Sea Of Terror

Chapter 18

"The President," Dr. Bing said, "was most emphatic. Both ships belong to Great Britain. The problem is theirs as well."

Rubens' jaw tightened, and he made an effort to keep his voice calm. "Madam Chairperson," he said, "I cannot stress this enough. That decision is shortsighted and it is wrong. If I could just have ten minutes with the President — "

"That is not going to happen, Mr. Rubens," Bing told him, and the tone of her voice had the finality of a slamming door. "He was very clear on the matter."

"London has indicated that they are ready to go in with an SAS assault sometime tonight," George Wehrum added. "We will support their operation by sharing intelligence, by providing logistical support, and by making available ships and helicopters to evacuate crew members and passengers from those vessels and to provide medical support when and if that becomes necessary."

"How are you going to evacuate over three thousand people in the middle of the North Atlantic?" Rubens asked. He looked around the room, trying to gauge the mood of the rest of the people at the conference table. It was crowded here, more crowded than it had been on Saturday morning.

"By aircraft carrier, of course," Wehrum said. "The Ark Royal is in pursuit of the target vessels now. And the USS Eisenhower — she was en route from Norfolk to the Med — she's been redirected and should rendezvous with the British squadron within twenty-four hours."

"What, are you planning on building a tent city on the Ike's flight deck?" Admiral Prendergast asked, his tone sarcastic and possibly angry as well. Rubens wondered if the order to the Eisenhower had bypassed Prendergast on the way down.

"If necessary," Bing told him. "However, it almost certainly will not be necessary. The SAS is very, very good at what they do."

Rubens could only shake his head. While an aircraft carrier was big enough to carry several thousand people — the Eisenhower had a complement of over fifty-six hundred — it would be an absolute nightmare trying to house, feed, and care for the needs of thousands of civilians as well. And that didn't even begin to address his original question, which was how the Navy would get those civilians off of the Atlantis Queen and onto the Eisenhower in the first place. They would not be able to transfer directly, not without risking a lot of damage to both ships. Personnel could be transferred by helicopter, but there would be only a few of those available, and each could carry only a handful of people — perhaps twelve to fifteen — at a time.

There was also a serious logistical question. If the Eisenhower's flight deck was covered with refugees, there wouldn't be room to handle flight operations — and there would be no place for the necessary small fleet of helicopters to land. No wonder Prendergast was pissed.

Of course, Bing was right in one respect. It probably wouldn't be necessary to evacuate the Atlantis Queen.

Either the SAS assault would be successful and the cruise ship secured… or the terrorists on board would push a button and blow her up.

There was also the question of the Pacific Sandpiper and her deadly cargo. The terrorists must be planning on using the plutonium somehow, if only as a bargaining chip.

"What about the Pacific SandpiperT General Barton said, as if he'd just read Rubens' mind. "Suppose the terrorists are using the nuclear material on board to make a bomb?"

"I believe Dr. Cavenaugh has a report on that issue," Bing said. "Doctor?"

Dr. Bruce Cavenaugh was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and served as an advisor on nuclear threats both to the NCTC and to Homeland Security. A rumpled man in a tweed jacket, the very image of an elderly professor, Cavenaugh stood to address the group, moving around to the lectern at the front of the room with a double handful of notes and folders before him.

"We've been reviewing the possibilities," he told the group, "given PNTL's cargo manifest for the Pacific Sandpiper While it's been widely reported that the ship carries enough plutonium to manufacture as many as fifty or sixty nuclear weapons, there is almost no chance at all that terrorists on board those two ships could create such a weapon themselves. For a nuclear explosion to be generated, two sub-critical masses of plutonium must be brought together very suddenly and very precisely. This requires precision tooling, and a means of reshaping the plutonium elements to achieve maximum effect. Usually, this means two hemispheres — imagine a ball cut in half — positioned so that conventional explosives slam the two halves together." He brought his hands together in a sharp clap, and several people at the table jumped slightly. "They achieve critical mass, and a nuclear explosion is the result. A second method is to machine a sphere of plutonium with a precisely drilled hole into which a plutonium cylinder is fired. A third would be to have one sphere of plutonium positioned inside a larger, hollow sphere, with conventional explosives around the outside to create a powerful implosion.

