Chapter 21
Helicopter Talisman One North Atlantic Ocean 47deg 48' N, 40deg 46' W Tuesday, 1843 hours GMT
"Five more minutes, General! Amethyst is peeling off now!" The helicopter pilot had to use his radio headset to call the information back and be heard above the roar of the rotors. The AW101 Merlin, its cargo deck crowded with battle-ready SAS troopers, screamed along less than a hundred feet above the water, and the thunder filled General Saunders' claustrophobic world.
"Right!" Saunders called back. He looked at the men with him, black-clad, faces masked by balaclavas and gas masks, torsos swaddled in Kevlar and combat vests and equipment. It gave them an otherworldly look, alien invaders bent on destruction.
It was an image deliberately fostered by the Special Air Service, an appearance not only practical in combat but also designed to terrorize hostage takers for the mind-numbing instant of confrontation, an instant these men were trained to utilize with deadly speed and precision.
His critics, Saunders knew, would attack him for his presence here, but Alexander Saunders was not the sort of man who would send his boys in while he remained behind, safe and secure in the rear. He'd been a colonel in the SAS before his promotion to brigadier and, later, his appointment to the DSF. It was important that he be here, to make a statement, to prove that Britain still had the resolve to go toe-to-toe with evil and to win.
Saunders let his mind move through the ops plan once more, looking for anything that might have been missed, any preparations or final orders that needed to be made. There was nothing. They were ready. They were go, as their American cousins might have said.
The assault code-named Harrow Storm was deploying as two waves. Amethyst was first, four HMA.8 Super Lynx attack helicopters on loan from the Three Commando Brigade Air Squadron at Yeovilton. They'd been outfitted as gunships, each mounting two 20mm cannons and eight TOW antitank missiles. Coming up on the Pacific Sandpiper and the Adantis Queen from astern, they were swinging off to the north now to begin their attack.
One, Amethyst Three, would go straight in, firing a wire-guided missile at the chain gun mount on the Sandpiper's stern. The other three would swing around past the Queen's starboard side, using the cruise ship as a shield in order to loop past the vessels' bows and come down on the Sandpiper's bridge house from forward. Amethyst One and Two would take out the Queen's forward starboard and port chain gun mounts respectively, while Amethyst Four provided cover and backup, using its cannons to disable the terrorists' helicopter and to clear the freighter's deck and superstructure. With the chain guns out of commission, the attack helicopters would then circle both ships, using their cannons against targets of opportunity, and in particular firing into the bridge windows in order to kill the terrorist leaders. Another prime target was the A Deck cargo hold doors, which satellite surveillance imagery showed to be open at the moment, with a gangway connecting them with the Sandpiper's deck. If those doors were closed, Amethyst Four would open them with a wire-guided missile.
Sixty seconds precisely after the coordinated attack began, Talisman Flight would reach the combat area, each carrying twenty battle-tested SAS commandos. Talisman Two's stick would fast-rope onto the Sandpiper's superstructure above the bridge, then move to secure the bridge and communications center. Talisman Three would do the same with the Queen's bridge, while Talisman Four lowered its stick onto the Sandpiper's deck immediately adjacent to the gangway leading to the cruise ship's hold. Their responsibility would be to get onto the cruise ship and disable any explosives that might have been rigged around the transferred radioactive canisters.
Talisman One would be in reserve, sending its commandos wherever they were needed, but with special attention paid to the Sandpiper's cargo holds forward. The op planners had felt that it was unlikely that the terrorists had planted explosives around the large one-hundred-ton canisters on the Sandpiper, because even an explosion large enough to blast the ship to bits would be unlikely to breach them. Intel from the NSA operator on board the cruise ship suggested that any explosives were there, in the Queen's aft hold.
The plan, code-named Harrow Storm, depended on speed, surprise, and overwhelming firepower for success. If anyone on either ship had a button ready to push to detonate those explosives, it would be in the hands of Khalid himself, rather than risking premature martyrdom with a poorly trained AQ soldier. And the psych wonks had done a thorough workup on the man calling himself Yusef Khalid. He was into a power trip, they said, and would not surrender the responsibility for blowing up those ships to an underling.
