Sea Of Terror db-8

by Stephen Coonts

  When the Sandpiper had swung north, however, the ASDS pilot, anticipating the vessel's attempt to close with the cruise ship, had been able to aim for a point well ahead of the Sandpiper, then turn north, with the transport pounding down on the midget sub's wake.

  Guided by satellite tracking systems, the sixty-foot submarine had allowed herself to be overtaken by the 322-foot freighter bearing down on her at twenty-two knots.

  The miniature submarine's maximum speed, while classified, was in excess of eight knots — about half of the plutonium transport's best speed. There was no way for the minisub to catch the freighter in a stern chase, but a bit of luck and some skillful seamanship on the part of the pilot and navigator had put the ASDS in the perfect position for an intercept at speed.

  As the freighter passed the submarine's starboard side, pushing the tiny vessel along on its bow wave, Gunner's Mate Chief Randolph Kellerman had popped the ASDS's upper hatch, leaned out into the cold, slashing spray, and fired a grappling line high into the night. He was aiming for the top of the high, dark, wet steel wall passing a few yards away. The grappling hook missed its hold on the first shot; he dropped the gun over the side, took a second from RM1 Garrison, who was clinging to the ladder inside the air lock just below him in the hatch, and took aim for a second shot.

  This time, the grapple snagged hard on the Sandpiper's port railing. The near end of the line was secured to a deck cleat and drawn taut. Inexorably the ASDS was drawn close alongside the larger vessel. Kellerman deployed several fenders to keep the hulls from grinding together, secured a second line aft, then unshipped a boarding hook. The device was a twenty-four-foot telescoping pole that extended and locked with a hook on the end, and a snap-down two-footed brace at the foot to hold it out from the hull.

  Swinging the hook over the railing directly overhead, Kellerman gave it an experimental tug, then started to climb.

  Bridge, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0538 hours EST

  Khalid hated the night.

  It hadn't always been that way. But six years earlier, he as Rahid Sayed as-Saadi, and his two older brothers, Hammed and Abdul, had been part of an insurgent team in Iraq, working with the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, known to the West as al-Qaeda in Iraq. The three brothers had been on a mission with three others in a suburb of Baghdad one night, well past midnight.

  They'd been told in the training camps that the night was their friend, that the American and Coalition forces feared the night and would fear the soldiers of Allah who made the night their own. The six of them had been crouched beside a pickup truck and a ruined mud-brick wall, preparing an old Russian artillery shell as an IED. The plan was to bury the shell beside the road, then detonate it by radio when an American patrol passed in the morning. With the bomb prepared, the six of them had knelt in a circle to pray.

  But first, the young as-Saadi had excused himself and walked a few meters away to urinate on the other side of the wall. The bomb — he'd been told later it must have been one of the damnable American "smart bombs" guided to their target by laser — had glided out of the night and landed squarely in the middle of the other five fedayeen as they prayed for success, exploding with savage ferocity and precision.

  He'd found himself almost ten meters away, unharmed but stunned, his ears ringing and blood streaming from his nose. The wall had been leveled, the truck shredded. By the firelight of the burning fuel tank he'd found Abdul's head, lying on the road, the eyes wide and staring.

  They'd never even had a chance to strike a single blow in the holy name of Allah.

  And that had been the beginning of the end of as-Saadi's faith. His brother fedayeen claimed to see the hand of God everywhere, with each victory won against the invading Coalition forces, with each American killed, with each enemy vehicle destroyed… and yet, step by step, battle by battle, the war in Iraq had been lost. Lost. It was unthinkable.

  And al-Qaeda hadn't exactly fought the war with intelligence and cunning. Savage, wasteful attacks against rival militias, against the Shia heretics, even against the growing Iraqi police and military forces, the American puppets, seemed to have a negative effect. The ordinary people of the villages and towns and city suburbs, the people al-Qaeda needed in order to hide, to move, to fight… as the years passed, those people had begun turning against the insurgents.

