Sea Of Terror

Chapter 14

Thomas Mitchell and Samuel Franks were in the ship's computer center when Mitchell heard the far-off drumroll of thunder. On this sunny Saturday afternoon, the two of them were the only people in the computer center.

The center, located off the large, broad atrium on the First Deck through which they'd first entered the ship, provided shipboard passengers with a large number of computers and access, by way of the Queen's own server system, to a satellite link and the Internet.

Franks was using that access now to check SOCA, Interpol, and Europol databases for names he'd gotten from the Purser's Office that morning, a list of the roughly nine hundred crew and staff people who worked on board this floating hotel. Mitchell was using another computer to complete and transmit a report for MI5 on what the two agents had accomplished so far on this cruise, which was, essentially, nothing. When he was done with that chore, he planned to help Franks divvy up the names and start searching, looking for anyone with previous convictions for selling drugs, smuggling, association with criminal elements, hell, for failure to use the zebra crossing zones at Piccadilly Circus if he had to. There had to be something.

Mitchell dismissed the sound at first as thunder, but after a few moments he realized that he could still hear it. "Hey, Franks? You hear that?"

"Huh? Whadjasay?"

"That rumble. You hear it?"

"Sounds like a jet."

"Yeah. Out here? I'm going up on deck and have a look."

"Suit yourself," Franks said, submerging again into his monitor display.

Mitchell emerged from the computer center and into chaos. The broad, sweeping curves of the Grand Staircase to his left was packed with people, some going up, some going down, all looking panicky. The Atrium itself was a mob scene. He estimated that there were two or three hundred people packed into that space, all of them going somewhere, but looking as though they had no idea as to where.

He looked around for a security uniform. Whatever had just happened, shipboard security was going to need some backup. He doubted that they had the training or the experience to deal with a full-fledged riot, and this crowd had the look of a riot in the making.

God, what had happened? Was the ship sinking? Unlikely in clear weather, and there would have been an announcement over the PA system if there was a problem.

Reaching out, he grabbed the arm of an older man in a bright-colored T-shirt and white slacks; a much younger woman beside him was clinging to his other arm, her face streaked with tears. "Hey!" Mitchell shouted, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the crowd. "What's going on?"

"They shot down that plane!" the woman shrieked. " They shot down that plane!"

The man shook his head, his eyes distant, as if he was in shock. "God!" he said. "Oh, God!" The two pulled away from Mitchell and kept pushing ahead through the mob.

He thought he saw the blue and white uniform of a shipboard security man going up the Grand Staircase. Plunging ahead, Mitchell elbowed through the crowd, making his way after the man. Around him, people shouted and screamed, and he caught occasional fragments in the racket: "Those were gunsl Big machine guns!" "Why would they shoot down Royal Navy jets?" "They shot down those planes!"

The guns, Mitchell decided, must be the 30mm cannons carried by the Pacific Sandpiper. The Queen, he knew, was unarmed. But Royal Navy aircraft?

Halfway up the staircase, a voice boomed from the PA system, "Attention! Attention, please! May I have your attention, please?"

The surging, jostling crowd slowly came to a stop, voices falling silent, faces turned toward the ceiling as though they were searching for the source of that voice.

"May I have your attention, please?" the voice continued, sounding louder now as the crowd noise dwindled. "Everything is under control. There is no need for panic. Repeat… there is no need for panic!"

The crowd had stopped moving, now, but the rumble of voices was beginning to rise once more. People were murmuring to one another, still uncertain, still frightened. A few continued to push ahead through the stalled mass of humanity.

"The freighter Pacific Sandpiper possesses an automated antiaircraft weapon system," the voice said in measured, reassuring tones. "It's a kind of robot that automatically tracks aircraft with radar and, when the safety is off, it automatically shoots the aircraft down.

There has been some kind of terrible accident, which many of you witnessed just now. One of the British jets came too close to the Pacific Sandpiper and one of those automatic weapons locked on and shot it down.

'There is absolutely no cause for alarm. Everything is under control, and the malfunctioning weapon has been locked down. Our ship's officers are assisting in investigating what went wrong.

"The best thing all of you can do is return to your staterooms immediately and stay there. We will keep you updated on developments as they occur. Due to the serious nature of this emergency, however, Ship's Security personnel have special police powers. Please cooperate fully with anyone wearing a blue and white security uniform, or the uniform of a ship's officer.

