Sea Of Terror db-8

by Stephen Coonts

  Ghailiani turned in his seat, his eyes locking with Khalid's. "I don't know, either," he said. "All systems appear to be functioning normally, except for the cameras and the security scanners. We could try to reboot. That will take about twenty minutes."

  Khalid considered Ghailiani for a second. The man was… calm, icy calm, when everyone else in the Security-IT suite was stressed to the point of near hysteria.

  What had the man done?

  Probably nothing. Ghailiani was weak and indecisive, paralyzed by the threat to his family. He wouldn't have done anything on his own. His current calm was probably simple fatalism… a numb acceptance that things were out of his control.

  But Khalid would definitely ask some more probing questions later, perhaps after having the men at the Millbrook safehouse work on Ghailiani's daughter for a time and send him some more photographs of the process.

  "Twenty minutes is too long," Khalid said. "You have five minutes to tell me what is happening to the security systems on this ship."

  He turned and left, walking swiftly through the Security Office and out into the Deck Eleven passageway. Through the security doors — he was relieved to see that they, at least, were still working as he swiped his key card — and up the service stairwell beyond. He emerged, seconds later, in the passageway leading to the radio room and the bridge.

  "The Americans are continuing their transmissions, Amir," Fakhet told him as he passed the open door to the radio room. "They say they will give us whatever we want, but that we — "

  "Ignore them," Khalid snapped. He used his card to go onto the bridge. Three of his men looked at him curiously, Obeidat, Mohawal, and Abdallah. Abdul Mohawal was at the ship's wheel.

  "Come hard right!" Khalid ordered. "Steer north!"

  "Yes, Amir!"

  "Fakhet!"

  "Yes, Amir!" the radio operator called from the next compartment.

  "Call the Pacific Sandpiper. We need them!"

  "At once, Amir!"

  It wasn't yet too late.

  Cougar Twelve 40deg 45' N, 70deg 07' W Friday, 0522 hours EST

  "This is Eleven. Target is changing course," sounded in Dean's helmet receiver. "Stay with him."

  Dean saw the ship turning, but the movement was slow and ponderous. The hijackers were probably hoping to throw off the landings of any more parachutists, but a cruise ship of that size simply couldn't maneuver like a speedboat. Dean watched the silhouette of Gene Podalski, Cougar Eleven, touch down on the brightly lit pool deck now just a few hundred feet ahead. He tugged slightly at the ram-air chute's controls, bleeding off some of his forward speed, and held his breath as the deck swooped up to meet him.

  He touched down on the hard wooden planking, taking a few steps to keep his balance, then collapsed the chute behind him. The other Cougar team members crouched on the deck, either forming a defensive perimeter, moving inside, or gathering up their chutes and jump gear.

  They'd all made it! Some of the op planners, he'd known, had insisted that it would be impossible to get all of the chutists down safely onto that tiny aft deck of a moving ship. In fact, part of each man's gear included a tightly packaged, inflatable one-man raft, just in case he missed the target and ended up in the sea. It looked like Brisard had managed to fall into one of the aft deck pools, but he was the only one who'd gotten wet.

  Dean unsnapped his harness, let his billowing chute, reserve chute, and harness go over the side. As he stepped inside the casino, he saw Carolyn J. Howorth and felt a further surge of relief.

  "Hey, CJ," he said, pulling off his oxygen mask, then raising his monocular. "Enjoying your cruise?"

  "Charlie!" Her eyes were wide. "What the hell are you doing here?"

  "Rescuing you," he said. "Unless you insist on doing it yourself."

  Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland Friday, 0524 hours EST

  "Looks like trouble headed their way, sir," Caravaggio said.

  Rubens looked at the big screen with its side-by-side schematics of the Atlantis Queen's decks. A tight group of green dots was clustered in the Grand Staircase on Decks Seven and Eight. They appeared to be going up, toward Deck Nine. "Dean?" he said. "Yeah. Copy."

  "You've got eight hostiles one deck down, coming up the main staircase. They're moving slow, but you don't have more than a couple of minutes."

  "Right."

