Sea Of Terror

Chapter 27

Khalid glowered at the night, which was just beginning to show the faintest flush of light in the east. He'd just lost touch with his men in the theater and in the A Deck hold aft. The attackers were moving too fast, too precisely, for his men to manage a coordinated defense. On the chart table he could see the blips of approaching aircraft — helicopters, most likely, from the British and American task forces that had been dogging them.

It was time to give up on the dream of setting off the explosives inside New York Harbor, of spreading death and revenge across Manhattan and much of New England. If Ra'd and the others in the hold were not answering, they must be dead… and Ra'd had failed to press the button on the detonator.

The booby traps set within the trucks might yet set off the entire load of explosives, would set them off if any of the attackers were foolish enough to try to dismantle the battery wires.

But Khalid still needed to make sure, and there was one way to do that.

Striding to the door leading to the radio room, he snatched up the radio and pressed the transmit key. "Ramid! Ramid, are you there?"

There was a crackle of static. Then, "I hear you, Amir."

"Execute Ya!"

Everything said over the radio was in code or in very carefully phrased speech; the enemy, Khalid knew well, was listening to everything. Ya was the final letter of the standard Arabic alphabet, and as the end of the series it carried the same sense of finality as the Greek omega, the English z. The ending.

"Execute Plan Ya," Abdel Ramid echoed from the Pacific Sandpiper. "Allah be praised!"

Khalid did not reply. Allah, if He existed at all, had thwarted Operation Zarqawi, as He had thwarted so much else.

Allah, if He existed, would have no part of this ending.

David Yancey saw the armed grenade bounce across the flatbed of the truck. If it exploded there, next to tons of explosives and at least one primed and ready blasting cap, sympathetic detonation would cause all of the C-4 in all three trucks to explode. He dived on the grenade instantly, scooping it up and rolling toward the open tailgate, whipping it around in his right hand as he rolled and flinging it as hard and as far as he could, even as he fell off the back of the truck.

He was aiming high, for the far side of that line of refrigerators if he could make it. The grenade exploded in mid-air before it reached them.

The explosion was piercingly loud in the cavernous metal-walled vault of the A Deck hold. Shrapnel rattled off the truck and the bulkheads and something struck his leg and his side as he fell and slammed full-length into the deck.

He lay there for a long moment, panting, rejoicing in the pain because it meant he was still alive.

Up past Kleito's Temple on Deck Ten, Dean led three men spiraling up the service stairwell. It had been all he could do to pull the others from the theater and lead them up here. CJ and the other woman might be killed as soon as their value as hostages was outweighed by the trouble they caused… and knowing CJ, she was capable of plenty of trouble. But Rubens had ordered Dean to play it by the book, and the book said to gain control of the ship's bridge, where the terrorist commander would almost certainly be trying to put together a last-ditch defense of the hijacked vessel.

Dean decided he would have to trust that CJ would take care of herself.

But, damn it, she was a desk jockey, a computer geek, not a trained field agent.

At Deck Eleven, someone with an AK-47 opened fire from above, loosing an entire magazine on full auto down the stairs.

Brisard had brought along Dean's H&K, combat harness, vest, and helmet, and he'd pulled those on over his civilian clothing, giving him an oddly mismatched look with his jeans and tennis shoes. Snapping a fresh mag into his H&K, he loosed a burst up the stairwell. The tango responded with another burst of AK fire, bullets screeching wildly as they ricocheted off steel railings, steps, and bulkheads. Tim Morgan cursed as a fragment off a vailing scratched his face, leaving a thin trail of blood.

"Where are they?" Dean asked Rubens, sheltering under the steps. "And how many?" The bad guys could hold them pinned here all day.

"You have four people in the Security-IT suite, Deck Eleven," Rubens told him. "There are six on Deck Twelve. That's three on the bridge, two in the radio room, and one in the stairwell above you. Five more are outside, on Deck Eleven, further aft."

"Waiting to ambush us between the casino and here," Dean said. "What about the two guys who left the theater?"

"We're tracking them. One is taking the two women down a passageway on Deck Four. He might be looking for a stateroom. The other is going up the Grand Staircase, passing Deck Five now. We're tracking them both." There was a hesitation. "One tango left Security a few minutes ago. You just missed him by a few seconds. He went down the stairwell you're in now. Deck Ten."

Dean tried to hold the described positions in his mind, a three-dimensional map of the enemy's positions. On the one hand, having the Art Room peering into the ship and identifying the locations of each person on board did a lot to lift the age-old fog of war.

On the other hand, it was damned tough to keep track of it all. "What about our people in the hold?"

"The situation there is under control." Rubens sounded stressed as he said it, though, and Dean wondered what he was hiding. "Helicopters are inbound, about ten minutes out. A NEST is on board."

"Okay, then," Rubens said. "Throw the switch."

"Done… "

By injecting the HTML code into the Atlantis Queen's computer system, the Art Room had turned all of the computers in the ship's IT section into zombies — that was what the techies called them — and admin control now rested with the Art Room. Not only did they have control of the security cameras and computer displays, but they also had control over every one of the automated door locks on the ship, all of which normally were programmed from the IT department but which now were being controlled by Rubens' team at Fort Meade.

They'd just locked every key-card door on the ship.

Another burst of gunfire thundered down the stairwell. Dean slapped Henderson on the shoulder. "Hit him with the frag-12s."

Sam Henderson, a former Army Special Forces staff sergeant, nodded and pressed the release catch for the ammo drum on his AA-12 combat shotgun. Dropping the 32-round drum with its normal load-out of 12-gauge shot, he pulled out a smaller, 20-round drum loaded with frag-12 rounds.

The frag-12 had been developed especially for combat shotguns, a 19mm grenade with four tiny, curved stabilizing fins that unfolded as it left the weapon's muzzle. The armor-piercing versions could blast through a half inch of steel plate, and a barrage of the deadly little slugs fired at three hundred rounds per minute created a firestorm of death and devastation.

Henderson chambered the first round. Dean leaned out from under the cover provided by the steps overhead and opened fire with his H&K, spraying wildly to make the gunman overhead duck back. Henderson stepped past Dean, raised his AA-12, and fired a long burst of frag-12s into the upper level. Explosions cracked and banged overhead, and someone screamed as an AK-47 bounced and clattered down the steel steps. Henderson fired another high-explosive burst, and then Dean and the others pounded up the stairs.

The tango lay on the deck in front of a partially wrecked door, covered with blood and trying to pull a pistol from his belt. Dean shot him twice in the head and kept moving.

In the passageway beyond the broken door, a second security door blocked the way Beyond were the radio room and the bridge, and five cornered tangos…

The Advanced SEAL Delivery System, a dry-deck submarine sixty-five feet long and displacing sixty tons, was a relatively new addition to the combat inventory of the U. S. Navy SEAL teams. On board, besides the two submarine officers serving as pilot and navigator, were sixteen Navy SEALs equipped for VBSS operations, the acronym standing for "Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure."

Over an hour before, they'd left the warmth and security of the USS Ohio, a former ballistic missile submarine converted to Navy Special Warfare service, now a transport carrying up to sixty-four SEALs and the ASDS on her afterdeck. The SEALs had climbed a ladder up into the midget sub's spherical air lock and taken their places in the closely fitted seats aft. The Ohio had taken them to a rendezvous point just ahead of the oncoming Pacific Sandpiper and released them.

For an hour, now, the ASDS had played tag with the Sandpiper, attempting to close for boarding. The Sandpiper had changed course several times, however, and currently was heading almost due north, toward the Atlantis Queen, almost half a mile away.

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.

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…

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, then 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.

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.

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.

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…

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 of 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"