Sea Of Terror

Chapter 11

Donald Myers looked up from the menu as Ms. Caruthers and Ms. Jordan hurried up to join them. Myers and the rest of the tour group were already seated at the large table along the port side windows, looking down on the merchant vessel close alongside.

The Lost Continent Restaurant was the second-largest dining area on the Atlantis Queen, luxuriously furnished and appointed, with large windows, crystal chandeliers, imitation Mayan walls and columns, and a small rain forest's worth of potted trees and vines giving the place the romantic atmosphere of a fantasy-adventure novel. It was located on the Tenth Deck, aft, overlooking the Atlas Pool on the Deck Nine fantail and, at the moment, offering an unparalleled view of the Queen's docking with the other ship.

The group had decided to come here when the announcement had sounded over the PA system perhaps forty-five minutes ago, planning on having some breakfast while watching the drama unfold outside. A good way to keep the women out of the way of the rescue, Myers thought. Lots of other passengers evidently had thought the same, that it would let them watch without getting stepped on. The Lost Continent was crowded with people. They'd been lucky to get here early enough to beat the rush and get seats.

"Oh, good," Ms. Jones said. "Elsie! Anne! You're just in time! They're starting to toss ropes across to the other ship!"

"It's all so perfectly excitingl" Ms. Dunne added.

"Never mind that," Ms. Caruthers said. "Donald! There's something wrong aboard this ship!"

Myers sighed, looking up. Both of the women appeared slightly flushed, perhaps a bit out of breath. "Such as what, Ms. Caruthers?" he asked.

"Elsie and I were just coming out of our cabin, up on the Hera Deck," Ms. Jordan said. "We were in a hurry because we wanted to come down and join you all for breakfast and — "

"I believe there are terrorists on board, Mr. Myers," Caruthers interrupted.

"Terrorists?" Myers said. He managed not to laugh out loud. Since they'd come aboard Thursday, he'd been playing with the thought he'd had about the women's terrorist and sewing circle and wishing he could share it with someone. Caruthers' blunt statement brought the humorous image back to mind.

"Terrorists," Caruthers said firmly as the two women sat down at the places left for them. "Men with guns!"

"Slow down, Elsie," Roger Galsworthy said. "What men with what guns?"

"There were three of them," Jordan said, "and they were coming down the hallway as we were leaving our stateroom, bold as you please, and one of them bumped against me and almost — "

"They were wearing ship's crew uniforms," Caruthers said, interrupting again. "And they were carrying machine guns!"

"Machine guns?" Abe Klein said, chuckling. "Seems a little unlikely."

"They were those Russian guns, like in that movie Russian Dawn back in the eighties," Ms. Jordan said. "Where a bunch of high school kids fight a Russian invasion of the U. S.?"

"I think you mean Red Dawn, Anne," Caruthers said.

"Red Dawn, that's right. The rifles were this long," Jordan continued, holding her hands apart, "and black, except for orange wood underneath the barrel, and back on the stock. And the… the thing where they keep the bullets? It was this long and curved. And one of the men said something to the others when the one bumped into me, and another looked like he was going to hit me, but another one snapped at him and they just kept on going."

"What did they say?" Myers asked.

"I don't know," Caruthers said. "It wasn't English or French."

"It sounded foreign" Jordan added.

Myers frowned. "Foreign languages often do."

"One of them," Jordan continued, "the one who'd snapped at the other one, just kind of looked at us and said, 'Ship's Security, go back to your stateroom.' And they kept on going down the hall. Running, almost."

"So what did you do?" Ms, Dunne asked.

"Came right down here to find you, of course," Caruthers said. Her mouth was set in a hard-lined expression of disapproval.

"Look… you said they were wearing crew uniforms?" Myers asked.

"That's right," Caruthers said. "White slacks, dark blue shirts, ship's logo on the left chest, where a shirt pocket would be if it had one. But they had dark skin. Not like coloreds, but dark, Mediterranean-looking. And they all had beards. Have you seen anyone in the Atlantis Queen's crew with beards?"

