Sea Of Terror

Chapter 9

Inui was swimming slowly out from the sinking ship, going nowhere in particular except away from the flames. If he was going to die, he preferred drowning to being roasted alive in the inferno behind him.

His life jacket kept him afloat. For perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, now, he'd been considering removing the jacket and allowing himself to sink, to accept a relatively quick and merciful death, but his orders, his omi, his duty to those above him, kept him moving. His orders were to allow himself to be picked up by the Pacific Sandpiper if possible, to join the KKD activists already on board and assist them with the hijacking.

The problem was, he couldn't see the Sandpiper now, even when the ocean swell carried him to the top. Smoke and flame blanketed the sky, his eyes burned with fuel oil, and all he could really see besides the smoke was water.

And then a hand grabbed the back of his life jacket. He spun, lashing out.

"Easy, Inuisan! It's me!" a familiar voice said in Japanese. It was Yano, and he was in the now-inflated life raft, leaning over the side to haul Inui on board.

Weakly he turned and tried to climb into the raft, a task that would have been frankly impossible without Yano's help. He landed in the bottom, panting hard. "It is… good to see you! You found the raft!"

"It hit the water not far from me, and opened automatically," Yano told him. "I had to shoot another man in the water who tried to climb on as well."

Inui nodded, then managed to sit up. He was only a little higher above the surface, now, but as the raft rode another passing swell he could see the Sandpiper, beyond the sinking Ishikari and partly obscured by smoke. "We'll have to paddle that way," he said, indicating a direction well away from the Sandpiper, "so we can stay clear of the Ishikari."

"Yes. And quickly. The ship is going down swiftly, and we don't want to be caught in the back-current!"

There were two folding plastic paddles stowed inside the emergency rafts. Yano had broken out one to begin his search for Inui. Inui unshipped the other and assembled it, and together the two men began paddling a^way from the dying ship.

"This is nuts," James Petrovich said. He looked at his watch. "Can we go back inside yet? Please?

For fifteen minutes now, or a bit more, the Atlantis Queen had been bounding ahead on her new course.

"What's the matter?" Fred Doherty said, grinning. "Cold?"

"As a matter of fact, yes!" Petrovich plucked at the T-shirt he was wearing. "I'm not exactly dressed for this!"

"We're going somewhere in one hell of a hurry," Doherty said. "You know, I think we should go see if Sandra's up.

Maybe we can talk to the captain, see what's going on. Maybe even set up an interview."

"Anything, man, if it means getting out of this wind!"

Doherty shook his head. "You kids, these days. You have it too soft."

"Okay. I… what the hell?"

Doherty was looking aft, past the ship's smokestack. An aircraft was approaching from astern.

"What?"

Doherty pointed. "Helicopter. What's it doing way the hell and gone out here?"

Petrovich shrugged. "C'mon! We're not exactly at the ends of the earth. We're, what? A hundred, a hundred fifty miles from shore, maybe?"

"That's a long way for most helicopters. Quick! Get a shot!"

Petrovich perched his camera on his shoulder and panned back and forth, peering at his viewfinder screen as he tried to pick up the approaching helicopter. "Got him!" The cameraman pressed the roll button and began filming.

"And there he goes!" Doherty said. "Jesus, that guy is booking!"

The helicopter passed up the starboard side of the Atlantis Queen, less than a hundred yards away and apparently on exactly the same heading as the cruise ship. Doherty didn't recognize the helicopter's type, but it was big, with a high-up engine mount and a pair of large air intakes to either side, the type of helicopter used for transporting cargo or passengers rather than a military gunship. It had French markings, but so far as he could tell it looked like a civil aircraft, rather than military.

It was close enough that he could glimpse several people on board, looking back at him through portholes in the aircraft's body.

Not military, not coast guard… or whatever organization served as a coast guard for France. Doherty was curious. He wondered what the range of that type of helicopter was, and what the hell it was doing this far out in the Atlantic Ocean.