"Return to your staterooms immediately, please."

Mitchell felt rather than heard something like a collective sigh arising from the hundreds of people around him and crowding the Atrium just below. The crowd collectively seemed to sag, like puppets relaxing against slackened strings.

"Special police powers?" Special police cock was more like it. There was something decidedly not right about that announcement.

From the sound of things, a Royal Navy aircraft had just been downed outside, but blaming it on an accidental firing of a robot antiaircraft system was also cock.

There was, Mitchell knew, an automated weapons system like the one described just now. It was called CIWS, for close-in weapon system, and was pronounced "sea-whiz" in military-speak. It consisted of a multiple-barreled Gatling gun mounted inside an upright cylinder with an astonishing rate of fire — as high as fifty rounds per second. It was used as a missile defense system, particularly on aircraft carriers. It was never installed on a civilian vessel.

He decided to make his way up to Security and see if he could find David Llewellyn.

Yusef Khalid leaned over the shoulder of one of his men, studying the TV monitor on the console before him. At the moment, the camera was looking down onto the Atrium on Deck Two, as the crowds slowly thinned. Nearby, another monitor showed the length of a long passageway on Deck Seven, where people were unlocking their stateroom doors and stepping inside. The fantail was clear now, as was the Atlantean Grotto high atop the ship's superstructure. "Security guards" had also been sent out onto the Promenade Deck to herd the sightseers inside.

Six of Khalid's men were sitting at the line of monitors along the console, using security cameras mounted throughout the ship to watch as the crowds dispersed. It was bad, very bad, that some idiot on the Pacific Sandpiper had lost his nerve and shot down that Harrier, and Khalid had already sent word to Abdel Ramid to have the responsible person sent to the Atlantis Queen's bridge to see him. He hadn't decided yet what punishment to mete out for that extraordinary lapse of judgment…

The operational plan was divided into five distinct phases. Phase one had been the actual infiltration of both the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper, with IJI members disguised as security personnel or deckhands and staying very much out of sight. Phase two had commenced with the destruction of the Ishikari and the takeover of the bridge, security, and engineering sections of both target ships.

Phase three had involved tying the two ships together and proceeding southwest as quickly as possible, and was actually rather open-ended in terms of the operational time line. Khalid was all too aware that the operation could easily fail at this point for the simple reason that it would be all but impossible for twenty-four armed terrorists to control the nearly three thousand crewmen and passengers on board the Atlantis Queen if they panicked or if they got wind of what was happening too early.

The longer the passengers on the cruise ship could be kept ignorant of what was going on, the better; Khalid was determined not to have a repeat, on a far larger scale, of the debacle of Flight 93.

If that Palestinian idiot on the Pacific Sandpiper had not lost his nerve and opened fire, those Royal Navy fighters would have snooped around for a bit, helpless to do anything but look, then returned to England, where the information gleaned by their reconnaissance pods could be analyzed. Khalid fully expected the two hijacked ships to be intercepted by naval warships, but with luck that wouldn't have happened before mid-day tomorrow.

The hijackers had maintained radio silence, knowing that there might be key phrases or code words that would reassure the ships' owners in England that all was well; Ghailiani had told Khalid that there were such codes, but that only the ship's captain and senior security people knew them. Rather than risk having those people give him the wrong codes under interrogation — there would be no way to check what they told him even if they were tortured — he'd ordered radio silence. The enemy might suspect something was wrong, but they wouldn't know.

And the longer Khalid could maintain that balance of uncertainty, the better for the operation.

Khalid straightened up, then walked down the line of terminals, looking at each glowing screen.

"Wait a moment," Khalid said, pointing at one monitor. "Who is that? What is he doing?"

The screen showed a single man in a rumpled suit coat, sitting alone in a room filled with computer screens and keyboards. He appeared to be alone at the only live monitor.

"Computer center, sir," Inan Al-Shafi replied. "Deck One. He's been in there all morning. There was someone else with him a little while ago."

"Can you zoom in on the screen?"