  Eventually Rahid as-Saadi had moved up in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, attracting the attention of several of the Leader's senior lieutenants. As-Saadi had submitted a plan to seize a British plutonium transport ship.. then amended it to include the cruise ship. By sailing both ships together into New York Harbor, he would ensure one of two outcomes would ensue. Either the radioactive cargo, or part of it, could be scattered across all of Manhattan as a deadly, poisonous dust on the wind, the poison blowing as far up the coast as Maine… or the Americans would be forced to sink both ships and kill over three thousand innocent people to prevent that far greater disaster. America would be humiliated before the world.

  And Yusef Khalid would die on the Adantis Queen's bridge, claiming vengeance for Abdul and for Hammed, but, more important, focusing the cause of Jihad back where it belonged… not on religious extremism, not on the differences between Sunni and Shia, but on the need to strike the hated West again and again and yet again at the points where they were most vulnerable.

  Iraq and Afghanistan had bled al-Qaeda nearly dry. A successful attack, one killing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, from New Jersey to Maine and crippling the American economy by poisoning ships and docks and ports and cargoes all along the northeastern seaboard… that would bring fresh and eager recruits flocking to the Cause. They would come, they would train, they would strike, and they would continue striking until America was humbled, until America was destroyed.

  And Hammed and Abdul and Rahid himself would again have peace.

  In the meantime, he dreaded the night, and the Americans who'd made it their own…

  SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0538 hours EST

  Kellerman had practiced this climb hundreds of times, but he'd not expected to be making it while the ship he was boarding was surging ahead at twenty knots or more. Twice he'd nearly fallen, but at last he grabbed the lowest line of the safety railing along the ship's bulwark and rolled himself over onto the deck.

  They'd deliberately positioned the ASDS alongside the Sandpiper directly beside the aft end of the deckhouse. The midget sub was invisible to radar and all but invisible optically to any lookouts. Unless their luck was very bad, the SEALs should be able to get aboard without being seen.

  But Murphy is an uninvited guest at every military evolution. Forward, just five yards away along the covered passageway between deckhouse and railing, a watertight door swung open and two men stepped out. Both had AK-47s slung over their shoulders.

  Kellerman was wearing standard VBSS gear, including combat harness and black wet suit, his face blacked, a AN/ PVS-14D night-vision monocular over his right eye and a watch cap over his head. He was carrying an H&K SD5 strapped to his back along with a rolled-up caving ladder, but getting his primary weapon unhooked and into play would be too noisy, with too much movement, with the enemy just a few steps away. If they turned to face aft…

  Kellerman was already unholstering his pistol, the Navy version of the P226, a sound suppressor already screwed over the muzzle. One of the men leaned against the railing, looking out over the sea as he struck a match and lit a cigarette. The other turned and looked straight at Kellerman.

  "Min haida?" the man said. The words sounded calm, perhaps curious. It was so dark he probably wasn't seeing anything more threatening than a shadow crouched on the deck. Two-handed, Kellerman fired and kept firing, snapping round after round into first one man and then the other, shifting his aim back and forth as the two tumbled back from the railing. One tried to reach for his rifle, then slumped with two holes side by side just above his left eye.

  Swiftly Kellerman reloaded his pistol, t
hen holstered it. He unhooked the caving ladder from the back of his harness, attached the free end to the railing, and let the roll deploy itself down the side of the ship. Garrison was already climbing the boarding hook, coming up hand over hand as Kellerman had done. Lieutenant Rogers was already in the ASDS hatch, securing the base of the caving ladder and preparing to come aboard.

  The two bodies were dragged aft and sent tumbling over the fantail. Kellerman then unshipped his H&K and took up a security position forward of the ladder, waiting as the rest of his team came on board.

  Cougar Twelve

  Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen

  Friday, 0540 hours EST

  Dean stood beside the massive security door, exchanging glances with the other three, Brisard, Morgan, and Henderson, close behind him. "Ready?" he asked, and all three nodded.

  Dean and Brisard carried H&Ks, Morgan a CAR-15, and Henderson his full-auto shotgun, still loaded with 19mm frag-12s. The door was locked, of course, and the ID key cards they all carried no longer worked.