"But the plutonium on board the Pacific Sandpiper is carefully packaged in one-hundred-ton canisters bolted to the cargo hold deck, in such a way that the plutonium always remains sub-critical. It might be possible to use cutting torches to remove the storage containers inside each canister, true, but the plutonium is stored as plutonium oxide, an extremely fine powder. The terrorists simply don't have the facilities to transform that powder into pure, solid plutonium. If they slapped a critical mass of plutonium oxide together, the worst that would happen would be the release of a tremendous amount of heat.. enough heat to melt through the bottom of the ship and sink her… what became known as the 'China syndrome' back in the 1980s. There would be extensive contamination of the sea in the ship's immediate vicinity, of course, but no explosion."

Rubens could feel the others at the table relaxing. Since the beginning of his crisis, the major concern had been that terrorists were attempting to seize the Sandpiper in order to either gain access to enough plutonium to make atomic bombs or threaten the United States with the possibility of a nuclear explosion.

"Dr. Cavenaugh," he said. "What about the possibility of a dirty bomb?"

"Ah! Yes. That is one possibility we've been looking at that does appear to pose a very real threat in this situation. The plutonium oxide is already in a fine powder form, as I said. If it were to be removed from its protective containers, a sufficiently powerful conventional explosion — an explosion big enough to destroy the ship, say — might hurl most of that powder into the atmosphere, where prevailing winds would carry it out over a large footprint. Any ships downwind of the explosion would be contaminated."

"Then we will recommend that our British friends stay well upwind during their assault," Bing said.

"How big of a footprint, Doctor?" Debra Collins wanted to know.

"That depends on wind speed, humidity, and several other factors," Cavenaugh replied. "But potentially five or six hundred miles long, perhaps fifty to one hundred miles wide."

"Enough," Rubens said, looking squarely at Bing, "to blanket all of Manhattan and Long Island with radioactive dust, if they blow that ship up inside New York Harbor. That is what I want to be certain the President understands. Those ships changed course thirty-six hours ago, and are on a heading that appears to be aimed straight at Boston or at New York City, or, if they come further down the coast, Philadelphia or Washington, D. C. Our crisis assessment team at the NSA believes the enemy's target to be either Boston — it's the closest major city on the new course — or New York City.

"Right now, the Sandpiper and her cargo are nineteen hundred nautical miles from New York. That's four days at the speed they've been traveling since Saturday night. That makes it our problem as well as the Brits'."

Bing shifted uncomfortably in her chair but said, "The President has already been fully informed, and it is his decision that this situation be resolved by the British."

"We have a special operations unit ready to go in," Rubens said, "on twenty minutes' notice, but they will need approximately twelve hours to redeploy to the Eisenhower Once there, however, they would be available to provide special combat intelligence to the SAS commander on-site."

Bing appeared to consider this, then shook her head. "The President has decided that this situation will be resolved by the British."

Rubens heard the warning in Bing's voice and in the way she kept repeating her words: do not push. The harder he fought to have the NSA's combat action team included in the assault, the more deeply entrenched and stubborn Bing and her cronies would become.

He wondered, though, if the President really was dead set against U. S. forces participating in the op… or if this was Bing's way of defending her turf. Whichever it was, Bing had just slammed the door shut on Rubens, or she thought she had.

He was not willing to concede the victory to Bing and Wehrum, however, not yet. Rubens had tremendous respect for the British SAS. They were well trained and battle-tested. Some claimed they were the equals in most respects of the U. S. Delta Force.

But Rubens knew too well that no combat op ever goes down exactly the way it was planned, and if the hijacking of those two ships was the prelude to a terrorist nuclear attack against the U. S. East Coast, he wanted to have all of Desk Three's available combat assets on the scene and ready to go.

Just in case.

Carolyn Howorth carefully stepped up to the door, pressing her face against the tiny window in order to see as much of the passageway beyond as she possibly could. For two days, now, yesterday and today, she'd been "skulking," as she'd described it in her reports back to GCHQ, slipping through the huge cruise ship passageways and access corridors in an attempt to garner every scrap of information she could on the paramilitary force that appeared now to be in total control of the Atlantis Queen.

In some thirty-six hours of skulking, she'd learned quite a bit. The hijackers appeared to be Arabic speakers, though she'd heard some speak English — including a few with no trace of an accent. She'd actually seen at least twelve different men but suspected there were others she'd not seen — up on the bridge, in the Security Office one deck down, and in places like engineering and the ship's holds, all of which were barred to anyone without a properly programmed key card.

Two guards stood outside the doors leading to the ship's Neptune Theater at all times, and she'd watched other guards escort bound crew personnel and passengers through those doors and emerge again without them. The theater, then, was a secure holding area for people the terrorists needed to take out of circulation, quite possibly because they'd seen or guessed something they shouldn't have. She hadn't been able to find a way in, yet, to see how many people had been taken there, but the traffic suggested that the number was fairly high. There were probably several terrorists inside the theater as well, keeping an eye on the prisoners.