"Maybe," the man said. He typed a command into his keyboard, then held his mouse, turning the wheel with his forefinger. The camera view began closing in, peering over the passenger's shoulder. The monitor flickered with a bright, fluorescent glare. Khalid felt he could almost see what was on it — it looked like a list, in neat blocks of text, each with a small graphic or photograph. But the resolution was too poor to make out what it was.

"I have a list of people who've checked into the computer center this morning," Hamud Haqqani, at the next workstation over, announced. "There were only two. Samuel Franks… SOCA. And Thomas Mitchell, MI5."

"Well, well," Khalid said. "SOCA and MI5? What are they doing aboard?"

"There is a note attached to their passenger records, sir," Haqqani said. "They were given passage two days ago so that they could investigate the murder of a ship's officer on the Southampton docks without delaying the departure." His hands began clattering over his keyboard. "I should be able to call up what he's looking at."

"Do it."

Hamud Haqqani was an IJI Brigade member recruited from Islamabad, Pakistan, where he'd worked for a major international banking concern as an IT specialist. Khalid had several computer experts on his team — six of them were sitting here in this room — but Haqqani was undoubtedly the most brilliant, and the most skillful.

He typed in a final line of code, and his monitor flashed over to a ship's personnel record. Each member of i he ship's crew had an entry, complete with security clearances, a bio that included their employment history, drug-testing records, police, health, and pay records, and a small black-and-white photograph. The image on the screen scrolled up suddenly, without input from Haqqani. The passenger — Mitchell or Franks — appeared to be going through the entire list of nine hundred personnel.

"What is he looking for?" Khalid wondered.

"If he's on board investigating the death of that officer," Haqqani said, "he may be looking for police or arrest records. They probably suspect someone in the crew of being involved in drug smuggling."

For Khalid, that incident on the docks two days ago had been the weakest point of the operational plan. Involving the police and even SOCA in an investigation of the drugs and money found on the pier might well have delayed the Atlantis Queen's departure, which would have complicated her role in the operation with the Pacific Sandpiper and possibly eliminated her from the plan entirely. By employing that Turkish smuggler Khalid had hoped to throw the British authorities off the track, convince them that the case had been solved, or at least was on its way to a solution, with the Turk's arrest.

And there'd simply been no other way to sneak several tons of high explosive on board the Atlantis Queen.

"Keep an eye on him, and on what he's reading," Khalid said. He turned and left the Security Center, making his way up a level to the bridge. Tatari, Musa, and Nejmuddin were among the men there, standing to one side, wearing shipboard security uniforms, including gun belts. "You three," Khalid said to them. "Go down to Deck One, the computer center. There is at least one man there, possibly two. They may be armed, so be careful. Bring them to me here."

"Sir!" the three Brigade soldiers snapped in near unison, and then they hurried off the bridge.

Ever since the assault group had taken over the bridge, they'd been finding the Atlantis Queen's security personnel, the real ones, and taking them, one by one, to the Neptune Theater, where they were being kept under close guard. The ship's officers were being held in one of the ship's two conference centers on Deck One, as were those few crew members who'd realized something was wrong and come to the bridge or to Security to report it. At this point, the Atlantis Queen was completely under the hijackers' control. Only the passengers, the hotel staff, and a few dozen crew personnel on the engineering levels and in the service sections remained free, and with a little luck they could be kept ignorant for a few precious hours more.

And after that, it wouldn't matter what they knew.

That would be the beginning of phase four.

They led Fred Doherty and James Petrovich forward to the bridge, passing through two separate checkpoints where one of the men had to slide a card through a reader. He wondered how they'd managed to get those security IDs. At the final checkpoint, the gunman who appeared to be in charge slid his card through a scanner and pressed his thumb against a print reader; somehow, these people had gained high-level security access throughout the ship.

They had to be terrorists. Nothing else made sense — men with assault rifles herding passengers around like cattle, the shoot-down of that Harrier. And his assumption was validated the moment he stepped onto the bridge.

Doherty and Petrovich stepped into a small whirlwind of drama. A bearded man in a blue and white security uniform was screaming into the face of a man in what looked like combat fatigues and with a red-and-white-checked Arab-style kaffiyeh over his head.

"Majnun! Mahbul!" the security guard screamed. He glanced around as Doherty walked in, opened his mouth, then seemed to reconsider. "Idiot!" he said in English, his voice lowered. "Because of you the entire operation has been jeopardized! I think, for you… the special technical unit."