  But they had another means of entry. Dean reached into his retrieved combat harness and pulled out a small, waterproof pouch. Inside was a laminated card a bit larger than a postage stamp. Taking the card, he positioned it over the thumbprint reader and pressed the activation button.

  Their secret door-opening device was actually nothing more than a laser photocopy of the thumbprint of David Llewellyn, the ship's chief security officer. His prints, of course, were on file back in Southampton, and Sir Charles Mayhew had arranged to fax them out to the Eisenhower. Since Llewellyn's thumbprint was the default print for all print readers on the ship, it gave them access to all doors with print readers.

  What Dean had never known before was that a print reader could be spoofed by a photocopy; so much for Hollywood and its use of bad men's fingertips to access the things.

  The machine hummed, a band of light moved along the touch screen, and the door clicked open. Dean stood aside as Henderson and Morgan rolled through. Forward was a short passageway leading past the radio room on the left, with the bridge itself just beyond. The radio room door was open, and Morgan opened up with his CAR-15, firing short, precise bursts that cut down two terrorists seated at the console side by side. A second door was open, leading onto the bridge; Morgan pulled a flash-bang from his combat vest, pulled the pin, and tossed it through. Brisard, meanwhile, went up to the first bridge door, still closed, and braced against the bulkhead.

  The flash-bang went off with a shrill explosion of sound and a literally blinding chain of dazzling flashes, the charge designed to stun, blind, deafen, and disorient anyone within range. Henderson rushed through the radio room door, followed closely by Morgan, as Brisard and Dean went through the other. Explosive shotgun blasts shredded one terrorist near the chart table, who was fumbling with his AK; Morgan cut down the tango at the helm.

  Dean caught a flash of movement at the door leading out onto the port wing of the bridge. "I've got him!" he yelled.

  "Radio room, two tangos down!" Morgan snapped over the combat frequency. "Bridge, two tangos down. One runner. Bridge secure!"

  Dean rushed out into the night, looking around. A ladder led down.

  Khalid was below, descending.

  SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0542 hours EST

  Kellerman led the way to the Sandpiper's bridge. Five SEALs followed him as Lieutenant Rogers led the rest down into the bowels of the ship, splitting into three fire teams to hit the engine room, the crew's quarters, and the common room — the largest compartment on the ship save for the holds forward, and the likeliest place for the Sandpiper's crew to be held.

  Kellerman pounded up a ship's ladder, reaching the top just as two men burst from a cabin farther down the passageway. One threw a hand grenade, which flew past Kellerman's head and clanged off the deck below. "Cover!" QMI John Podesta yelled as the other four SEALs crouched and turned away to minimize the effects of the blast. Kellerman opened up full auto on the two tangos in front of him, the sound-suppressed rounds snapping as they slammed through both men and took them down.

  Both, Kellerman noted as he passed, were Asians, Japanese, he thought. Odd. His briefing had said they'd be facing Islamic fundamentalists, not Japanese. Where the hell had they come from?

  He would photograph them later, after the ship was secure. If there was a later.

  Cold Steel had been sent in with the assumption that the tangos would not have explosives set around the remaining radioactive material forward. Those one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the hold's deck were simply too huge, too thick-walled, too well cushioned, to breach with anything less than a few hundred tons of explosives. The VBSS team was concentrating, then, on securing the bridge, engineering, and the crew.

  But there were never any guarantees in this line of work, and the tangos were perfectly capable of pulling off an unexpected and last-second kick to the nuts.

  There was nobody else in the room from which the two Japanese had emerged. Kevin Smith was injured, his ears bleeding from the grenade blast. He sat on the lower step of the ladder while the rest of the SEALs continued their climb.

  The bridge was just ahead, and two decks up.

  Cougar Twelve

  Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen

  Friday, 0543 hours EST

  Khalid was ten feet below the port side bridge wing, swiftly descending the vertical ladder past Deck Eleven. Dean leaned over the railing and fired, but the ladder had safety hoops encircling it every few feet, and the bullets ricocheted into the night. An instant later, more bullets snapped in, these coming from somewhere aft. Dean looked up and saw the muzzle flashes — gunmen hidden on Deck Eleven, just in front of the ship's smokestack, which was just barely visible in the darkness.

