"Cold Steel!" Kellerman called over the combat channel. "Bridge clear! Bridge secure!"
Herrera was at the ship's wheel, his eyes startlingly wide against the blacking on his face. "Madre de Dios!"
Kellerman followed the other SEAL'S stare ahead, across the ship's forward deck to the black water beyond. The Adantis Queen was there, looming huge out of the predawn darkness, lights aglow at her bridge.
And the Pacific Sandpiper was headed straight toward her at twenty knots.
Cougar Twelve, Dean Deck Ten, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0544 hours EST
Dean flinched as the first shot rang out. The smile on Khalid's bloodied face froze, then melted as the terrorist leader took a step to the side, half-turning. The man standing in the doorway to Kleito's Temple fired his handgun once again, and Khalid collapsed to the deck.
The man emerging from the bar was wearing a Royal Sky Line security uniform. Tucking the pistol into his waistband, he stooped to help Dean.
"Thanks," Dean murmured. Reaction was setting in, adrenaline thundering through his body, and he was starting to shake.
"No," Mohamed Ghailiani told him. "Thank you.
Deck Five, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0545 hours EST
Yaqub Nehim had been looking for one of the empty staterooms, a place to hide with his two personal hostages until the enemy came for him or the ship was blown to bits. He'd bound both women's wrists at their backs with plastic zip strips and herded them along the passageways with his Russian-made Makarov pistol. There were a number of empty staterooms here, and if the explosives in the hold didn't explode, it would be hours before anyone found the three of them. Plenty of time…
On Deck Four, he'd discovered that his key card no longer worked. None of the doors he'd tried would open.
Something, he knew, was going seriously wrong. For several minutes the radio on his belt had sounded with several sharp calls in Arabic, and once he'd heard the chatter of an automatic weapon. On Deck Five he'd met Ra'id Hijazi, panting and wild-eyed, who'd confirmed that enemy commandos had killed all of the fedayeen brothers in the theater moments after Nehim had left with his captives, that only he had managed to escape.
Nehim's thoughts of venting his lust on the two women melted instantly. "What should we do?" he cried. A new thought struck him. "We should kill these two!"
"No!" Hijazi said. "There are hostages in the gambling place, old people, many of them. We will take these two, gather up the other hostages, and wait. We can use them to bargain for time."
Hijazi's sanctimonious quoting of the Qur'an had always irritated Nehim. "What happened to dying the martyr's death?"
"The plan is wrecked. We will never reach New York. But the ship may yet explode at any moment. We need time.
"The children in the hold must be dead by now."
Hijazi gave him a measuring look. "Yesterday, at the Amir's orders, Aziz, Al-Shafi, Haqqani, and I went down to the hold. We… arranged things so that the explosives will detonate easily. Very easily."
"How?"
"Never mind. But if the enemy commandos attempt to tamper with the crates on the trucks, if this ship runs aground, if we hit anything or anything hits us, believe me. The trucks will blow!"
"Perhaps one of the lifeboats. Nehim was thinking furiously. He could take one of the women as hostage, lower a boat —
"Fool!" Hijazi snarled. "In minutes these waters will be filled with enemy ships, the sky filled with their helicopters! No, if we hold many hostages at gunpoint, they will try to negotiate. We can kill a few at a time, to prove we mean business, to keep them from attacking. And while they negotiate, their people will attempt to dismantle the explosives in the truck."
"And we shall die."
"Martyrs' deaths, Yaqub." He gestured at the two disheveled women glaring at them from a few feet away. "We will find better than them in Paradise!"
Nehim had serious doubts about the Prophet's description of what awaited true believers in Paradise, but Hijazi's plan offered at least the possibility of escape. They were in the middle of an empty ocean. There was no chance that the cruise ship would run aground out here, or that anything would hit them.
He might survive yet.
SEAL VBSS Force Cold Steel Pacific Sandpiper Friday, 0545 hours EST
"Podesta!" Kellerman barked. "We need to turn now!"