As quickly as it had appeared, the aircraft roared off toward the northwestern horizon at a speed Doherty guessed was well over 150 miles an hour. Petrovich panned with its passing, staying on it as it dwindled to a speck and vanished. "Got it," he said.

"Let's find the captain… or a ship's officer and see what's going on."

"Another one of your hunches."

"Okay, okay, the thing at the dock yesterday didn't pan out so well. Forget that. I have a feeling about this one."

They hadn't been able to see much of anything from the Promenade Deck yesterday — just emergency vehicles and a lot of British cops. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung around the perimeter, and no one had been willing to talk to the news team. They'd tried several more times to invoke privilege of the press in order to reach the scene and question people, but each time polite but firm soldiers or Ship's Security officers had turned them back.

"That's what you always say. You need to stick with the program, man. Spoiled rich rock stars and actresses, that's the ticket."

A loud, two-tone chime sounded from a nearby speaker mounted above the entrance to the Atlantean Grotto. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Cruise Director," a woman's sultry voice announced. "May I have your attention, please?"

"Uh-oh," Doherty said. "This'll tell us something."

"Captain Phillips has asked me to tell you that the Atlantis Queen has changed course to give aid to a ship in distress at sea. The ship is on fire and possibly sinking about twenty-five miles ahead of us, and we should reach her within the next hour and fifteen minutes, or so, where we will render what aid we can until rescue vessels can arrive.

"The captain asks me to tell you that this rescue will not delay our voyage. We can easily make up any lost time in our passage south to Gibraltar. He does ask, however, that passengers refrain from using the Promenade — that's the outside area on the Aphrodite Deck, also known as Deck Three — until further notice. Ship's personnel may be bringing survivors on board onto the Promenade Deck, and we may also be lowering the vessel's lifeboats to help with rescue operations.

"The captain also requests that any passenger on board with medical experience — especially people with EMT or emergency room training, as well as doctors and nurses — please identify yourselves to a ship's steward or ship's officer if you wish to be of assistance. The ship's medical staff would appreciate any volunteer help available.

"We trust that this incident will not offer any inconvenience or discomfort to our passengers, but by the ancient and sacred law of the high seas, any ship at sea is required to give aid to any other ship in distress. The crew and staff of the Atlantis Queen wish to thank you for your patience and for your understanding. That is all."

"Wow!" Fred Doherty said. "You hear that? What'd I tell you! What did I tell you?"

"You smell a hot news story."

"Hot? Hell, yeah! The Titanicl The Lusitanial The Andrea Dorial This could be real big, and we're in exactly the right place to catch it all! Interviews! Hot news footage! Story at ten!" He leaned on the terrace railing, peering at the horizon in front of the ship's bridge. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could see something, a black smudge, perhaps, beneath the overcast on the horizon. Smoke from a burning ship, perhaps?

This could be his ticket to a producer's slot with one of the major network newsrooms, the break he'd been praying for ever since he'd gotten out of college and taken his first news job with that joke of a dinky little local TV station in Wisconsin.

"Let's go talk to the captain," Doherty said. They would need press access to the Promenade Deck, and possibly the bridge and the ship's infirmary as well.

All it would take was one little disaster and his future career was assured.

It still bothered Inui that he could remember nothing of the blast itself. The shock wave, he decided, must have stunned him, even knocked him unconscious for a moment. He expected his mind to work, however, and it irritated him that he seemed to have missed a rather spectacular flight from the Ishikari" s forward deck into the sea.

Yano said he remembered nothing either, or very little. "It was like being scooped up by a giant hand," Yano told him. "Then… I don't know. I was in the water, and the raft was unfolding nearby."

They'd been paddling hard for several minutes, now, getting well clear of the sinking ship. Inui was still coming to grips with the fact that he was alive. That he was seemed like nothing less than a miracle… and Inui did not believe in the supernatural.

