Sea Of Terror

Chapter 13

Commander Christopher Pryor sat in the cockpit of his Sea Harrier FRS.2, watching the screen of his radar as the flight vectored toward the target as the ocean's surface blurred beneath the belly of his aircraft, less than a hundred feet below. His wingman, Commander Vincent Spick, was parked off his right wing and slightly behind, in the four o'clock position. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine at his back thundered raw power as the two Harriers hurtled southwest at over six hundred knots.

"Alpha One, this is Alpha Two," Spick's voice called over his helmet headset. "I have visual on the target."

Pryor glanced up. Sure enough, there it was — a cruise ship gleaming a dazzling white in the afternoon sun, still a good twenty miles off. "Copy that, Two," he replied. "I see him. Throttle back to three hundred." "One, Two. Roger three hundred." The two Harriers slowed rapidly. In the dense, wet air this close to the deck, moisture streamed from the upper curves of their wings like thick fog.

"King's Palace, this is Alpha One," he called. "Visual on target. We are on intercept approach." He flipped a switch on his console. "Cameras are rolling."

"Copy that, Alpha One," replied the voice of Flight Control back aboard the Ark Royal "Get us some good pictures."

Except for a pair of 30mm Aden Mk 4 gun pods apiece, the Harriers were unarmed. Both, however, had been fitted with reconnaissance pods, streamlined cylinders slung like bombs from their bellies containing highspeed cameras at both optical and infrared wavelengths as well as forward-looking and side-scan radar. The Sea Harrier had been designed with both fighter and reconnaissance roles in mind, and it performed both well.

Pryor brought the nose a bit higher and began angling the main engine thrust down until his Harrier seemed to be floating in mid-air, drifting forward just a bit faster than the ship was moving. He peered out the side of his canopy, studying the ship.

She was huge, a third again longer than the Ark Royal and riding considerably higher above the water. Her sides looked like cliffs closely pocked by balconies on the middecks, by portholes in long lines both higher up along the superstructure and closer to the water, and by broad expanses of glass at places like the bridge and wrapped around the aft portion of the superstructure. A large swimming pool formed a broad, rectangular patch of azure blue on her fantail; another, smaller pool was on the very top of the superstructure, between the rise of the bridge forward and the aft deckhouse and smokestack. As the Harriers slowly moved up the ship's starboard side, he could see people. Hundreds of them, appearing on the superstructure balconies, along the Promenade Deck encircling the deckhouse, and on the sundecks amidships and aft.

"King's Palace, Alpha One," he said. "I can see a lot of passengers. Some are waving. Everything looks normal."

"Copy One."

"I'm attempting to raise them now."

"Roger that. We are monitoring civilian channels."

Shifting to the radio frequency he'd been given during pre-flight on the Ark, Pryor began transmitting. "Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

There was no reply.

"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

As he spoke, he eased the Harrier around past the Atlantis Queen's bow, barely a hundred yards in front of her. As he did so, the bow, followed by the long forward deck and the high, blocky deckhouse of the second ship, edged into view. The Pacific Sandpiper was securely lashed to the Queen's port side. Pryor could see the hawsers connecting the vessels clearly, along with what looked like a gangway with safety rails going from the Sandpiper's deck into an open hatch in the Atlantis Queen's side.

"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?" He listened. "Pacific Sandpiper, Pacific Sandpiper, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"

Damn it, why don't they respond?

Dr. Stephen Penrose looked up in irritation as thunder rumbled outside. His audience, he saw, was paying more attention to the view out the large forward windows of Kleito's Temple than they were to his presentation.

"The tradition of Lyonesse as we now know it," he was saying, "goes back at least to the tenth or eleventh century, when it was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves of the English Channel. Only one man — one Trevellyn — was supposed to have escaped. Riding the fastest horse of the islands, he made it to Cornwall just ahead of the oncoming flood… "

Several of the people in his class were standing now, and a few had actually left their seats and were walking past him to the front windows.

"As, ah, as I was saying," he continued, "the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages, but there are hints of Lyonesse at much earlier times. The ancient Bretons, for instance, tell of the fable of Ker-Ys, the fabulous city of Ys, sunken somewhere between Cornwall and Brittany in Celtic times… "

More people hurried forward, speaking excitedly to one another. Penrose put down his notes and scowled at them. It was bad enough that those security people had come to him just an hour before his lecture was due to begin, telling him that the Neptune Theater was closed and that he would have to give his presentation in this gaudily decorated restaurant. Now his audience was more interested in whatever was going on outside than they were in his talk.

"I beg your pardon," he said as a young couple walked past his lectern toward the front of the room. "If you don't mind, I'm trying to give a talk, here!"

