Sea Of Terror

Chapter 19

"It's okay," Howorth told their prisoner. "It's okay! We're not going to hurt you!"

But the man continued to sob. "Zahra!" he finally managed to say. "Zahra! Nouzha!"

"What language is that?" Mitchell asked. "Arabic?" "Maybe," Howorth said. She frowned. "Actually, I think they're names."

They'd brought their prisoner down to Deck Eight, the highest deck on the liner with staterooms, and used a security passkey they'd found in the man's shirt pocket to open the door to an empty cabin. The other terrorist, the one who'd broken his neck on the stairs, had been dragged to a janitorial closet on Deck Nine and stuffed inside. They had his passcard now, too, as well as his AK-47.

Now they had the prisoner between them on the bed as they tried to get some kind of sense out of him. His emotional breakdown had been startlingly swift and complete; Howorth doubted that he was one of the terrorists. He'd not been armed, and he was wearing a Royal Sky uniform. Possibly he was as much a hostage as the rest of the Queen's passengers and crew.

"My… wife…," the man finally managed to say, shoulders heaving. "My wife, Zahra. And… my daughter…

"What about them?" Mitchell asked. Standing suddenly, reaching down, he grabbed the front of the prisoner's blue security force uniform and bunched up his other fist. "You'd best start talking, raghead, or — "

"Stop it!" Howorth said, pushing the fist aside. "Damn it, Mitchell, this isn't an interrogation!"

"Like hell it isn't!" But he relaxed slightly, backing off.

"Tell us about Zahra," Howorth asked the prisoner.

"My… wife. They have her. And my daughter…"

"Who? Who has her?"

"Yusef Khalid. The leader of Islamist Jihad International. The men who… who have taken over this ship."

"Are you a part of this group, then?" Mitchell demanded.

The prisoner shook his head. "No. Or…

Slowly, they managed to drag the whole story from their prisoner He was Mohamed Ghailiani, and he was a Moroccan emigrant, now a British subject and an employee of Royal Sky Line, living in Woolston, just across the river from Southampton. Khalid's people had abducted Ghailiani's wife and daughter, were holding them to ensure Ghailiani's cooperation.

"Do you know where they're keeping them?" Howorth asked.

Ghailiani shook his head. "No. But they've been e-mailing me… pictures. To show me they're still alive. And to… to remind me." He closed his eyes, his face screwing tight with rising panic. "Oh, God! I'll never see them again!"

"You will, Mohamed," Howorth told him. "We can help you! But you'll have to help us."

"When they know I've helped you," he said, pain etching his voice raw, "when they know I've talked to you, they'll — " He broke off, sobbing again.

"This is useless," Mitchell said.

"No," Howorth told him. "This may be the one big break we need. You know they're going to be putting together some kind of rescue op. Mohamed, here, will be able to give us all the intel we need. We just have to show him we can help his family."

"They… they're going to kill them," Ghailiani said, miserable. "They're going to kill them"

"Not if we have anything to say about it," Howorth told him. "We need to get to my stateroom and get my computer. And we'll need your e-mail account information, Mohamed. Address and password. Can you do that for us?"

Slowly, Ghailiani nodded.

"I think we'd better get out of here anyway," Mitchell said. "They'll be tracking this guy and his buddy. And us."

"Too right." Together, they helped Ghailiani stand and move toward the door.

Dr. Barnes sat down at the console in the back of the infirmary and switched on the power. Slipping the headphones on over his ears, he dialed up the volume slightly, listening to the hiss and crackle of ionospheric static.

The shortwave radio had been installed in the cruise ship's infirmary as a lifesaving measure, a means for the medical personnel to communicate directly with a hospital ashore in medical emergencies without having to run all the way up to Deck Twelve and the radio shack aft of the bridge.

He'd first tried using his cell phone, of course. The Atlantis Queen's onboard cell network connected via satellite to shore networks, enabling passengers to make calls and connect with the Internet. However, when he tried to make a connection, all he got was a recorded voice telling him the system was temporarily unavailable. That, he reasoned, would have been one of the first things hijackers would do — shut down the phone network so that the hostages on the ship couldn't call out.

But, just possibly, the hijackers didn't know about the infirmary shortwave.

"This is Delta Charlie Sierra One-one-three Echo," he said. "To any station hearing this call. Mayday, mayday, mayday.. "

The danger, of course, was that they might monitor the call from the radio shack. But it would take them time to get down here, or to disable the antenna on the radio mast.