"Yes, actually," Myers said, trying to ignore the unpleasantly racist comment. Caruthers was old and had grown up in the South of the 1940s. "Some of the line handlers when we left the dock yesterday had beards."

"I am not crazy, young man," Caruthers told him. "I know what we saw!"

"I'm sure you do." Myers was continually bemused by Anne Jordan's taste in movies. Schwarznegger action films… and now Red Dawn. Her description of the rifle, though, sounded very much like an AK-47, or something just like it — an AKM, perhaps. Orange stock and fore-grip, banana clip magazine… not a machine gun, but an assault rifle, certainly.

"We need to tell the captain!" Caruthers said.

"Ms. Caruthers, I'm sure you saw what you say you did. But I feel very sure that there's a logical explanation."

"Such as?" Caruthers said, staring him in the eye and lifting her chin. "In my world people don't run around with guns, bumping into decent people and talking in foreign languages!"

"These people," Myers said carefully, "take security very seriously on this ship. You all saw that at the security checkpoint the other day, right?"

"Up to a point," Caruthers said. She almost smiled at the memory.

Myers was still embarrassed about that scene. In the end, the security guards had settled for using a handheld metal detector to check Caruthers and the others who'd refused to submit to the X-ray scan head to toe, then waved them on through. Caruthers clearly considered that to have been a victory for moral and upstanding people everywhere.

Myers pointed out the window. "We're coming alongside another ship. I would be willing to bet any money you like that if this ship has to get close to another ship, the rules say that armed security guards take up stations where they can keep an eye on things."

"Makes sense," Abe Klein said, nodding.

"Of course it does," Galsworthy added. "Us former-military types have seen this sort of thing before, right, Donald?"

"Uh, right. Yeah." Galsworthy, he remembered, was ex-Air Force from the Vietnam era, and made a lot of the fact when given half a chance.

The conversation wandered on, moving on to the fine points of twentieth-century piracy and the security systems in place on board the Atlantis Queen — key cards to keep unauthorized personnel out of secure areas, for instance, and scanners to make sure people weren't wandering off where they shouldn't. Bored, Myers turned away and watched the docking taking place outside. Crewmen — and many of them were bearded, he noted — had tossed massive hawsers out and down to the far smaller ship alongside. Crewmen on the other ship had made the hawsers fast to cleats in the deck.

He could see the name of the other ship across her transom — Pacific Sandpiper She looked like an oil tanker, with her superstructure all the way aft behind a long, long forward deck, but she was a lot smaller than he would have expected for a tanker. He'd seen photos of ships like this one designed for carrying grain on the Great Lakes. Maybe that's what she was… a grain ship.

A helicopter was circling both ships in the distance — part of the rescue operation, no doubt.

Terrorists. He shook his head and, again, suppressed a laugh. The only terrorists on board were at this table.

"Lutfin, Komutanim!" Lia DeFrancesca said. "Please, sir! We really need your help on this!"

Colonel Tarhan looked up at Lia from behind his desk and rubbed at his luxuriant mustache with a nicotine-stained finger. "Well..

"Everywhere I go," she told him, "the bureaucracy stands in the way. And we must have this information before the British have to release the suspect."

"Yes, I can certainly understand that," Tarhan replied. He picked up the wire photo of Nayim Erbakan and studied it again. He glanced up at Lia. "You say you're with Interpol?"

"Zswropol, Komutanim," she replied. The Turkish honorific was reserved for a military superior officer, rather than a civilian. It emphasized, Lia hoped, the essential fraternity of military personnel, their bond of brotherhood, whatever their country of origin. "If I were Interpol," she added, "I wouldn't need to be here, jumping through the bureaucratic hoops.

They were speaking English, but Lia's legend called for a French accent and she knew a few words in Turkish.