He'd been flattered when the Cruise Director had approached him a month before. Penrose taught European history at London College… but he was also known as something of an authority on Atlantis and on other traditions associated with lost or sunken continents. Sharon Reilly had proposed that he give a whole series of lectures throughout the length of the two-week cruise, with each talk timed to be given when the Atlantis Queen passed close to that particular site. They were paying him only a nominal fee, but a free booking on a Mediterranean cruise had simply been too good to pass up. He'd arranged for a grad student to take over his classes and taken a short leave of absence from the college.

This morning, as the Queen cruised out of the English Channel with Cornwall and the Stilly Isles to the north and the Breton Peninsula to the south, he was talking about Lyonesse, a mythical island that had little connection with Atlantis save for its ultimate watery fate. He found the subject fascinating, especially with its rich mythic connections with the Arthurian legends. He expected others to find it interesting as well… or at least to show some respect for those who wanted to hear.

Turning sharply, he opened his mouth to order the small crowd forward to return to their seats and stopped, eyes wide, jaw hanging. Ahead of the ship, two gray jet aircraft appeared to be hovering in mid-air in a very un-airplane like way. They were facing the ships, the air beneath their bellies blurred with the heat of their jet exhausts, seeming to drift backward to keep them just ahead of the Atlantis Queen.

"Good heavens," he said. "What do they want?"

His lecture forgotten, Penrose joined the other passengers at the forward windows.

"What a shot!" Fred Doherty exclaimed.

From the terrace high above the decks of the two ships he and Petrovich had an unparalleled view of the aircraft as they slowly passed up the Atlantis Queen's starboard side, then hovered for a time directly ahead, drifting backward to maintain their relative positions with the ships.

On the Grotto Pool deck below, Harper's exposure had been forgotten as both sunbathers and gawkers ran to the port side railings to watch the show. The two teenagers on the terrace leaned on the railing, pointing, jostling, yelling at each other above the howl of the two jets, and Petrovich had to move back and lean over the railing to get a good angle past them.

What the hell is going on? Doherty thought. Those jets were British, Royal Navy, he was pretty sure. He could see the blue and red roundels just behind their enormous air intakes on the sides, the red, white, and blue roundels on the wings. He'd seen Harrier jump jets before — at an air show demonstration back in the States. The Marine Corps used those aircraft, he remembered; their ability to hover like that had always amazed him.

They were hovering now thirty or forty feet above the water, their vectored jet blasts raising clouds of swirling spray from flat-blasted patches on the sea below them.

Harrier jump jets.

What the fucking hell is going on?

Commander Pryor tried a few more times, then gave up. "King's Palace, Alpha One," he called. "I'm getting no response from either ship."

"Copy that, Alpha One. How about the forward deck of the freighter? Could you effect a landing there?"

He'd already been wondering about that possibility. It seemed impossible that all radios on both ships should be down, and he'd begun entertaining the notion of landing his Harrier, climbing out, walking up to the Sandpiper's bridge, and demanding to know what the bloody hell was going on.

But something was nagging at him. This was more than mechanical failure, and the possibilities were making the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. Besides, that damned helicopter was in the way.

"Ah, negative, King's Palace," he said. "There's a large helicopter parked on the forward deck, off-center toward the port side. Rotor diameter appears to be about fifty feet. The forward deck is about two hundred feet long, but he's taking his chunk out of the middle. There's also a bridge crane across the deck forward. The LZ is too tight."

The Sea Harrier jump jet was a bit under forty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of just over twenty-five feet. With its superb VTOL capabilities, he could have touched down on that deck if the ship had been stationary, but the slight pitch and roll of the vessel coupled with its forward movement through the water made the risk far greater than Pryor was willing to accept. There was also the very real danger of the Harrier's exhaust overturning the helicopter if it caught the other aircraft wrong and possibly starting a fire.

"Very well, Alpha One," the voice of the flight controller said. "RTB."

Return to base. "Roger that, King's Palace. Alpha Flight, RTB. I'll see if I can get a closer look-see on my way out."

He gentled the throttle forward, letting the Sea Harrier drift ahead. His intent was to essentially hover just off the Sandpiper's port side and let the ship pass him only a few yards away. That would give him, and the electronics packed into his reconnaissance pod, an excellent close-up look at the plutonium ship and a chance to see if anything seemed wrong or out of place on board. Spick followed, keeping his aircraft farther out to give Pryor elbow room for the close-in maneuver.

As the ship passed in front of him, Pryor could see people on the bridge, shadowy figures watching him, though he could make out no details. That meant the ship was manned, however; he'd begun wondering if everyone had packed up and moved on board the Atlantis Queen next door. He could also see a large number of the Queen's passengers watching the show from their seaside balconies and open deck spaces above the Sandpiper. It was eerie having all of those people watch him — just like at an air show — but with no radio contact at all.

His attention, however, was suddenly drawn to some damaged areas on the Sandpiper's forward deck, between the helicopter and the crane — stanchions torn up or knocked over along the starboard side and fist-sized dents and rips in the steel deck.