QM1 John Podesta took the ship's wheel, spinning it hard to the right. "We won't stop in time," he said. "But the Queen is moving forward. Maybe we can miss her by passing astern!"
Kellerman hesitated, his hands above the two throttle levers, one for each of the Sandpiper's screws. His instinct was to throw the ship into reverse, to try to stop the leviathan before it collided with the ship now just five hundred yards ahead.
But with the rudder hard right, with the bow now slowly swinging to the right, toward the other ship's stern, throwing the screws in reverse would actually act against the turn. He remembered reading about some confusion on the bridge when the Titanic had spotted the iceberg, about how an attempt to turn away from the ice had actually swung the bow of the doomed ship toward it.
"That one," Podesta said, pointing at one of the side-by-side levers. "All back! The other one, full ahead!" In the old days, these levers would have been engine telegraphs, telling the crew in the engine room what to do. Nowadays the throttles were handled directly from the bridge-7-a good thing, since Kellerman hadn't yet heard the word from the lieutenant that the engine room was secure.
"Why aren't we turning?" Kellerman asked after a moment. The Atlantis Queen still loomed enormous just ahead.
"You don't turn these things on a dime, Chief," Podesta replied. "Or stop 'em on one, either. What the hell?"
Podesta was standing on tiptoes, looking down at the forward deck immediately ahead of the deckhouse. In the darkness, a half-dozen men were running forward, some clambering into the helicopter parked midway down the deck, others unfastening the lines securing the aircraft to the deck.
"This is Cold Steel Two," Kellerman called. Grabbing his H&K, he jogged for the port side bridge wing. "We have tangos on the forward deck! Looks like they're making for the helo!"
"It'll take 'em an hour to get that thing ready to fly," Vance told him.
As Kellerman left the enclosure of the bridge, he heard the shrill, rising whine of the helicopter's engine, saw the main rotor begin to turn. Two more tangos were running from the deckhouse as others climbed aboard. He shouldered his weapon and began firing. One of the hijackers fell. Another was hauled through the open doorway by a friend already on board.
The bastards had had the aircraft warmed up and ready.
The question was where they would go. The SEAL unit's pre-mission briefing had mentioned the helicopter, pointing out that by now it was probably so low on fuel it would be useless. Land lay forty miles to the north. They might make it… but would find themselves immediately surrounded by the authorities.
What the hell were they trying to do?
"Cold Steel, Cold Steel," Rubens' voice said over Kellerman's radio. "Take that helo down! Now!"
"Yes, sir!" He switched his H&K selector switch to full auto, raised the weapon, and began firing. With the integral suppressor, the H&K made little sound against the rising thunder of the helicopter's main rotor.
Jakowski was joining in from the opposite bridge wing, but the 9mm rounds had little punch to them. With an unsteady lurch, the helicopter lifted from the forward deck, its rotor arc barely clearing the traveling bridge gantry forward.
Kellerman kept firing until his magazine ran dry. He dropped the empty, slapped home a fresh magazine, chambered a round, and began firing again. By now, though, the helicopter was turning away, and Kellerman felt a cold chill of realization.
That helicopter wasn't headed for the mainland.
It was dropping low, low over the black water, nose down and accelerating as it headed straight for the cruise ship ahead.
Pyramid Club Casino, Atlantis Queen
Friday, 0545 hours EST
Yaqub Nehim shoved one of the women hard ahead, sending her sprawling onto the floor as they entered the casino. "Nobody move!" he screamed, holding the other woman close against his chest, the Makarov pressed up against the side of her head.
"Move to the back of the room!" Hijazi added, gesturing with his AK. "Quickly! Quickly!"
The old people did as they were told. "I hope you assholes know you're both going to die," one old woman said.
"And you will die with us, crone," Hijazi said. He strode closer to the crowd. "But if you all do exactly what we tell you, you might live a little longer!"
Nehim was feeling more confident now, more in control. They had twenty hostages here, all of them old people or women. The enemy commandos wouldn't dare attack them now.