"It is irregular," Tarhan said at last, "but let me see what I can do for such a beautiful woman."

Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, maintained NCBs — National Central Bureaus — or sub-bureaus in 187 member countries and had one of the largest and most comprehensive computer databases on international criminal activity in the world.

The NSA, quite naturally, had penetrated that database long ago, but its very size and complexity meant that any covert search of Interpol's records required time — days, sometimes even weeks. Things had gotten even worse since the NCTC had begun trying to do Interpol one better with its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Interpol tended to be jealous of its database and didn't make it easy for other agencies to gain access; a formal request for information could take weeks, even assuming it hit the right desk and reached the right person.

Taggart had tried first earlier that morning, showing his NSA identification and making a formal request downstairs at the National Central Bureau for Turkey, and as they'd expected, he'd been told that his request would be processed… a polite way of saying that approval might be forthcoming in a week or two.

And so Lia had decided to try it her way. Among her fictitious IDs was one for Captain Danielle Fouchet, former French gendarme and current agent for Europol.

Europol was not Interpol but a relatively new organization first established in the early 1990s by the Treaty of Maastricht and the creation of the European Union. Without full executive powers, it so far was limited to the role of support to the law enforcement agencies of the twenty-seven member nations of the EU. As the new kid on the European law enforcement block, it still faced considerable difficulties in finding channels with which to work with established agencies and databases — including those of Interpol.

Europol, she knew, struggled with many of the same challenges as the NSA or NCTC, but assuming this role gave her a significant advantage. As a European, she wasn't American. Too many foreign police services, reacting to the stereotypical image of the ugly American, the at times heavy-handed approach of the CIA and other U. S. agencies, and the perceived arrogance of U. S. foreign policy over the past decade, simply refused to work smoothly with any American intelligence unit. They dragged their feet, invoked special privilege, and threw up bureaucratic barriers, stonewalling attempts to get them to share needed intelligence.

That attitude was the NSA's primary motivation in infiltrating the intelligence data networks of other nations, even those of close allies; Lia didn't like the need for spying on allies, but that was the harsh truth of the current geopolitcal landscape.

And so Lia was posing as a French Europol agent and she'd chosen Colonel Tarhan of Turkey's Interpol bureau as her target.

She watched Tarhan typing away at his keyboard and smiled. Her ploy appeared to be working.

Working with the Turkish authorities could be challenging, especially if you were a woman. Though Turkey's government was defiantly secular, most Turks were Muslim and tended to be conservative to one degree or another when it came to dealing with women. An attractive woman on her own in the streets of Ankara could be subject to catcalls and harassment, even to physical assault; at the same time, many Turkish men, especially the older ones, could be almost charmingly and touchingly gallant when it came to responding to a woman's request, especially if she threw in just a touch of feminine helplessness.

Lia was also using Tarhan's military background to her advantage. The military dominated all aspects of Turkish society and government, doubling as the nation's police force. Individual Interpol NCBs were staffed by the national police of member nations, and so the Ankara bureau was run by Turkish military officers. By showing her credentials as a French Army officer serving with Europol, she could call Tarhan Komutanim instead of the civilian Bayim and relate to him as a superior officer.

All Turkish males were required to serve in the Army; women were not; she could tell that Tarhan was bemused by the idea of a woman Army captain and Europol agent… but she was counting on what would have been called machismo in a Latino country, his conservative and patriarchal gallantry toward women.

The technique required delicacy and care; it could easily backfire, especially if the target happened to be strongly Muslim or from a hyper-traditional culture like Saudi Arabia that seriously marginalized women to second-class citizenry. But the Art Room had transmitted the records of several of the officers at the Ankara Interpol bureau to her that morning, and she'd picked Tarhan as one who might be willing to bend the rules to help a woman in distress.

Especially a beautiful woman. Tarhan seemed quite taken with her, to the point that she was already wondering if she would have to fend off his advances later.