She'd come up the forward stairwell hoping to see if there was a way to get to the Ship's Security Office. The place was sure to be guarded, she thought, but if she could get inside, she might be able to learn a bit more about the size and disposition of the hijackers' force.

It was the Ship's Security systems that worried her most. The Adantis Queen was enormous, with mile upon mile of corridors, maintenance tunnels, and compartments that guaranteed that she could move around the ship unseen, if the hijackers weren't watching the Ship's Security cam screens, and if they didn't know how to use the onboard tracking system. According to Llewellyn's description of the system Friday night, passengers carrying key cards or the small tags with their embedded computer chips could be tracked by sensors inside the bulkheads. Worse, passengers without cards or tags could still be sensed — and a warning flashed to the Security Office that someone was wandering where she shouldn't without her ID.

She'd elected to carry her ID tag with her, on the assumption that with it, she was just one of some three thousand colored blips on the security monitor screens, and so might be overlooked even if she was now on the Eleventh Deck where she had no right to be, officially. If the sensors picked up a warm body moving in a restricted area with no ID, an alarm would sound, and that would bring the bad guys down on her like an avalanche.

The terrorists, clearly, had circumvented the security system somehow and were traveling everywhere-through the ship with impunity. The question was — were they using the ship's sophisticated security systems to monitor and control their hostages?

Through the tiny door window, Howorth could just see the security checkpoint in the passageway beyond and to her right, a sealed massive steel door with a card reader and a thumbprint scanner set in the bulkhead to one side. There were no guards as there were one deck up, in front of the security door leading to the bridge and radio room. She put her hand on the door handle to open it, then ducked back when she heard the boom of another door closing somewhere down the passageway to her left. A shadow passed the window, and when she edged closer to look, she caught a glimpse of a uniformed man pressing his thumb to the scanner plate, then opening the door to the Security Department.

If she could find a way through those doors, she might be able to get to the computer room behind the Ship's Security Office. But… what then? It would be more effective, actually, if she could somehow get the passwords that would let her break into the ship's computer network. Or possibly the Netguardz trapdoor might give her access.

David Llewellyn, she thought, would have those codes, or be able to get them. But she'd not seen him since Friday.

She'd been wondering if the ship's senior security officer had fallen afoul of the terrorists and been killed or marched off like the SOCA agent she'd seen outside of Connexions.

With chilling suddenness, a man's hand slipped around the right side of her head, clamping down tightly over her nose and mouth, drawing her backward as a second hand and arm grabbed her from the left, pinning her arms to her sides. Howorth struggled wildly, trying to break free, trying to kick back against the kneecaps of her captor, but her foot struck empty air as the man squeezed more tightly. She tried to scream, but the smothering hand blocked all sound, threatening to drag her into unconsciousness.

"There it is again, sir," Hamud Haqqani said, pointing at the display. Khalid leaned over the man's shoulder for a closer look.

The display screen was long and narrow, running left to right, and was touch sensitive. At the moment, it was showing Deck Eleven as yellow lines on a black background, the various compartments and passageways marked with coded alphanumerics translated by an inset table. Deck Eleven was divided into two sections — the aft sundeck around the ship's smokestack aft, and the superstructure forward housing security, the computer center, and, on Deck Twelve, the bridge.

Khalid touched the screen next to the forward superstructure, and the schematic expanded. Six red dots were clustered inside the Security Office — marking Khalid himself, Haqqani, and the other four with them. Just outside of the Security Office area, however, lay a passageway and, off to one side, the service access stairwell connecting several of the upper decks forward, including the bridge and Deck Eleven. A red dot hovered inside that stairwell and, when Khalid touched the screen again, expanding the schematic further, the single dot became two pressed closely together. He touched one of the dots, and a name and ID number appeared: Judith Carroll. One of the passengers. He tapped the other dot, and his eyes opened wider when he saw the ID.

Khalid looked up. Ghailiani and another member of the security team, Mahmoud Amin Rawasdeh, were seated at the security console near the door. "You two," Khalid snapped. "We have inquisitive intruders in the stairwell next to the passageway outside. Two of them. Bring them in!"

Rawasdeh picked up his AK-47, leaning against one bulkhead, and snapped back the charging lever with a harsh snick-snack. "Alive?" he asked.

"Any way you Can get them," Khalid replied.

Rawasdeh nodded, and he and Mohamed Ghailiani hurried from the Ship's Security Office.