He believed in himself. In his brothers. In the cause. In the organization.

Sekigun no Ko. It was what they called the KKD, a kind of inner-circle, private joke. Child of the Red Army. In Inui's case, it was almost literally true.

The Nihon Sekigun, the Japanese Red Army, had been born in the 1970s, a time of radical, activism, of leftist revolution, of triumph after triumph over the crumbling shell of Western imperialism. In 1972, in a show of solidarity with fellow revolutionaries of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, three Sekigun members had carried out the Lod Airport Massacre in Israel, killing twenty-five and injuring seventy-one. Most of the victims had been Puerto Rican Christians on a pilgrimage to Israel.

One of those gunmen had been Tsuyoshi Okudaira, Ichiro Inui's father. Okudaira had killed himself with a hand grenade in the Lod Airport baggage claim area rather than allow himself to be captured.

Nihon Sekigun had expected that victory and others to rally the Japanese people behind them. Their goal was nothing less than the overthrow of the decadent Japanese government and the creation of world revolution.

And yet the revolution had never materialized. In fact, most of the people at home had refused even to believe that the Lod terrorists were Japanese at all, and when, finally, they'd accepted the truth, most Japanese had begun turning against any type of militant activism. By the 1980s, with popular support almost nonexistent, the JRA could no longer operate in Japan but was entirely dependent upon the PFLP for training, money, and weapons. In 2001, Fusako Shigenobu, the JRA's original founder, had announced from her prison cell that the unit had been disbanded, that the Japanese Red Army was no more.

Cowards. Cowards and traitors to the Cause. Ichiro Inui had never known his father, but Ichiro's mother had kept Tsuyoshi's memory alive. Kazuko Inui had instilled in the young Ichiro his father's fanatical devotion to world revolution and a seething hatred for the West and its soul-devouring ideologies of money, greed, and planetary rape. In 1992, at the age of twenty-four, Inui had joined the Kokusaiteki Kakumei Domei, the International Revolutionary League. Many of the KKD's members had had their start with the JRA and hoped that a new name, a new face, would gain the support of the masses. They still worked for world revolution but now emphasized the Green fight rather than the Red. United with Greenworld and other militant ecological movements worldwide, they sought to eliminate the import of radioactive material into Japan and end Japan's domestic atomic energy program.

In 1998, his militant beliefs and his association with the KKD carefully hidden, Inui had been commissioned as an officer in the Kaiso Jeitai. Last year, a cell of KKD officers within the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force had arranged for his transfer to the Ishikari, where he'd met Yano. For an entire year they'd waited, carrying out their mundane duties, until the KKD's leadership had issued them with their final orders.

The KKD had allied with al-Qaeda for a final, devastating strike at the hated West. The target of the operation was one of the plutonium shipments returning to Japan after reprocessing in England. And the Ishikari, with her two KKD sleeper agents, would be escorting the freighter home.

A hundred yards away, the Ishikari groaned, then shrieked, her gaping stern sliding under swiftly now, dragging down shattered deckhouse, bridge, the forward gun, and finally the bow, which sliced up out of the sea as a geyser of water and escaping air erupted aft. For a few seconds the bow hung suspended above the waves, and then, gracefully, it, too, slid down and submerged in a final, oily rush of churning water.

The Ishikari had been an ultra-modern design, highly automated, and with a crew of just ninety. A number of those crewmen struggled now in the water, oil-coated, exhausted, and in shock. There'd been no time to clear or lower lifeboats, though a few rafts were in evidence.

A small boat was putting out from the approaching Pacific Sandpiper Inui and Yano began waving their arms, trying to attract the boat crew's attention.

"Helicopter off the starboard quarter astern, sir," the port side bridge lookout reported. "Six hundred meters."

"Very well," Jorgenson said. "Sparks! Raise that chopper. Tell them we need help spotting survivors in the water."