"To any station hearing this call, mayday, mayday, mayday…"

"Where are they going?" Khalid demanded.

"It's hard to tell," Haqqani replied, studying the liner's deck schematic. "They were on Deck Eight, but they're going down, now." He pointed. "This stairwell." "Who do we have near there?" "No one, sir. It's… it's a big ship." Khalid scowled. That had been the problem from the beginning. With only thirty-one men on the Atlantis Queen, plus the fifteen or so he might be able to borrow from the Pacific Sandpiper at any given time, his personnel assets were sharply limited. There were so many places on board where he had to have people at all times — the bridge, engineering, watching the prisoners in the theater, the aft hold on A Deck, the fantail, the Deck Eleven Terrace. Most of the men had been awake for thirty hours straight at this point, and he needed to let them start rotating shifts to get some sleep.

But the two he'd sent aft to deal with the intruders on Deck Eleven had run into trouble. They should have returned almost immediately with two prisoners or word that the intruders had been dealt with… but according to the monitor, they were moving down and aft through the ship. Deck Six, apparently.

"Call up the records on the Carroll woman," he said.

Haqqani did so.

"Her stateroom is Six-oh-nine-one," Khalid said, reading the entry. His eyes narrowed. "Another SOCA agent, no less. Show me Mitchell's records." He scanned through those as well. "He's on Deck Four — Four-oh-seven-two. Obviously they're working together, however."

"We have six men on the Deck Twelve Terrace, sir," Haqqani pointed out. "We could send some of them down to deal with these two."

"No. I need them where they are." He was not going to allow these… these rats in the walls to sidetrack the plan or divert his people from their mission.

"Amir Khalid!" a voice called from the Security Office intercom speaker. "Sir, are you there?"

"I am here, Fakhet," Khalid replied. "What is it?"

"Sir, someone is transmitting from inside the ship!"

"How? The satellite phone network has been disabled!"

"This is shortwave radio," Abdul Agami Fakhet replied from the radio room, one deck above. "It's coming over the scanner."

"Let me hear."

Khalid heard a rustle, and a burst of static as Fakhet turned up the gain on the radio scanner. "To any station hearing this call," a voice said, crisp and close. "Mayday, mayday, mayday…"

"Can you tell where the call is coming from?"

"No, sir. Somewhere on board."

Khalid thought it through. Passengers wouldn't have shortwave radios. It had to be a crew member somewhere, perhaps down in engineering. A Deck or below, certainly.

In fact, it scarcely mattered. He'd hoped that the implementation of the next phase of Operation Zarqawi might be put off a little longer, but everyone in the IJI command group had acknowledged that the assault team would have to come out into the open sooner rather than later… perhaps as early as today, certainly by tomorrow.

But another rat in the walls. With so few men to call upon, Khalid felt as though he were engaged in a colossal juggling act, trying to keep a dozen balls in the air at once.

And the first of those balls were starting to fall.

"Fakhet!" he said. "You were a radio operator in Afghanistan." He and two others had been picked for this operation because of their technical experience, so that they could man the ship's radio room.

"Yes, Amir."

"You know what shortwave sets look like. What the antennae look like."

"Yes, Amir!"

"Take Obeidat up to the ship's mast. Use the ladder and deck hatch behind the radio shack. See if you can find the shortwave antenna and cut it or pull it down."

"It will be done, Amir!"

This particular rat wouldn't be able to reveal too much to the world outside that hadn't already been guessed, but it was time to move to the next phase. In any combat, a critical aspect of battle management was the pacing, the ability to keep moving and to always stay one step ahead of one's opponent.

Khalid returned his attention to the ship's schematic. According to the data carried by the small moving red dots, both Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were traveling with Mitchell and Carroll. The four of them emerged from the stairwell onto Deck Six, now.

The most likely reason for this was that Ghailiani and Rawasdeh were dead, and the two SOCA agents had taken their ID cards with them. Like Khalid himself, Rawasdeh was a veteran of both Afghanistan and Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, the branch of al-Qaeda fighting in Iraq. He would never surrender, never betray the Cause.

Ghailiani, however, was an unknown quantity. The Ship's Security officer had been kept in line so far by threatening his wife and child — the operatives holding them e-mailed a new photograph to his account each day, proving his wife and daughter were still alive but still very much at their captors' mercy. But it was possible that Ghailiani had broken completely; for several days, now, the Moroccan had been showing the enormous stress he'd been working under, the staggering load of fear. Had he been pushed too hard? Had he elected to help the two British agents?