"Ah!" Tarhan said suddenly, leaning back in his seat. "Success!"

"What did you find?"

"I'm printing off the dossier." He waved a hand at the printer on the far side of his office, which had begun to buzz and whine. "It's odd, though. You say this Erbakan was picked up trying to smuggle drugs himself?"

"Yes. In Southampton, Thursday morning."

"It's not his usual modus operandi. Generally, he acts as the point man, setting up a meet and agreeing on a price. He's also never been involved with such a large amount. He really is a minor player."

"We thought so, too. That's why we're looking for any connections you might have in your records… Erbakan's connections with organized crime, with known terrorists, that sort of thing."

"Terrorists? Why would a drug runner be connected with terrorists?"

She shrugged. "Many terror networks finance their activities with drugs."

"In South America, perhaps. Or Southeast Asia. Not here."

Dream ony Colonel she thought, but she kept the words to herself. Though the Russians had been more and more in the picture lately, Turkey remained a primary route for narcotics — especially heroin — coming from Asia to Europe, and several local terror groups used the drug pipelines to their financial advantage… especially the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party seeking independence for Turkish Kurds. Evidently, Tarhan didn't care to air that particular bit of dirty Turkish laundry with a foreigner.

He turned back to his computer screen for a moment. "This Erbakan appears to have been involved in small sales of drugs — heroin and opium, mostly — in Germany. Cocaine is a departure for him. So is trying to carry half a kilo of it onto a cruise ship in England. But we do have this." He got up and walked around from behind his desk, went to the printer, and picked up a stack of printed sheets. On top was a color image, which he handed to Lia.

The photo was grainy, evidently taken through a telephoto lens, but it showed two men standing outside what appeared to be a warehouse on a city street. Both men were bearded, one in a red shirt, the other in a light blue jacket.

"The man in the red shirt is Erbakan," he told her. "The other is a man named Yusef Khalid. He may be AQ."

"Al-Qaeda?"

Tarhan nodded. "This is a surveillance photo taken by German Interpol three weeks ago in Bonn. They'd been tracking Khalid, building a file, and happened to catch him at a meeting with Erbakan."

"So what do you have on Khalid?"

"Not a lot. I'm printing out his dossier for you as well. He seems to be associated with something called the Islamist Jihad International, or IJI., They're new; we don't have a lot on them. But the money trail appears to be through the Bank of Saud, and may connect them with al-Qaeda." As the printer finished running them off, he handed a second sheaf of papers to her. Several, she saw, showed color images of Yusef Khalid.

"You have been so helpful," she said. "Thank you."

"How would you like to show your appreciation? Have dinner with me tonight?"

"Oh, Colonel! I'd love to. But I can't."

"Tomorrow night, then? The kebab at the Washington Restaurant is… how do you French say it? C'estfantastique/"

"Ooh.. mon Colonell Here." She pulled a card out of her handbag and handed it to him. "I'm here, at the Dedeman oteli. Call me, okay?"

His grin came close to being a leer. "Absolutely! Tomorrow then!"

As she walked out of Tarhan's office, the dossiers in hand, Jeff Rockman's voice whispered in her ear. He'd been monitoring the entire conversation from his console back at the Art Room under NSA headquarters. "Lia, you are absolutely shameless! You have a flight out of there tonight!"

"Oh, I don't know," she murmured as the door closed behind her and she walked through the outer lobby toward the front entrance. "He's a charmer. I might be convinced to stay on an extra day."

"Not this time, Lia," Rockman said. "The boss wants you in Southampton."

"Southampton?" she asked, puzzled. "England? I'm not coming back to Fort Meade?"

"Something's breaking in the North Atlantic," Rockman told her. "No details yet, but it's tied to your friend Erbakan, and we're putting a team together. You'll be meeting with Charlie in Southampton."

That would be Charlie Dean, and her heart quickened just a bit. "And Taggart?"