"Do not scream," the man's voice whispered in Howorth's ear as he clamped a hand down over her mouth. "I'm a friend! Okay?"

She nodded, and the hands released her. Turning, furious, she looked into the creased face of a rough-looking man in a dark suit jacket and tan slacks — probably in his forties, stocky, and with thinning hair. He didn't look much like an Arab terrorist.

"What are you doing up here?" he asked. "Who are you?"

"I might ask you the same thing."

"Mitchell," he said. "MI5." He quirked an eyebrow. "You?"

Before she could decide whether to answer or not, the door to the stairwell banged open and two men walked in on them.

The one in the lead wore a Royal Sky Line security uniform and appeared to be unarmed. The second man, with a bushy mustache and pocked skin, wore a khaki uniform with an Arabic kaffiyeh over his head, and was holding an AK-47 assault rifle in both hands.

Mitchell reacted immediately and decisively, stepping past Howorth, snapping his right arm out, hand open flat, to catch the first man beneath his jaw with the heel of his palm and slam him backward into the gunman. As the two collided, Mitchell reached inside his jacket and dragged out his handgun.

The gunman, though, was fast and strong. He knocked the unarmed man aside with a sweep of his rifle butt, smashing the muzzle down across Mitchell's right wrist with a sharp crack and sending the pistol clattering and skittering across the deck. Mitchell stepped inside the reach of the weapon, pushing the muzzle aside as he swung a vicious uppercut with his left, uninjured hand, then grabbed the gun's muzzle ^nd yanked forward, hard, tugging the gunman off-balance.

Howorth, standing to one side, thought first about grabbing Mitchell's pistol, but it had skittered to the other side of the stairwell and was balanced precariously on the top step, with Mitchell and the gunman between her and the weapon. The unarmed man was on his hands and knees; Howorth leaped at the gunman's back, grabbing his kaffiyeh and the iqal cord that held it in place from behind with both hands and dragging them down over his eyes.

The gunman spun, teetering at the edge of the steps, holding the AK with his right hand as he fumbled with his left to pull the checkered cloth off his face. Howorth raised her right leg, planted her deck shoe on the man's chest, and kicked, hard, sending the gunman, arms flailing, backward and off the top step.

He screamed going down, the cry echoing down the stairwell as he slammed into the steps halfway down and completed an awkward backward roll to the first landing below. Mitchell flew after him, vaulting into space and landing on the gunman's chest five feet below with a sickening thud. Reaching down, Mitchell pulled the AK from unresisting fingers with his injured hand while drawing his other fist back to deliver a final blow —

"Stop!"

Howorth turned at the voice. The unarmed man, ignored for the opening seconds of the fight, had scooped up Mitchell's P226 and now held it aimed straight at Howorth.

"Don't move or I'll shoot!" the man shouted, his voice cracking on the last word. He held the pistol with a manic intensity, both hands on the grip, arms stiff, the gun's muzzle wobbling in his unsteady grasp. Howorth raised her hands as Mitchell dropped the AK, dangling uselessly backward in one hand.

"Don't shoot!" Howorth said; She was close to the now-armed man, close enough to see the beads of sweat rolling down his cheek. If she could get a little closer… "Please, don't shoot!"

"Shit!" the man said. "Shit! Shit! Shit!…"

Howorth was startled to realize that it wasn't sweat she was seeing on the man's face but tears. He was crying. The pistol's muzzle wavered, then dropped to point at the deck as the man sagged, his shoulders heaving with his sobs.

Swiftly Howorth stepped forward and snatched the pistol from the man's hands. Mitchell retrieved the AK, then stooped to check the terrorist sprawled at the bottom of the steps. He looked up to meet Howorth's eyes. Dead, he mouthed. The tumble had broken the man's neck.

Their prisoner continued to cry.

Dr. Heywood Barnes stepped into the lush tropical ambir ance of the Grotto Lounge and walked forward, toward the big sliding glass doors opening onto the Deck Eleven pool area. The restaurant, curiously, was deserted. Normally, it was one of the busiest social areas on the ship. A "Closed" sign had been hanging at the front entrance, but he'd ignored it and come inside anyway. The lounge was supposed to be open all hours.

Barnes rarely got up here. His quarters, along with those of the other medical personnel on board, were on A Deck, just forward of the infirmary, and while there were no rules against his coming up into the passenger areas, fraternization was discouraged, save for very specific instances — when ship's officers dined in the formal Atlantia Restaurant on Deck One, for instance, or up on Deck Nine, in the Lost Continent.