Abdullah Wahidi was shaking, sweat soaking his face beneath his kaffiyeh. The British warplane was less than a hundred feet away, now, and slowly drifting closer. The second aircraft was farther off, too far to see details, but the near one…

He could see the pilot's head, encased in an oxygen mask, helmet, and dark goggles, behind the clear canopy. He had the unnerving feeling that the pilot was staring directly at him.

Abdullah Wahidi had been born in the teeming camps of the Gaza, raised from infancy with an implacable hatred of the Zionists, the Jews, and taught from childhood that it was his sacred duty to die a martyr's death for Allah, the Almighty. For a time, Wahidi had rallied to the Taliban's call, fighting with the international jihadists against the Americans in Afghanistan. He'd trained at a camp in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan, where he'd learned how to operate antiaircraft weapons such as the Russian ZSU-23 and the American shoulder-fired Stinger missile.

He'd never fired anything like this, however, and he grasped the handle gingerly, as though he feared it would bite him. He wanted to run.

The raw emotion, the terror, shamed him. He'd volunteered for this operation, knowing beyond the shadow of any doubt that he would die. He wanted to die. Had he not been given this opportunity to serve Allah, the mighty, the magnificent, he would have died behind the wheel of a truck laden with explosives, detonating the cargo at some embassy, military checkpoint, or other target in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel. Death, a glorious death that meant Paradise for him and money for his family, was what he sought more than anything else in this world.

Why, then, was he so anxious to flee?

The enemy aircraft was drifting closer. It wasn't natural for something that looked like a jet to float like a helicopter, but that was exactly what the machine was doing. His grip tightened slightly, and he moved the barrel of the 30mm cannon, tracking the target.

"Abdullah! Abdullah!" his loader cried. "He's coming closer! He sees us!"

"We are to hold our fire!"

The enemy aircraft began pivoting slowly, until its nose pointed directly at the gun mount, at the same time beginning to rise as the whine from its engine increased to a shrill blast of noise.

"But he sees us! He's going to shoot! In Allah's name, fire! Fire!"

With a dawning sense of horror, Pryor realized what it was that he was seeing. His head snapped around as he looked at the Sandpiper's superstructure. A panel was hanging open just beneath the bridge level, exposing one of the ship's 30mm gun mounts at the corner of the deckhouse. The gun, sixty feet away, now, was aimed directly at him.

He knew from his preflight briefing that the Pacific Sandpiper was armed, but the information was strictly of academic interest, since he and Spick weren't expecting to engage the ship in combat. As Pryor stared into the black cavern of the compartment housing the cannon, however, he began to make out shapes half-masked by the shadows — two men behind the gun, looking back at him with wide and terrified eyes.

"Tango, tango, tango!" he shouted over the open radio channel. At the same time, he applied full right rudder and full vectored thrust, pivoting the Sea Harrier to the right and lifting it straight up. He needed to get clear of the ship before shifting to forward flight. He could feel the aircraft shuddering violently, and the view forward through his canopy was obscured by blossoming puffs of gray smoke.

The shudders grew worse, and he heard the shrill clang of metal on metal, heard the port side compressor fan shredding in a storm of metallic shards.

"Mayday! Mayday!" he called, frantically battling with the controls as his aircraft began rolling to the right and out of control. "Alpha Flight is under fire! Repeat, we are — "

And his canopy exploded in his face as the Sea Harrier began disintegrating.

Fred Doherty heard the clatter of a heavy automatic weapon firing before he saw what was happening, and his first thought was that the two ships were grinding together, that hull metal was tearing, and he reflexively grasped the terrace's safety rail. From high up on the Queen's Deck Twelve Terrace, though, he and Petrovich had an excellent view out over the Sandpiper's bridge house, and they could see both Harriers hovering above the water off the smaller vessel's port side immediately beyond the freighter's bridge. The rattling thump continued as the front half of the nearer aircraft appeared to disintegrate as if in a hurricane blast; bits of metal were peeling up and off and flying away behind as the nose was engulfed in a staccato burst of small explosions.

"Tell me you're getting this, Pet!" Doherty said softly. Petrovich had been filming the approach of the two Royal Navy aircraft; his camera was locked onto the Sea Harrier as it yawed sharply right and then vanished behind the Sandpiper's bridge. "Tell me you got that!"

Aviation fuel exploded, the fireball boiling up from behind the Sandpiper's superstructure. The second Sea Harrier, farther away than the first, dropped its right wing and began accelerating rapidly, its engines howling as it streaked past the Sandpiper scant yards above the water. The thud-thud-thud of autocannon fire continued to hammer from the freighter's guns. As the Harrier hurtled toward the east, its slipstream raising a rooster tail of spray from the surface, green tracer rounds flicked toward it, throwing up gouts of spray. Petrovich had panned his camera from the fireball left past the Sandpiper's superstructure, following the fleeing aircraft as it vanished toward the horizon.