"He'll be getting orders from our friends at the Company. I think he's going to be on his way to Paris."

"Okay. When's my flight?"

"We have you booked on a British Air flight out of Ankara at seven-ten tonight, your time. And Mr. Rubens wants you to scan those dossiers you just got out of lover boy and transmit them back here stat."

"As soon as I get to my hotel," Lia told him.

Damn! The round of jet-hopping was starting to catch up with her — Baltimore, to Lebanon, to Turkey, and now up to England.

But at least she would be seeing Charlie Dean.

Yusef Khalid stepped onto the port bridge wing of the Atlantis Queen and looked down at the Pacific Sandpiper. The smaller ship was tucked in close alongside the Queen, now, and fenders had been lowered over the sides of both ships to keep their hulls from smashing into each other in rough seas. Massive cables crisscrossed the space between the vessels, giving the Sandpiper the look of a tugboat nuzzling her far larger consort.

From his vantage point on the wing, Khalid could look down on and into the Sandpiper's bridge, which only came up to about the Fifth or Sixth Deck on the Queen. He could make out figures inside, though without detail enough to tell who was who.

There could be no doubt, however, that the IJI was in full control there, as well as on board the Queen. Armed men stood on both of the Sandpiper's bridge wings and on the forward deck, supervising the crewmen who'd just completed the binding of the two ships. They wore the uniforms of the Sandpiper's security force now, the so-called Atomic Police, to allay the suspicions of the curious, but Khalid knew they were his.

The helicopter had been circling in the near distance, but Mohamed Darif had already sent the radio call to bring them back on board the Sandpiper. Had there been a problem in taking the Queen, the men on the helicopter would have taken out the ship's bridge and any other pockets of resistance they could see on the deck or in spaces like the casino with large windows with automatic weapons fire. Fortunately, that hadn't been necessary; the plan called for a quiet takeover of the Atlantis Queen. With over two thousand passengers on board, plus nine hundred crew, the IJI strike force had to proceed carefully. The longer the passengers and the majority of the crew could be kept in the dark as to what was happening, the better. Khalid had only twenty-four men at his command with which to control over three thousand.

Even cattle could be dangerous if they broke into a stampede.

Glancing up, he saw that the weather appeared to be breaking, with large patches of blue sky beginning to break the overcast to the west and south. The seas were gentler, too. A mixed blessing, that. Calmer seas meant fewer problems towing the Pacific Sandpiper; Clear skies meant they would be exposed to the snooping lenses of Western spy satellites. As with the passengers on board the cruise ship, it was important to keep the Americans and the British in the dark as to what was happening for as long as possible. The Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper still had a long and risky voyage in front of them.

He watched as the helicopter moved in close for a landing, drifting in across the Sandpiper's port side, touching down gently well over on the port side of the deck in order to keep its rotors clear of the towering cliff side of the Adantis Queen.

Looking aft along the Queen's superstructure, Khalid saw people, hundreds of people, watching the show. Many of the fancier staterooms on the Queen had exterior balconies walled off from their neighbors but providing an outside space for sun worshipping, a romantic outside cabin-service dinner for two, or simply watching the ocean and taking in the sea air. At the moment, those balconies also provided excellent seats overlooking the Sandpipers deck, and the passengers in those staterooms were taking advantage of the fact.

Let them watch. As long as there was no panic.

Yet..

Turning, Khalid walked back off the weather platform and into the bridge. Three of his men stood guard over Phillips and a helmsman, both of whom stood by the ship's wheel. Vandergrift and the others had been herded aft to join other prisoners in the officer's wardroom, and the security guard's body had been carried away and the blood mopped up. It was important to maintain appearances, at least for a time.

"Tell me something, Captain," Khalid said.

Phillips looked at Khalid but said nothing. Khalid saw the anger in the man's eyes, but he also saw the fear. It would be important to keep Phillips afraid until he was no longer needed.