Generally, Barnes was a solitary soul who disliked crowds and social mingling, preferences that years ago had led to his taking the position of ship's doctor when he could easily have had a thriving practice ashore.

For the past several days, however, the infirmary had been anything but quiet. Members of the ship's crew and staff kept gathering there, hanging out in the waiting area or in the staff lounge, drinking tea and coffee, and discussing them.

"Them," of course, were the foreign soldiers, presumably Arabs, who were now everywhere on board the Queen and who appeared to be in control of the ship. Two of them were in the main galley now at all times, flanking the big double doors leading to the aft A Deck hold. Galley personnel who had to go into the hold for supplies were escorted in and out and kept away from the area near the loading bay and external doors. But Johnny Berger and several other members of both staff and crew had been back there and seen a number of trucks parked near the doors and a large number of armed and uniformed men.

PA announcements and a memo from the bridge had spoken of helping the Pacific Sandpiper and of security personnel from the other ship protecting a top-secret military cargo… but no one really believed any of it. Phone calls to the bridge had gone unanswered. Personnel who'd physically gone to the bridge or to the Security Office to talk to someone in charge had never returned. The mess stewards, though, had been ordered to take boxes of food — cold cuts and sandwiches, mostly, and hundreds of bottles of water — up to the doors leading to the Neptune Theater, where gruff and uncommunicative uniformed guards had taken them inside. Rumor had it that the missing crew members were being held prisoner inside the theater.

Earlier that afternoon, Barnes had made his way up to Deck One and found an out-of-the-way alcove in a deserted Starbucks on the mall. From there, he could see down a passageway leading forward to the theater, where he could just make out one of the guards at the entrance without being seen himself. After an hour of waiting, another guard had led a woman out of the theater and steered her to the left, toward the restrooms. After perhaps ten minutes, the two had reappeared, vanishing once more into the theater.

So… there were prisoners being held in the theater. They were being fed and being taken to the nearest restrooms, but they were under heavy guard. Barnes had considered going up to Security but decided against it. The terrorists, if that's what they were, must be in control of the Security Department and the bridge, and if he called attention to himself, he would end up with that woman and God knew how many others tied up and under guard inside the theater.

And so, using back service access ways and emergency stairs, Barnes had ascended all the way up to Deck Eleven and the Grotto Lounge. Partly, he wanted a look at the Pacific Sandpiper, which some of the staff said was still tied up alongside as the Queen clipped ahead through the ocean at a good twenty knots — an insane pace if they were, indeed, towing another vessel. Barnes' cabin was on the starboard side of the ship, and he couldn't see anything from there. From the Deck Twelve Terrace, though, he would be able to see clearly in all directions, and be able to look down onto the Sandpiper

He also wanted to check for himself the ship's course. Rumor had it that the ship had changed direction two days ago, late Saturday, and was now heading due west, instead of south toward the Strait of Gibraltar.

He heard a clatter of noise from just ahead and froze, then stepped back into the shelter of a spray of palm fronds. The restaurant's tropical jungle decor had always seemed rather silly to him, but he was glad to have the cover now. Several men were talking to one another just ahead. There was a long string of almost guttural words, followed by a loud thump. "Iyak!" one voice cried, the voice sharp, even threatening.

Barnes had spent a year in Kuwait, during his stint as a medical officer with the British Army, right out of medical school. He didn't speak the language, but he knew Arabic when he heard it. Easing forward, he tried to get a better view.

Four uniformed men were at the glass sliding doors leading out to the pool area, and they were manhandling a large flatbed handcart piled high with wooden crates under an olive-drab tarp. The cart had just become entangled with a table as they'd tried to position it in front of the door, and the men were trying to pull the cart free. "Yallah!" the one in charge cried. "Yallah!" Two more armed men, Barnes saw, were standing outside by the pool, apparently guarding a stack of identical tarp-covered crates.

Abruptly the cart bounced free of the obstruction and three of the men wheeled the cart out onto the deck while the fourth, the leader, stood to one side, gesturing to the others. In that moment, Barnes noticed two critical things.

First of all, the afternoon sun was streaming through the broad glass windows of the Atlantean Grotto Lounge. Those windows faced forward, and if the sun was coming in that way, it meant the ship was sailing west, into the late-afternoon sun.

And as the soldiers bullied the cart out the door, the tarp had been tugged aside just enough for Barnes to see letters stenciled in black on the side of one of the cases.

"FIM-92 STIN" was all he could read, the letters centered above a portion of a serial number.

But that glimpse was enough to chill Barnes' soul.

My God! he thought. I've got to tell someone!

But who? And how?

And was it already too late?