If the SOCA agents had managed to kill Rawasdeh and Ghailiani, they had Rawasdeh's assault rifle, and they probably had handguns of their own.

"How many men do we have guarding prisoners in the theater?" Khalid asked.

"Six, Amir Yusef," Haqqani replied. "Four inside, two at the doors outside."

"Alert the two at the doors. Send them up to Deck Six to kill those two."

"Yes, Amir."

"They are to use caution. The targets are armed. They are not to attempt to capture them. Just kill them as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I don't want to lose any more men."

"It will be done, Amir!" "It had better be!"

"Nice place you got here," Mitchell said as they stepped inside Howorth's stateroom. "I didn't get an ocean view."

"Maybe you don't know the right people," Howorth replied.

"Maybe. Who are your people, anyway?"

"Let's go into that later," she told him. She tossed her ID card and Ghailiani's onto the bedside table. "Watch the door, will you? If they're tracking us by these ID cards, they may be on their way here already." All business, Howorth walked to the desk set into one corner of the compartment, next to the sliding glass doors opening onto an enclosed balcony.

"Yeah. And they know our staterooms, too. Why the hell do we need to come here? We need to find a place to lay low."

She was already booting up her laptop. "Because my computer is here," she told him. "And it has its own satellite link, so we don't need to go through the ship's communications suite."

"And that right there rules out MI5 or SOCA," Mitchell said. "So… MI6? CIA?"

"Something like that." She glanced at Ghailiani, who was sitting on the bed now with a dazed and vacant look on his face. "Let's leave it there, shall we?"

Mitchell read her glance and nodded. It wouldn't do to discuss things like that in front of someone who was still, technically, a terrorist, or one of the terrorists' accomplices. He looked over the AK-47, then leaned against the door. Howorth typed in the first of her passwords… and then the second. After a moment, the front page for GCHQ's secure Internet connection came up. She typed in the final password and her user name, then began typing rapidly.

"Maybe we should pack that up and take it somewhere else," Mitchell suggested. "Damn it, they're going to be here any minute!"

"Not much longer," Howorth told him. "Just let me — "

There was a thump at the door, and Mitchell turned, startled as it opened slightly, hitting his shoulder. "Shit!"

Howorth glanced over her shoulder and saw him throw himself against the door, banging it shut. She kept typing

Automatic gunfire thundered in the passageway outside. Bullet holes appeared in the door, sending splinters whirling into the stateroom as Mitchell's body was smashed back a step in a spray of blood. The thunder continued, more and more holes appearing now on the inside of the door as Mitchell collapsed on the deck. Bullets slashing through the stateroom hit the balcony windows, smashing them in shattering glass. Ghailiani was hit as well, knocked back onto the bed as a booted foot smashed the wreckage of the door open.

Howorth had an instant to react. Mitchell's AK was too far, the P226 clumsily inaccessible tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Snatching up the computer, she leaped from the chair and whirled around toward the sliding door.

"Wakkif!" one of the gunmen yelled as he barged into the room, the stock of an AK-47 up against his shoulder. But Howorth was through the shattered glass door and onto the narrow balcony. The man behind her opened fire, and bullets smashed more glass and screamed off the balcony railing.

She hit the railing and hurled the computer out into the emptiness beyond. While it was unlikely that the terrorists would be able to break her laptop's security, there was no sense in handing them the computer's hard drive and the data stored there as a present. Grabbing the railing with both hands, she vaulted over, twisting to face the ship's hull as she slammed against it.

For a dizzying instant Howorth dangled a hundred feet above the ocean and the surging white wake of the ship below. The Atlantis Queen's white superstructure had a slight tumblehome, and her feet and ankles, she could feel, were hanging over empty space — the opening of the next ocean-view balcony below hers. She let go.

Sliding down the tumblehome, she fell into the opening of that next balcony down, snatching at the next railing, nearly losing her grip as the shock wracked her body with pain and concussion. Somehow, though, she managed to hang on, scrambling against the railing, throwing her upper body and then her leg over the rail and onto the balcony. As she rolled up against the glass doorway, she heard voices just overhead, as the attackers came out onto her balcony.

She froze. Maybe they would think she'd fallen into the sea.

They would certainly want to check to make sure. They wouldn't follow her down the outside of the ship's hull, but they would come down to Deck Five and look, just to make sure.

At her back, the glass door suddenly slid aside. She looked up at the surprised face of a man looking down at her, and held her finger to her lips.