"Our calculations were necessarily rushed," Khalid told the Queen's captain, "and not many of us have much experience with the sea. I want you to come over here and tell me if you feel the two ships have been tied together securely enough to make this voyage."

Reluctantly Phillips left his station behind the helmsman and joined Khalid. Khalid let him step past him and onto the port bridge wing, pressing the suppressor of his pistol up into Phillips' side.

"I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with this insanity," Phillips growled.

"At the moment, all I want to know is the seaman's take on those ropes."

"Lines," Phillips said. He sounded tired. "They're called lines."

"Lines, then. If the seas get rough, will they hold?"

"It depends on how rough it gets. If a gale starts blowing, or a storm hits, no. Nothing would keep us tied together." He hesitated. "You have no idea how powerful the sea can be."

"But will it hold for now? In these seas?"

Again Phillips paused, frowning. "Yes."

"How fast are we moving right now?"

"About four knots. Enough to maintain headway."

"Will those lines hold if we increase speed to, say, ten knots?"

Phillips looked hard at Khalid, startled. "What, towing that ship like this?"

"Exactly."

"Probably. If it doesn't get rougher than this."

"How about fifteen knots, Captain?"

He shook his head. "I don't know if we can manage fifteen knots dragging the other ship."

"What if the other ship was running at fifteen knots as well?"

"Listen, mister. This ship isn't designed for that sort of thing. I don't know if we can do that or not."

"Best guess, Captain."

"I don't know!"

Khalid shrugged, then grasped Phillips' arm and guided him back inside. "Let me explain. You are going to give the order to your engineering room to make revolutions for ten knots. My men are going to watch those ropes… those lines, I should say. If they start to break, my men are going to go down and bring every passenger on B Deck forward to the Neptune Theater. That would be… how many people, do you think?"

"I'm.. I'm not sure. Two or three hundred, perhaps."

"That's what I thought. Men, women, and children, locked inside. They will be our hostages for your good judgment."

"Damn you, many what are you going to do?"

"If the two ships break apart, I will order my men to begin shooting the hostages. All of them."

"Then the lines aren't going to hold!" Phillips said quickly, his eyes wide. "The ships will break apart if you try to do more than five knots!"

"Ah," Khalid said. "I see. In that case, Captain, I want you to pass the appropriate orders to tie the ships together in such a way that they will not break apart, at ten knots, even at fifteen. When you have completed that, we will bring the passengers from B Deck up to the theater and lock them in. They will wait inside while we test your seamanship. If the lines hold, we will permit them to return to their staterooms."

Phillips sagged, like a puppet with its strings cut. "The lines will hold," he said.

"What was that?"

"I said the lines will hold, damn you. As they are. I told you they wouldn't so I wouldn't risk those passengers' lives."

Khalid smiled. "I thought as much. So.. you would bet your life on the lines holding as they are?"

"Yes."

"You would bet the lives of two hundred of your passengers that they will hold? At ten knots?"

"Yes, damn you!"

"That is what I wanted to hear. Captain, you may give the order to increase speed — slowly — to ten knots. Helmsman… you will put us onto a course of two-zero-zero degrees."

The helmsman cast a scared look at Phillips, who nodded at him. "Yes… sir."

"Rashid?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Radio our people on the Sandpiper. Tell them what we are doing. Have them match our speed."

"Yes, sir!"

"Don't worry, Captain," Khalid added. "If you do what we say, you and every one of your passengers and crew will come out of this safely. We are making a… political statement. We have no wish to harm anyone. But we are going to make our message heard!"

"What message is that? Maybe…"

"Yes?"

"Maybe I can help."

"You are helping, Captain. Just continue following my orders and everything will be fine."

"But what is this message? What does this, this hijacking accomplish for you?"

"All in good time, Captain Phillips. All in good time. For the moment, all you need to know is that the safety of your passengers and crew rests entirely in your hands."

And slowly, the Atlantis Queen began gathering speed, her smaller consort tied close alongside.