The Ishikari had gone down in a boiling fountain of water just five minutes earlier. In seas this heavy, with the surface covered with oil and debris, it was tough to spot human heads floating among all the flotsam, and the helicopter would be invaluable in the search.

Captain Jorgenson turned back to the bridge windows, looking down onto the ship's long forward deck. Since the explosion on board the Ishikari, members of the ship's crew — security troops and off-duty personnel, for the most part — had gathered on the foredeck along the starboard side railing. The security people were at their assigned posts, but the others were simply playing tourist. Some of them had cameras around their necks, for God's sake.

"Mr. Dunsmore," he said sharply. "Pass the word that the decks are to be cleared immediately. Only security personnel or crew members actively engaged in the rescue are to be on deck!"

"Aye, aye, sir."

It was only natural, Captain Jorgenson supposed, for the crew to go out and rubberneck, but it was damned unprofessional.

"I'd like the guns opened up as well," he added.

"I already gave the order, Captain. As soon as you said we were going to close with them."

PNTL's standard rules of procedure. The Sandpiper's guns weren't normally visible from the outside, but at certain times designated by the Piper's operational orders, sections of the deckhouse dropped open to expose three 30mm cannons, one at each corner of the deckhouse forward, overlooking the deck, and one at the stern, above the fantail.

Jorgenson certainly wasn't expecting an attack from the Ishikari's half-drowned survivors, but inflexible corporate doctrine demanded that the guns always be run out should the plutonium freighter approach another vessel or if she was approached by aircraft. They'd war-gamed numerous piracy and terrorist scenarios at PNTL headquarters back in the nineties, looking at the possibility of pirates pretending to be in distress at sea, or a helicopter filled with heavily armed troops landing on deck.

Actually, the captain personally disagreed with the policy of arming the vessels; adding seven tons of high explosives to an already volatile mix of radioactive plutonium and thousands of gallons of fuel oil simply didn't make a lot of sense in his estimation, an accident waiting to happen. But the rules were definitely the rules, and he intended to follow them to the letter.

"There's the chopper, Captain!" the armed guard on the bridge announced. He'd moved over to the starboard wing and was leaning out of the doorway leading to the weather deck outside. "AS 332 Cougar!"

Jorgenson glanced at the aircraft, gentling in to a slow-drifting hover less than a hundred yards abeam of the bridge. He scowled. Something wasn't right. "I thought that was supposed to be an ALAT helicopter," he said.

The AS 332, originally designed and marketed by Aerospatiale, had both military and civilian versions. The silver fuselage and the large, black tail number identified this aircraft as the civil transport version.

The side doors, he saw, had been slid back. He saw a number of men crowded inside…

"Sound the alarm!" Jorgenson cried. "That's not — "

"Tomare!" Wanibuchi, the Japanese liaison standing close behind the bridge security guard, shouted. He reached into his bulky yellow windbreaker and pulled out an automatic pistol with a long sound suppressor screwed onto the muzzle. "Ugoku na!"

It happened too quickly, was too shockingly sudden, for anyone to react. As the bridge security guard reached for his weapon, Wanibuchi swung the pistol up into line with the back of the man's head and pulled the trigger. With the suppressor, the sound of the shot was a sharp, hissing chirp that knocked the guard forward through the half-open doorway. "Do not move!"

Immediately, a second shot, followed by a third, sounded from the radio shack, and Robert Orly stumbled through the door onto the bridge, the side of his head a scarlet mass. He fell forward, the cord jerking his headset from his ears as he fell full-length on the bridge deck. The second corporate liaison, Kitagawa, stepped out, his pistol held in a tight, two-handed grip. Dunsmore lunged for the alarm klaxon on the bridge console, and Wanibuchi shot him down before he'd taken two steps.

"Nobody move!" Wanibuchi shrilled, the gun in his hand swinging wildly from the crumpled Dunsmore, to Jorgenson, to Kinsley, the helmsman, to Mathers, the navigator. "All of you! Hands up!"