The color appeared to drain from the other man's swarthy face, and his eyes grew large. "Ia!" he screamed. He then dropped to his knees and loosed a babbling torrent of a foreign language far too swift for Doherty to catch more than isolated syllables. The security guard looked at one of the other uniformed men and jerked his head. Two security men came forward, grabbed the kneeling man, and hoisted him to his feet. Doherty and Petrovich stepped aside as the security men marched the blubbering man off the bridge.

The leader of the group nailed Doherty with a glare. "And you are… who?"

"Fred Doherty. CNE. This is my cameraman, James Petrovich."

"CN… CNN?"

"Not quite. CNPS. Cable Network Entertainment."

"My men thought you might be television reporters. They saw your camera."

"Yeah, and I'll ask you to tell them to be careful of it," Petrovich said. "That thing cost eighty grand and I'd rather it not come out of my paycheck!"

"At the moment," the leader said slowly, "you two have more important things to be concerned about than paychecks."

"You're terrorists," Doherty said with what he hoped was an emotionless, matter-of-fact delivery. "You've hijacked these ships."

"You're very perceptive, Mr. Doherty."

Doherty's mind was racing frantically. "And you need us!"

"Oh? And what makes you think that?"

"Easy. Your men spotted the camera, and promptly hauled us up here to see you. I figure you're going to want to transmit some sort of ransom demand to the world, right? We can help you with that!"

"Actually, we brought our own cameras along, and we have the transmission facilities of this ship. Had we known you were going to be on this voyage, perhaps we would have planned otherwise. This… CNE. What is it?"

"It's like CNN. Main offices in Hollywood, not Atlanta. Not as big as CNN, of course. Not as well known. But we have connections! And a news studio. We could set you up with a live feed, interview you, let you put your demands to the right people, the whole schmeer! Like I say, you do need us."

The leader took three swift steps forward, and suddenly his face was inches from Doherty's, the man's eyes glaring into his with a dark heat, the voice low and dangerous. "Do not presume to tell me what I need, Mr. Doherty. This operation has been planned for years, with attention to every detail. You and your tall friend here are two passengers among two thousand. Two hostages among two thousand, I should say. And if you get in my way or simply make me angry, I will have you executed instantly. A number of people have been killed already to carry out this plan. Two more are nothingl Do we understand one another?"

"Y-yes."

"Good. Because, as it happens, we may take you up on your kind offer of help." He nodded at one of the guards. "Room ten-oh-two. Watch them."

And they were taken off the bridge and into the passageway leading aft.

The crowds in the ship's public areas were dispersing by the time Carolyn Howorth reached the First Deck and walked aft toward the computer room. She'd paused in the stairwell to listen to the PA announcement, then continued on her way down. That bit about "special police powers" didn't sound right, nor did she believe that what had happened to that Harrier outside was an accident.

She was walking past the Atlantis Queen's Sea Goddess Hair and Beauty Salon, the Interconnexions computer center just ahead.

Something was wrong. Three men in khaki uniforms and black berets were ahead of her, opening the center's door. Two, she saw, had AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, a most un-British weapon to bring aboard a British cruise ship. The third held a drawn automatic pistol.

Fading back a few steps, she moved into the entrance of the hair salon, watching as one of the armed men stood guard and the other two pushed the door open and vanished inside. Several tense moments passed, and then the two reappeared, with a civilian between them. The man was short and had the look of an accountant, with glasses, sports coat, and a balding scalp, but as he struggled in their grip, his coat fell open and she noticed that he had a shoulder holster rig on underneath.. and that the holster was empty.

Not an accountant, then, but police… possibly a detective investigating the Darrow murder. Then she remembered her conversation with David Llewellyn the previous night and him talking about two MI5 men on board, one of them seconded to SOCA.

They'd used a plastic zip strip to tie the civilian's wrists behind his back.

Quickly she reached into her hip pocket and pulled out her mobile — her cell phone as her American colleagues would have called it. Pretending to look up a number, she snapped several photos with the camera function before putting the phone to her ear and pretending to talk to someone.

Someone back at GCHQ or Fort Meade might be able to get an ID on one or more of those thugs. They weren't security; of that much she was certain.