He would also, they insisted, hesitate before committing suicide and ending the mission. With the ships, the hostages, and two and a half tons of plutonium, he held what he believed to be the winning hand… which, oddly enough, meant he would wait before playing it. The man, according to all intelligence reports on him, wasn't religious; he would want more than martyrdom at sea. If the psych profiles were accurate, he wanted to sail those two hijacked ships into New York Harbor or Boston Harbor and hold them for ransom.
So the op planners estimated that there was only a 20 percent chance that Khalid would push the button before the SAS could kill him and secure the explosives.
An 80 percent chance of success was pretty good in Saunders' estimation, better than you usually got in this business.
Less certain was the fate of the hostages on board. Some were bound to be hit when those wire-guided missiles started detonating, especially on the Sandpiper. Captains and senior officers might well still be on the bridges of the two vessels, and they would almost certainly be killed if they were. And the SAS assault teams would be first moving to secure the radioactive canisters and any explosives planted around them and worry about hostage rescue later. A lot of civilians might die. Any crew members still in the engineering sections deep in the bowels of both ships might be killed as well.
But what was certain was that all of them would die if Khalid blew up the ships and blanketed the area with a cloud of radioactive fallout, especially if his ultimate goal was to set off his bombs in Boston or New York City. The SAS troopers would save as many of the civilians as they could, but their first responsibility, spelled out most carefully in their orders, was dealing with the terrorist bomb threat, followed closely by ensuring the safety of the MOX canisters on both ships.
'Amethyst is beginning the attack run!" the helicopter pilot called to him.
"Right." He made a fist of his gloved hand and punched the air. "Showtime, people! Let's kill some tangos!"
The troops cheered as the Merlin transport accelerated, engines howling.
Security Office, Atlantis Queen 47deg 48' N, 40deg 46' W
Tuesday, 1846 hours GMT
"Amir!" Ahmad Khaled Barakat's voice sounded calm over the intercom channel. "They are beginning an attack run."
"Wait," Khalid replied. "Wait! No one is to fire without my direct order!"
He was in the Ship's Security Office, watching the approaching helicopters on a monitor displaying the feed from a camera mounted on the ship's Deck Nine fantail, looking aft across the swimming pool there. Three of the four helicopters in the lead were angling off to the left, toward the starboard side of the Atlantis Queen. The remaining lead aircraft, plus the other four, larger and heavier aircraft, continued to approach from astern.
So predictable, he thought.
Khalid and the Operation Zarqawi planning staff had expected something of the sort, of course. The Americans and their British lapdogs weren't about to let the Pacific Sandpiper's cargo go without at least a show of force.
He held a microphone in one hand. "Barakat! Are you ready?"
"We are ready, Amir! We have target lock."
"Hold steady. Track them, but do not fire!"
"Yes, Amir!"
"Shawi! Are your people set?"
"Yes, Amir! The gun ports are all open, as you commanded. We're tracking them with the stern gun!"
"Do not fire until I give the order."
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"As you command, Amir!"
"Let me see Camera Ninety-five," he told Hamud Haqqani, seated at the monitor immediately in front of him. That camera was located on the terrace overlooking the pool and sundeck on Deck Eleven, between the bridge superstructure and the ship's smoke stack. The camera angle could be controlled by Haqqani from Security and was looking now out across blue water as three of the four lead helicopters flew past. The fourth was centered on the view from the fantail, steadily moving closer.
"Amir! This is Fakhet, in the radio room!" a voice called over the intercom. "They are transmitting. They say they want to check on the condition of the passengers and the crews of both ships! They say this is not an attack, and that they are willing to negotiate!"
"Ignore them," Khalid snapped.
The enemy would be using the transmission as a ploy, hoping to get as close as possible. Those four leaders were gunships; he could see the TOW missile launchers slung from outrigger pylons to either side of each helicopter.