Feeling a deathly cold rippling up his spine, Jorgenson did as he was told. Mathers and Kinsley raised their hands as well. Dunsmore was writhing in a spreading pool of blood, arms folded across his belly. "May I help my officer?" Jorgenson asked. "He's hurt!"

"No! Get down on the floor!" Wanibuchi shouted. "All of you. Lay on the floor! Facedown! Spread your arms and legs wide apart! Do it! Do it!"

Floor; Jorgenson thought as he moved to obey, not deck. These people weren't seafaring men, then. Perhaps they could use that.

Wanibuchi barked something at Kitagawa in Japanese.

"Hai!" the man replied, and left the bridge, taking the central passageway aft.

"How many of you are there?" Jorgenson asked as he spread himself on the deck. "Only the two of you? You can't possibly take over this ship!"

"Be quiet, Jorgenson," Wanibuchi replied, his English perfect. "Another word and I will shoot your navigator at the base of his spine. It's an agonizing way to die."

Jorgenson heard footsteps and then a metallic clatter. Turning his head, he saw Wanibuchi picking up the SA80 assault rifle dropped by the guard. Wanibuchi saw the movement and raised the rifle. "Turn your head! Look at the wall!"

Again Captain Jorgenson did as he was told, and wondered how he could fight back.

Chujiro Moritomi had to restrain himself to keep from breaking into a run. The excitement of the moment pounded in his heart and throat and head, to the point that he was having trouble breathing. He felt powerful, though, even superhuman. Some of the radio operator's blood had splashed Moritomi's jacket, but he ignored that. He had killed the man, had walked up behind him and fired two bullets into the side of his head and killed him.

They'd located the positions of the ship's guns during their first inspection of the vessel, days ago. The number two gun was on the starboard side of the deckhouse forward, three decks down from the bridge. Holding his pistol behind his back, he reached the door, turned the handle, and pulled it open.

A cool breeze slapped him in the face. The compartment's outer panels had been dropped, converting it to a kind of outdoor balcony overlooking the forward deck to the left and the wreckage-strewn ocean off the ship's starboard side straight ahead. Two of the civilian guards were inside, one leaning against a stack of ammo cases, the other in the saddle behind the 30mm chain gun.

"Well, hello," the man by the ammo cases said, looking around at Moritomi's entrance. "Whose little wog are you?…"

The gunner turned, startled. "Here, now! You're not allowed — "

Except for the M230 chain gun, neither man was armed. Moritomi brought his pistol around, put two shots into the gunner's head, then shifted aim and shot the loader as he lunged for the door.

Stepping through the door, Moritomi turned, pulled the door shut, then shoved the body of the gunner out of the saddle. The M230 was aimed in the general direction of the helicopter off the ship's starboard beam.

Moritomi had trained with these weapons at the camp in Syria. He checked the ammo feed, made sure the power was on, and dragged back the charging lever with a rasping snick. Then he swung the weapon around to the left, depressing the barrel to aim at the Sandpiper's crowded forward deck, and switched off the safety.

Jack Rawlston turned from the ship's starboard railing and looked at the crowd in disgust. "Here, you lot!" he shouted. "Clear the deck!"

There was, inevitably, a certain amount of friction between the regular crew and the "specials," the civilian security guards provided by PNTL and the UK Atomic Energy Authority "Up yours," an older seaman growled. "Who made you captain?"

"Clear the fucking deck!" Rawlston bellowed, swinging his arm. "We need some order up here!"

He was assuming they would be bringing survivors up onto the forward deck, and this crowd of rubbernecking tourists was going to be in the way. The skipper might want that helicopter to land, too, and they would need the entire length of the deck clear for that.