And he might yet get out of this.
"Please!" the young woman in his grasp begged, twisting, whimpering. "Please let me go!"
He let her turn around until she was facing him, then squeezed her close with his left arm. To Nehim's eyes, to his culture, the whore was half-naked, her legs bare, the swell of her breasts clearly defined beneath the Western T-shirt she wore.
"No, whore," he told her. He brought his left hand up to grab the long hair at the back of her head, dragging her face closer to his. His right hand, holding the pistol, waved at the darkness beyond the casino's windows. "You and I have the rest of the night to enjoy!"
He tried to kiss her.
Her knee came up hard, a sharp, savage shock squarely into his groin.
Gunfire cracked, two shots. At first, the sagging Nehim thought that Hijazi had opened fire… but as he dropped to his knees he saw that a man had been hiding an AK-47 behind the back of another elderly man just in front of him, that it had been he who'd brought the weapon up and fired two rounds into Hijazi, who was collapsing onto the deck.
Nehim started to raise his pistol, but one of the elderly women nearby whipped her cane up and around and cracked it hard across his wrist, sending the gun flying. An instant later, the cold, black muzzle of a second AK slammed hard against the side of his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a woman who might have been his grandmother beaming at him.
"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," she told him sweetly. "Arnie Schwarzenegger said that, in True Lies — "
"It was Bruce Willis in Die Hard," another grandmother, the one with the cane, said. "Get your movie quotes straight, Anne."
She picked up the dropped Makarov and smiled at him.
Cougar Twelve, Dean
Deck Ten, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0546 hours EST
Dean sat with his back against the railing. "You're Ghailiani?"
"Yes, sir," the Ship's Security officer said. He quirked a smile. "Nice trick with the computer virus, and locking all the doors."
"How'd you get out of Security?"
"The others were distracted, trying to figure out what you did. I slipped out, took a gun, and came down to Kleito's Temple before your people locked the doors."
"Why Kleito's Temple?"
He nodded at Khalid's body. "Because I knew that bastard would run if the bridge was threatened. If I went up there myself, I'd never have gotten close to him. But if he ran, if he came down here…" Another shrug. "I just had to wait and see which ladder he came down, port or starboard."
"Your family's okay, by the way," Dean said. "SAS released them yesterday. They weren't hurt."
Ghailiani smiled again. "I saw. It's been… a nightmare."
Motion and a flutter of sound pulled at Dean's eye, and he looked out over the water, toward the south. The sky was growing lighter in the east — the approaching dawn — and the other ship, the Pacific Sandpiper was there in the south surging directly toward them, her bow wake a white mustache against the darkness.
Worse, a helicopter was flying toward them — an Agusta
Westland Super Puma. It had just lifted off the Sandpiper's deck and was accelerating straight toward the Queen.
There were still tangos on the Queen's upper areas, outside on Deck Eleven, the ones who'd been shooting at him a moment ago. Possibly the helicopter was flying to pick them up… or to bring reinforcements for the terrorists from the other ship, but Dean had a feeling that the bad guys had something else, something deadlier, in mind.
"Rubens!" he called over his comm implant. "They're trying to ram! The Sandpiper… and there's a helicopter that looks like it's lining up to crash us!"
"We're on it," Rubens replied.
"Tell them to turn the Queen to port!" By turning into the attack, the Queen might be able to swing her stern out of the way. Her Azipod thrusters gave her a lot more maneuverability than a ship her size with conventional screws.
"We're on it," Rubens repeated.
The helicopter was closer, much closer, looming huge… close enough that Dean could see the pilot at the right-seat controls…
The missile streaked in out of nowhere, coming from the west on a slender white contrail. It struck the Super Puma squarely in its starboard fuselage, exploding in orange flame.. and then a far larger explosion followed, a vast and thundering boom across the water as the aircraft was completely engulfed in flame and black smoke. Burning chunks of wreckage scattered through the air, and something struck the Queen's hull with a metallic clang a few yards away.