The three lead attack helicopters were visible in full broadside now, passing the Queen's starboard side where the Sandpiper's guns couldn't reach them.
He keyed his microphone. "All stations… fire! Fire nowl"
Grotto Pool, Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen 47deg 48' N, 40deg 46' W Tuesday, 1847 hours GMT
"Fire now!" Khalid's voice called over the radio in Ahmad Khaled Barakat's earphone.
He raised his hand, then snapped it down. "Fire/" The five men with him on the Grotto deck stood along the starboard rail, each balancing a one-and-a-half-meter-long tube over his shoulder. Three of the men fired their weapons, the back-blasts spitting bursts of white smoke across the suddenly churning waters of the pool. Three missiles leaped from the launch tubes, kicked out by small ejection motors that carried them a safe distance from the shooters before the main, solid-fuel rockets fired. They dropped a few feet before the main engines engaged, giving them an odd, swooping look as they streaked out and up toward their targets, the motors white-hot on the leading tips of their gently curving contrails.
The weapons were American-made FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, a type well known to the mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan during their war against the invading Soviets. All six of the men standing behind the railing were veterans of that war. Barakat himself had stood on an icy, wind-blasted precipice north of Kabul and brought down a Russian Mi-8 helicopter with one, over twenty years earlier, and he'd trained all five of the others in their use at various camps across the border in Pakistan.
Ironically enough, it had been the American CIA that had provided these missiles, a means of striking at the Soviets through their mujahideen proxies in Afghanistan over twenty years earlier. The Americans had supplied as many as two thousand Stinger launchers to mujahideen camps in Pakistan and taught Barakat and others how to use them. Later, when the hated Soviets had at last been sent scurrying north beyond the Kotal-e Salang, the money-crazed Americans had actually tried to buy back the unused launchers.
As if Allah's holy fighters would ever surrender such magnificent weapons!
Three targets, three missiles. The other two men stood ready, launchers balanced on their shoulders, waiting to see if the first three would find their targets or if they would need to fire more. The missiles streaked low across the water, their infrared homing sensors drawing them relentlessly toward the hot engine exhaust ports on either side of each Super Lynx's engine.
The first Stinger struck the lead helicopter squarely in the engine just below the main rotor, the three kilograms of high explosives in the warhead detonating with a sharp flash ^nd a spray of fragments. The aircraft staggered in mid-air, rolling to the right as its main rotor began to come apart, then plunging nose first into the sea with a vast white splash.
The other two helicopters had started to shear off toward the north, but a second Stinger missile found one of those and exploded against its fuselage as well. Smoke boiled from a hole in the aircraft's side. The third Super Lynx released a string of flares like dazzling stars as it turned away, struggling to gain altitude. The last Stinger started to follow it up, then veered off, tracking a flare instead.
"New weapons!" Barakat yelled, pointing. "Now! And you two! Go aft! Quickly! Quickly!"
Arif and Nejmuddin, the two men who'd not yet fired, hurried toward the right, running past the white loom of the cruise ship's smokestack. The other three dropped their empty launchers and snatched up three more. A pile of cases had been laid out in a neat row beside the swimming pool, opened and ready, all of them covered by a large tarpaulin to keep the weapons hidden from the prying eyes of American satellites.
They would reload the empty tubes later. Right now, it was faster to grab new launchers. Several BCUs, or Battery Coolant Units, rested on the deck nearby. Each man plugged a tube from the BCU into the hand guard of his new weapon, charging it with argon gas and preparing it to fire.
Over the years, many of the weapons had become useless. Those battery packs needed careful maintenance to keep them charged; the argon gas canisters sometimes leaked. But enough had been kept in working order, or been refurbished by parts brought from other sources. There were even American weapons dealers willing to break their own laws and sell fresh battery packs to Saudi buyers, for enough money.
What was it Lenin had said about selling Capitalists the rope with which they would be hanged?
Astern, there was a flash, and a missile came streaking in low above the ships' wakes. The fourth helicopter had just fired a missile, which was arrowing straight toward the stern of the Pacific Sandpiper. At almost the same instant, Nejmuddin fired his Stinger at the hovering aircraft. Arif fired his weapon an instant later.