  A drive-by upload, the GCHQ woman had called it. Send an e-mail in HTML format to a target computer. Get someone with access to that e-mail to open it and click on a hypertext line. The result was an influx of code into the target computer — a carefully crafted virus, in fact — that took over that computer and gave the sender administrative control.

  In short, the Adantis Queen's security and IT computer network was now being run by the Art Room, almost a thousand miles away. So far as the hijackers were concerned, everything was running normally… or it had been until Rubens had ordered the cameras switched off and the security overwatch display rerouted to the Art Room and switched off on the ship.

  It gave Dean and his men a technological edge where they most needed one.

  Cougar Twelve

  Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen

  Friday, 0524 hours EST

  "Keep us posted," Dean said. Swiftly he started peeling off his clothing.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Howorth asked.

  "Plan A," Dean replied, standing on one foot as he peeled off the jumpsuit. "Walters! You're with me!"

  "Got it."

  Dean had to sit down to peel off the Polartec long johns. "The rest of you.. police the area and get yourselves and all of your gear behind that bar. And… someone get that guy down off the robot."

  Operation Neptune had come in with two possible mission plans, depending on the situation they discovered when they got on board. While they were prepared to launch a general assault — Plan B — with some of them heading down to the cargo hold and the rest heading for the bridge, they were also prepared to carry out the original plan, which had been to infiltrate the ship by posing as passengers. Each of the Black Cat parachutists had a change of civilian clothing — jeans, pullover sweaters, socks, tennis shoes — rolled up inside the rucksack he'd carried secured to his harnesses during their jump.

  "They're all on Deck Nine," Rubens' voice said in Dean's head. "Looks like they're sorting things out among themselves."

  Dean fastened his jeans and tugged his shoes on — to hell with the socks. As he dressed, he glanced around the casino, looking at the crowd surrounding them, trying to take their measure. A number of them were elderly. Others were younger but scared. There was always the possibility that one or more terrorists had infiltrated themselves among the hostages. In fact, in a normal hostage crisis takedown, the rescue team would be using zip strips to immobilize everybody they found inside, the objective, just in case.

  That simply wasn't practical here — or desirable, given that they might need to move these people out quickly. But Dean was alert to the possibility that not all of these civilians were innocents.

  He pulled his sweater down over his head, unholstered his pistol, a SIG Sauer P226, screwed the sound suppressor onto the muzzle, and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back, tugging the sweater's hem low to hide it. Nearby, Walters did the same.

  "Listen up, people!" Dean called. "When they come in here, as far as you know, a bunch of guys in black shot those three, then headed up the steps outside. We'll be watching, in case they try anything, okay?"

  The crowd responded with a murmured assent.

  "When are you getting us off the ship?" an older man called.

  "As soon as we can. Be patient."

  "What if they're coming to kill us?" Howorth asked.

  "We don't plan on letting them," Dean replied. "Your e-mails said they were probably taking people who got in the way to the theater, right?"

  "That's right. Deck One, toward the bow."

  "If that bunch of tangos coming af
t don't find us, either they're going to herd you all forward to be with the rest, or…"

  "Or what?"

  "Or we'll take them down here," Dean said. He wouldn't admit to her that those tangos could be an execution squad. That was unlikely, though. The terrorists wouldn't start killing their hostages until they knew things were going bad.

  Ten of the Black Cat team members vanished with weapons and gear into the bar area to one side of the casino, ducking low to stay out of sight. It wouldn't hide them if the tangos searched carefully, but Dean doubted that they would be in a patient mood.

  The young man with glasses who'd been hovering near Howorth did something with his laptop, and the robot near the outside door opened its arms. Walters dragged the body to a spot near the door onto the deck and left it there with the AK beside it.

  "Remember!" Dean told the quietly watching people. "Guys in black came in, you're not sure how many. Maybe five or six. They shot these three, then went up the outside stairs." According to the ship's deck plans he'd been studying, there were two sets of curving steps, port and starboard, leading from Deck Nine up to Deck Ten and an outside promenade running forward to the Kleito Bar. It would be a quick and immediate way to reach the bridge and the Security Office, an obvious attack route.