The fireball plunged suddenly down, striking the water twenty yards clear of the ship. Dean released the breath he'd been holding; the size of that explosion meant the terrorists had had explosives inside the helicopter, a last-ditch effort to detonate the explosives in the Queen's hold and scatter radioactive death across New England.
It had been that close…
With a roar, a British Sea Harrier flew in low above the water, banking as it passed the surging circle of white water where the Super Puma had gone down. Dean heard shouts from farther aft, and the rattle of automatic weapons.
Shit. There were still tangos back there, and they might still have Stinger missiles.
"Help me up!" He'd lost his H&K, but he had Khalid's AK-47 and Ghailiani's pistol. The terrorists were on the Deck Ten pool area, behind Kleito's Temple and the ship's health club. Once on his feet, Dean found he could manage a halt-footed limp. It wasn't broken then, just sprained… but getting around was going to be damned tough.
With Ghailiani helping him, he plunged back inside the ship.
Cougar Three, Brisard Deck Eleven, Atlantis Queen Friday, 0548 hours EST
Guided by Rubens and the Art Room, Tom Brisard had left one man at the ship's helm and led the rest aft, down one level to Deck Eleven, then out onto a raised promenade overlooking the Deck Ten Atlantean Grotto Pool area. Through their night-vision monoculars they could see five tangos there — three of them standing guard, the other two opening one of the long dark olive crates lying on the deck.
Brisard had been Army Delta Force before signing on with Black Cat… and before that he'd been an Army Special Forces staff sergeant, with experience both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, none of which had required him to parachute into swimming pools or hot tubs, thank God. He knew the others weren't going to let him live that one down, and he was briefly tempted to take out his embarrassment on the tangos in his sights.
"Take prisoners if you can," Rubens' voice reminded Brisard over his headset.
"Roger that," he replied in a whisper. The Black Cat personnel's emergence from the ship was silent, and the tangos never heard their approach. At the moment, all of them were staring off to port, where an approaching helicopter had just fallen into the sea and a British Sea Harrier was drifting slowly closer toward the ship's side. The terrorists appeared mesmerized by that shrieking, hovering apparition.
"Wakkif!" he shouted, targeting one of the thunderstruck men below. "Halt! Do not move!"
For a heart-pounding instant, commandos and terrorists faced one another across fifty feet or so of emptiness. A second Sea Harrier appeared, followed by the thunderous beat of more helicopters.
&nbs
p; Then, faced by the Sea Harriers' cannons, incoming helicopter transports, and the aimed weapons of the commandos on the railed balcony above them, the terrorists began dropping their weapons and raising their hands.
Health Club
Deck Ten, Atlantis Queen
Friday, 0548 hours EST
Fred Doherty put a hand on James Petrovich's shoulder.
"Don't worry, man," Petrovich said before Doherty could say a word. "I've got it and it's fucking great!"
Leaving Ames in the room, they'd emerged cautiously from the wardroom cabin where the terrorists had been keeping them along with Phillips and other bridge officers, slipping out after hearing what sounded like muffled shots or explosions and finding the guard posted outside of their room was gone.
There'd been no guards in front of the storage room where their cameras were being kept, either. They couldn't access the security door leading to the bridge and decided they didn't want to tangle with whoever was in there — Khalid or whoever had just stormed the ship. A body lying in the forward stairwell showed that a takedown was under way.
Instead, they'd made their way aft down Deck Ten, through the Kleito bar-restaurant area, and then past the cruise ship's large and rather formidably equipped health center.
Through the large glass windows at the aft wall of the exercise room, Doherty could see several terrorists standing pinned in a glare of light from the sky. There were helicopters as well; his time in the Navy years before had taught him to recognize both British Merlins and U. S. Navy Seahawks, and the pair of British jump jets hovering off the side of the ship were a nice, if noisy, extra touch.
Using his camera's night settings, Petrovich had started filming as the first black-clad commandos had begun fast-roping onto the deck…
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