"You heard the man!" Timmy Smithers shouted. "You people make yourselves useful and — "

He never finished the sentence. Rawlston heard an angry high-speed rattle of automatic gunfire, and then the Pacific Sandpiper's steel deck was erupting in white puffs of smoke and hurtling shards of shrapnel. Smithers was jerked to one side, his upper chest and left shoulder exploding in a pink spray. Merchant seamen began falling as explosions ripped through the crowd with murderous detonations.

It reminded him, Rawiston thought as he dived for cover behind a hold cover, of autocannon fire from a helicopter gunship, and he assumed the helicopter was firing on them. He hit the deck, pulled his SA80 off his shoulder, and came up with his weapon aimed and tracking, ready to return fire.

But the fire wasn't coming from the helicopter, not so far as he could tell. The aircraft was circling now past the starboard bow, still a hundred yards off, but he saw no weapons pods or gun mounts on the helicopter, no door gunner or clattering minigun trailing streams of spent shell casings. If it wasn't the French helicopter…

More high-explosive rounds slammed into the deck, tearing a safety stanchion free and cutting down three men running toward the bow, and two shells hit the lip of the cargo hold cover a foot from his face, stinging him with specks of flying metal. The way the impacts tracked up the deck, moving forward, made him look aft.

Rawlston saw the muzzle flash from the starboard-forward chain gun as it hosed down the Piper's forward deck with explosive rounds.

What the bloody hell?…

He twisted around, leveling his rifle at the Piper's superstructure. From here he couldn't see the gunner, but if he could lay down a heavy enough fire, aimed into the open gun housing, he might drive the bastard to cover.

Before Rawlston could fire, however, bullets whined and shrieked, ricocheting off the deck beside him. He turned again. That fire was coming from the helicopter, which had changed course suddenly and was flying straight toward the Sandpiper's forward deck. Several more security guards and seamen, caught in the open in a deadly crossfire between the helicopter and the superstructure of their own ship, jerked, spun, and fell. Rawlston saw at least a dozen men sprawled in bloody heaps across the deck, maybe more… some of them still moving, trying to rise, trying to seek cover.

The helicopter roared low overhead, so low that Rawlston instinctively ducked as its shadow engulfed him and then swept on. Men inside the helicopter now shot at the open port side gun mount, pouring automatic rifle fire into the opening from almost point-blank range. Rawlston changed targets again, drawing a bead on the helicopter… and then a savage hammer blow struck him in his side, slapping him back and away from the meager shelter of the hold cover. The 30mm chain gun on the starboard side was firing now in short, precise bursts, and a piece of shrapnel blasted from the hold cover had struck him in the side, hard.

There was no pain… and then he drew a breath and the pain shrieked inside his brain. A broken rib at least, and maybe a punctured lung as well. He clutched his side and his hand came away wet with blood. His gun had spun away with the impact, was lying on the deck five yards away.

Rawlston started crawling toward it, staying on his belly as the chain gun continued to fire bursts, sometimes at him, sometimes at other survivors taking shelter on the blood-spattered deck.

The helicopter was hovering now, just above the center of the long forward deck between Rawlston and the ship's deckhouse. The portside gun wasn't firing at what should have been an easy target, so Rawlston had to assume that his mates on the number 1 gun were dead… the number 2 gun as well, come to think of it, since neither Marty nor George would have opened fire on their own people.

The helicopter slowly descended toward the deck, and men were jumping out of the open side doors even before the wheels kissed steel. Armed men, lots of them. Men in kaffiyehs and combat vests, men with AK-47 assault rifles and two, Rawlston saw, with longer, heavier RPGs.

They leaped onto the deck and began spreading out, bending low beneath the still-turning rotors of the helicopter. Two headed straight for him, their rifles up to their shoulders, the muzzles aimed at his head as they screamed orders at him. He couldn't hear what they were saying over the thunderous pound of the aircraft's rotors, but he rolled onto his back with his hands up beside his head.

The impossible, Rawlston realized, had just happened.

Terrorists had just seized the Pacific Sandpiper