  "They're coming your way," Rubens said in Dean's ear. "They're at the door"

  Dean and Walters mixed in with the civilians, urging them to scatter more around the casino rather than provide a bunched-up target. The door at the back of the casino banged open, and six men in khaki with AK-47s burst inside.

  They came in with their guns raised, ready to start shooting. "Everybody stay where you are!" one shouted, his voice shrill. "Everybody don't move!"

  "Don't shoot!" Dean yelled. "They're not here!" This was the critical moment. If this was an execution squad, they could start shooting in an instant. Dean wanted to get them talking instead.

  "Who is not here?" one of the gunmen yelled back. The others advanced cautiously, weapons up.

  "A bunch of guys all in black parachuted down on the pool deck!" Howorth called out. "They… they shot your men!…"

  "They're not here," the guy with the laptop added. "They all went back outside and up the stairs to Deck Ten!"

  "How many?" the hijacker demanded. "How many were there?"

  "I'm not sure," an elderly woman on the other side of the room said. "Maybe five or six?"

  The tangos advanced, then, some moving among the passengers, roughly shoving them aside, others making for the door leading outside. One checked the dead terrorist inside; another checked the two on the deck. One of them had a small, handheld radio and was talking into it in rapid-fire Arabic.

  Dean watched as the terrorists gave the room a cursory check, though they never even approached the bar. The one with the radio began gesturing and shouting. "All of you! We move you to safe location."

  "Wait!" Howorth said. "Where are you taking us?"

  "We take you someplace safe. Now move! Move!"

  Dean allowed himself to be herded along, one of the passengers. The skinny guy started to pick up his laptop, but one of the gunmen jabbed the muzzle of his AK against the guy's side. "No! You leave it!"

  "But that's my computer!"

  "Leave it, Jerry!" Howorth said. "Damn it, you can get it later!…"

  The crowd of civilians began moving out into the passageway, hurried along by their captors.

  A group of eighteen or twenty of the civilians in the casino were older people, in their sixties or seventies or even older. One was a man in a wheelchair. Several of the women had walkers, and more were leaning on canes. As the gunmen hurried the mob forward toward the door, the group swiftly fell behind, unable to keep up. One of the gunmen shoved an elderly woman and knocked her down. The gunman snarled something and raised his rifle as if he was going to strike her with it.

  Dean whirled and caught the terrorist's arm, stopping him. The man gaped at him, eyes wide.

  "Don't," Dean said in a firm voice. "Don't. They're old; they can't hurt you."

  The gunman wrenched his arm free, then swung the butt of his rifle at Dean's face. Dean sidestepped, but the stick grazed the side of his head, knocking him back a step. The gunman hovered there, as though trying to decide who to kill, Dean or the old woman.

  " 'Do no harm to the elderly, and do not strike the infirm, for it is hateful in the eyes of Allah,'" Dean said, touching the wound on his scalp with his fingertips. They came away slick with blood. "Isn't that what your Qur'an says?"

  "You… you know the holy book, the words of the Prophet?"

  "A little. I know it teaches you that if you kill the innocent, you burn in Hell!"

  The man's eyes widened a bit more. "Leave them, Rashid!" another gunman said.

  Turning suddenly, he waved the elderly group away. "Go back!" he said. "All of you! Go back! Stay here!"

  Dean helped the woman up off the deck. "Thank you, young man," she said. "Just like Bruce Willis!"

  A passenger, an older man, took her hand. "Come along, Ms. Jordan. Let's stay out of their way."

  One of the gunmen was left behind to collect the three dropped AK assault rifles. The others urged the younger captives forward. One nudged Dean in the ribs with his rifle. "Now move! Quick! Yallah!"

  Dean let himself be nudged along.

  "That was very brave," Howorth said quietly, moving close beside him as they moved into the passageway. "Do you really know the Qur'an?"

  Dean glanced around to make sure none of the terrorists was within earshot. "No," he whispered, "and neither do they. Most of them, anyway."

  "What do you mean?"