  Dean was fully illuminated by light spilling from the bridge behind him, a perfect target.

  Khalid reached an open platform on Deck Ten; according to the plans he'd studied, there was a door there leading into Kleito's Temple.

  A bullet struck Dean's vest, slamming him painfully back a step. In a second or two, Khalid would be back inside the ship, and if he discarded his passkey, it would be easy to lose him.

  A bullet grazed Dean's left arm, a fierce burn; Dean vaulted the railing and fell…

  Cougar Six

  Aft Cargo Hold, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0543 hours EST

  David Yancey lay on his back, fighting back the pain. The bruise where the tango had hit Yancey's vest was throbbing, and he thought there might be a broken rib there. Kevlar vests were lifesavers, but they weren't perfect.

  More serious were the wounds in his side and leg, where shrapnel from the grenade had missed the vest and punctured him. His fingertips came away wet with blood when he touched those spots.

  Oh… and there remained the little matter of radiation from the opened MOX canisters in the trucks. He'd been here… how long? Ten minutes, maybe.

  "How are you doing, David?" Rubens' voice said over his helmet radio.

  "Okay, sir. Listen… I think I have it doped out."

  "David, you need to crawl away from those trucks. The farther you are from the MOX canisters, the better."

  He tried to move, and gasped as the pain hit him. He shook his head, trying to clear it. "Listen… don't want to pass out. They have those crates of C-4 just tumbled inside the trucks every which way, y'know?"

  "The EOD and NEST people will be there soon. They'll take care of it."

  "That grenade popped out from under a box. I think they have a lot of grenades inside all three trucks, sir. It would be a simple way to booby-trap them… put eight or ten grenades under those boxes and between boxes and tucked in everywhere, all of them with the pins pulled… "

  "The EOD people will take care of it, son. You just try to get away from those trucks."

  "The thing I can't figure is… I can feel the ship rolling a little right now, the deck moving under my back. If the weather got rough, like it was the other night, some o
f those boxes could shift. All it would take would be one armed hand grenade to set off all the grenades, all the blasting caps… and the whole mountain of C-4 would go up"

  Chapter 28

  Cougar Twelve, Dean Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen Thirty miles south of Nantucket Friday, 0543 hours EST

  Dean plummeted through the night, feetfirst, his H&K in his right hand, his left outstretched for balance and to grab at Khalid if he missed.

  He almost missed, coming down immediately behind the Saudi terrorist, grabbing as he fell, crashing against the man and slamming both of them sideways against a railing. White pain shot up Dean's leg with the impact. The H&K went spinning into the night. Khalid snarled and twisted and tried to turn, bringing his AK up; Dean slammed the heel of his palm against Khalid's nose, slammed it as hard as he could, and felt cartilage snap with the blow.

  Khalid yelped and tried to pull away. Dean held tight with one arm and slammed Khalid's face and jaw again and again until the terrorist finally managed to hit Dean hard in the chest with the muzzle of his AK and break free.

  Dean felt the pain screaming up from his left ankle; he must have broken it in the fall. Khalid took an unsteady couple of steps backward, his face a mask of blood, his teeth showing bright through the blood as he raised his AK-47.

  The gunshot was startling and unexpected…

  SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0544 hours EST

  Kellerman signaled to Podesta and Vance, counting down the seconds, three… two… one… got Jakowski tossed a flash-bang in through the open door, and Podesta and Vance rolled through into the darkened room filled with smoke and screaming. Kellerman and Jakowski were next, with Herrera bringing up the rear.

  Sound-suppressed gunfire snapped and hissed. A tango at the helm crumpled and collapsed; another lying on the deck, covering his ears, jumped and twisted and lay still; a third fired blindly with his AK, spraying high until two 9mm rounds punctured his skull. Two more tried to run out onto the port side wing of the bridge and were cut down at the door.