The trick here was to make the helicopter pilot veer off before the wire-guided missile struck its target, a deadly game of chicken. The British pilot held his figurative ground, however, dropping a string of bright-burning flares and holding his position until the TOW missile slammed into the open gun port above the Sandpiper's fantail and detonated with a savage blast. Only then did he swing his aircraft's nose to the right, beginning a hard turn away from the battle, but before he'd completed the turn the first Stinger streaked into the fuselage just behind the cockpit and exploded.
Barakat raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, studying the retreating Super Lynx. The first round of the battle had certainly gone to the jihadist fighters, but only one aircraft had been shot down, and though two of the others were damaged, they were still in the air, and all three were still armed and deadly. There were also four more helicopters in the air, the troop transports, still a couple of miles out.
The battle wasn't over yet.
Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Tuesday, 1348 hours EST
"It's not over yet," Jeff Rockman said, his eyes on the big screen, along with those of every other man and woman in the Deep Black ops room. Amethyst Two had just gone down into the sea.
"Yes, it is," Rubens replied softly. "They've lost the element of surprise."
On the enormous monitor filling much of the wall in front of the Art Room consoles and workstations, the battle unfolded in eerie, green-lit silence. The images this time were coming not from a U. S. spy satellite but from an aircraft currently orbiting nearly two hundred thousand feet above the North Atlantic, on the very edge of space.
Once, that aircraft had been known by the code name Aurora, and some insiders continued to refer to it as such. The actual name had been changed in 1985, when a military censor had missed the mention of "Aurora" in a Pentagon budget request to Congress, and the very existence of such an aircraft remained one of the U. S. government's most closely guarded secrets. With pulser ramjet engines fueled by liquid methane, the hypersonic Aurora could accelerate to mach 6 and reach altitudes of sixty miles or more, qualifying the handful of Air Force pilots flying them for astronauts' wings. This aircraft had left Groom Lake — the fabled Area 51 in southern Nevada — in the wee hours of Sunday m
orning, arriving at its operational airfield in Machrihanish, Strathclyde, on the tip of the Kintyre Penninsula in Scotland, just over an hour later.
From there, it had deployed out over the ocean to the targeted operational area for the past three days, tracking the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper closely. From its perch almost forty miles up, the dead-black, triangular aircraft remained invisible and unheard; its array of sophisticated cameras, imaging radars, and other senses gave observers at the NRO, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA unprecedented resolution, better even than the best views afforded by the Argus series or other spy satellites.
On the big wall display, the view had zoomed in on the flat, open deck between the Atlantis Queen's bridge house and Deck Twelve Terrace, and the open passageways leading aft on either side of the smokestack. There was a light cloud cover between the spy plane and the ship, so the view was illuminated in greens and gray tones, a computer-synthesized blending of radar, IR, and UV imaging.
When the terrorists pulled back the tarpaulin, the Stinger missile launchers in their opened crates had been easily identifiable. So were the BCU units on the deck, bleeding cold argon gas under IR wavelengths in thin, black clouds. Three of the terrorists, seen from almost directly overhead, ran aft past the smokestack.
Voices called back and forth from the Art Room's overhead speakers.
"This is Amethyst Three! Target lock!"
"Amethyst Three, Talisman One! Take your shot!"
"Three, firing!"
"Pull back," Rubens said. "Let's see the helicopters."
The view zoomed out, the two hijacked ships dwindling to side-by-side mismatched green rectangles against a black sea. Two helicopters were turning away to the north, one trailing hot smoke, while a spreading patch of white-on-black marked the crash site of Amethyst Two. Amethyst Three was dead astern of the two ships. They watched in silence from the Art Room as a wire-guided missile streaked away from Amethyst Three toward the stern of the Sandpiper, as, an instant later, the contrails of two Stinger missiles drew white lines out from the Adantis Queen's superstructure toward the British helicopter gunship.
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