Rubens looked up at the main display screen dominating one wall of the Art Room. At the moment it showed a shocking digital photograph blown up with punch-in-the-gut clarity — two women, one in her thirties, the other obviously much younger, lying side by side on a rumpled bed, tied, gagged, and partly undressed. A newspaper lay on their bare stomachs, folded to show the masthead logo, The Sun, and today's date.

"Do we have a positive ID on them?" he asked.

"Yes, sir." The reply came through an overhead speaker. Charles Gaither was an NSA analyst working at GCHQ in England and was speaking over one of the NSA's secure satellite links with Menwith Hill. He had the same image on his own monitor, thirty-four hundred miles away. "The one on the left is Zahra Ghailiani. Age thirty-four. Housewife. The other is Nouzha Ghaliani, daughter, age fifteen. Zahra's husband is Mohamed Ghailiani. Their address is a flat on Lower Mortimer Road, in Woolston. British citizens. Mohamed Ghailiani is a security officer on board the Atlantis Queen."

"So the IJI is holding these two hostage to guarantee Ghailiani's compliance."

"Yes, sir. According to our informant on the Queen, they forced him to make security cards for them that gave them access to all parts of the ship, then forced him to help them get three trucks on board while the Queen was still at the dock. According to him, they've e-mailed him several photos like this since the ship left port. He's terrified for their lives."

Rubens studied the photo a moment, looking for clues in the background. The wall was dirty plaster; a piece at the extreme right edge of the photo had cracked and broken off, exposing the lath beneath.

"You'll have been analyzing this," Rubens said. "Do you have anything yet?"

"Not much. See the hole in the wall at the right? Lath and plaster construction. That means they're being held someplace pretty old, built before dry wall came into general use. Almost certainly not a motel or a hotel. The bed frame is an old style, too, probably at least thirty years old."

"It doesn't look much like an upscale part of town."

"Exactly. We also know they had photos of the two women to show Ghailiani the same morning they went missing. We're operating on the assumption that they're being held pretty close to Woolston, probably in the same neighborhood, within a fifteen-or twenty-minute drive. That narrows the field for the search quite a bit. MI5 has units out now going door to door, asking people if anyone saw anything suspicious last Thursday."

"People always see suspicious stuff," Rubens said. "That could take a long time."

"We have one thing more to go on, Mr. Rubens. Take a look at this."

The two kidnapped women vanished from the big screen, replaced by a grainy and slightly fuzzy photo in gray-green tones. It showed a suburban street scene — rows of trees and neat, brick houses — and with a dark-colored sedan parked to the right. A man leaned on the car, smoking a cigarette and looking away up the sidewalk.

"We have a tap into the British security street-camera system," Gaither explained. "Cameras mounted on lampposts take shots every few seconds and forward them to the local police. Nouzha Ghailiani goes to school in the Woolston district, and we knew what bus stop she used. We dialed into several cameras in the area and came up with this."

"What about it?"

"I don't know about America," Gaither said, "but over here the police are extremely interested in older guys who hang around school bus stops. Nouzha's stop is just out of frame to the left. This photo was taken about fifteen minutes before her bus was due to arrive last Thursday morning."

"I see."

A white rectangle drew itself around the man's head, and the scene expanded until only the head was visible, vast and disturbing, filling the screen.

"We can't tell a lot from this shot," Gaither went on, "but the subject's mustache and skin tone are at least consistent with Middle Eastern profiling data."

"'Profiling' is a bad word over here," Rubens said dryly, "but your point is taken."

"We got a total of thirty-two photographs of this subject," Gaither went on. "Unfortunately, the camera didn't happen to catch Nouzha."

The face vanished, the image shifting back to the street scene. The image changed, tree branches and cars in the background jumping back and forth like a choppy movie viewed frame by frame. The last three frames showed the man throw his cigarette down, grind it underfoot, and begin to walk out of frame to the right. The final image showed the car pulling out away from the curb.

"And one thing more… "

The image cut back to one showing the car parked by the curb. Again a white square drew itself around the license plate mounted on the car's front bumper. The plate was partially obscured by the trunk of a small tree growing out of a planter area in the sidewalk, but as the scene zoomed in close, "E83K," the last four figures in a longer registration number, became visible.

"We have a partial plate number," Gaither continued, "and a make and model on the vehicle. MI5 is running the data through their databases now."

"Good work," Rubens said. "They may not be holding the Ghailiani family at the same address where the car is registered."

"No, but it will give us a start. We're putting together a team now to liaise with the HRT in Southampton."

"Who's running the team?"