Silently Doherty put one hand on Petrovich's shoulder and pointed. As the Queen and the Sandpiper continued plowing forward, the wreckage of the downed aircraft slid into view astern of the freighter, its tail sticking up out of the water at a sharp angle, aviation gasoline spreading around it and burning furiously. Petrovich kept filming as Doherty scanned the water, looking for some sign, any sign, that the pilot had ejected or managed to get clear. He wondered if he should throw a life ring… or get help…

Then he began to realize through the mind-clouding shock that the Sandpiper had attacked those aircraft, had deliberately opened fire on them and shot one of them down.

"My God!" was all he was able to say, his voice tightening as he choked out the words.

"We'll… we'll need to get this out right away by satellite," Petrovich said.

"I don't think so," Doherty managed to reply. His thoughts were racing furiously. Ever since the rendezvous with the Pacific Sandpiper, things had been wrong. The two ships lashed together and heading southwest, without explanation from captain or crew; the fact that they'd left the area where the other ship had sunk so quickly; the odd lack of security on the sundeck just now; and now this. "Jim, I think we've been hijacked!"

"You're shitting me!"

"Damn it, that other ship shot that plane down!"

He could see the realization working its way through the cameraman's thoughts. "Holy Christ!"

The film crew had an arrangement with Royal Sky Line to transmit footage and interviews back to CNE using the Queen's onboard satellite communications system and didn't have a satellite transmitter of their own.

"Look," he said. "If we have been hijacked, they'll be in control of the radio room. And they might not like it that we got those pictures. We need to hide the tape."

"Yeah. Yeah. Hide the tape… "

Something was happening on the Grotto Pool deck. Two men wearing blue and white security uniforms had just burst out of the Grotto Restaurant. They were carrying AK-47 assault rifles, and they were shouting at the passengers gathered at the railing, "You! You! All of you! Move back! Move back!"

The passengers were screaming. "Jesus!" Fred Doherty said. It was a hijacking, a hijacking in progress. "Get that!"

Doherty pointed the camera again as the gunmen herded the screaming crowd back from the railing and past the pool. At least four of the women, including Harper, were still topless, were trying to cover themselves with their arms. One of the gunmen picked up a bright red beach towel from one of the chairs and flung it at one of them. "Filthy Western sluts!" Doherty heard him scream. "Cover yourselves decently!" As the women snatched up towels or bikini tops, the gunmen waited, then started herding all of the passengers toward the restaurant.

One gunman glanced up and saw Doherty, the two teenagers, and Petrovich with his camera on the terrace above. The gunman aimed his rifle. "You, up there! Do not move!"

Doherty slowly raised his hands and took a step back from the railing. "I think we'd better do what he says."

A moment later, he heard the sound of running footsteps at his back.

Carolyn Howorth was on the Promenade Deck, on the port side forward, just in front of the Queen's towering white superstructure. She'd come out here for a better look as soon as she'd heard the thunder of the two approaching jets and seen them move past her stateroom porthole on the starboard side. She'd jogged down three decks, cut across the atrium and the onboard shopping mall, and emerged on the Promenade just as the two Sea Harriers began drifting past on the far side of the Pacific Sandpiper.

Hundreds of other passengers were already on the Promenade, and she had to shoulder forward a bit to get a good view. Deck Three, the Promenade Deck, was above the Sandpiper's deck alongside, but about at the same level as the freighter's bridge. She reached the railing just as one of the Harriers came apart in a hail of 30mm cannon fire.

Passengers around her began screaming, some streaming back for the imagined shelter of the Queen's interior, others just pushing away from the port side railing, as if they were afraid the Sandpiper was about to turn those unexpected guns on them next. Turning, she looked up at the Queen's bridge high overhead, but she was too close to see in through those high, slanted windows.

She wasn't certain what was happening, but she knew she had to get back to her stateroom. She needed to use her laptop to get in touch with either GCHQ or their American cousins, the NSA, and she needed to do it now.

Once back inside the Queen's superstructure, however, Howorth found the passageways too jammed with humanity for her to make any progress. By the time she reached the Atrium and the Grand Staircase, she wasn't able to move at all. Instead, she ducked back into the ship's Starbucks and began considering her options.

Her laptop was in her stateroom, on Deck six, three levels up. There was a service stairway behind her, she remembered, that would take her up to six and, better still, on to Deck eleven, and Security. If it was less packed than the Grand Staircase in the Atrium, maybe she could find David Llewellyn.

That staircase would also take her down two decks, to the First Deck, where, she remembered, a computer center offered Internet access to passengers.

Two decks down was better than either three or eight decks up.

Emerging once more into the current of panicked passengers, she headed for the computer center.