The fact that they'd grabbed that man in the computer room led her to suspect that it wouldn't be safe using the ship's Internet center to call home; the ship's Security Department likely was able to monitor computer use, and that might have been what brought those three down here. She continued pretending to talk on her phone as the three armed men marched their prisoner off, passing her just a few feet away.

She waited until they were gone, then found a stairway and started climbing back to Deck Six and her stateroom.

Back in her stateroom, minutes later, she opened up her laptop, which was slightly more than it seemed. The battery pack was actually a powerful satellite uplink unit that would allow her to communicate directly with both Menwith Hill or with Fort Meade. A slender cable unreeled from a spool inside; laid out across the desk, it served as the satlink antenna.

Strange soldiers on board the ship, rounding up select people, binding their hands, and leading them off. PA announcements invoking special police powers.

The ship had been hijacked. Of that Howorth was certain. And it was up to her to get the word out.

All regular communications to and from the ship, she knew, went through the radio room adjacent to the bridge, which was why she couldn't simply use her mobile to call Menwith Hill. The TV sets in the staterooms were not working — she'd already checked — probably because the people on the bridge now didn't want the passengers seeing news broadcasts from ashore right now.

Typing swiftly, Carolyn Howorth entered her code designation, routing code, and an urgent flag. She attached the photos she'd taken with her phone, then began writing her report.

Terrorists have taken control of the cruise ship Atlantis Queen and the freighter Pacific Sandpiper she wrote. The terrorists are well armed and the operation appears to be well planned…

Thomas Mitchell emerged from a stairwell on the Eleventh Deck forward, just down the passageway from Ship's Security. A dozen feet down the corridor was a locked steel door with security check hardware beside it — an ID card reader and a thumbprint scanner.

There was also a push-to-talk intercom that would let him request to see someone from Security, but he hadn't yet decided whether he should take that option. He was moving cautiously and once, on the way up the stairs, he'd stopped when he'd heard a door bang open far above him and waited until the sound of footsteps receded again.

Something was very, very wrong on board this ship. The more he thought about it, the more suspicious he was of that PA announcement a few moments before. He was determined to track down David Llewellyn and find out what was happening.

But he also wasn't convinced that it was a good idea to call attention to himself just now.

He heard something rustle behind him, and he turned sharply. Someone was coming around the corner of an intersection down the passageway aft, and an instant before they came into view, he ducked back into the stairwell. There was a small, square window in the door. Mitchell pressed himself up against the door and edged his head just enough to one side to glimpse movement in the passageway outside. Two figures strode past, their shadows cast by overhead fluorescents momentarily sweeping across the glass. Stepping to the other side of the window, he pushed his face up against the glass in time to see the backs of two men walking toward the security checkpoint.

Both men were wearing khaki uniforms. Both had AK-47 assault rifles slung over their shoulders and had small, military-type radios clipped to their belts. One wore a black beret, the other a white and gray head cloth, an Arab kaffiyeh, held in place by the braided cord called an iqal.

The one with the beret pulled an ID card out of a breast pocket and slid it through the reader. He then pressed his thumb against the scanner, and Mitchell heard the metallic click as the steel door popped open.

Terrorists, with ID cards and thumbprints on file giving them access to Ship's Security. Mitchell reached inside his jacket and pulled out his pistol, a service-issue SIG P226, and quietly pulled the slide back, chambering a round.

Think! Think!…

If terrorists were in control of Ship's Security, they were already in control of the bridge, and probably engineering as well. The freighter tied up alongside must belong to them now as well; probably terrorists had come aboard the Queen from the Sandpiper. This operation clearly had been carefully planned and orchestrated, and must involve a large number of well-armed men.

Think it through! Think!

The Ship's Security personnel must all be dead or have been captured, if the terrorists were this much in evidence. Mitchell realized at that moment that he might well be the only free man on board the Atlantis Queen who was armed and alert to the terrorist threat. He couldn't take on the entire terrorist group… but perhaps he could get intelligence on the hijackers that would help a CT team. If he could get in contact with MI5 or military intelligence, he might be able to pass them critical information about the takeover, including the very fact that the Atlantis Queen and the Pacific Sandpiper had been hijacked at sea.

First he needed to find Sam Franks and bring him into this.

Carefully he began tiptoeing back down the stairs.