"Edward Cartwright. Colonel, SAS."

"Okay. I'm going to send two of my agents to work with him," Rubens said. "We need to stay on top of this. I don't want to lose even thirty seconds because the lines of communication get scrambled or some idiot bureaucrat decides we can't have access."

"Right, Mr. Rubens."

"Let me know the minute you turn up anything else. Rubens out." He cut the connection.

Rubens walked over to Jeff Rockman's workstation. "Patch me through to Charlie Dean and Lia DeFrancesca," he said. "Where are they?"

"Holiday Inn, Southampton, England," Rockman told him.

A moment later, Dean's voice sounded over the speaker. "Dean. I copy."

"And DeFrancesca. What's up?"

"New assignments," Rubens told them. "Lia, you're going to the MI5 branch office in Southampton tonight, and putting yourself at their disposal. Talk with Colonel Edward Cartwright. He knows you're coming. You'll be our liaison with the SAS hostage rescue team they're assembling for an important op. Code name Imperial. Ilya Akulinin will be flying back out to join you tomorrow. He'll be your backup."

"Yes, sir. What's this all about?"

Briefly Rubens filled them in on Ghailiani and the need to find and free his family. "There's just one hitch," Rubens added. "Ghailiani may be dead or captured. We… lost contact with our operator on board the Atlantis Queen in mid-transmission."

"Who was that?" Dean demanded. "Carrousel?"

Rubens hesitated, then said, "Yes. She began transmitting over her secure link with Menwith Hill a little over an hour ago. She told us she'd hooked up with a British MI5 agent, gave us a fair rundown on the terrorists, and said they'd captured Ghailiani, one of the Ship's Security men, who's being forced to help the terrorists. But halfway through the transmission, she was cut off, mid-word. We have to assume that she and the MI5 man are dead.

Ghailiani may be dead as well." Rubens paused, then added, Tm sorry, Charlie. I know you've worked with Carrousel before."

"So Lia's helping MI5." Dean's voice sounded hard, a bit cold. "Where do you want me?"

"You're on your way to Spithead tonight. A COD is being readied to deliver you to the USS Eisenhower. You'll draw CQB gear and weapons on the ship and take charge of Black Cat Bravo when it comes aboard tomorrow morning."

"Are we going to mount an assault, then?" Lia asked.

"Yeah," Dean added. "Did Saunders and the DSF come around?"

"Not yet," Rubens told them. "We're working on that."

"Meaning, Charlie," Lia said, "that they're still trying to pick up the pieces after we walked out on a British general."

"We didn't have a lot of choice," Dean said. He sounded angry. "Damn it, we were told that Saunders had been bypassed, that the Brits were going to accept American help. We go into that meeting, and there's Saunders telling us to keep our collective noses out of the UK's business. He wasn't going to play nice. So we left."

"You did the right thing, Charlie," Rubens told him. "I would have done exactly the same if I'd been there."

"What's Saunders' problem, anyway?"

"It's not him as much as us," Rubens said. "The real problem is that both we and London are getting mixed signals from our own people. The Pentagon wants us to go in whether the British want our help or not. A Broken Arrow alert requires a military response, and the Joint Chiefs informed London that we were prepared to handle the takedown and to safeguard the security of the Pacific Sandpiper's cargo. But the President and the State Department both want to leave this to the British."

"Why?" Lia asked. "The Brits are good, yeah, but shouldn't they be looking for all the help they can get right now?"

"More to the point, shouldn't we be offering it?" Dean added.

"Of course. But the President promised to disengage from Iraq and avoid foreign military interventions. And if someone's going to try to go in shooting and fails… well, both the President and State would rather someone else take the fall. Right now, things in Washington are more than normally surreal."

"Hell, that's saying something," Dean observed.

"So what's the story?" Lia asked. "Are we going in or not?"

"This is classified, of course… but an SAS assault is going down tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow! They're going with Saunders' plan?" Dean asked. "A helo-borne assault?"

"We don't have the details yet," Rubens said, "but I would guess so. With luck, the commandos will get on board, take down the bad guys, and secure both ships.

"But if they don't, and assuming the terrorists don't push a button and blow both ships to bits, I want our people ready to launch a follow-up. Code name Operation Neptune. We need to find Ghailiani's family, the sooner the better, and we need to have a Black Cat team ready to insert off the Eisenhower if the HRT doesn't go down as planned. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said.

"Absolutely," Lia added.

"Good. Questions?"

There were none, and Rubens broke the connection.