

  "Yes, I can certainly understand that," Tarhan replied. He picked up the wire photo of Nayim Erbakan and studied it again. He glanced up at Lia. "You say you're with Interpol?"

  "Zswropol, Komutanim," she replied. The Turkish honorific was reserved for a military superior officer, rather than a civilian. It emphasized, Lia hoped, the essential fraternity of military personnel, their bond of brotherhood, whatever their country of origin. "If I were Interpol," she added, "I wouldn't need to be here, jumping through the bureaucratic hoops.

  They were speaking English, but Lia's legend called for a French accent and she knew a few words in Turkish.

  "It is irregular," Tarhan said at last, "but let me see what I can do for such a beautiful woman."

  Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, maintained NCBs — National Central Bureaus — or sub-bureaus in 187 member countries and had one of the largest and most comprehensive computer databases on international criminal activity in the world.

  The NSA, quite naturally, had penetrated that database long ago, but its very size and complexity meant that any covert search of Interpol's records required time — days, sometimes even weeks. Things had gotten even worse since the NCTC had begun trying to do Interpol one better with its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Interpol tended to be jealous of its database and didn't make it easy for other agencies to gain access; a formal request for information could take weeks, even assuming it hit the right desk and reached the right person.

  Taggart had tried first earlier that morning, showing his NSA identification and making a formal request downstairs at the National Central Bureau for Turkey, and as they'd expected, he'd been told that his request would be processed… a polite way of saying that approval might be forthcoming in a week or two.

  And so Lia had decided to try it her way. Among her fictitious IDs was one for Captain Danielle Fouchet, former French gendarme and current agent for Europol.

  Europol was not Interpol but a relatively new organization first established in the early 1990s by the Treaty of Maastricht and the creation of the European Union. Without full executive powers, it so far was limited to the role of support to the law enforcement agencies of the twenty-seven member nations of the EU. As the new kid on the European law enforcement block, it still faced considerable difficulties in finding channels with which to work with established agencies and databases — including those of Interpol.

  Europol, she knew, struggled with many of the same challenges as the NSA or NCTC, but assuming this role gave her a significant advantage. As a European, she wasn't American. Too many foreign police services, reacting to the stereotypical image of the ugly American, the at times heavy-handed approach of the CIA and other U. S. agencies, and the perceived arrogance of U. S. foreign policy over the past decade, simply refused to work smoothly with any American intelligence unit. They dragged their feet, invoked special privilege, and threw up bureaucratic barriers, stonewalling attempts to get them to share needed intelligence.

  That attitude was the NSA's primary motivation in infiltrating the intelligence data networks of other nations, even those of close allies; Lia didn't like the need for spying on allies, but that was the harsh truth of the current geopolitcal landscape.

  And so Lia was posing as a French Europol agent and she'd chosen Colonel Tarhan of Turkey's Interpol bureau as her target.

  She watched Tarhan typing away at his keyboard and smiled. Her ploy appeared to be working.

  Working with the Turkish authorities could be challenging, especially if you were a woman. Though Turkey's government was defiantly secular, most Turks were Muslim and tended to be conservative to one degree or another when it came to dealing with women. An attractive woman on her own in the streets of Ankara could be subject to catcalls and harassment, even to physical assault; at the same time, many Turkish men, especially the older ones, could be almost charmingly and touchingly gallant when it came to responding to a woman's request, especially if she threw in just a touch of feminine helplessness.

  Lia was also using Tarhan's military background to her advantage. The military dominated all aspects of Turkish society and government, doubling as the nation's police force. Individual Interpol NCBs were staffed by the national police of member nations, and so the Ankara bureau was run by Turkish military officers. By showing her credentials as a French Army officer serving with Europol, she could call Tarhan Komutanim instead of the civilian Bayim and relate to him as a superior officer.

  All Turkish males were required to serve in the Army; women were not; she could tell that Tarhan was bemused by the idea of a woman Army captain and Europol agent… but she was counting on what would have been called machismo in a Latino country, his conservative and patriarchal gallantry toward women.

  The technique required delicacy and care; it could easily backfire, especially if the target happened to be strongly Muslim or from a hyper-traditional culture like Saudi Arabia that seriously marginalized women to second-class citizenry. But the Art Room had transmitted the records of several of the officers at the Ankara Interpol bureau to her that morning, and she'd picked Tarhan as one who might be willing to bend the rules to help a woman in distress.

  Especially a beautiful woman. Tarhan seemed quite taken with her, to the point that she was already wondering if she would have to fend off his advances later.

  "Ah!" Tarhan said suddenly, leaning back in his seat. "Success!"

  "What did you find?"

  "I'm printing off the dossier." He waved a hand at the printer o
n the far side of his office, which had begun to buzz and whine. "It's odd, though. You say this Erbakan was picked up trying to smuggle drugs himself?"

  "Yes. In Southampton, Thursday morning."

  "It's not his usual modus operandi. Generally, he acts as the point man, setting up a meet and agreeing on a price. He's also never been involved with such a large amount. He really is a minor player."

  "We thought so, too. That's why we're looking for any connections you might have in your records… Erbakan's connections with organized crime, with known terrorists, that sort of thing."

  "Terrorists? Why would a drug runner be connected with terrorists?"

  She shrugged. "Many terror networks finance their activities with drugs."

  "In South America, perhaps. Or Southeast Asia. Not here."

  Dream ony Colonel she thought, but she kept the words to herself. Though the Russians had been more and more in the picture lately, Turkey remained a primary route for narcotics — especially heroin — coming from Asia to Europe, and several local terror groups used the drug pipelines to their financial advantage… especially the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party seeking independence for Turkish Kurds. Evidently, Tarhan didn't care to air that particular bit of dirty Turkish laundry with a foreigner.

  He turned back to his computer screen for a moment. "This Erbakan appears to have been involved in small sales of drugs — heroin and opium, mostly — in Germany. Cocaine is a departure for him. So is trying to carry half a kilo of it onto a cruise ship in England. But we do have this." He got up and walked around from behind his desk, went to the printer, and picked up a stack of printed sheets. On top was a color image, which he handed to Lia.

  The photo was grainy, evidently taken through a telephoto lens, but it showed two men standing outside what appeared to be a warehouse on a city street. Both men were bearded, one in a red shirt, the other in a light blue jacket.

  "The man in the red shirt is Erbakan," he told her. "The other is a man named Yusef Khalid. He may be AQ."

  "Al-Qaeda?"