  "In my experience, most Christians don't know the Bible very well. My guess is that most Muslims are the same with the Qur'an. The fundamentalists like to pick and choose which verses they'll use, and argue about interpretations… but only the scholars know the book well. Just like with most Christians."

  "And my guess is that you're damned lucky!"

  The group hurried forward through the ship.

  Bridge, Atlantis Queen 40deg 45' N, 70deg 07' W Friday, 0528 hours EST

  "Very well," Khalid said, speaking into the radio handset. "Hurry!"

  He handed the microphone back to Fakhet, then stepped back out onto the bridge. The Pacific Sandpiper was a mile away, and it would take her time to complete her turn.

  Khalid considered keeping the Adantis Queen on the same heading, due north. The coast of Massachusetts was out there, the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. If he ran the Queen aground there, it would create an appropriately spectacular disaster.

  But not, perhaps, spectacular enough. Al-Qaeda's message would be so much sharper, so much more to the point, if it was delivered to Manhattan. "Bring us back to the left," he told the man at the helm. "And reduce speed to ten knots." Khalid wanted the Pacific Sandpiper to catch up with them.

  Aziz had reported in moments before. Passengers in the casino said they'd seen black-clad men parachute onto the pool deck — probably SAS. They'd apparently killed three guards back there and now were on Deck Ten, moving forward.

  Khalid retrieved his AKM assault rifle from the electronic chart table and checked the action. Let them come. He was ready for them.

  As for the passengers, he'd ordered them moved to the Neptune Theater. If there was going to be a firelight, he wanted them in a controlled place, where he could have his men begin shooting them if the attackers got too close.

  And as a last resort, he would detonate the radioactive canisters in the hold.

  Neptune Theater, Atlantis Queen

  Friday, 0529 hours EST

  Yaqub Nehim grinned down at the struggling woman. "Perhaps you would like it if we tied your hands again?" He let his hand move along her leg, caressing.

  "Get your hands off of me, you asshole!" the woman screamed. She tried to slap him, and he blocked the clumsy swing easily.

  "You son of a bitch! Leave her alone!" The ship's chief security
officer lunged at him, but Nehim whipped the muzzle of his pistol around and caught the man on the side of his face.

  "Yaqub!" Ra'id Hijazi called from farther up the theater aisle. "Leave the woman alone! This is not the time!"

  "Mind your own business, Ra'id! I've been looking forward to this since we came on board!" Yaqub gave a harsh, bitter laugh. "It's not like any of us will survive this voyage, right?"

  "Women are a trap of Satan!" Hijazi said, quoting an ancient hadith, a traditional quote from the sayings of Mohammed.

  "'Forbidden are married women,'" Nehim replied, "'except those you own as slaves!' Surah Four-twenty! We can do as we like with these whores!"

  It wasn't rape and it wasn't illegal when the woman refused to be properly dressed. These Western bitches paraded around half-naked all the time, putting themselves on display. Often they did not even go out accompanied by a husband or another male relative. They deserved whatever they got. In fact, most fundamentalist Islamic regimes condoned forcing condemned female prisoners to have sex, since the holy Qur'an forbade putting a virgin to death.

  He doubted that these women were virgins, but they all were certainly under a sentence of death. It wouldn't hurt to make sure, just with one of them…

  Yaqub Nehim cared little for the Sharia or the tenets of his religion, and his knowledge of the Qur'an extended just far enough to provide a rationalization for what he would have done anyway. He'd gotten into trouble with the authorities in his native Saudi Arabia over his attempt to have sex with a foreign woman, an Italian, in Medina five years ago. The ulema hearing Yaqub's case, the religious judge, had offered him a choice — prison or joining a jihadist group dedicated to destroying the enemies of Islam.

  He'd accepted recruitment. He knew what Saudi prisons were like.

  As for accepting martyrdom… well, there was still time. Perhaps one of the lifeboats…

  The door at the back of the theater banged open, and passengers spilled inside. Nehim let go of the struggling woman and stood, raising his AK-47 in case this was the vanguard of a prisoner revolt. Then he saw Aziz and Baqr and others of his mujahideen comrades, funneling the prisoners in through the door.